First, because by definition you're building so many of them, I hear the stupid "The smaller they are the harder I hit 'em" phrase about three times a minute. Either give an option to turn off ship complete sounds, or make it much less frequent. For that reason alone I wouldn't use them.
Second, they're bad. Real bad. I like how easy they are to kill, it's their damage that needs a boost. Corvettes are fragile weapon platforms, but a whole stack of a 100 seems to do less damage than 4 or 5 wings of bombers would (probably much less, because their attack run time is much longer). If this means the cost of them needs to go up slightly, then so be it. A large speed boost would also be helpful.
Third, corvette's always run into their target, and spend a few seconds sliding off and around it, lowering their on-target time and just looking plain silly. (Engines to ram speed!)
Finally, it's tedious making an effective amount of them, even with shift-click. Perhaps someway to make batches of say, 20-50 of them?
Their phrase is sooo annoying.... :/
Corvettes from my point of view seem like cheap (emphasis on CHEAP) attrition units.. AKA pure cannon fodder. To suicide themselves harassing, and disabling enemy cap ships, and other key units while you bring in the big guns to bear on them, and finish them off.
Yea voice acting needs work that ill agree on. "the bigger they are the more annoying i sound"
For once I'll agree with Sanchez I say they may just be better axing them completely. Super cheap, spammable units aren't good for the game. Remember scout spam being viable? You want that again? I don't see a role for them that wouldn't be toxic for the game. Do we really need 'strike craft that aren't actually strike craft'?
Recycle the models and just make them a new frigate type instead. It could be made an anti-heavy unit, good against HCs, and Titans (anti-cap is iffy and probably unneeded) but trash against anything else. I don't know, just putting something out there. It's not too late to make a major change.
Before we call for a complete scrap, is there any way we can think of to salvage their role as anti-titan support? I think we need to find some way to give these ships an ability that would make titans (and possibly SBs) nervous when they're in numbers with a fleet, but have opposing frigates pass them off as a nuisance.
Perhaps a modification of what lbgloan said? Instead of making them a new frigate, perhaps turn them into a form of strikecraft? Nerf their damage output, slap on a cripple ability, and possibly good to go.
Of course this does mean losing my minesheep...
Let every corvette having a stacking debuff that increases ability cooldown by 1%...or weapon cooldown, or something....
100 corvettes = 100% ability cooldown penalty on the enemy titan....that's pretty damn useful considering how powerful those abilities are...
There are a whole host of possible debuffs...armor penalty, shield/hull repair penalty, AM regen penalty, linear speed penalty, ability/weapon cooldown penalty, ability AM cost penalty...the list goes on...
I feel like a broken record here but seriously people...we have a ship with very light armor (something that virtually all ships other than flak suck at killing) that is fast and easy to amass in a pinch (like, you know, when someone rushes you with a titan)....
Sure, corvettes need some work...I'd start by making Titans, caps, and Titan/cap abilities pitiful against very light armor so they don't die so fast...and obviously the abilities will need to be changed...but these ships have a lot of potential if properly changed/modded....
I'm not sold on making the larger ships unable to harm the smaller ships as much and here is why. Big ships have big guns, if you hit a small ship with a big weapon, that ship should go 'Poof!' in a faster fashion than the standard frigate. From a balance standpoint is just seems odd, for lack of a better word.
I would rather see abilities that stack, some better survivability. Heck, can we give them research like 'Evasive Maneuvers' that will help them decrease 'chance to hit' from enemy weapons? Make them Electronic Warfare scouts with similar stats, maybe a bit weaker.
We can always go the route of making a Corvette class, next to the Frigate and Cruiser classes and give some more 'types' of Corvettes. Eggshells with Hammers ... turtle shells with EMP abilities, etc etc. Right now they are just balanced too poorly. They are most definitely salvageable in my mind without making them a one off counter to one type of unit.
The evasive maneuvering ability for corvettes is a good idea Boshimi.
I agree that their pathing is terrible (they just slam into their target). And PLEASE let me turn off ship responses! Or at least add some variations.
Big guns can't even hit SC...so we already have had a situation since the beginning where "bigger" isn't "better"...
Logically or not, we already have weapons that excel against heavy armor targets but are awful against light armor targets (anti-heavy and anti-very heavy weaponry)...and if we really want to be realistic about this, the biggest ships historically have been countered by either aircraft, submarines, or small, highly maneuverable ships...I feel like corvettes can parallel that role...
I'm not against things like increasing the chance to dodge for corvettes, but really once you crunch the numbers there's virtually no difference between decreasing the chance to hit and decreasing the damage per hit, as it all averages out the same...
Ogrovs only counter one thing, but they are quite useful despite what would seem like an obvious limitation...considering how powerful Titans and capital ships are, a unit that is specifically tailored to deal with these two unit types would still be quite valuable...I wouldn't even say these ships are a "one off" counter either, as they have composite weaponry...the DPS on them may or may not be appropriate, but like HCs they are all purpose units that are weak to only one unit type...
The serious limitation to corvettes is that they are just too vulnerable to the damage done by AoE abilities or ships with multiple firing banks...if you don't deal with this problem in the damage table, you need to deal with it somewhere else....per fleet supply it takes much longer to amass corvettes than most other ship types, which pretty much spells doom for any ship that you're supposed to lose a lot of...
With the way that Sins is constructed if you change the damage certain weapon types do (i.e. flak for example) then it is largely an across the board change and is hard to balance as suddenly other items no longer work as intended. If you increase with research the HP, Shields, restore rates, etc of the Corvettes then they will be come more survivable. Increase their abilities, give them things like evasiveness and you do no disrupt other game play balances based on weapon type and armor.
For Corvettes, can we just give them a sound effect instead of a voice track? Would that solve the problem?
Most new voices in game are kind of juvenile.
Hope they keep Sins on a more serious level.
The Corvettes slamming into the target is more of a ramming then a firing..
Devs look at SOA2 to see ships arc and fire without ramming.
Maybe give Corvettes the mine detect ability?
Immune to radar?
Well at last. Somone finially got the message.
Seriously as an anti-titan counter they're probably going to be medicore. But with their damage and armour types they should be feindishlly effective at drawing anti-fighter weaponry onto themselves and off the fighters, as well as making their DPS really nasty on LRM's. They strike me as being intended to deal with early game LRM mass issues. PLus they're solid resistance to capital ships and Bombers should enshure that they make bomber spamming carrier capitals much less effective.
That said i do see 2 issues with them.
1. Virtually everything, (with one or two exceptions), has at least a couple of points of armour. Given the prior minimum HP values thats another 50-100 Hull right there. Meaning the diffrance between a corvette and even a light frigate is much greater than it first appears.
2. They have such low total HP's before migations i suspect their sheild migation isn't maxing out before they die, or if it is, only just before they die. That represents a huge effective P cut compared to a more normal ship.
I'd reccomend bringing them upto about 350Hull and 250 Sheilds, plus dropping several points of armour onto them. Make them double cost and supply and that should fix up most of their issues IMHO.
With regards to the voice track and just replacing it with a sound, the problem I have there is that right now it's hit or miss, the TEC are just.. irritating, the Advent's is incredibly high pitched, and I can fully imagine taking my headphones off if I'm spamming them.
The Vasari though? He just calmly, professionally says "Corvette awaiting your command." Absolutely perfect, short, to the point, not annoying.
I found them okay for drawing fire, as the main purpose i used them for while the fleet was attacking targets.
Besides that watching them all bounce off starbases as they rammed them made me think they were ramships and had no "ranged" weapons at all. Their flight paths need to be fixed so they don't ram their targets, unless they can do extra damage that way (possible boarding crew?)
plus I used to to pad out the fleet supply...
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