Basically you are saying a chance at DCx2-3 which only delays the problem a bit longer, because it is fixed amount, which is fine in the short run, but I was looking for a more long term solution. The only way to do that is with a % damage because it varies with the increasing hull and shields and not with the fixed damage cap.

yes, to see the real game impact and later we can either again discuss the need of damage per outstanding health (I do not know game, where this is working)
or we can have later multiplication of scan critical chance with this bonus % critical which can be later always expanded by item set ability from PvP Battleground rewards.

I do prefer the idea of cumulative bonuses which is challenging to gain, while the game mechanics remain predictable.

In terms of being a fixed amount vs dynamic amount in the form of percentage of hull and shield ... I'd like to point out something that's already in place that might help show an issue with having it be a percentage of one's total hull+shield:

Planet
10,000 population
100,000 defense

Seems impenetrable, right? As well it should be.

Quantum Bio-Vaporizer. 10k->5k->2.5k->1.25k->625->312->156->78->39->20->20 normal hits at 1 damage each. 9 QBVs and 100 energy and voila that population meant squat. Granted, the invade chance will be lower, but the point was the population.

Now imagine we have:
Unbuffed Player Ship
100,000 hull
50,000 shield
50,000 defense

Should be more than a quick kill, right? As well it should be.

20 Special Weapon Triggers = dead. That's 100 energy multiplied by however many shots it takes to get those to trigger. If it's a 4.5% to trigger (I'm just using a simple number, yes I know the decimal is longer) ... then that means roughly 1 out of every 22 hits will be a trigger. So, 2200 energy and boom the big ship is dead ... regardless of how much hull, shield, or defense they have.

I mention that because 2200 energy is a lot for one ship ... but I did it moreso to show that the big ship can be killed by anyone regardless of how much hull, shield, or defense they have ... just like the planet, all of their work means effectively nothing and their defense becomes "How much energy does my opponent have and is he/she willing to use it".

You're talking about longterm and I am as well ... do we honestly want to make our own ships like planet population and say "Screw it, it's too hard, I can't kill it in one or two clicks, so it should be made easier"? Do we honestly want a person's defense to become how much energy their opponent has?

Think about it, if this were the case ... why put on defense modules? A lot of the damage is going to come from these triggers, which can't be stopped or mitigated. Why put on hull? It'll only increase the perceived amount of damage, but it won't matter because the weapon is a set percentage of hull+shield. Small ship build? Screwed. Big ship build? Equally screwed. Will the big ships require it to kill smaller ships? Nope. Will the smaller ships use it to kill bigger ships? You bet.



Just some points that I think are worthy of considering.

As far as the module is concerned, I feel like it devalues hull too much. Perhaps the best way to deal with this would be to take another look at the rank-based damage cap? Whilst it might piss off some SSB users, most people would be unaffected.

Options i see here(can be mixed and matched together for best effect):
Slight rework of ssb equation. not thinking anything huge here just a few changes. maybe add another variable.
add a 3rd cap equation that could help
completely different crit equation
if some sort of % damage cannon is added have rank(not so sure) or strength differential as a variable to the % that it does (still working on this, but think its the most viable option for long term fix that is fair to all. have it set so ships that are anywhere close in strength would only be doing small percentages, but as one ship gets way way way stronger it approaches the cap % per trigger)

Remember, the point here again is not to try to nerf the tankiness of ssb - its a way to deal with any ship that has so much hull as to be effectivly invincible. More and more ships are reaching this catagory - they simply have to be able to use one repair artifact in the time it takes an attacking force to lower all their hull.

Changing the rank based damage cap to increase damage taken at low levels does not help the problem with base ships, and making people take significantly more damage simply for being a higher rank is just massivley punishing people for leveling.

I get what you were saying with devaluing hull though. It does suck that all ones hard work building up your ship can be reduced to a "if struck 20 times by weapon, die"

I would be partial to something like this:
The more attacks one ship undergoes in a row by the same ship, the higher its damage cap becomes.

Ingame effectivly it would mean this.

The first 100 attacks against me are at my normal damage cap.
The next 100 attacks against me are at my normal damage cap X 1.2. I now take 20% more damage from all attacks from the same source
The next 100 attacks deal 1.4.
Then 1.6
Then 1.8.

This could be handwaved explained by numerous things. It could be your computers getting better at predicting me. It can be accumulated damage slowing my systems.But whyever it is explained it will help deal with impossibly strong baseships, while not setting a cap on them.

They just take more and more damage over time, making it harder and harder to defend. An online egagment gets more thriling and difficult as time goes on. However, this also means that things such as NPCing are uneffected.
However, it WOULD make base combat interesting, on both sides. I would make bases immune to this effect.

This also would open a whole new section of modules and artifacts, focused around modifying this combat fatigue. Perhaps you have a module to target me accuratly, and deal more damage every 70 hits. Perhaps i have an artifact that resets my damage cap while attacking bases.

Ideas are endless really.

EDIT: Obviously these would reset over time, not be forever increased. I would think it should be a fairly short time as well - if you stop attacking me for a full minute, my defences should recover. However, simply stopping to pop a null fuse would not allow me to regain my defences.

I would have concern related to the impact if two ships are fighting together for a longer while, both attacking each other. Not sure, why their defense should be impacted - maybe rather increase of their attack weapons - increasing the inflicted damage?
I am not sure, whether the bonuses should increase after each 100 attacks or rather after each 50 attacks (500 energy vs 250 energy) - yes, I know this would mainly impact high ranks but still not sure about balance when a high rank is fighting with low rank.

Similar concept I know as "Dark rage" where after fulfilling a given damage bar the player can activate a Rage attack bonus and inflict bonus damage as +% to regular damage. This can be multiplied by critical hits.

I tend to consider other suggestions, so I would here mention the multi-attack button suggestion, where a critical hit bonus would make a difference. Not even to mention the accumulation of bonuses.
I could assume this would be first tested on NPCs only and later could be considered for PvE (OP: viewtopic.php?p=351252#p351252)
10e/20e/50e/100e attack button - viewtopic.php?p=352573#p352573

increasing attack does nothing if you are hitting the cap or close to it which is the problem here
and one reason def should be impacted is because def=thrust and after a long drawn out fight things may start to overheat or have other problems come up. (how long is one attack supposed to represent? we dont really know)
multi attacks also do not help here. its not just time clicking here thats a problem. its the never ending growth of hits to kill without any effect from increasing strength against it.

Maybe I used wrong words, so some additional comments:
- the damage cap would not be fix, but there would be way thru critical hits to get over the damage cap. As I understand, the fixed damage cap is the reason why this thread exists. We can use any words, but all suggestions here are directly or indirectly changing the damage cap.
- if def=thrust can overheat, so also weapons could overheat --> both ships modules should overheat as participating in battle.
-multi attacks with criticals over damage cap would make a minor change in dynamics.

To do NOT scare SSB players a little example:
Current normal attack capped to 200 for me.
After critical hit - my attack would be 200+10 (if the 5%critical hit is triggered)
Critical hit with multi attack 20e my attack would be 4*(200+10) again only if the 5%critical hit is triggered ... thus bonus 40 damage over damage cap
100 e attack = 20*(200+10) again only if the 5%critical hit is triggered ... thus bonus 200 damage = one bonus hit over damage cap for same energy ...

Feel free to play with numbers and increase the critical hit bonus % to handle the invincible ships and/or imagine the accumulated critical hit impact with multi-attack what would happen in game slowly over time to keep speed how top ranks gain in strength.

Critical hit modules would be challenging to obtain and there is no reason why not implement if needed a module countering the critical hit chance (-% for critical his... to decrease either the chance of critical hit or the bonus from critical hit)

the overheating was just a random reason to make it make sense. maybe weapon technology is much better than thrusters?
maybe they dont have the power to keep them running and are putting that towards shield regen?
helmsman have to take over for tac officers in drawn out battles when tac officers need a break?
the reason has no significance as long as it could possibly make sense in some situation.

and your suggestion doesnt really help. adding % of cap still is a hard cap on damage. its just another cap. the fix has to not be based off of the ships cap. thats the problem in the first place.

honestly, if you convince all, that the damage cap should not be fix... I would have no problem to live with it at all.
I assume negative feedback for such change thus I wrote my above suggestion. I am really not known as fan of SSB

Okay, for a new cap formula how about:

((attackerlevel/2)^x)+c - that'd give an exponential damage cap growth to match exponential hull growth. It could be amended with the appropriate constant (c) to make it equal 10 at level 1.

Here're some potentials:


In almost all cases "c" would be 10.

could the formula take in consideration also the rank of attacked player please?

whats x?
and its basically just taking the current cap formula to a power(the +19 removed and the +c added). id have to look at lower numbers as this seems to grow WAY too fast.

To start, DONOT nuff the effect based on rank. Many of the strongest ships are not even the biggest in rank atm and they are slow ranking now so by the time most of you mid ranks rank up a bt you and them will be the same rank. dont care how you work the % or it happening but working it to hit the total amount of hull and shields left is the best way to do it.

The damage capts protect ssb any ways. there no reason taking a little % damage like the rest of us will matter to much . Nano spam.


with me taking 3,500ish a hit + % damage SSB will take like 500 + % damage so i dont wee how this is VERY damaging to them . its not like the Extra % damage will be going every hit.

X is the number directly below where it says X (1.2, 1.25, 1.3, 1.35).

It has to grow relatively quickly, obviously. 1.2 seems like the best of the bunch from that lot, though actually seems about right.

Updated with smaller numbers, the +10 and level 1.

i got that. didnt know if those numbers were arbitrary or you had a reason
1.2 basically means after 15xx it is the only applicable formula.

a rank 1k shouldnt do double damage to a rank 2k.

i think the % weapons are a much better fix.
make them only available at kinda higher ranks. 800-1k as the min. maybe higher.
and thinking another tanh function replacing the damage cap with say 5% shield hull
the number put into tanh will be some function of their attack and def
with about equal strength ships would only do 1%

How many people take 2200 energy now to kill? Only ones I think of are those with ~200k hull currently and golgotha. Is that really unreasonable cap? It is higher than a vast majority are currently even tweaking the % a bit down can scale it up more so the random triggers etc will be negated enough that 2k enough is enough to kill someone.

As for hull and shields being useless, well aside from bases and defensive pvp and early NPCs can you honestly think of a time you need to buff either and it makes a difference? in offensive pvp you have geminis killing you. bases are only going to be really effecting people for so long, eventually the attack from most bases wont be enough to do dilly to anyone, just like NPCs.

Bigger ships are easier to kill so I think you just flipped them, but either way there needs to be a more dynamic method to deal damage to a ship. 5 v 1 should go to the 5 not the 1. I understand building your ship to become super powerful, I believe I have a pretty decent ship, but I should not be able to defend several ships hitting me at the same time especially when I know for a fact 2 are much stronger than myself.



I would be okay with this if the number of hits is a bit lower and it scaled a bit faster.

Again lag is the issue with this, the servers are crap when it comes to dealing with multiple hits.

changing the damage cap...No.

Of course, those numbers are just rough estimates - I was in a mindset of dealing with future growth and planetary defence more than standard pvp defence at this stage - though this would be effecting me already. Those numbers already mean most ships will be dealing double damage to me by the time they finish killing my ship on the BT. When I go Lazuli Fixer, as is my endgame plan, they will be dealing 3-4 times my normal damage cap before I die just with my current hull.

To be honest I was worried that it scaled too quickly, especially for planet defense and bases. There are two possibilities here - both ships take more damage over time, or only the defender takes more damage. This is also broken down into the choice if this damage increase is done on the defenders side, or the attackers. By this i mean, if the attack formula looks to see how many times your ship has attacked this same target, or if checks to see how many times in total the target has been attacked.

Consider that when attacking something, you will attack a hundred times in a minute. If you can attack 4 times a second, it is 240 attacks. So for every minute you are under attack, you take 20%-40% more damage. Thats a BIG boost already - its a direct increase to damage taken, not simply to attack score where in reality it deals a lot less damage. If 5 people attack you and we are using the cumulative choice for damage calculation you take double to triple damage in just one minute of active online defence.

Many online defenders on exotica withstand attacks for as much as an hour at a time. That is obviously too much, but making a ship crumble after just 2-3 minutes is possibly too far the other way. A large ship build that been EMP'd and under attack for 4-5 mins in total will be taking six thousand damage a hit from just one attacker. Even without the EMP's it is likely to be taking 2-3k damage a hit naturally - and that number will just continue to increase.

At this point, they can continue to grow more and more tanky and defensive of course, but requiring 600 dutranium brackets to stop one or two attacks is a steep price.

Now, if the attacker also takes increasing damage ( I was specificlaly thinking in terms of against planets and bases here) It becomes a lot more tactical. One can choose to attack a thousand times, but will take increasingly huge amounts of damage, unless they pause for a minute before continuing. I do think this is needed, as i already tend to repair less often than the bases I kill... But it is possibly too big a disadvantage. Would need to discuss and play test - bases will be a lot more tanky if everyone needs to take a minute break from the assault every three-four minutes.

So basically, while i think the idea is solid, the rate of damage may need some serious discussion. Below are some more possibilities
Both offer faster extra damage, but the damage increases at different rates. Again, i think one of the big factors is if increased damage is calculated on the attackers count of attacks or the defenders - 1000 attacks by 5 people is only 1k energy spend each attacking.

50 attacks total, 1.2x damage...............25 attacks, 1.1x..........10 attacks, 1.1x
100 attacks total, 1.4x damage.............50 attacks, 1.2x...........40 attacks, 1.2x
200 attacks total, 1.6x damage.............100 attacls. 1.3x..........90 attacks, 1.3x
400 attacks total, 1.8x damage.............200 attacks 1.5x..........120 attacks, 1.4x
800 attacks total, 2.0x damage.............400 attacks 1.6x..........250 attacks, 1.5x
1600 attacks, 2.2x damage...................800 attacks, 1.7x.........360 attacks, 1.6x

etc