Since the addition of the badge market, I have encountered what I consider to be a serious problem with damage calculations in PvP. Some people do not spend any (or at least very few) rank points on adding decks to their ship. The damage calculator has an apparent limitation based on the size of the ship. This results in significantly smaller ships being able to deal more damage to me than I can deal to them. This really needs to be adjusted to use ship level instead. Using ship level ensures that each ship has had a minimum number of rank points to improve their ship. How people choose to spend those points is their decision, but not spending them on decks shouldnt result in a benefit to PvP.

Small ships by definition are small and agile, allowing them to dodge incoming weapons more easily. Larger ships are less agile but are capable of firing more weapons. Dan has always made it clear that he intends the damage calculations to reflect this, so in that respect there's nothing wrong with the damage calculations.

I personally don't like the damage caps though. If it was up to me, I would adjust the system to remove all damage caps. A battleship should be able to one-shot a gnat. However, I would then significantly increase the effect of defences vs weapons to compensate, because whilst a battleship can one-shot that gnat, that doesn't mean its weapons will actually hit. That gnat can still move out of the way if it is fast enough.

OK, I'll buy that. In which case the damage calculation needs to be modified so that the larger ship "misses" entirely and the gnats damage output is reduced significantly because the ship is trying to avoid death as opposed to inflict damage.

yeah. there needs to be an attack cap for ships. like 10x deck space. that way the most damage a 40 deck space would do is 400, while the cap for a 100 deck ship would be 1000, and so on. this would gurantee that people who decide to have bigger ships can compensate for the extra weapon space.

i encountered a rank 85 scout, very difficutl to disable, they have a limited decks and usually they put it into hull, the rank 85 hade like 800 hull and i only did 20 damage everytime, it still inflicted back 40, despite my defence was 650 :/ your gonna need 325 rank points to get 650 tac officers, dont know why it did so much damage. :?

if they put all theyre rank points into tac officers then theyre leveling VERY slow. most of those are probably from rescued prisoners.

They may be leveling slowly, but this presents a horrible mis-balance in damage calculation. Technically, the scout ship can have unlimited damage output by putting all of their points into tactical officers. They have absolutely no need to put any into helmsmen because damage dealt to them is already capped at a very low level. If the current damage caps are to remain in place then the number of crewmen that can be added to ships also needs to be capped.

I love the damage cap. It makes smaller ships viable.. If there is no damage cap at all then I would easily 1-shot any small ships and their traps will mean NOTHING because they will trigger after my first shot to halycon me but I already kill them first.. Damage cap protects them..

I don't support attack cap either because it will kill viability of small ships as well. No attack cap and existing damage cap are perfect balance to make small ships viable and can take down big ships but takes more energy to achieve that. Small ships already have lot of penalties anyway so removing damage cap and add attack cap will add too much penalty to them forcing everyone to go big as cookie cutter.. We need several viable paths whatever people like.

I will say no thanks to attack cap and no thanks to removal of damage cap.. The whole reason why you don't like is because you simply hate the idea of a tiny scout to kill you off.. Scout players made lot of sacrifices by not being able to own many planets, cannot hack and very prone to being hacked and unable to have high AP/RP due to few planets to own.. Leave them alone and let them have fun to shoot big ships down.. After all, you have difficulty to kill a fly after several attempts on average.. Heck, a cute little virus can kill you no matter how big you are..

i feel the best way around this is to remove the damage cap and instead make them harder to hit dependant on the differance of sizes between the ships. there should also be a module around this to make smaller hits easyer to hit. like a lock on module.
thats just my opinion anyway

I cant see why were giving the chance to research all this tech if and when we install it the bonus's it gives are lowered cause we put more on larger ships. By definition, Larger ships should have larger def. and more atk. I understand they are not as agile but when I am lv 69 being pinned up against only 80's+ on my battle tab which is common ud think that when they put me up against another lv 69 if i have more atk and def i should win, but you dont. Think about it how many times u heard a speed boat take out a military battleship?? I noticed for the past wk the battles are being offset alot and i know several people from several legions they are all complaining about it. Most people I hear complain about it me also stopped battling people if we have the research and cant use it whats the point of playin this game? This problem isnt some cap thats been placed on the game when it first started. This is something people been complainin about starting this wk. Thats all i have to say i want to dontate at least $20 to change over race and get some weapons but if they arnt goin to work for me then im goin to keep my money and just play free if i keep playin at all.

Maybe some sort of split the difference... something were you keep the damage cap but have a % chance to do full damage without the cap, essentially, a super critical.

It is flawed logic.
yes a small ship might be able to dodge and weave, but if you do get hit it should roast you.

This is an old argument that Dan isn't going to change because he wants to make it easy on the little guys.

Wait until you get big and someone smaller can hack/raid you for almost twice as much as you can hack/raid them. You have spent a ton of time (and possibly money) on building a great ship that does you know good against 80% of players in the game. Then the cheats added to the game for the littler ship really get aggravating.

If you are smart you will build up your artifacts, ignore research and never spend a dime on the game trying to grow. Let your artifacts buff your ship and put every point into crew so that you can have a ship with 200 decks and 20,000 crew members that will take out someone 4 times your size

Think of it more as glancing blows. with all of the deflectors, nullifiers, and other systems on GL ships it is more likely that they take less damage because they are only being hit by the AoE.

Maybe under level 250 it works like that but once you are in the big leagues none of that matters. Because Dan hasn't told us the actual math this is just my guestimate.

The tech grows about 1% per level but the penalties grow about 3% per 10 decks. So a gun that costs you 50 deck space and gives you a 6% increase in attack power actually has a net loss of about 9% of attack power when you attack someone smaller than you.

So again, there comes a point where there is no point in researching better tech because the damage cap will always stop you from reaching your true potential. And that isn't just on players, it happens on NPCs all they time. My attack power against NPCs is about 24,000 yet many I cannot do more than 600 damage per shot.

I am sure someone who is better at math than me (Mento) will come along and give us better numbers.

agree it does rankle that you get better stuff but cause less damage...it would bug tf outta me.
a grazing blow damages a scout by a % of its decks?...every time?...you never hit it full on with the superior targeting systems the research sinkhole deducts from you?
its stoopid...these lil ships should be one hit fireworks if you critically hit them...not 20 hitpoint max.
maybe one upgrade we could get once we get to star destroyer size could be onboard fighter sized ships...just to play the scouts and light frigates at their own game

A long time ago (before the damage cap change) I suggested that the damage cap be based on scan and cloak. higher cloak = lower cap, and higher scan = negate some of the opponent's cap. If we do it like this:

your cap = decks/2 *(their scan/your cloak) then damage will still be weighted in favor of a smaller ship but a better ship will counteract that.

Then, to account for lower levels:
your cap = decks/2 *[(their scan/their level) / (your cloak/your level)]

I'm not entirely sure how this will work out, but it sounds like it would be successful...

I seriously like the way it is right now. You guys all seem to hate the scout ships. Well, guess what? You can easily take them out. Plus, they completely lack energy and are 100% hackable. Are you guys just mad that you got killed by a scout ship? That you feel helpless? Seriously people, grow up and learn to use your brain. Play your advantages as a big ship against a small ship and you can easily destroy them. Best example would be my legion taking on a legion full of scout ships. And we are killing them a lot more than they are killing us.

By the way, well said Nocifer Deathblade.

The more I think about this the less I like it. I can understand and even support the current cap system in the interest of game balance. It leaves the pvp scouts as only ever pvp scouts, ignoring a large part of the game and many of the features that Dan has tried to work into the game. If that's how they want to play, that's how they're going to play. It will always bug me that it take more energy for me to knock a harassing scout out than it does a titan, but today is the first time I've had to take notice of that fact (my legion's low level trainees are being harassed by a pvp scout and its almost not worth my time to help them because of how much energy it takes to knock him down).