They have like coffee makers, good holo decks, I've even heard of swimming pools on some!

i will say that after a recent ( very recent ) runnin with an ssb that there are is - at least in PVP - a very large benefit for SSB's over LSB builds, as the defense was typically standard for most other MSB / LSB builds of that rank range, however in contrast to that the damage I did per shot was significantly lower, putting damage cap aside, on a comparative shot per shot aspect with a similar ranked ship ( within 50 ranks, but a 2000 deck difference, while only ~5000 defense difference in the favor of the LSB build ) average shot to the SSB was 223, whilst the average shot to the LSB was 926.

Which I believe - speaking objectivly - is the point of this thread as well as that of the 'damage cap needs to change' thread.
Do LSB's have their advantage - yes, outside of PvP, however eventually said bonuse become negligable, far faster than that of the bonuses of the SSB in terms of PvP / base / NPC.

<personal observation>
Had the damage cap not apparently instantiated a form of % damage decrease and instead cap out at the same rate that LSB ships take damage ( i.e. SSB ships would take damage cap if you would deal more than that to an LSB ) then these threads likely wouldnt exist.
</personal observation>

To that end again, i like the ideas suggested here, found myself re-reading the entire thread

And those are.....?

running 10k+ scan is negligible ?? i can just on the verge of getting to 10k now at rank 808 ... and that is with the UST buff AND the explorer profession thrown in. when i switch back to excavator .. it will be a couple more months until i have enough decks to put on the less efficient scan modules to regain that scan capacity. and shuffling / repairing mods requires credits and TIME ... time that means you could miss out on a juicy planet alert that someone with more decks can jump in on right away while you decide if it is worth breaking those other mods to put on these invasion attack mods. don't discount the advantages of LSB please.


again, you are looking at this as a decrease in the damage your weapons do, rather than in the decrease in damage taken by the target. your weapons still have the same power ... accounted for in the atk / def portion of the calculation.

the point of this topic was to incentivize the addition of decks, not to nerf the SSB build. i'm not going to bulk up just to be pretty ... i want to make sure that if i add new decks, that those decks get put to use in an impactful way. as i am already at a damage cap rating of 100%, that equates to incentivizing ranking. so why would i be willing to rank up / deck up ? higher scan capacity, new content (medals, missions), and ship modules that are worth equipping (that i don't currently have sufficient space for).

consequently, stuff like capping npc ranks disincentivizes ranking and so those restrictions should also be looked at. i agree that there is an implied penalty for ranking up ... but that has been there for a while now ... and seeing that led me to my current ranking speed approach. i am playing the game AS IT IS as efficiently as i can ... if it changes i will adapt and i have built my ship to take that possible need for adaptation in account. LSB's and speed.rankers have simply not.

Surprised you need it spelling out really...

Increased size = more scanning mods = increased scanning prowess = more arti planets = greater arti prod at lower ranks (As we all know, Arti is king)
Increased size = more guns= higher invasion success (at lower ranks=bigger value) = more arti production
Permanent maintenance of a ship set up = no changing up of ship set up for simple activities

There will be others, but I am in work right now and can't really be bothered typing or thinking of more...

And I wasnt trying to nerf SSB's or advocate the need for LSB's to be made better, when i started playing i was well aware the damage cap value, i had just envisioned my ship being a travelling shiny bauble of shiny baubliness, that post was meant to be purely objective.

While this was a case when I first started play it has become somewhat muddled in the current state of the game given the number of "reset" players that have begun showing up. Addition to that is the number of players ( myself included ) who drop off their research and mining planets that they built up to legion mates rather than selling them off leaving their low ranks / just joining new members with planets that would still be considered good by high ranks ( respective to resource of course ) thus freeing up many more planet slots for them to dedicated to artifacts than had been done previously.

Case in point, their is a player in our legion sitting at a relatively low rank ( mid 200 - mid 300 range ) who currently has 17k APH (substantially more than what I had at their rank), their stats are not anything impressive -but that is due to limited space as you had pointed out-, however they achieved this by exactly the means that I just stated, and they are going for an SSB build.

Even with every fully upgraded ship mod, a LSB rank 250 is not going to be able to conquer a moderately-defended planet. The phrase "Defense is Irrelevant" is really only applicable to higher rank ships with good AP. For the most part, anything better than pure production will still be out of reach for most low ranks with or without a full set of researched guns. Awesome planets with less than 3-4k defense (where guns would actually make a fair bit of difference for low ranks) are a happy but extreme rarity.

Secondly, any low rank ship that can afford Null Rays or better is either a crazed slow ranker or has somebody bankrolling them. It's not the norm -- or at least it shouldn't be. Don't know what's going on in rank 1-250 anymore, tbh.

I did the SSB thing at low ranks and remember taking everything off and adding cannons for invasions... I don't remember a single truly "nice" planet where guns added more than 7-8% to my invasion chance.

And overall attack? Eh. My Quasis are mainly a vanity at this point. I could drop them all and my attack wouldn't suffer. I keep them on because I have way more mining than I know what to do with, because I'm a completist, and because I enjoy upgrading stuff/placing Marks of War on people. I have no good practical reason for keeping these guns on my ship. In fact, practically speaking, most people (especially higher ranks, for which the bonus is negligible) would consider these guns a disadvantage, due to their extremely high cost and the additional 220 they add to the damage cap. And they are right!

The same can be said for defensive modules. At a certain point, even a fully upgraded Trans-Entropy Drive III become such a small % of your overall defense that the additional cost and 51 damage cap makes them a wash at best.

Larger ships are inefficient and super expensive. And I think that's great; it is the price you should pay for convenience, IMO. That being said, until non-scan/cloak ship modules provide a net positive rather than a net negative to your build, they are outta balance. And shush about the additional few thousand attack being a "net advantage." It is close to meaningless when you are attacking w/ six figures, and greatly outweighed by the cost/cap penalties they incur.

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Mod-swapping is a real advantage. Since upping my decks, I have scored a few very nice well-defended FFAs because I didn't have to spend 45 seconds fiddling with my build to re-install Biospheric Decimators and Bio-Disruptor while somebody else bombs, bio-vaps, and takes the alerted planet for themselves.

You'll get no argument from me on that one.

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And the advantage of always being at or near max scan is very real, too.

A lot of my PVP-happy friends complain about having to hit the same people every day. Most of them have smallish ships and low scan. I have close to 13k scan going at all times, and while I do see certain ships quite regularly, the overall variety is much, much wider. It is a genuine advantage.

Then of course, is the issue of scanning planets. Iirc, if you want every scan mod on your ship, you need a little over 1900 decks, so true SSBs are going to suffer for scan until extremely high ranks. There are a lot of nice planets out there in the 12-15k cloak range, and SSBs are going to have a lower % chance of locking onto them. This is, IMO, the biggest advantage of not being an SSB.

But notice I said "of not being an SSB." MSBs can scan just fine, thank-you-very-much. There are plenty of "efficiency build" ships out there who suffer swaps like SSBs, but don't have all the extra crap LSBs have -- scan isn't a LSB vs. SSB issue. It's an SSB vs. everybody else issue. So calling scan an LSB advantage isn't quite accurate (now cloak on the other hand...).
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My main argument for "Big Hurkin' Ship Modules" is to have something nice for those giant, inefficient ships that introduces new options and a non-gamebreaking advantage/incentive for them -- things you might expect on a giant spaceship. To me, this is preferable to hearing them constantly whine about the "unfair" damage cap, how they wish they could drop 2,500 decks or even reset. Some people want everything on their ship, just as others want a minimalist build, or a 100% efficiency (MSB) build. There's nothing wrong with this, and IMO, their punishment of extra cost and damage cap (which is fully justified, IMO!) should be offset somehow by unique advantages -- like cost/cap for SSB or versatility/efficiency for MSB.

I think my suggestions accomplish this goal.

+1 New content is always good especially when it gets rid of those pesky SSB

would like to point out that the increased scanning only makes a small difference.
this is because the higher scan of the larger ship is only adding the 100-200 (probably a fairly high estimate in most cases) or so planets that can be scanned with that scan in one run.
after that you are still getting purgers at the same rate and therefore able to scan again at the same rate.
the only other occasion where this makes a difference is if the higher scan happens to make the difference on the cloak roll on a partial cloaked planet(which are a fairly small percentage of the total pool further decreased by it requiring a fail vs success case)
the lsb scan advantage/ssb scan disadvantage also shrinks/grows with rank as the ssb approaches the deck size required to fit all scanning modules.

SSB are built to be "pesky," and they are one of the few strategies in ship building in this game that create variety and style among players' ships.

I don't care how much people whine. Anything that "gets rid of those pesky SSB" ships hurts the game.

Don't wanna spend the extra energy required to take them out, find a larger ship to target. There are plenty out there.

Is damage cap "broken" or could it be better balanced? I wouldn't say it's broken. Simply changing the way debuffing artis are handled could probably reduce a lot of the annoyance re: cap that you get from bigger ships. E.g. if EMPs launched from the same ship became less effective on a target with each subsequent use (and if you couldn't launch while hiding behind 0 disables!), EMP-til-capping would virtually go away outside of legion alerts and Exotica, where several ships are expected to hit at once.

Respectfully, the number of planets you're able to add is far less important than the amount of cloak you are able to break through -- and for this, having max, or close to max repeatable scan is nice to have

But of course your are right that the advantage goes away at higher ranks w/ higher deck counts.

More scanning mods ALL the time is not necessarily a good thing, so scratch that as an advantage. And more scan doesn't necessarily = more artifact planets. That is dependent upon the RNG. So a ssb can only scan 100 planets at a time versus a LSB scanning 400 planets at a time. You still have to purge all the planets you don't want in order to scan again. The only real difference here is how often you can scan. And that depends on the number of purgers you acquire (not having booku scan power), whether your a ssb or a lsb. Not to mention the ability to share planets. Scratch that so called advantage.

More guns = higher invasion success? True to a point. Let's examine though. A LSB may have some of those small mods that don't give great attack/deck ratio. So you miss out on what 400 attack power? (depending on what rank your at). Against say 10k planetary defense that 400 attack will earn you maybe 1.3% better chance. True it could be the 1.3% that makes the difference (not likely), but if your doing your ssb right, then isn't most of your attack coming from your TO's that you get from RP's in your artifact shipments? And even still, in the long run, a LSB will (hopefully) end up with more attack from TO's than ship mods. There are after all, only so many ship mods that give attack. Scratch that so called advantage.

The 3rd one I'll give you. LSB's don't have to uninstall and install mods based on what they want to do (for the most part). So it saves some time. I'm not sure what the comparison of cost would be to changing out ship mods (meaning repairing them a bunch more often), versus having a daily upkeep of ALL the mods is. I've never calculated it out. So we'll agree 1 advantage here. Assuming the cost is either negligible, or more expensive for ssb's.

Any others?

you are missing the point of scan. having all the scan mods on means a higher scan value. yes, one of the consequences is being able to scan more planets. the MAGNITUDES MORE significant benefit is being able to scan a planet that has more cloak. and yes, planets with more cloak can be shared, but there is no advantage gained by the SSB .. in fact, based on the time for mod.swapping, the LSB has the advantage on those.

so a SSB scanning with 5k scan ... gets only up to 460 planets ... how many of those 460 planets have over 5k cloak ? none (other than those owned). a LSB scanning with 10k scan ... gets up to 800 planets (340 more) and along with the usual dreck gets how many planets over 5k cloak ? a bazillion more percent than the SSB. and what planets tend to have more than 5k cloak ? planets worth taking ...


this has nothing to do with ship size ... how often you can scan is about AP/hr ... not the actual scan capacity from decks. at the same rank, an SSB *might* have an advantage as a LSB as they do not have to purge as many planets between scan runs ... but the extra attack provided by LSB means that will likely have better planets and a higher AP/hr. a SSB build is NOT for the impatient ...

Disagree.

You almost never find an unoccupied arti planet better than VL/3x. Unless a planet owner is ignorant of game mechanics, lazy, or truly foolhardy, they are going to put some passive cloak on their VM, high arti planets. Likely won't make them truly unscannable, but anything from 6k-15k seems fairly common from my experience (of course, since I'm only counting planets I have actually been able to lock on to, the average cloak is probably higher).

So... if Bob the planet owner puts 6k cloak on his Very Massive, 9x Exotic and Leonard the SSB (12k scan) and Billy the LSB (19k scan) both happen to roll the dice on that planet, Leonard has a 50% chance of locking on the signal, while Billy's odds are much better than the flip of a coin at 68%. Assuming both of them scan the same amount, this means more artifact planets over time for Billy.

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NOTE: I am going on the assumption that the cloak breaking formula = 1 - (cloak/scan) or at least something that functions in a similar manner. If it has been confirmed that this is not the case, it invalidates my post!

Perhaps a new thread could have a real count where people can post what their build is and how many planets they scan and their best 10 scanned artifact planets. That way we can see real results.

yep, call it 'Scanning for Glory'. i would be happy to contribute to tht topic. oh ... and i would include the top 10 highest cloaked planets on top of the best 10 arti planets ... there might be some duplication between those lists ... but it would be revealing ...

info to be documented:
decks
scan buffs
max scan
total planets scanned
top 10 arti planets (with total atk / def)
top 10 highest cloaked (with total atk / def)
typical invasion attack

anything else ?