Logical balance

[Blighter]

Think the main problem with Battleships is that the ladies and gentlemen around do not tend to think 'group combat' but have that idiot misconception of their big and nasty Battleships supposedly being able to WTFPWN everything else there is but another Battleship SOLO.

It's retarded. I fly an Osiris with six Hacker Primaries, five Solaris and a Mortar. Alone, it's a deadweight. It dies against a couple Bombers, it dies against a Dreadnought, it dies against a Carrier, a pair of Siege Cruisers, whatever.

However, in a group engagement, a massive fight with people on your side who understand basic tactics and coordination, it's an enduring little monstrosity that can fight for four hours on end, take part in demolishing (if not demolish mostly by itself) lord knows how many Fighters and Bombers, four or so Gunboats, three Siege Cruisers, three Assault Battlecruisers, three Assault Carriers and a Dreadnought. Granted that's an example of a specific fight, during which an Outcast Dreadnought called 'Ven'Gyr' was present on 'my' side, but even that big chunk of metal survived and fought for way over an hour. That heavy BS that didn't have any anti-small-trash guns, that heavy BS that can barely dodge, survived. For over one hour.

Over one hour and four hours of constant BS fighting, made possible not because the ships were uberpwnzor or superior or whatever, but because they weren't alone, because it was a group engagement where the group worked together.

You want a Battleship to be able to annihilate a group of Fighters or Bombers alone? Why so, because it's "RP", because it's "supposed" to do that or is "logical"? Bull.

Fly in a group. Fly with people. Experiment with your ship. Find out what loadouts, etc., work for you and find people to fly with. Analyze, develop tactics, a plan, and you'll see that you can take on odds which look impossible just with some coordination of your group. That's all it takes.

It doesn't take superior individual flying skill on your side as much as teamwork in order to make the most out of a Battleship. Fighters seem to be useless escorts? They ain't. They at least can deshield whatever flies around you if it's small. Bombers are useless escorts? They ain't. They can suppress all the other capships that're firing on you. Gunboats being useless escorts? They ain't either. They can suppress the same way Bombers can, and do even more, dependant on loadout. I'll bring up Mjolnir's mention of Gunboat Missiles here, they ruin the day of Light Bombers. One hit on hull's like five Nanos plus Powerdrain = can't SNAC = oshi, lost the big anti-BS damage potential out of a sudden.

In that particular fight, after some point in time 'my' side retreated. At that time it consisted of a couple Gunboats and the Ossie I was on. The Gunboats weren't kitted out to gun down the chasing Fighters and Bombers (Cerbs and BR/Pulse). So wha'd I do? I told 'em, as usual, to stick close to me and suppressed the Fighters and Bombers with my pissy five Solaris turrets. A Battleship protected Gunboats even, not the other way around. Couple minutes later, a Siege Cruiser and the last Carrier showed up. I had roughly 50% hull left and those two caps together should've ripped me apart, but they didn't. I slaughtered the chasing Cruiser and the Gunboats on 'my' side kept the Carrier suppressed so it couldn't cruise up and tear me apart up close. Result? One more trashed Cruiser and Carrier, whoop-dee-doo. Why? Basic coordination.

I don't get why people say escorts are useless or whatever. Without escorts, that fight would've ended for me after five minutes tops. I stayed alive for four bloody hours just because I had escorts. Not magical "I-Win!"-buttons, but escorts which suppressed whatever was sent on the Venny's and my behind. And there weren't even any Light Fighters on 'my' side that could've just Screamer Mined the crap out of all Bomber powerplants, so really.

Y'all don't want "balanced" Battleships, what y'all want is for your Battleships to be magical "I-Win!" buttons that can kill a horde solo for whatever reason.

I don't think it's necessary, but it would be hillarious if that were to happen since a group that knows to work together could slaughter everyone else even more easily with more 'punchy' BSes as the core of their fleet.

So I support y[color=#FF99FF]'all, just to watch the slaughter in the future. <3

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[CzeReptile]

I wonder if you actually ever had useful escorts. There are 2 types of those

1. fighters

- split up and keep bomber shield down all the time while they drain powerplant with shieldbusters and slowly hurt hull
=> bomber never has shields and is very open for razor shots from battleships, bomber never has energy to really fire SN either

2. gunboats

- GB missiles and pulses also drain energy from bombers

"But then the bombers will target the gunboat", yes they will probably do that... so the GB can keep close to the BS it's defending so the BS guns (like solaris) hurt. At the same time the BS can trade bots to the GB, killing a moving GB with 1700 bats/bots close to a BS with a few solaris is extremely difficult.

Oh yeah. Get a gunboat. Gunboat dies. What next?:D:DReally, whenever we meet dread escorted by gunboats, we go for gunboats first. Escorts become prime targets. It just does not work.


And to last post here, not everybody has a group that goes together whenever they feel flying. FIgure that out. When you assemble your group of uber pvp players who spam everyone to death, not we all have the same ability to do you see? I just log in my ships to server randomly, without hour pre-gathering so I can wtfpwn everybody in sight.

Caps are good ships, despite being totally unbalanced towards anything but themselves. Currently, group of gunboats can practically destroy anything. It wont matter how much you go balancing various things, someone will always appear to whine about some other class being too imbalanced. And to all that escort thing.
When I engaged not long ago in a major battle between Liberty and Rheinland forces on my turtle brick and when Liberty smalls swarmed into the fray (I had about dozen wraiths + 5 other caps surrounding and escorting), I lost all my bots and then half hull to the bombers and VHFs assaulting me despite the overwhelming hail of fire all over. Hell I even consumed about 2500+ bots from other caps. Truth being said, I alone shot about 6 or 7 of them with my primaries. Even with that much escorts, I ate up 4500+ nanobots. Go figure about how balanced that is. Not a single Liberty cap was on scene.

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[Dashiell]

Y'all don't want "balanced" Battleships, what y'all want is for your Battleships to be magical "I-Win!" buttons that can kill a horde solo for whatever reason.

This kind of remark make me roll my eyes 1440 degrees.

Why is it, that every time a discussion about balance comes up people who don't agree alsways start yelling:

- you just want a super pwnzor ship

- you're just a sucky pilot and I`m way better

- you people only gank so your ship should be weak

- we always get ganked so our ships need to be uber

Seriously. For once, can we just try to make this a proper discussion about balancing ships? not unbalancing. no one here is asking for an omi potent pwn machine.

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[Jihadjoe]

Basically... What Enchy said.

If you say "escorts are useless" then modify your loadouts and tactics. Battleships don't suck They're awesome when you use them right, and hell, to do something wildly destructive with a battleship you don't need awesome guns, plant, armour, better shields... or even awesome BS flying skills. You just need to think and plan and scheme and plot.

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[Hidamari]

Joe that leaves one problem still.

In a bomber Vs BS match, the bomber is not only very hard to hit, but does not even need to enter the range of the battleship.

Yeah, some of the smaller BSs can dodge some shots if they keep moving, but they will get hit. The SNAC has no ammo, and a few bobmers continualy spamming and not entering range of any of the BSs guns will always win.

Mjolners talk of Solaris and Razor ignores all of that, the bombers simply dont need to enter gun range. When they do against a good pilot, they tend to get spanked, but if they just sit back and SNAC snipe, they win.

It's not that the cap drivers are asking for uberpwn ships, they just want to have a fair and equal chance.

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[Valinor]

I agree completely with Reptile, Dashiell and Hidamari, that's exactly my point.

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Official member of the Hessian Conspiracy.

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[Blighter]

It's not that the cap drivers are asking for uberpwn ships, they just want to have a fair and equal chance.

This line made me laugh.

[color=#FF99FF]I fly Fighters most of the time, how about I want a fair and equal chance versus capital ships too?
How about I want a fair and equal chance with say two Fighters versus one heavy Solaris-geared Cruiser just as y'all want a "fair and equal" chance against SNAC-geared Bombers?

It's trash, fair and equal my behind, a Bomber's job's to wreck caps, who ever said you're supposed to even have a fair and equal chance, Fighters don't have it vs. Caps either, nor do Bombers vs. Fighters, etcetera.

Fair and equal here translates into making Caps pwnzor more and harder, and that's all there is to it.

But go on, those threads just keep getting funnier and funnier, all the time.

[Corsair]

Bombers are MEANT to kill battleships. Heavy Battleships should NOT be balanced to kill bombers. They should be able to rightly cannibalize any other battleship, however.

A brief example.

Light Battleships EX: Osiris, Lib Dread:
More anti gunboat / cruiser, less anti battleship
Medium Battleships EX: Bretonia BS (?):
Fares well against battleships and gunboats / cruisers, but isn't exceptionally good against either
Heavy battleships EX: Rheinland, Kusari:
Utterly destroys Light, medium, heavy battleships, but are too slow to hit gunboats and cruisers reliably.

Edit: Ench also makes an important note- The best bit of battleship logic I've ever read. Battleships are meant for fleet combat, not for going out and destroying every single pirate, alone. And apparently, they're already scaled for that. Just needs "Logic and coordination". Don't think that real world tactics don't work here.

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[Soban]

So I fly different BS and I can say one things: it's Awesome to do rp.

Then I totally agree with Bit-Chee, Play in group it's really much more fun!
However it's not easy for everyone to find people to do battle-group.

May be we should think about a new way to do "battle group" may be show in other color the player who are of your faction or allies , then call them for do group and also do different squad option because some time this option hum sucks( Do form up in cap ship ... you will understand). So why not create battle formation like a line, or phalanx ( Cap ship in midle, mid ship around the core, and fighter/bomber on each side).

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[Lance_Uppercut]

I've always pushed for bombers to be bigger (huge, even), and slower and heavier and basically like RL bombers -- slow and totally vulnerable by themselves but devastating if successful.

So bombers, IMO, should be GB-sized vessels with broad spans but thinner in general. Think the US's B2.

This ties in here that, yes, if you make these changes and separate the BS-class ships a bit, you could easily work in "heavy bombers" into the balance as well.

Would it work ("make sense") to give a single ship the power to fire 2 or more Nova torpedoes in one pass, but the maneuverability of a GB and conventional armament of a LF?

At the same time, does it work ("make sense") now, that a bomber pilot can easily take out a fighter if he hits with his energy torpedo?

I'd much prefer the former... it would serve to BOTH nerf and buff the widely-used bomber class, and (I hope) help people to work together for better results.

Naval factions should love this. Freelance pirates, maybe not. Maybe it's best to add in a new class rather than change the old class (since pirates wouldn't have access... yadayada make up your own reasons.)

Thoughts?

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::The Pennsylvania Liberation Force