Given how powerful the ability is now, I've put together a list of changes that I think could make this ability work without being worthless:
(edited 7/1)
So, does anyone else think these changes would be adequate? Not enough? Too much?
H
Problem really is in the Shipboard Labs tech. Makes it so you can get Strip way too fast. SL needs a rework. My current thinking here is to assign Lab type to cap ship type. So the 3 assault Caps (Kortul, Vulkoras, Rankulas have weapon labs, Jarrasul, Skirantra, Antorak have civilian labs).The Vorastra must be present for the full duration of Strip for it to work
Might as well make it part of The Maw then, which probably wont happen as it requires a major rework of the tech. Using Strip takes 10 minutes. There is a high-cost tier 8 tech reducing it to 8->6 minutes
10 minutes is a really long time in-game. I'd be all for 5-6. Also, Strip to the Core probably should not be affected by the civilian tech that reduces salvage times and increases salvage payouts.Initiating a Strip reveals and highlights the planet to all players (just the planet, which would appear as if scouted but with no vision)
I like this
Any siege damage sustained cancels the Strip.
The duration increase would give enough time to siege the planet successfully. Otherwise all this would do is require the clearing out of neutrals, which you do anyway.Initiating the Strip costs 3750 credits (payout also increased by 3750 credits) - if halted by siege, this is not refunded.
Not much point if you get it back in the payout. If you lose the planet to siege then youve lost any completed time in the Strip process which, with increased duration, is fairly significant.Other than the credit increase, payout is unchanged.This is where I think the tech needs the most work. If it's possible to do this, I think the payout should be taxed in the same percentage as your fleet upkeep tax. If that doesnt work, I'd suggest diminishing returns from each planet stripped.
Mine in bold
I fully agree that ship-borne Labs is half the problem.
Shipborn labs should give 1 military lab per capitalship at rank 1 and 1 of both types of labs per capitalship at rank 2.
That way rank 2 is as strong as the current rank 1- and both ranks are needed for shipborne labs to help the vasari loyalist player towards stripped.
Also, while I agree stripping should take longer(and rather like the idea of any siege damage stopping the stripping process) I don't think an initial cost to start stripping is really necessary. All that's really necessary IMO is for it to be realistic for the opponent to take back their planet before it's gone forever.
Correct me if I read this wrong, but are you suggesting that you need a titan in order to use stripped the core? If so, I like this idea. This will help deal with stripped to the core rushes, as you would need tons of money to get the research and titan. By the time you get the titan, your enemy would have a much larger fleet.
Easy up on the nerf hammer there buddy. I'd suggest lvl 1 on titan research (thereby requiring 1 military lab) for mobile rulership. Your strip to the core ideas are nice, but durations and cost are excessive.
Remember, you want to balance things, not nerf them into oblivion.
While in general I agree with you, the problem isn't just "too much resources too early"- it's simply unbalanced that every world that falls to the vasari loyalists can never be taken back.
While I don't agree with all of the OP's nerfs, I do think it's nec essary for enemies to be able to retake a world before it's eaten.
I would say I disagree on almost every point. If you nerf them too far, than it makes it impossible to go full mobile. And that is the problem with most of the "fixes"....
1 - Agreed, the Titan is the important key for going mobile
2 - Yes/No. I always thought the strip should have been fixed to a ship... So I think it should be part of the Titan.
3 - HELL NO. I do not like this at all. I would say 2-3 minutes to strip... but that would be the most.
4 - Interesting idea, but I don't see how this helps the "imbalance"
5 - Again, NO. If there is a time delay, then you have time to bomb the planet before it can be striped.
6 - A cost to strip? Lol? The whole point of striping a planet is to get resources once you are full mobile... this defeats the purpose of full mobility.
7 - Agreed. Payout seems fine where it is. There usually are not many high level worlds to strip, and they are usually swallowed up before one can tech to strip anyways....
My only suggestion is to put it at research level 8. This forces the player to have multiple capital ships and a titan to tech it, or to have multiple planets and labs to get to it. It pushes it back to the mid/late game, where it should be. That is the only issue I see with Strip to the Core... making it a mid/late level tech, not a rush-able tech.
That is all.
In Rebalanced Races, I nerfed it by nerfing Shipboard labs from 1/2 labs to .2/.4/.6/.8 labs, thereby slowing the upgrade chain.
What about moving it to tier 8? Wouldn't that force the player to have a riskier build to try and tech that high? Even with labs, the amount of cash to get there will seriously hurt their fleet and defenses...
There are two things I would like to see:
First, move stripped to the core to tier 8 and increase the research time and cost by four times. This way, rushing stripped to the core is a far riskier.
Second, make stripped to the core take three minutes to complete. If the planet is lost due to siege frigates, then stripped to the core is canceled.
OPs nerfs were a little excessive. You have to remember without striped to the core the VL really have nothing going for them when compared to the VR. I suggest this. In order to use striped to the core you need to have a titan built but it doesn't have to be present and the strip should take 3-5 minutes. I also think the tech striped to the core should have 3 levels. Each level increases the payout by 1/3 with the final upgrade making it pay out what it currently does. this takes care of the problem of strip rushing while keeping striped to the core viable.
Gah.. Forgot about that... The reason I settled on .8 was because at the time I was thinking it was T8.. I'll have to change that..
Shipboard Labs really seems to be the problem IMO because it nullifies research tiers which is the main reason I focused on that instead of STTC itself.
Seems I was rather excessive with the time-to-strip proposal - the goal of all these requirements was mainly to give players who stand to lose planets that they would otherwise colonize a chance to prevent the planet from being destroyed the 10 minutes was just a seat-of-the pants estimate of how long it would take to cross 5-7 gravwells.
Now that I think about it, it seems almost like the strip time should be proportional to map size - on a small map, it wouldn't take to long to respond to a strip attempt in your region of the map, but when there are 50+ gravwells, it becomes much easier to find planets on someone's section of the map that they can't reach in 3 minutes or so - making it easy to deny their future economy at no risk unless time-to-strip is increased. Once the map has been colonized, stripping planets becomes harder, so it makes sense for a tech to be available then that reduces time to strip (besides labs, a requirement for many prereq techs would also help keep it from being available sooner).
Regarding any siege damage at all cancelling the strip, consider this scenario: Vasari Loyalists have a titan+fleet, and are stripping a planet. Advent Loyalist have a titan+fleet, and they want to stop them. If they need to siege the planet all the way down to do this, those ships aren't contributing to the fight, giving the Vasari a significant edge. Not building siege ships would mean the Strip succeeds, and they still are facing a roughly even fleet. Thus, the requirement that the Vasari must prevent siege from reaching the planet at all, either directly or through deterrent value (any capitals moving in to siege eventually get sniped by Assailants). Perhaps this is an overreaction, since an midgame Strip-using Vasari would have needed to sacrifice some fleet to get the needed research - but then, they could have sacrificed a few of their own planets to get the ball rolling.
The cost-to-Strip was proposed because right now, initiating Strip is practically risk-free - at worst, you lose the ninja-colonized planet you didn't intend to keep anyway. The OP stated that the cost would be added to the return if you succeed - it just means that if you use the ability near enemy territory, you might actually lose something significant.
Also, I agree that Shipboard Labs needs a nerf as well - don't think the devs intended for research tiers to become meaningless halfway through the game.
Thanks for the feedback!
I see your point so how about this. As you siege a planet you decrease its strip % this way you dont need to fully commit your caps. you can just siege it down to a percentage low enough that you have time to fight back. As for a risk how about this once a stip is started you must keep at least 3-4 caps in the grav well until its complete those 3-4 caps are phase jump disabled until 2 minutes after either they succeed in the strip or the strip is canceled. This makes sense as you would need ships nearby to collect resources and seeing as caps are the the most important asset of the VL its a decent risk.
I still think you all are over-reacting....
Volt hit on the main issue ---> ship labs. If SttC is moved to tier 8, and ship labs are halved, I think all the other issues are gone.
Messing with the strip amount, canceling, ect. is a BAD idea.
This is the Loyalists remember... they want to GTFO as soon as possible. Being mobile is how the faction works, so don't nerf it into oblivion.
Based on limited personal experience I would like to throw in my opinion:
I have to digress on the opinion that SttC should be considered an endgame tech/mechanic. While it definitely looks like one, it is countered more or less effectively by culture. Planets you cannot colonize are as blocked to you as are stripped ones to the enemy. Should an enemy manage to shut down or delay your scorched earth advance you may find yourself in an undesirable position: Unable to advance and highly susceptible to attrition tactics. Prime example: Advent loyalist with "auto-culture": Needs frontline culture of your own to repel as capitals alone can't clear a single planet of their culture.
So to make a long story two lines longer: Keeping SttC as a viable mid-game strategy requires striking a fine balance.
My suggestions:
1. Instead of splitting the "capital labs" or cutting down their amount, make it depend on the Titan's level.
Would make rushing for the lab tech far less effective since the requirement of having a Titan imposes an expensive restriction. Additionally it would account for a smoother increase in labs, primarily depending on time rather than on to two techs. Let the Titan produce 1-2 credits per second per level. Both of these would further add to the administrative nature of the Loyalist Titan.
2. Make SttC taxed income and make it relative to planet health. Have minimum of 25% to be gained as a sort of emergency income.
This would increase the time before a player gets to make full use of stripping the planet. It encourages planetary development to not be hurt by negative income on the planet. Salvaging tech should be kept as is. This should help to change SttC from promoting sort of a "locust approach" to more of a slow-moving scorched earth.
Apart from this I have a question related to SttC:
Does anyone else besides me always recolonize stripped planets and scuttle them afterwards? This creates an asteroid belt which is of far more use to the Loyalist than to any other faction; it yields much more income than the dead asteroid due to the inherenct extractor bonus, you cannot lose it to culture, and you can always have the extractors be recaptured by your scouts if need be.
edit: some typos
This would be a viable option if capitalships(which the vasari loyalists generally have a lot of) didn't push back culture so effectively. After a brief wait you can almost always push back the culture enough to colonize with a few capitalships.
Actually stopping the Vasari Loyalist Strip Advance cold with culture isn't really possible. If capitalship culture pushback were nerfed so that the Vasari were forced to attack other sectors to knock out culture buildings before they could realistically colonize it would be a viable counter.
As it is, it's just a short pause while they wait for their fleet to remove the culture so they may colonize.
If that is the case, I might simply have run into a bug, or just played poorly.
I had a fleet of 6-8 low-level capitals in a Advent Loyalist gravity well, then bombed into neutrality, and was all but unable to push back his culture. Next culture centers of him were some jumps away.
Could this have been the Global Unity bug?
Apart from this: Wouldn't my proposal of making the SttC income relative to planet health and taxed help with the culture problem? If he is able to field enough capitals to repel culture easily, he must be paying some moderate to high taxes which in turn would force him to babysit this planet quite a while.
But feel free to fill me in on culture repulsion please, it seemed more viable back in Trinity.
I like ideas.
Only thing that I think its a bit too harsh is the price tag it should be about 2000 credits and duration should be about 3-5 minutes and i would change if planet takes any damage to If you loose planet strip is cancelled and your investment is lost
Just had a new idea regarding strip time - if you make the base time 8 minutes and have the Vorastra's desperation passively reduce the time by 1.5 minutes/level, it serves to allow defense against early-midgame planet denial while allowing lategame mobile play (3.5 minutes to strip at level 3 Desperation, and 2 minutes at level 4). I suppose the numbers could still be tweaked though.
Vorastra to strip planets itself - as replacement for Desperation
Disclaimer: Currently redoing all the math after having access to the exact values of all techs.
While you were making your calculations did you took into account trade route and how many legs did it had?
Sorry, since this is a per-planet calculation I did not include it. But I will add it to my post shortly.
Meanwhile some food for thought: A stripped planet provides the resources to build enough capitals to provide a similar credit income like the planet would have possibly had. Including fleet research, excluding taxes.
All while saving time and providing you with capitals and labs.
I somehow doubt, that this is easily balanced...
I think, requiring the Titan to be present in the gravity well in order for resources to be collected solves the problem most easily. Fleet labs, as well. You'd now have to add the build time of the Titan as well as the travel time, and research time as well, slowing it down. Strip might also be a tech 8 research too.
Also gives a more flexible option to Vasari Loyalists, as then you can abandon a planet without stripping it (for an ally, for example).
I like this. At the very least, being able to choose which planets to strip. Just last night I intended to give my buddy the planet, but I left the Jarrasul on auto, and it colonized when I wasnt paying attention. Had no choice but to strip it, very disappointing.
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