Scripting & Balancing • Re: Are carriers too cheap?

It's a good idea to have escorts mean something, but it's also an important aspect of the game to be able to destroy civilian ships even when outnumbered (that is, it's a valid strategy to send a sacrificial force in order to do more damage to the enemy by destroying high-value ships like a Colony Ship).

I am confused if you opposed or not the 2-1 ratio. Adding 2 targets for escorts and 1 target for civilian ships would satisfy your two constraints, do you concur?

What would be fun - some kind of kamikaze stance which goes for civilians first (1-2 ratio?) and draws enemy fire. Although doing different ratios in a combat would ruin the combat backend. So just ignore this.

I see Wobbly is doing the math just right, so it's a waste of the time of two good developers to let you argue (clearly as if this was a post of mine and you where LienRag).
...
Wobbly's argument of X weapon is better than Y without including all the costs in the math).

i had the feeling that there should be some combinations of the early hulls where including flak is more efficient than carriers. in our old analysis we did not look at the basic hulls but more at robotics and organics (because those were inefficient anyway and nobody would use those for military). is your(?) combat simulator still working?

the main problem to easily construct an example is that flak can't be put into internal slots. if we would allow that, direct-weapon+flak would be much easier to compare to fighter bay+hangar (and in turn helps to make design decisions).

Side note, I don't know why we, in general, waste so much time regarding balance issues. When Geoff wants to add something (that doesn't have any clear downside), most of the time there is NO DISCUSSION AT ALL, then the change is in master and we can see in practice what is better and what got worse

well, geoff has informal dictatorship rights i guess.

, and what got utterly broken, and we gradually fix it. I would like to take that approach more often.

certainly agreed. merging stuff is too hard currently IMHO

In this case this would boil down to Ophiuchus saying about Wobbly's changes "I'm not sure this would work, but OK, let's see how it goes" instead of 20 posts that end up with angry people looking for something else to invest their time.

in this case it would be rather: 'I'm not sure about balance, we certainly could try. But I am sure it breaks an internal structure for costs between the hangar types (which i consider a design tool/a benefit). Making the first fighter tech available later goes (not strongly though) against the vision of empires clearly commiting to the weapon branches. Let's rather try something without that; I am also open to discuss/suggest options which I think could do that.'

Maybe i should not have started with suggesting options and wait for wobbly to come up with an idea.

Also i am happy that wobbly did dive deeper into the math.

And sometimes there are functions (like the obsolete one of the lance being able to kill the colony hull with a single shot) and intentions (fighters-1 should compete with mass drivers) which are not self evident - and it does make sense to do balancing inside of those design constraints.
Note the vision for the three weapon lines could also be changed. For example: everybody goes for mass drivers and then specializes into one/two of the weapon branches. But i think that would need a discussion outside of simple balancing.

Ceterem censio we should do the arc disruptor buff we talked two? years ago

Statistics: Posted by Ophiuchus — Thu May 23, 2024 10:15 am

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