Logical balance

[mjolnir]

Regarding the comment about barges - when a dev says that a ship is considered a joke, you're in trouble. Players put the time and energy into gathering the credits to buy one of these things so that they can role-play with them, and to use them in game. What is a joke is when the player base isn't respected that way.

Barge was added as "joke" yes. Meant to be a very rare sight with 2-3 in the game max, acting as bases never seeing any combat. It was requested to be added by Junkers to sit in their Guard System as far as I remember, never getting from there. Lot of effort was put to make trading with it extremely difficult to impossible, even so people still do it.

Now a rather a large (6+) number of people get it (from admins) and suddenly those people who bought it for the 500 mil (less than a BS) complain that it is useless in combat as it was meant to be so they can't move it trough hostile space? Tough luck.

Ohh and a quote that sums up the situation:

"if it didn't suck in combat the monthly sighting of a junker barge hauling 25k cardi to ny through all sirius wouldn't be monthly"

Though maybe making it invincible would fix the disconnect bug it suffers.

Why is this relevant to cap ships? Because the SAME thing applies to battleships and you'll have the same result - escorts against a multiple bomber attack are useless. Even taking into consideration the differences between the Mako and the Osiris, the caps end up being irrelevant to the battles we used to stage in Lost. If a battle was restricted to caps only - then the battleships came into their own, standing off at 2 or 3K, shooting at each other.

But throw two or 3 bombers in on either (or both) sides, and it was quickly a case of which side would run out of caps first so that the bombers would end up shooting at each other. And even with a mixed force - 2 battleships, 3 bombers, and 3 fighters or gunboats per side - the defending fighters can't kill the bombers fast enough to protect the battleships.

There are notable differences between a Barge and say a Mako... apart from the 1/10 or smaller size... it's the shield. The BS shield at least doubles BS lifespan compared with barge.

Anyway the fights in lost yes.. interesting indeed. Some observations from there:

1. The caps there had 99% of the time one-purpose anticap loadouts. Event the slightest loadout mixes produced incredible results - example: lone Mako (think it was Tic's) with a single Battlerazor got 5 bomber kills and survived without much damage. Can you imagine what a full solaris one would do? Well I can as I have seen some of those Osiris/LN dreads in combat more than enough times.

2. Most damage in short time done to caps was done by other caps, a few shots added from bombers resulted in the very quick capship destruction and bombers remaining. Note that the primary reason for quick cap death wasn't the bombers alone, it was capship firepower. Check dps rating for a BS or even cruiser compared with bomber to see what I mean. This was also clearly seen in the events done so far, there was little reason to come with bomber as it could die before doing enough damage. While coming with a BS always resulted in a huge amount of damage getting delivered.


The reason why mostly one-purpose anticap loadouts were seen in Lost is simply that without them the caps would go down just as fast to enemy caps, without hurting them.. so they won't survive the cap shooting to actually make difference to bombers.

This issue of defense guns taking place from offensive guns is addressed by the turret split.

So if you're going to say that escorts are a viable option for a battleship, then it has to live long enough for the escorts to do their job. The quickest and easiest answer I've seen for that is a simple one - increase the number of bots and bats available to a cap ship.

What changed from 4.84 to 4.85? Bomber dps stayed same.... capship armor AND dps got increased. Result is as mentioned above.... Capships do damage to each other so fast that they both die before fighting bombers can make a difference.

So if you increase bots/bats on caps, you'd need to keep their guns the same... which would prolong both mixed and capship vs bomber fights.

(What's really sad is how much empirical evidence I gathered when I did my Happy Admin Day event for this back in April. The Venator lasted about 5 minutes against a combined fleet. The Sea Serpent lasted for the whole hour, and wouldn't have died then if I hadn't of lagged. They both had Cap VIII armor and battleship shields - just the Sea Serpent is a MUCH smaller and more manuverable target - like the guys said earlier, Voidrunner against 10 regular ships is a nightmare.)

Actually you are misunderstanding the reasons there. The Sea Serpent can survive very long [b] because of the lag [/]. Any added lag helps a fighter and hurts a battleship. In an environment without any lag, sea serpent can't survive 1-2 firestalker spamming ighters, not to mention some thing like 2 missile spamming gbs taking turns in cruising up for more than 5 mins.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.