Happy 2011 to all the Sins players out there! It's been quiet on the Sins' front for a while now due to other business, but as I promised late last year, we're working on a new Diplomacy update for everyone. The update will be released in beta first due to a number of changes we're making in the game, probably in the next two weeks. Once we're happy that everything is working as expected, we'll release a final version for everyone.
So what's going to be in the update?
Currently the Pirates can either be non-factors or incredibly nasty early on given how their upgrade system works and how their fleets are composed. If you get a streak of bad luck, you end up with Pirates that have an insane power curve that makes the game very unfun, very quickly. To fix this, we're switching the Pirates to a series of fixed fleet compositions and upgrade paths. What this means is that early on, if you get tagged with a Pirate raid from bounty, you'll find them annoying but easy to deal with. As the game progresses, the Pirates abilities and toughness will scale over time based on the amount of credits they collect from missions, bounty, their planet, etc. The Pirates will no longer simply scale in power, either! We're giving them unlockable special abilities that will give them an edge in late game situations. On the flip side, we don't want situations where in the late game, a player can send a massive Pirate fleet at another player by simply dropping 100 total credits on bounty. So we're adding in a new system that will scale back Pirate raids levels if the bounty isn't high enough to warrant a big deployment.
Basically, the Pirate bounty system will be a bludgeon, whereas giving the Pirates missions via Diplomacy will be a scalpel.
Well, yes, a flack/shield kol has much more play room as far as antimatter goes.... but maintaining adaptive force shield requires 60 AM/40 seconds... or 1.5 antimatter/second or the exact same antimatter cost as powersurge.
antimatter regeneration for both the Kortul and KOL is .75+.08*(level-1) In other words... at lv10, the base regen still cant quite maintain these abilities... that said, due to the slight lag time in ability activation and autocast imperfection, for all intensive purpuses, it can. (1.47 vs 1.5)
That means that perfectkol in perfect land (without starbase) has 2.6 antimatter/second to spare... or 1 flack burst every 38.5 seconds. Plenty of time for a skirantra (.85+.09*(level-1) am/second to spend 80 antimatter and more than completely repair any damaged strikecraft. lv 10 = 1 heal every 37.1 seconds. (more base regen, but no culture bonus, or last stand bonus)
Vasari bombers have 140 base hp, and .5! regen/second, and 5 armor.
A flack burst will do 48 damage to a unupgraded vasari bomber. Since regen is 1/2ed when under attack, and 8 seconds between flack bursts, the bomber will regain 2 HP... 3 flack bursts wont kill an unupgraded vasari bomber. It takes 4.5 flack bursts to kill a fully upgraded vas bomber.
So, a kol gotta spend 400 antimatter to almost kill a vasari bomber... and it takes a skirantra 80 antimatter to almost overheal that bomber by a factor of 2.
Lv 10 kol has 486 Antimatter.
lv 10 skiranka has 617.5 Antimatter.
(both including antimatter upgrades)
w/e... I am supposed to not be commenting on balance before the patch comes out... oops.
Since the new patch is going to be beta, you might want to consider unhiding the beta feedback subforum.
the update is so new that when i checked i was the only one shown
I really hope that a lot of these simple texture reductions make it into official patches. The game devs really should take advantage of the community reducing a lot of the memory usage for them.
This ability is only activated when under focus fire, so again it's not something you will necessarily maintain at all times. If the Kol is under serious fire, you are probably retreating it so long-term is not a big deal, and if it's not under serious fire you won't activate much, if at all.
In practice, the Kol will burst several times near the start of the battle in quick succession (blowing through its antimatter reserves, which are much larger at higher levels). This, along with garda presence, will greatly thin out the enemy strike craft. At this point, replacements will be killed off by flaks and fighters as they are created, so they shouldn't build up nearly as quickly. The need for quick-succession bursts disappears if the ability does its job right.
Hey.... Yarlen... wasn't this supposed to have been released by now??? On January 10th you said that it was two weeks away! Now it's mid Feb and it still hasn't been released!!
It is out now. Go download it.
How? Where? I don't see a link here to download and Impulse doesn't yet recognize that there is an update yet available.
Click on the blue tab in the upper left hand corner of impulse, then check the box that says "show pre-release version"
Ah, I'm an idiot. Thank you. First off, I love the new pirates mechanic. Now it doesn't take me 2-3 fleets of 8 capital ships and 40-50 frigates each to take them on anymore. I don't have to avoid them like the plague anymore. They are also useful to annoy the other players with by way of increasing the bounty on their heads too now. The rest of the changes seem more subtle. Will require much more play to determine how big an impact they really have on overall game play.
That could be part of the problem; your capital ship to frigate ratio is way off. Eight capital ships is more than you'd ever want for TEC or Vasari (Advent can go that high only after researching mass transcendance). Presuming typical units (ie, not huge units like carriers or heavies) I'd probably only want 1 or 2 capitals with a fleet that small.
For my style of play it works just fine. I use normal fleet sizes on nothing larger than medium maps with 2-3 ai players. Anything larger and I seem to get memory mini-dumps after a couple hours of play. That make up also maxes out my supply points for that particular phase in my games. I have found only using 2 or 3 capitals and the rest frigates and cruisers only gets them killed. I still lose 1 or 2 in really large battles but that make up usually ensures a quick victory with minimal losses. I don't like having to constantly pay for frigate and cruiser replacements when I could be using those resources for research and fortifying key systems. It may not be ideal for your style of play but it is perfect for me.
The strategy you describe works quite well in the early-game. The toughness of capital ships means your opponent has very little opportunity to deal lasting damage to you. I run cap-heavy openers all the time, but they are simply not viable beyond 4 capital ships. Any further and you're sacrificing so much firepower that your fleet simply won't be able to stand up to a credible threat. I strongly suspect that the "power" you're feeling isn't the capital ships, but rather economics; you probably have a lot more money sunk in your fleet than the AI has in its. This is fairly typical of hard difficulty and below; they get their economy rolling slowly, spend money on pointless things, and fall behind relatively early. So it's not surprising you can make ends meet with a capital ship armada and enjoy the benefit of not having to worry about replacing frigates. Against serious threats like the pirates, it's not going to cut it.
If you reconfigured to be frigate-based, you could easily double your damage output, and that's going to allow you to fight fleets far stronger than what your capital ship armada could deal with. But the benefits don't end there; by having fewer capital ships, your experience isn't spread as thin, and your remaining capital ships will reach higher levels. This may actually give you better support abilities than if you'd had more capital ships. As well, with more fleet spent on combat frigates, you can lean a little more heavily on defensive support cruisers. The right abilities here can greatly extend the longevity of your fleet.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your playstyle. If you're having fun, power to you. However, your fleet will be stronger if you reconfigure with more frigates, and if your goal is to match up to the more powerful diplomacy pirates, then you may need to adopt that strength.
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