Capital Ship Point Defense

[Jinx]

comparisons are made where no comarison is possible...

ppl like to say "but your big capital ship can blow up a bomber in less than a second" - and that is correct, because the bombers main defense vs. a capital ship is only 1% its armour and 99% its size and agility. - so a sitting duck is blown to pieces in less than a second.

the difference is - when we get both the opponents to activly dodge. - the capital ships defense grows a little, depending on the capital ship by maybe 1% to 80% easily ( like 1% for a juggernaut, 80% for a BHG GS ) - while the bombers defense goes up 99% ( hypothetical numbers - but you get the drift )

so - a bomber can NOT be blown up by even a battleship in a second ... unless its sitting still. mind, a still sitting fighter can be blown up by pretty much everything in seconds, cause weapon DPS is MUCH greater than the passive defense of ships ( armour / shields ) - as it must be. - dodging makes such a huge deal of defense, that weapons MUST be powerful or a fighter vs. fighter fight would never end.


so, now that its cleared up that a capital ship cannot blow up a bomber in such a fraction of a second. we can look at comparing skills you need.

hitting half the capital ships is not too easy when they move. - your hit rate would be 50% maybe which makes it not possible to really solo such a ship, 10% of the ships are "large" - so that even a blind person hits them 90% of the time, the rest is tiny enough to be relatively safe - unless they behave like fighters and joust.

the real problem here is that a capital ship starts with a size like a BHG GS and goes up to the size of a zoner juggernaut ( roughly 500 times larger [ volume ] ) - you don t get that much of a size difference in any other shipclass. - yet, the "supernova" is THE universal weapon vs. them all... and it NEEDS to be ( in the current state ) able to hit both, the BHG GS and the juggernaut and also produce sufficient effects.


to compare that to a fighter. - its having a ship with 4 lvl 10 guns fighting both... a starflier with lvl1 shields and a nomad fighter with lvl10 shields. - and for both, you ll only have ONE type of gun. - the difference is to get a gun that is both.... not unfair towards the starflier AND the nomad fighter - and thats where the trouble starts.

logical ideas that can prevent a lower number of bombers from "raping" larger ships are.
- revise the point defense. - it might not kill a bomber, but it should jolly well make the bomber work as hard as the capital ship player. a bomber should pay heavily for a mistake ( "should" yes, that is a subjective term )
- revise the shields ( they are currently the best defense vs. bombers ) so that they regen fast enough to make it only possible for 2 very well coordinated bombers to take it down - or 3 that are working together casually. ( 2 bombers working VERY well together should be rewarded indeed... but it isn t required at the moment. - right now, 2 bombers vs. 1 cruiser have a fairly easy life )
- swap nova / supernova roles ( that fixes the anti-fighter role, too ) - even a good SN gunner fails like 50% vs. a fighter ( or more ) when firing his SN. if every SN shot cost 10.000 it would make such behaviour less attractive. - and 70 SN are still enough not to run dry. - the nova would then become the main anti-cap weapon, without ammo, but significantly more torpedo like.
- increase bombers roll / reaction delay - but thats such a global effect that its hard to predict what it does to the bombers as such ( might well go from the best ship down to the worst )
- decrease bomber thrusters to 140 instead of 200 - that would also be a HUGE nerf that yields unpredictable results.
- turn the supernova into a huge pulse gun ( so that the "gun" type is more logical anyway ) - so it can be used to kill capship shields like before - but a REAL bomber would NEED guns and nova torps to hurt the caps. ( no more universal weapon ) - that would also make SNing fighters pointless, cause if its only a shield gun... they don t kill fighters.

most of those things are huge changes that would not be considered, but they can be used to see that the situation is not trapped in a dead end. - we have still ways to balance into every direction.


edit: oh, @darthbeck: saying something like that is very disrespectful towards those that like to fly capital ships. - its lke saying "your ship is crap! and right so, if you want a better one, fly a different kind. - thats not balance and thats not what we try to do. we want every ship to be good - yes. bombers ought to be good vs. capital ships. - but capital ships ought to be good vs. bombers, too. its not like ppl making capital ships say "oh, yes, bombers the ultimate weapons... lets just pack, cause we have no idea how to counter such a shipclass with our multimillion units powerplant, our huge guns and crews of 2000+ people.

if we take RP seroiusly. the bomber would be the more efficient ship even if it took 10 of them to take down a single cruiser. - cause it would be 5 HUMANS vs. a crew of hundreds. - that is what i call efficient. what we have now is 1 human vs. hundreds. - only cause the crew of the capital ship is imagined doesn t mean its not there - anything else are pvp thoughts.

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Shipdesigns made for DiscoveryGC