I'm not here to beat this dead horse any more, and I think everybody is aware that I have been championing adding an upgrade slot for the SB. The reason I am making this thread is to give a clear presentation of the advantages of this idea and to provide an implementation strategy.
Having an upgrade slot for each SB would do three things:
So, maybe one of the reasons the devs haven't implemented this idea is because there are no upgrade slots left on the screen (for whatever reason, I don't see many items that use the "F" hotkey slot). Well, I have a solution to that too. As you may or may not know, VR lost the Enslaved Labor tech, which I disagree with by the way, but I digress. Fitting into losing the Enslaved Labor tech, I suggest replacing the Colony Pod upgrade slot with Phase Space Engine upgrade slot.
Sometimes, in diplomacy, I would accidentally scuttle planets...now that has been extended to enhance my overall strategy when I play VL....
Exactly, I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand.
And if you haven't scuttled your home world at-least once, you haven't really played Sins.
100% right on. This would be a pre rebellion design that has always been true.
Now in rebellion, breaking this fundamental balance with orkies is the primary reason they are OP.
As for dumb dumb build starbase everywhere, the only change in the tactic is that vasari build less starbases overall, so they become even more efficient at their chap tactics. Before rebellion, they had to invest heavily in defenses.
Now they just have an offensive defense structure. Its unique, but its also uniquely overpowered because it breaks the fundamental rules governing balance in the game(as greg so nicely thought to write out).
I believe ( Yes i know my beliefs have been said to be obserd):
The only reason the devs are not nerfing the crap out of jumping orkies is because you can get fleets and caps combined upgraded to be more offensive in terms of weapons than any starbase. Firstly think about how they just nerf the starbase by like 10% or 20% after jumping for just a brief period. That says alot about their way of thinking but they will never tell you why they did it.
I cannot argue with their balance sheets because recently i have been playing games where i concentrate on fleet upgrades and strength in numbers to overcome titans and starbases. The truth is it is a much more powerful way of playing than relying on starbases. 150 Kanraks with fully upgraded weaponary,hull , armor, mitigation, overseers, Subverters and Repair clouds is still more powerful than jumping orkies.
This is true in any scenario. I always think starbases are not at all a threat up unti someone decides not to scout them and not rush to snipe them.
I give the devs props for changing which research tree to follow to get jumping orkies but until then i really find jumping orkies to be situational.
Yes but those 150 kanraks subs etc cost fleet supply therefore loss of income for rest of the game.
yes but i win the game
riddleking, if you have been following the conversation, the main discussion is centered around how insanely strong rebel vasari eco players are relative to any other faction's eco spot in game.
The imbalance isn't as noticable on the front lines rebel players, yet its still very strong. Once these guys get their titan up and running, with their jumping starbase a 2v1 will have a hard time holding against that 1 vasari rebel player.
2 titans beat 1 titan, but the vasari rebels can have as many "titan like ships" as they want.
I agree with you here--buuuut doesn't this all boil down to teams and how 1 team plays compared to the others? Theres no actual replay to showcase this happening where someone who is suppose to feed is instead building titans and starbases and upgrading them. Doesn't he hurt his team members by spending credits this way?
If im getting massive feed while there eco player is building bazookas then whats to stop us crushing his team mates before he rolls out his titan or starbases and whats to stop us from ganging up on starbases and the remaining titan with uped armor points, mitigation and bombers?
i would think such investments for eco players hurt there feed graph.. we really need a replay to showcase this multiple titan paradox
i could be wrong ofcourse because i've never faced such odds but even then whats to stop the other team from having starbases of their own and titans if there getting good feed. Besides when you say multiple orkys your talking about orkies that haven't all been fully upgraded and will fall when hit by 100s of units.
Sorry I do not have reply but you can ask player slayer to confirm if he still remembers that game.
I was VR and after sb rushing and killing a guy I went eco and at the same time got 5 star bases operational. 2 were helping to kill guy who got 60k credits to my team mates who was supporting my sbs 10k. Those 10k were given to him by me. Oh and my team mate was loosing until my SBs arrived. 1 was supporting other side and help holding the line while I sb was fighting with slayer who was their eco thus forcing him to fleet and last 1 was supporting my titan while it was feeding on pirate base.
Game ended before I could use my titan but it with a sb support and few caps was bound to rape their eco positions.
People forget that SB doesn't need to be full health and weapons before it will make a difference in fights that their team mates are having. Just forcing them to get higher fleet supply to adapt or completely change fleet composition can be game breaker. Anti corvette or LRMs fleet will do no serious damage against star base....
I honestly don't know how mobile starbases came to be. You simply can't make 1 starbase op and leave the others under powered.
I think a permanent -20% fleet supply upon researching mobile starbases goes a long way towards balancing it.
Still think it should have a -20% weapon damage and armor too. It's simpler to implement and nerfs it allrighty.
doesn't stop someone still spamming them. This is a really bad balance issue and i wish mobile starbases have a choice to be gravity well locked and get all the upgrades but can choose to be mobile and not get the upgrades plus have a perminant penalty on weapon damage, hull, armor, shields and shield mitigation, fleet supply cost etc.
So wait, then should all starbases be mobile to close this obviously huge power gap?
That's why I made that long post about why starbases need to be mobile in the first place. That is the primary way to balance all starbases, and by default help to balance the vasari rebels in rebellion.
Actually pre rebelion if you wanted to take enemy hw when it was fortified you needed to send bomber spamm with your siege. now just build kosutra or 2 and start sending orkies with few siege trough. Kosutra has no prerequisites and cost just a bit more than wery weak sb.....
I know any vr would be happy to trade this for a nerf that should be done
I feel sorry for the devs because how do you balance mobile starbases for vasari rebels. No matter what they do it will still mean the rebels will have 2 or more titans and even if they limit the number of starbase it will still not matter. How they end up solving this 1 is going to be the biggest balance update since sins vannilla release.
But if you bake in those tradeoffs, it gets more expensive. the theoretically 'infinite' number of starbasees is actually limited by economy, so you can't actually an endless barrage of them. At least not fully upgraded ones.
Having a permanent -20% damage output and armor makes the SB less menacing, so it might be more interesting to put your money somewhere else perhaps. And having less fleet makes the race less menacing in general, so it gets easier to counter.
Precisely - it should never have happened in the first place...
As this and other threads have pointed out jumping star bases just break too many balance rules - lack of fleet supply requirements, economic upgrades as opposed to experience upgrades etc...
The problem with applying fixes such as have been suggested is that they are basically accepting the jumping starbase as a new kind of ship. But the problem is simple... starbases are NOT ships and the differences are just too great to be sorted out with a few tweaks here and there.
It's not a capital ship... it's way more powerful. Even an un-upgraded orky can take on 2 or 3 capital ships (depending on their level of course). Strategically it has the same shit your pants effect as a Titan but it's worse because you have no research pre-requisites behind it, you can build it anywhere and you can build as many as you like. There's no Foundry to destroy - your opponent could be building a star base in any sleepy corner of the map before revealing it. Even if you limited it so that you had to upgrade them in a particular way or limited them by fleet capacity etc... you can't do that with all starbases as that would be unfair defensively (as has been pointed out). So what's to stop players upgrading just 1 or 2 star bases to jump at a time and queuing up the rest? It takes a very big fleet to take out a starbase - and minutes later you'll have another one knocking on your door.
Strategically all of these things make it a complete nightmare. It's fundamentally broken.
Although all the suggestions are inventive and well thought out, none of them can really change that fact.
The big song and dance selling point to the game was meant to be the Titans, but with what was probably a coding afterthought, they've completely destroyed the whole point of Titans in the first place.
It's Frankenstein's monster and unfortunately the only thing the developers can really do to fix this is to put their tails between their legs and kill the jumping ability.
The only reason this hasn't been suggested more strongly by ourselves is because as much as we complain we all love playing the Vasari rebels Me included! who doesn't like building unlimited death stars and stomping around all over the place?
Unfortunately they have to go if the game is to become a proper game again.
Its quite easy.
Give other starbases the ability to move.
Once they can move, the defensive capability of the TEC/Advent race increases dramatically.
tweak the numbers if needed to ensure balance.
Done.
People can take out a vasari support fleet on an orkulus with their own starbase.
Vasari starbases then become far weaker because without an effective support fleet(scared away by high risk of close combat with a starbase) they are vulnerable to assault.
Once a starbase is vulnerable to assault, its time to take it out.
Doesn't the Vasari Starbase do more damage vs Starbases than the TEC/Advent ones though? I thought that was why they didn't have a building destroyer like the Ogrov or starfish.
-Twi /)
You are indeed correct twi. Yet, who is going to risk their fleet to support that starbase when your starbase comes in close?
Meteor does a good job of dealing with pesky support fleets, so the fight is a lot closer. Then, with your own fleet supporting against that starbase, you can bring that to bear on the vasari starbase.
A vasari starbase without support is still formidable.
it becomes a time game, who can do the most effective damage and not lose too much fleet/credits. A lvled progenitor can do a lot to prevent incoming starbase damage, along with a few repair bays.
and there is a bug that you can position your Vasari starbase just so that tec or advent starbase wont be able to fire at it....
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to making the other faction's Starbases moveable then. Maybe just a a slightly slower pace than Vasari. They are a race who specialize in mobility after all, and their Starbase was designed to move, while the others would have to be modified.
This is the right way to go, eliminate starbase jumping, good idea on paper, wrong for the game.
Other races having moving starbases is two wrongs don't make right. IMHO
Horrible idea that will never be implemented.......
When I said I'd be okay, I did not mean the TEC and Advent should be able to jump, just move where they're built. Do that, and make it so you can build them in magnetic clouds so vasari can't get an unbroken chain by jumping one in, and they should be fine. (After making the phase engines a starbase upgrade of course, but that's nearly unanimous at this point.)
I've already provided a suggestion that puts jumping Orkies back to a Defense star base early/mid game while maintaining it's fun factor flavor of being able to Phase jump.
So lets look at the basics of the design statement (using Paxton's design criteria):
Orkulus class star bases should only be able to jump where a phase node is currently active.
1. Does it match the game focus? Yes. It maintains the Orkulus star base as a primarily defensive unit and is much more intuitive as the research to phase jumping star bases now branches off Phase Gates.
2. Does it solve a problem? Yes. It prevents Orkulus spamming into enemy territories which is made possible by the fact star bases do not require fleet supply and indirectly fleet upkeep.
3. Does it solve multiple problems? Yes. Orkulus class star bases requiring phase nodes to jump solves the issue of turning the Orkulus Star Base into another Titan class combat ship. It solves the problem of having multiple titan class combat ships attacking anywhere on the map. It adds additional strategy to requiring a Kostura Cannon and phase gates to attack remotely. It opens the Antorak as a viable capital ship which is rarely used currently (A level 6 Antorak can remotely place a phase node). A phase gate need not exist where the Orkulus class star base is present as it could be upgraded to deploy it's own phase node.
4. Does it have drool factor? No, but honestly this is one of those things where drool factor needs to meet reality as the current mechanic is basically a cheat against the AI and other players. I look at this question from the other direction. Had Orkulus class star bases required phase nodes to jump at the initial beta, I think people would have considered this a very cool and balanced implementation, with the potential to become very powerful attack with a 16 lab build out.
5. Is it easy to implement? No idea. I know it would require coding, and would assume the check to see if there is an existing player star base in the gravity well could be extended to support checking for an active player phase node.
6. Does it provide good feedback? My assumption would be yes. If you try jumping to a planet without an active player phase node a message could be displayed stating this fact, similar to if you try jumping to a gravity well already containing a player star base. Additionally the research text for star base mobilization can also be updated to state the need of requiring an active phase node to jump to another gravity well. Phase Gates and phase nodes are also an ingrained well known mechanic with Vasari as a faction.
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