I don't know, but abuse of    this annoying simile is much less civil, disrespectful and arrogant than "If you don't play Multiplayer, your opinion is completely worthless."

I'd say Dorian is at least more civil than him. I mean he is actually listening to him and giving him arguments until Annatar said that he does not play multiplayer.

In contrast, Annatar is not even intended to listen to Dorian in first place.

And not that Dorian is saying false.... *hint hint.

HTML is screwing up, you will see HTML icon on the writer and you need to delete the messing part.

The hint is do not copy-paste people's name.

Well, Dorian was not hostile and agreesive until Annatar poped Death-Star thingy (which is quite ridiculous to me as well), not to mention he continued to abuse smiles. I mean... if I were Dorian you may expect same results we are seeing now.

I reread their posts. At best both Annatar and Dorian do not listen to each other, but the fault is more on Annatar IMO.

Even thought majority of people are playing singleplayer, the balance of game always have to be based on multiplayer for several reasons.

1.) There is clear limitation on AI. AI is not just effectively using the ships, units and economy. Wonder why hard and unfair have 50, 100% eco boost? This pretty much screws up balance regarding cost, since AI is cheating and we never know whether this unit is cost effective or not.

2.) Unlike AI, actual human beings try to exploit the advantages as many as possible; like strikecraft 'balls' or spamming Akkan's ion bolt with phase inhibitors to stuck capitals ships are only can be discovered via multiplayer. This not only helps for details of the game, but also they make games more fun.

3.) Maybe this is a bit biased, but online people tend to play games more often than casual gamers playing singleplayer. Hence most of time online folks have much more experience and knowledge about the game. Such knowledge helps to make proper balance suggestion rather than blind favors.

To be honest, multiplayer is more fun. I played a few singleplayer, and I got bored quickly because the pattern of AI is always same.

Maybe it's just a bit completely made up, would be more accurate. Do you have ANYTHING to base this on other then a stereotypical notion that people who play SP are "casual", and that "casual" players play less?

The reality is that a lot of people prefer single player. Their money is just as good as yours. Ignoring them to cater to you exclusively is bad for business. The smart thing for IC to do is to listen to everybody, and look for solutions that work for both groups.

I see this same kind of argument all the time from WoW players, saying that Blizzard should cater to the top 5% because they're the best. That's nice, but it's the other 95% that pay for everything, and they want some attention too.

Unfortunately, it is not made up, IMO.

If you compare singleplay people and multiplay people based on capital ships abilities, you will see some massive difference in knowledge and understanding. (search and read if you want proof. It is very obvious to me)

Sometimes I wonder how can people suggest balance changes without knowing that Dunov's abilities, except shield restore, are narrow frontal that cause serious delay on using the abilities (since it needs to turn its body to shoot)

There are also serious misconceptions around here, usually created by singleplayer folks (and a few multiplayer folks as well).

Maybe 'some' casual people play a lot, more than online folks (which I highly doubt), but the problem is that no matter how long they play, they just don't fully understand game mechanics or game itself.

Unless they face wall called reality in multiplayer.

Yes.

From my understanding, the core of the problem is in strikecrafts -fighters- themselves rather than whether we have to put some good flaks on capitals and starbases. And putting flaks on capitals rises another concern that it may devalue some capital's anti-strikecraft abilities (i.e Kol) but maybe it won't be problem anyway.

No misunderstanding, many people recognize the problem. Look at Strategy and Multiplayer sections. The key problem is that strikecrafts are virtually free that flaks and anti-strikecraft technology are very ineffective regarding this issue (since they don't make carrier owners cost anything)

Instead of putting flaks on every single big objects, the whole carrier mechanics need to be changed (and it is currently on discussion on, again, Strategy and Multiplayer sections) to fix this problem.

BUT, if Ironclad won't fix strikecrafts, then flaks are indeed good addon for capitals and starbases; the current situation is almost beyond control, and while flaks won't help that much, it is still better than having none.

Again, maybe some flaks won't be helpful for your capital ships, chased by 50 fighter squadrons, but it is still nice to have flaks.

Also, you must realize that bombers appear rarely, due to massive number of fighters being created in games. This is because there are very few things that can kill fighters, which are fighters themselves and flaks (with exception of abilities) If capitals and starbases, or other big objects can surpress fighters, there would be more oppounities for bombers to be used.

From my understanding for game balance, it is essential to have counters to specific unit in RTS, and in this case, flak is only -supposed to be- counters to fighters.

Now, ask any experienced players whether flaks are good for fighters. The answer would be no; once I saw a player with 35 flaks try to counter 25 vasari carriers full of fighters.

...He could get situation under control only after his hw and some planets completely wiped out. See, flaks are not working properly and there may need for some more firepower.

At last, even though a starbase can have a maxium of 20 fighters, and hangers can have more squads, they are still not enough for typical carrier spam. I mean the number of carriers I usually see is more than 40, total of 80 fighters...

....you are not going to defend against them with 40 or less fighters. You need some more assistance.

So, let's wrap up.

1.) In current state fighters are too strong; they need more supress fire from more units.

2.) More flak-present environment allows us to use bombers, aiming for diversed tactics.

3.) In current state of balance, it is not possible to defend worlds with only fighters provided from hangers and starbases.

4.) Flak frigates themselves are not enough. (maybe this looks like duplication of no.1 But this is very different issue. Ask me if this needs more explanation.)

5.) All of reasons above are not applied and not necessary if Ironclad fixes strikecrafts, completely eliminating the core of the problem.

P.S : See, without that smile, the whole paragraph looks more serious and professional. And I really appreciate your decision to not put smile for my post.

Alright, now we're getting to the good stuff.

First, I think you're arguing something else than the original poster and a few others, who seem to focus more on bombers against starbases.

But beside that, Sins always had an issue with scalability. Defenses are pretty static. Three hangars early game are still the same three hangars late-game. At the same time, a player's fleet can grow from 10 carriers to 30. Likewise an upgraded starbase does not scale in effectiveness even with hull/weapon upgrades as well as fleets do. So even though a fully upgraded starbase is scary early on, with big enough fleets it still becomes a non-issue - and I have a feeling that this is why the starbases have super-abilities that help them scale better to the threat. Advent drops meteors on as many ships are are in range, Vasari just flat out has a 200% frontal damage reduction (and has more debris to suck in), and TEC's is the ugly duckling in that it just self destructs and takes everything out with it.

These abilities help them scale better against normal firepower, but as you point out don't help much for strike craft scaling (whether it's 80 fighter squads or 80 bomber). Adding a flak weapon to a starbase really will not do all that much to solve it. First there are game engine concerns and a 3 weapon limit (and current 4-target limit for starbases). But even if those limits didn't exist, a flak weapon would still have the same scaling issue. With enough strike craft, it just can't kill them fast enough to make much of a difference.

But on the other hand, the anti-strike craft abilities that capitals have scale very well to the size of strike craft fleets. The Kol doesn't care if there's 10 squads or 80, it'll still hit anything in range. The Kortul will jam everything, and the Halycon will push everything away. If we're talking about necessary changes to starbases to help deal with the large numbers of strike craft, then I think that what they need is an ability that affects large numbers of them, rather than a weapon that's still limited to some number of targets.

But, this also introduces another problem: game length. Of all I see on the forums, "I don't have time for MP" is one of the biggest reasons people cite for not playing it. If you have a starbase surrounded by fully build up defenses and an enemy fleet, your own fleet is already at a big disadvantage. You won't be able to deploy, much less have time to upgrade, your own starbase to help, so essentially it's your fleet vs enemy fleet + defenses + starbase. There has to be vulnerability on the starbase to help deal with it - and right now it is anti-structure ships and strike craft. Anti-structure ships can be one-shotted fairly easily with probably ~10 fighter squads from hangars/starbase, so you'd need a bunch of them. If starbases have too good of an anti-fighter capability, it will be that much more difficult to take them down.

There are a few other things that can help, though, which are not directly related to strike craft or flaks. Some key abilities could work to disable starbases. Akkan's Ion Bolt, Advent's Riverie.. Vasari does pretty good with Nano-Disassembler and phase missiles, I would think. But having some limited means to disable a starbase would help even out the odds, somewhat.

As an aside, have you tested the improved flaks in Entrenchment extensively, yet? Part of the weapon bank changes included better targetting for flaks and other multi-bank ships so it was supposed to increase flaks' effectiveness.

NOTE: I figured I should add, the reason I kept insisting that people start providing good arguments for it isn't because I thought I was right and they were wrong, or whatever. My goal is to improve the game, it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. When IC looks at a suggestion thread, they like seeing a well put together idea and reasons for why it makes sense, rather than a debate of whose opinion matters and whose does not. They make the decisions, and the more solid discussion about gameplay and mechanics we give them, the better decision they will be able to make.

I have not extensively tested flaks, but I really do not see that much improvements.

Yeah, that is correct. Game length is the problem. The problem, however, is essentially based on the concept "entrenchment" itself.

Even without further buff to starbases, based on what I played with some other players online, it just takes too long to finish it due to mines and starbases themselves, and I really do not see online community endorses this expansion greetly.

So anyway.... your point is adding flaks is pointless anyway since it does not affect the current situation, right? (other than game length issue)

For such case, as I suggested a long time ago, flak should do AOE damage, not point damage. It seems this is viable way to scale flak cannons to larger size of strikecrafts (of course the value and radius needs to be tested very carefully to not break the balance)

And No, flaks should stop carrier spam since flaks are supposed to be counter to carriers. We need to make balance so that people are forced to used mixed fleet......

That's an excellent point, but does it HAVE to be that way?  Can a starbase be made to scale better, such that a late-game starbase is still a decent defense against a good-sized fleet?  (Not a perfect defense, of course, but more viable than it is now?)  What if:

> Every fleet size tech upgrade (the ones that give supply points but increase your overhead costs) you buy could also boost some of the stats (HP, shields, damage, etc.) of your static defenses, including starbases.  Vary it by race; TEC might add +1 armor and 5% HP per tech, Advent might add 5% shields and 5% fire rate, Vasari might add 5% damage and 5% movement speed for starbases.

> Static defensive structures, including starbases, could benefit twice the usual amount from any tech upgrades.  So, "+5% to phase missile damage" would add 10% to missile turrets and starbase phase missiles, "+1 armor" would add 2 to the armor of all structures, and so on.

> Each cap ship crew upgrade could give your starbases a passive "ECM" ability that creates a 5% chance for torpedos to miss (meaning 40% miss chance at the highest tech), or better yet, it could increase the range of all structure weapons by 5% such that you couldn't outrange a fully-teched starbase even with torpedoes.

Alternately, instead of the above three (which tie starbase bonuses into existing techs), you could just add a new chain of tech upgrades in the new Defense tree, techs that only increase the stats of defensive structures and that stack with the techs that give more universal bonuses.  Since they're so specialized, the bonus on each tech could be more substantial; imagine a tier 1 Terran tech that gave +1 armor, +5% HP, and +5% range (if applicable) to all structures and starbases, but did nothing for any of your ships.  Pile on some bonuses like that, and a teched-up starbase gets SCARY.  You can come up with some more interesting bonuses, too; what if the maximum targets per bank could be increased from the current max of 4, to some higher value?  A starbase that can deal full damage to a dozen targets per facing would be scary...

Effectively, if starbases gain MORE from tech upgrades of any kind than individual ships do, then the required fleet needed to overcome a single base could grow nearly as fast as the fleets do, and a late-game starbase would still be tough to take down.

As for the SB's weakness to strikecraft, in a different thread, I suggested changing one of each starbase's three weapons into a better anti-fighter weapon.  For the Vasari, I mentioned changing the disintegration beam to be better against strike craft, a la a flamethrower.  If it's possible to have different weapons on a single ship having different targeting priorities (see the secondary capship weapon bank AI change in 2.5), there's no reason why you couldn't have that one weapon type with strikecraft as top priority while the other two types focus on enemy ships.  I'd prefer not to have some sort of "flak" module that I'd have to buy if I wanted to stop strikecraft, but which'd become dead weight if your opponent didn't use carriers.

According to the new Entrenchment change log, simply being in the same grav well as the enemy will impose a 50% production time penalty to the carriers, which will definitely help.

Flak ranges have also been increased 20%.

Psst, Annatar. It doesn't give an actual amount on the production penalty:

So, instead of putting trash flaks, Ironclad decided to fix the core of the problem.

Hmmm, this alone makes Entrenchment better than Original...