Discovery 5.1 Dev Diary #4 - The Inter-Class Balance Puzzle

[Haste]

The Inter-Class Balance Puzzle

Art by @CuteyCAI

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Hello and welcome to Dev Diary #4 for the upcoming 5.1 update.

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Overview

This dev blog aims to shed some light on the balance changes coming in 5.1, with a heavy focus on balancing fights between (groups of) different ship classes. We'll be looking at things a macro level, leaving the detailed changes to individual ship classes for later blogs.

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The goal

The primary, overall goal of balance that 5.1 will move the mod closer towards is for every (combat) ship class in the game to be useful in every combat scenario, regardless of the enemy ship composition. In addition, we are aiming to do this without grasping for the rock-paper-scissors clutch, which makes it particularly tricky. No ship is meant to truly counter any other ship, with ship classes instead providing playstyles and different mechanics to master. Gunboats do not counter fighters. Cruisers do not counter gunboats. Battlecruisers do not counter cruisers. That is the goal, and although acing it immediately is unlikely, we'll try to get as close as possible.

Despite wanting to avoid rock-paper-scissors, it is important for ship classes to have different strengths and weaknesses so that more diverse fleets composed of a wide variety of ship classes excel. Mono-fighter or mono-bomber should be no more viable than mono-cruiser or mono-battleship. This is why we're trying to further reinforce ship identities: cruisers are shield-tanks focused on hit-and-run. You can run circles around a battlecruiser in a smaller ship, but it has powerful flaks and an even more powerful heavy turret to make up for it. And, pound-for-pound, a fighter or bomber simply doesn't have the raw stats of a capital ship, but of course has the ability to disengage from anything but other snubs at will.

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Cool story - but how?

We started off the patch's development cycle by doing a heavy-handed blanket change to the stats of all larger ships, from transports and gunboats to battleships:

• Armor reduced by 50%.
  
• Powercore recharge & capacity reduced by 50%.
  
• Weapon damage & energy consumption reduced by 50% - with the exception of transport turrets.
  
• Shield recharge & capacity reduced by 50%.
  
• Nanobot & shield battery capacity reduced by 50%.
  

Now, your first instinct should be: "Ah. So you made larger ships awfully weak." - because without any further changes this makes larger ships toothless, paper tigers. Do note, however, that by applying all these changes equally to all larger ships, balance between them was still completely unchanged, and only their interactions with fighters, bombers and freighters changed.

So, after a brief playtest to confirm our logical suspicions that this would render capital ships non-viable against snubcraft, we made the following changes:

• Cruiser & battlecruiser primary turret velocity increased by 250 m/s. Refire rates for these turrets have gone up, too. Cruiser primary turret damage was buffed back up as well, and is fairly close to the values currently live with patch 5.0.
  
• Fighter / bomber strafe speed reduced by 25%. We'll get more into how bombers were changed later in this blog.
  
• Fighter / bomber weapon ranges now cap out at approximately 450 meters.
  

Essentially, capital ship weaponry is now more reliable against snubs, as they are forced closer up and can no longer box their way out of the vast majority of shots. In return, however, the weapons no longer rip fighters to shreds in milliseconds when they do score hits.

After more playtesting and finetuning, we established that capital ships had once again reclaimed their title as kings of PvP, and have since made one more change: all large ship shields now have 25% less recharge (applied after the division-by-two mentioned before), and all capital ship weapons that do significant bonus damage to shields, like pulses, have been made 25% less effective at doing so. Again, this maintains the status quo in the world of capital ships, but allows smaller numbers of smaller ships to actually get over that initial hurdle represented by capital ship shields and begin chipping away at the hull. This is particularly good because it prevents a single battlecruiser from requiring five snubs to log in just to even begin damaging it, which other adjustments like reduced armor would not help with.

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What about bombers?

Needless to say, if bombers were ported over from 5.0 without a single change, they would dominate capital ships effortlessly. So they, too, have been extensively changed. We've finally accepted that, at the end of the day, a Cougar is a Lynx with torpedo tubes, just like a Roc or Vulture is an Eagle with torpedo tubes. So why should they have such drastically different powercores? These powercores have been a thorn in our sides for a while now, as any attempts to make fighter versus bomber combat interesting tends to fail because bombers can permanently fire even the most energy-hungry guns, while fighters can in fact run out. This means bombers have to have poor survivability to prevent them from simply being superior fighters - although there's an argument to be made that that's exactly what they are in 5.0.

So, here's a summary of the major changes:

• Shield resistances / weaknesses to specific ship classes' guns are gone.
  
• Bombers have two tiers of shields, both of which are steps up from Very Heavy Fighter shields.
  
• Bomber shields, while stronger than fighter shields, drain substantial amounts of powercore while recharging.
  
• Disproportionately large heavy bombers - which often were comically upscaled versions of their line's VHF to begin with - have all been downscaled.
  
• Bombers are no longer divided between light, medium and heavy, and are instead categorized as simply light or heavy. Heavy bombers can be recognized by having the strongest shields.
  
• Bomber powercores are heavy on capacity, but much closer to fighters' powercores in terms of recharge. Specifically, while their shields are offline - or toggled off using the /shields command or hotkey - bombers have substantially more energy to work with than fighters, but while their shields are recharging they have to make do with less recharge than the average VHF.
  
• Bomber torpedoes are now all ammo-based with restrictive ammo counts. They are highly efficient and make up, in part, for the weaker powercores bombers now have. However, relying too much on these torpedoes will quickly run you out of ammo. Support ships with docking modules can, of course, help mitigate any ammo troubles - encouraging more diverse "fleets".
  
• Bomber and fighter weapons have been effectively merged: light bomber weapons like Arbalests are now the same class as fighter codenames like EXCALIBUR. Heavy bomber weapons like Hellfire Rocket Pods are now the same class as Mini Razor and fighter missiles.
  

This last point likely needs an explanation. Bomber weapons, when mounted, now add additional mass to the ship they are mounted on. As a result, strafing, accelerating and decelerating becomes slower. Bombers, however, now have two thrusters, stronger engines, and higher base mass. As a result, they themselves suffer far less from this increased mass than a fighter would. You can run Supernova Antimatter Cannons on your Patriot now, but should you? We'll leave that up to you, the players, to decide.

In general, our intention with bomber balance is to make the class into a more forgiving type of snub. Stronger shields and thicker armor let you make more mistakes, but ultimately fighters and bombers will not perform significantly differently against capital ships. They will just play differently, which is exactly what we're setting out to do.

Needless to say, there's a lot more going on with bombers, as their guns themselves have changed significantly and are generally faster, but less damaging, and every single bomber has had its stats reviewed and redone.

A quick note on cruisers

Cruisers are currently arguably the strongest capital ship class for fighting other capital ships. Antonio briefly touched on some of their changes in Discovery 5.1 Dev Diary #3. What I will add to the things listed by him there is that we've attempted to balance out heavier versus lighter cruisers by adjusting shield hitboxes and the effects of shield upgrades. This now means that both light and heavy cruisers can effectively fight in that sweet spot of ~1500-1850 range, and can be damaged in return by larger ships, but through effective piloting (and often a lot of patience) can still come out on top. It's now just a two-way fight, instead of the larger ship desperately trying to land a single hit on a cruiser upwards of 2000 meters away while the cruiser slowly grinds down the bigger ship.

Another problem is how effectively cruisers can gap-close towards gunboats and easily overwhelm them with raw stats and firepower. We've aimed to address this, too. Because cruisers are now highly reliant on their shields, gunboat mines have received a shield damage buff that allows them to one-shot cruiser shields, massively equalizing the playing field. Cruisers now have to consider if they're willing to fight, deshielded, with a struggling powercore or if they're better off avoiding those mines and playing more carefully. Cruisers' engines can also be targeted by gunboats and have much less health than the ship as a whole, making them a highly vulnerable, attractive target for smaller ships.

We'll likely go into more detail on the (third) cruiser rework in a future blog.

Gunboat tweaks

As with cruisers, an issue plaguing gunboats is that lighter, smaller gunboats like the Liberty Gunboat tend to perform substantially better in fleet fight scenarios than heavier gunboats like the Corsair Gunboat. We're aiming to address this in a similar fashion to how cruisers have been tuned, by giving medium and heavy gunboats one and two new shield upgrades respectively. This means heavier gunboats can tank a few more hits and still keep their shields up, which is a significant advantage against both fighters and in large brawls - both aspects where lighter gunboats currently do better. Of course these shield upgrades also provide an advantage when fighting other gunboats, but given the shield-busting strength of gunboat pulses and - more importantly - Ravager mines, this does not seem to have upset the balance of duels and small gunboat brawls.

We've also been tweaking gunboat heavy turrets to try and nudge the meta away from being purely Pulses, Prims and Streamer forward guns, making more different loadouts equally viable.

Some battlecruiser finetuning

An often-cited complaint about battlecruisers has been the unwieldiness of their heavy turrets. So, in 5.1, these turrets have received a substantial turn rate buff and a small increase to their "firing cone away from where the barrel is pointed". Other than that, we have made frontal Fire Control sections slightly easier to take down, making them a more viable target. Finally, we've increased the energy consumption of battlecruiser flaks to make them slightly less oppressive against fighters, bombers and gunboats, making sure battlecruiser players have to make their flak hits count.

Spicing up fighter groupfights

Finally, I'll briefly touch on how we're attempting to make fighter groupfights more interesting. Currently, they're all about focusing down the most threatening enemy player as quickly as possible, while that player has to dodge their ass off and last as long as possible. This is unlikely to massively change, but to make it more viable to play more tactically and - potentially - target multiple players, we've added powercore drain to all fighter shields, which is only active when the shield is below 100% capacity. This drain has been partially offset by making base recharge rates higher, but a fighter with an actively recharging shield deals substantially less damage. As a result, it might be worth it to spread your damage around a little bit more as a group and weaken the enemy team's damage output. Of course, as with cruisers and bombers, players have the option to turn their shield recharge off using the /shields command or hotkey, maximizing their damage output but freezing their shields in place.

We're hoping this change will add a little more decision-making and tactical play to fighter groupfights, as now you may want to not just pile on Wesker, but perhaps have some players put pressure on Cobalt, too, to reduce incoming damage for your allies. In addition, AoE weapons like Cannonballs that can strip the shields off of entire groups of ships at once get some interesting additional utility.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, fighter "light" missiles like the Longbow and Javelin have had their detonation distance ("proximity fuse") reduced and power consumption increased to make them less oppressive in groupfights. These values were originally changed briefly after 5.0 released as the server was under unusually heavy loads (due to technical issues), making missiles underperform. Now that the server is coping better, this has made the light missile archetype broken, for lack of a better word. We're hoping that they will remain viable, but no longer be by far the most powerful weapon available on fighter heavy slots.

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Answering questions before you can ask them

Q: How can cap combat not be affected by the blanket changes?
A: If they're applied equally across the board with damage output, shields, armor etc. all taking the same percentage hit, nothing changes. Of course we have made changes like increased projectile speeds for anti-snub weapons that make them more viable against, say, gunboats as well -- we're aware, and have accounted for that. There's a lot more small changes than can reasonably be covered in this post, as it's meant to give an overview rather than list every last detail.

Q: Where are the battleship changes?
A: We did early tests for battleship changes including powercore-draining impulse engines, much higher top speeds, reverse (braking) thrusters and a primitive component implementation, and some of the tests have made their way to the playerbase as videos. Unfortunately this patch is already more than big enough in terms of balance work, and trying to chew through the entire battleship class is a lot of work. The work done is still around, but separated from the 5.1 patch for now and will be worked on again later. In the most up-to-date test build, battleships are actually incredibly powerful against snubs in particular, as approaching a battleship to less than 450 meters while it rains 1500+ m/s secondaries on you is a pretty big ask. We'll see what's needed to make them a little more balanced in that regard, but little else is currently planned.

Q: Are Wardogs still the best snub mine in the game?
A: Hopefully not. We've reworked them to explode at the end of their new 1.5 second lifetime, and they now get dragged along with your ship's movement at the time of dropping them, making them behave a bit like bowling balls you hurl at your opponent. They're fun and different, and not nearly as obvious a choice as a defensive groupfight-oriented mine, because they now stick closer to the owner's ship, increasing the risk they pose to the user.

Q: Has anything changed about freighters?
A: Yes. While I didn't devote a section to them, freighters have had some adjustments. For one, like fighters, they get to mount (some) bomber equipment on their gun slots. We've also made their shields a good bit stronger. We paired this with higher base powercore recharge, much like other snubs. In return for stronger shields, we've taken a sizeable chunk out of their armor. The result is a freighter class that is defensively-oriented, more than capable of fighting other snubs in small brawls, and better at pirating because you can turn your shields off for a big DPS boost.

Q: Have light fighters changed?
A: You'll start seeing a pattern here, but we've also shifted light fighters towards being shield tanks. Combined with larger shield bubbles, this makes ships like the Wyrm and Patriot a bit more hittable for the average player. We're still ironing out some details, like whether or not to try and give them regular thruster energy, though. I might try and cover them in more detail in another blog.

Q: Finally we see Haste's true face! Discovery VHFLancer is here at last!
A: That's not a question. In addition, no, not really. Fighters are possibly the least useful ship class in 5.0. The difference is simply that fighters now have a role in fights that involve more than zero capital ships, which is the vast majority of fights on the server. Our goal is simply for every ship class to be fun to undock and fly around and play the game with, regardless of who you might bump into.

Q: Where's the Hegemonster?
A: I intend to cover changes to the Hegemon Asteroid Miner in another blog about some upcoming mining changes / additions.

Q: How many fighters or bombers does it take to kill [insert capital ship here]?
A: Usually, about three highly competent players for one competent capital ship pilot. The breaking point varies ship by ship, and generally bigger ships take more players to take down. Our primary concern when it comes to fighter versus capital interactions is how things scale into larger fights. We don't want six bombers to kill twelve capital ships with ease because they hit a certain critical mass. However, with tools like flaks and snubs' limited range, this doesn't seem to be a concern currently.

[BobMacaroni]

am I correct in assuming this means that fighters will be able to run Arbalests and Hellfire rockets as well?

[Emperor Tekagi]

Yes, which adds mass to your snub and in return slows it down in regards to things like turning, strafing and acceleration.
So you trade off maneuverability for a snub with a punch. So basically fighter-bombers but as dynamic thing you can just swap to on the go.

[Couden]

When FWGs for Hurricane?

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[Lusitano]

i miss 4.86 ... i

[TheSauron]

Are you sure the average Disco man will be able to survive the simultaneous cap velocity buffs and snub strafe nerfs while 30 centimeters away from an angry cap?

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One MD Admiral

[Haste]

Are you sure the average Disco man will be able to survive the simultaneous cap velocity buffs and snub strafe nerfs while 30 centimeters away from an angry cap?

No. I'm quite sure they won't be. I'm afraid that's just the reality of having capital ships that can defend themselves from competent snubs. Snub vs cap gameplay is just very punishing because of how much damage capital ships (have to) do in a short time window.

Hopefully bombers will actually be a little more forgiving in this regard, but their larger size might work against us there more than the stronger shields work in our favor.

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[John'DTR'Grey]

Good night.

I would like to ask, is there any plan to "fix" the giant spread of the Solaris gatlings for the capitals?

Thank you so much also for the patch notes, and for the work you put in, it is much appreciated, and not much words can express the glad we are with it
Keep it up!

Salut.

[The_Godslayer]

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"

[Jeuge]

lmao

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