Where the vasari starbases would be the fastest (we'll call this 100% starbase movement speed)
Advent starbases would move at 50-75% of this speed,
and TEC starbases would move at 25-35% of this speed.
This would ensure that all starbases are useful in defending their gravity well. This also adds to the game's skill requirement as all the main defenses in the game aren't quite so static.
This would also be a way to start to balance the vasari rebel's phase jumping starbases so that the vasari rebel tactical advantage isn't so huge when they use their starbases in a gravity well.
I thought Rebels want to make some allies with TEC and Advent factions and then move on.. From Rebellion intro you can see a coalition of many interracial factions moving towards an alien galaxy... Maybe I completely misunderstood..
I actually agree about the moving Starbases, I do think they all should be able to move, and at different speeds is a decent trade, and if you feel it's still unfair, make it so they can't shoot while moving then. But let them move!
Thank you wintermist
Hmm i've had a thought as well, about the TEC big red button. When upgraded it would cause the starbase to lose it's ability to move, or reduce movement greatly.
your thoughts?
mass bombers, spin around gravity well and kill orkies and any moving SBs.
Overall it won't make a difference esp with the 1.5 patch.so they are weaker than you think.
This is a horrible idea. It would ruin faction diversity by making all races the same with different ship skins. It would also greatly destabilize the game balance, something that has now finally been fixed.
So is necroing an old thread.
LOL carpet. I just discovered this hilarious thread. How you have the stamina to defend a troll post with more 12 pages worth of paragraphs is truly amazing.
Right up there with thinking flak frigates are OP.
This experience was just like taking a stand for something that is far more real then a video game. A good experience, I recommend it to everyone.
Tangerine, Sareth?
Hmm not up on the current internet lingo, what do you mean?
I once saw a child playing with a tangerine the size...of a tangerine...
Troll detected.
Old thread but still going, either there's merit or tenacity
I think having all star bases move (inside their own gravity well) is a fine idea IF the movement is SO SLOW that during a fight it is already too late to move.
All Vasari starbase tactics are good and balanced according to the majority due to the early game disadvantages of the Vasari, I haven't played enough to argue, however I do think that having starbases permanently stuck doesn't match the technology level or any of the races; humans invented the tugboat concept a long time ago.
So I agree with the first point in that Starbases shouldn't be stuck however I disagree that they should move fast enough to move around and attack.
The OP could suggest other options though for buffing the Advent and TEC Starbases to counter Vasari building starbases outside of the range of Advent and TEC starbases and then fighting when fully upgraded.
An idea for each of the races which I think match their race bonus and would counter the early game Vasari Starbase build tactic are written below but they are just random ideas:
Advent Starbase: Passive upgradable ability that very slowly damages all enemy ships/starbases in the gravity well. The damage stacks for each individual ship/structure to get stronger the longer the enemy stays in your gravity well, such that in the time it takes to build and upgrade a Vasari Starbase in the same gravity well, to the same level as the local Advent Starbase, the Vasari Starbase would be at 75% health, and it would be forced to get rid of the Advent Starbase. Name it something about Unwanted Presence, the slow but limitless energy of the advent's hatred.
TEC Starbase: Passive upgradable ability that very slowly drags all enemy ships/starbases in the gravity well closer to your stabase. The drag effect gets stronger the lower% health the starbase is, such that when the TEC starbase is 15% and about to red button the enemy has to have planned to be running full tilt away in order to get away in time or destroy it before it blows. All enemy starbases during their construction and after would also need to be dragged in although it is not technically a ship, and because their movement speed is so low they cannot escape the Red Button. Seems overpowered but hey its just an idea. Name it something about gravity/heavy mass energy harnessed from the reactors as they overload from getting damaged
Spreading the uniqueness of the Vasari Starbase is probably a step in the wrong direction, so I suggest adding options to the Advent and TEC Starbases such as those above might be a better way to satisfy the OP
THESE WOULD MEAN LOTS OF BALANCING BUT ARE ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS -phew all caps cause its yelled loudly
Then again, I think having the Advent and TEC Starbases move at 0.5-1% of the speed of the Vasari starbase such that it would need to begin moving 10/20/30minutes before a fight in order to get into position. And if the phase lane you need to defend changes during the game your able to shift your front line defenses EVENTUALLY. Or if you updgrade your red button and see that the extra range means all your hangers will explode, then you can shift that tiny bit in about 5-10minutes or so but too late during the fight. Therefore the fight tactics will remain the same, but the
tl;dr It is a fine idea for the purpose of shifting a starbase between combat, but only moving at 1% of the speed of the Vasari Starbase. This option would be the easiest to implement as at that speed it wouldn't even need movement animations and wouldn't really change any race balances
Took the first response right out of my mouth. Lots of balancing on this kind of game can mean a lot of work, potential screw ups...probably not worth the risk.
I wanted to have a streamlined solution so that there would be a chance that it would be adopted by the development team.
Since there are no mods to test on this, the precise speed of the starbases should be balanced. I do say in previous posts that these speeds are tentative numbers, balance comes first. The point was that balance comes from just fixing one thing. In a game like sins, efficiency is a unique advantage and nets a unique trait. Movement is not a unique trait for the sentient beings of the Sins universe, and I'm glad you agree with me on that basic point. Movement confers an advantage so large compared to other advantages that it grossly imbalances things.
This thread has maintained relevance for the entirety of its posting, so no necro here. I think the reason a serious rebalance hasn't occurred is that the developers don't want to spend the resources required fixing the game. The vasari setup with starbases/Titan/Corvette swarm is ridiculously OP, mainly because the starbase moves, giving the vasari effectively 2 titans to face the enemy position and/or to stalemate for an extened period of time. This combo holds for most of the mid game(by far the most useful game option of any race in the game, bar none.) , and by endgame vasari will have a large carrier force to deal with the other fleet combination possibilities.
Thank you for posting!
If you know anything about modding, a test mod for this is easy to whip up. Just need the two other faction's starbase files (starbasepsi & starbasetech) and then modify their speed/accel numbers at the very end. Anything else is gravy.
I did do a quick test mod on this. 1% is too slow... you have to zoom in to practically the pixel level to even notice the movement. I changed it up to 10% and that seemed a lot better. Too slow to make a difference in battle (and I truly mean that... the damn things crawl like a snail), but fast enough you can actually notice it moving. With this speed, you shouldn't need to rebalance any ability ranges.
The catch, however, was with the Tech starbase.... If you upgrade it to include remote construction... the buttons bug out and overlap with the movement buttons. Dev.exe throws a bunch of errors every time you select the starbase and you can only hit the frigate construction button, not the cruiser one. You can get around this, however, by selecting the planet and get the build buttons there, owned, friendly, neutral, or enemy. This might be (part) of the reason the devs never went this route.
The following are code snippets from the files. (Only the lines I altered are shown... gaps are non-altered lines I removed. And yes, I altered deceleration... it looked too... sudden, jerky... with it at the default value considering the slower speed.)
Original Psi/Tech
Original Phase
modified 10% value
Cheers furyofthestars
I know little of what's involved but sounds like you put in some good effort thank you for that
I am for REALLY slow moving Advent and TEC Starbases, 1% or 10% so long as its too slow for combat.
I don't think its a big deal to put a note in the Remote Construction tooltip that you have to select the planet in order to construct (see above post about this bug).
I think the argument for this change should not even mention the Vasari Starbase tactics as that would mean rebalancing. Which is a bit different from the original intention of this post; sorry OP.
The argument for it should be: 'would not need rebalancing because it would be too slow for combat and only for the purpose of repositioning between fights'
I am also for new ideas on the Advent and TEC Starbases but that's just cause it sounds exciting.
EDIT: I just realised that it might upset one in a millions games where a player wants to build a critical ship (an escaping colony ship maybe?) and have it come out of the starbase but it comes out of a frigate factory on the otherside of the gravity well (and dies to a 'hold position' fleet?), because he/she was unable to designate where it was built due to our change. I have never built the Remote Construction upgrade so I don't know what's what.
If I could've gotten the test mod uploaded, I would have, but for what ever reason I was having difficulties with it last night. I tried wincustomize, but couldn't get it to give me an upload button/link or whatever. Not sure if it was something I was doing wrong or a setting on my PC....
Yeah, 10% is definitely that. 1% is so slow it's pointless to even make the change. Look at it this way... if it takes the Vasari SB 10 secs to do something, at 10% it would take 100 secs (1 min 40 secs), at 1 % it would take 1000 secs (16 mins 40 secs). Considering how slow the Vasari SB is in the first place, realistically your looking at more than 10 secs for anything it could possibly do... even rotate 180 degrees.
@furyofthestars
Hey thank you fury for testing it out. Have you tried the 25% for TEC and 50% movement for advent, just to see?
If you do could you link the mod? I hope the mod uses rebellion + the DLC's.
I would greatly enjoy testing it out. Any change that doesn't impact strategy to a point of significance really doesn't belong in the game.
thanks!
@ wetdelicious
If I recall correctly (its been a while since I have as well) you click on the planet to build from the frigate factories and the starbase itself to build ships from it. When you are in such a tactical position(colony ships to survive), you really want to be building colonizers from both.
Re 25/50%, no I haven't. I only tried the 10%, but assuming I can ever get it uploaded someplace, it'd be easy enough to create a 25/50 version to upload as well.
And yes, I'm using Rebellion plus both DLCs.
EDIT: Ha! Figured it out... wincustomize didn't like Firefox (or the version of FF I was running).
Links!
Mobilize both to 10% - https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_mods/183/
TEC 25% / Advent 50% - https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_mods/184/
EDIT: bad links... I screwed up the upload and they were rejected.
Note: I reverted the maxRollAngle to 15 for all cases. While I haven't done any specific testing to be sure, the more I look at it and think about it, the more I'm sure this is not a speed/accel variable and thus should not be reduced. Well, reduced below what the Vasari can do, anyway. Not sure why the static ones get such a high roll angle....
Oh, and this is modifying the speeds/accel/decel ONLY. ie, I have made no attempt to balance ability/weapon ranges, etc.
Wow! Thank you so much! I'm going to test it this weekend.
The links are not working. What is the name of the mod?
Er, crud. You're right that they're not working. I have to be signed in before I can even see my mods, but then clicking the download buttons give me Invalid URL error 400. The mods are "Mobile Starbases -10%" and "Mobile Starbases - 25/50%", but they're not appearing in the master list, either. *grumble* Maybe there's a delay/approval time period first before they are available? I'll find out....
That's super neat! Is there a way to mod it so that all the factions starbases can phase jump the way that Vasari could pre 1.5? I don't care about game balance since i really only engage in compstomp and co-op compstomp games.
Yeah, you'd have to add the specific research that Vasari Rebs get to the faction you want to be able to phase jump.
Apologies, but I'm not going to get into the "can you make this mod for me" type of a deal. I only made up these two cause I was interested myself.
@sareth, yeah, there looks to be an approval process. I'll keep an eye on it and post once they've been approved. If by EoD Monday they still haven't been approved, I'll contact them to figure out what's going on.
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