it was touched on a little earlier but damage cap doesn't seem to be the problem so much as hull does. the easiest way to fix it would be to limit how much hull per deck there is say around 100 hull per deck.

difrence is around 20K attack, you would be able to pick up from modules
so if you had gone huge, (presuming you have had the same artifact pull), your attack would now be 55K instead of 35K

but at the same time, it not that easy to compair - if you had gone huge you would proberly also have killed more NPC's instead of doing PvP = more terraformers to increase your artifact production

and found more planets you would have been able to steal

and would proberly also have ranked faster

so........as I sayed, not that easy to compair


the main point is, 20K extra attack, doesnt realy make up for the advantages the dammage cap gives you
but for me that isnt realy a problem, as I dont realy care about PvP stats
I'll still do it to max my CK69 Assault Sentry and when I need it for missions/ legion missions, but PvP will never be my main thing in the game
one of the things I love about this game is, that theire isnt only one way to build your ship, but you can basickly designe a ship can do the things you like to do in the game - and I see SSB ships a a part of that


so for me, SSB ships isnt a problem, every ship will eventyaly end up as SSB around rank 7000 to 8000
main problem here is ships are starting to take to many hits to kill, no matter if they are SSB or huge, and it only going to get worse

sure, you can pick on the players with low artifact production compaired to yourself, but a lot of those are proberly running halcs

Senator,

A good discussion though. Still think we need a middle ground. Guess the base of my sadness on this topic is more how modules which should be fun and cool, just arent in so many cases. There should be a variety of good play styles..like ssb...but I feel there are not. The cap to me is the crux of that shift--again, appreciate your well considered thoughts and look forward to more fun flyin!

Cheers

While DarkMar doesn't mind SSBs, he even pointed out that the damage cap gives you an advantage. Therefore, I'm not sure why he has some sense but I don't just because I don't agree with you at all.


they may account for a small % of YOUR overall attack and MY overall attack, but i have spent 2 years as a SSB soaking up arti production in order to get my current 32k tac officers. that is the time required for a SSB to become competitive in attack power. note, competitive, not superpowered.[/quote]

But this doesn't change the fact that as a SSB you have a major advantage in this game thanks to the game mechanics. I've been playing for 4+ years. I have 77305 Tactical Officers currently. I actually saw your ship on my BT today so I hit it a few times. I was doing roughly 150-350 dmg per hit. I guess my LSB "advantage" allowed me to hit you for so little damage every time even though my attack power is so much higher than your's, right?



This argument is invalid to the discussion. Why you ask? Any player that has more SS should be able to drop "Ship B" faster than the ship with less SS attacking "Ship B." This discussion is about a LSB attacking a SSB and how much of an advantage a SSB has in the fight.



Guaranteed an advantage? See my point above. I've been playing longer than you, probably have more artifact production than you, I for certain have way more attack and defense than you, yet I can barely even dent your ship. Get real man! Who really has the advantage?



This statement reminds me of the Civilization 3 days when warrior units could kill tanks. It's a joke and everyone knows it except for you.



It doesn't require 20k+ scan to scan good planets. Scanning planets is all luck and the majority of the good planets you scan will have less than 10k cloak. How much scan do you have on your runs? I guarantee you its plenty. As I stated before, no advantage for LSBs here.



It's not asinine. You have a major advantage in this game as a SSB and I have none as a LSB. I admire your fight to maintain your advantage, but let me explain how much of an advantage you have since you keep claiming otherwise.

Your ship:
- SSB
- 2 years playing GL
- 32k tac officers

My ship:
- LSB
- 4+ years playing GL
- 77305 tac officers

When I attacked you today, I was lucky to do between 150-350 damage per hit. You hit me for more damage than I could do to you. Where's the advantage I supposedly have as a LSB? Newsflash. There isn't one.



Adjusting ship modules will not fix the problem. I still won't be able to hit SSBs for more damage than they can hit me for. On top of that, wouldn't adding new modules require me to add more decks and increase my own damage cap? Taking deck size out of the PVP equation is the simplest solution.

My suggestion to rebalance,

Damage cap remains the same, Stats change,

Your TO's add their total for EACH weapon you have online Multiplued by 0.5 the teir of the research (so the new ones give very little the HUGE guns give alot more)
Your Helmsmen add their total for EACH Sheild/Thurster/Driver you have online, (end of the research tree ones) Multiplued by 0.5 the teir of reserch (so defult ones give very little, high end ones alot)
Your Scientests are changed to "collectors" and add to all 3 productions

Add a bunch of new npcs with decent drops that have stats that scale with the new adjusted stats,


You can be the Tin tank pvp king if you want but you will lose out long term as your str can't compete, with the new npcs and the drops you want from them. you will WANT these huge heavy gun

I have a serious question for people who say there are no advantages to the LSB build and would like to alter the damage cap:

Why have people chosen to continue to add decks, knowing full well the effect that has on ship toughness and therefore PvP?

I ask because for at least the (almost) 3 years I have played the pros and cons have been very clear, so what motivates people to choose to ignore the obvious implications for toughness and continue to add if there are no benefits?

From checking out medals a lot, it seems possible to me that some people just hit 4400 decks for the medal and decided "why not?", despite the fact that a 4400 deck ship would have been much more robust than one almost double the size
...that confounded math stuff, I guess I can confidently say that given the Damage Cap is the primary multiplier that in a case such as this they would be almost twice as tough.

For others, I guess collecting all the modules Pokemon-style makes them happy.

So, in an honest attempt to try to understand why, for the LSBS out there: what motivated you to choose to keep adding decks long after the Damage Cap was revised?

Because, having started over 5 years ago - before the damage cap was changed - I was already a LSB and short of resetting and losing a years worth of effort in the process, there was no way I could change my build... Simple way to rebalance? Allow people to remove decks without resetting, then all of the SSBs can find out what its like to only attack SSBs...

DarkMar reads and understands. you read and miss the boat.


i get my 4 year reward in october. i have spent the last 2 years as a SSB, not 2 years overall playing time. READING fail.



MATH fail.



you want MY damage to your ship nerfed, even though i have 35k attack. but a laughably puffball LSB with 35k attack would do the SAME damage to you, that is all hunky dory just because you do more damage to him ? LOGIC fail.

the ONLY advantage that a SSB build has is defense against PvP attackers. nerfing that takes away the whole point of the build and decreases the variety of ship builds, something that Dan has been clearly opposed to throughout the years of development.

If you don't mind, could you tell me when you got to 4400 and what you are at now?
I can't believe you were at, for example, 7000 decks before the change.

I think, many people didnt think SSB was a legit possibility. So although the cap rule changed, people had become so accustomed to playing larger ships as the way to go no one blinked twice that some people were slowly starting their climb. I know for me this was the case. By the time you see the change really start to impact ships in your bt range it was already too late.

So Diego is correct, we all had ample headsup..virtually everyone...but to recognize the situation and forecast for it, diff story.

For me while SSB's are super annoying (seriously 1 hour plus to disable someone? It should NOT take longer to disable a SSB than it does a level 6 Base!!) The thing that really annoys me personally are the Gemini Cannons on SSB's. Having a ship that I can only do 125 dmg to turn around and hit me for 56k dmg on top of the 1-2k they are doing per hit is insane. If people don't want to nerf SSB's then change the Gemini's to reflect damage done to your target. Say that a Gemini cannon does 40x (50x?) the max damage of the firing ship does to the defender.

In the case above the SSB that I can only hit for 125 dmg fires a Gemini blast of 5,000 - 6,250 back not 56k. Meanwhile my (LSB) Gemini when being attacked by a SSB would fire off a blast of 50k to 62,500.

The reason for this is that SSB's are so annoying because they take so long to kill (energy & time spent) AND they totally wreck LSB's with their Gemini Cannons forcing you to constantly repair which makes the whole process even longer. If the Gemini's were scaled to to the damage dealt to the defending ships SSB's would then just be a matter of time & energy and it would be almost impossible for a SSB to 'defensively disable' a LSB who was attacking. Meanwhile the Gemini Cannons still have their deterrent/annoyance factor to anyone attacking anything that is not an SSB.

Thoughts?

That's my mistake for assuming 2 years of playing time. In the direct replies to me, you never specified 4 years.



There is no math fail here. Most good planets you scan will have low cloak. The only fail I noticed was that you failed to even address my question for some reason.



The only failed logic is your own. If you have less attack and defense than someone, they should have the advantage. If you have more, you should have the advantage.



Finally you admit that you have an advantage in PVP which is what everyone here has been trying to point out.

Where has Dan specifically said he would like to see SSBs and LSBs in GL? I don't frequent the forums often so I'd be curious to see that. In regards to the damage cap, wasn't it put in place to keep high rank players from wrecking the lower ranks? I'm pretty certain the intent wasn't to give a SSB a huge advantage.

might come as a suprice to you, but some of us realy doent care about PvP
we only do it to get oure battlemarked modules, for legion missions, for missions like Sphere of Influence, and to get the 3 daily yellow badges needed to feed the Cuniculus, Lepus Adjutant ability

if you are mostly hitting NPC's and bases - theire isnt mutch disadvantages in having a huge ship
with the defence I'm running most common NPC end up doing 40 dammage out of a dammage cap of 3550, so most of them cant even break my shield

and as you are running max cloak as well, most SSB ships wont be able to find you unless you hit them first


also, I like a challange.... pleople keep telling me you cant do PvP if you keep adding decks
so ofcourse I went for a huge ship build, and guess what I have still maxed all battlemarked modulse exept the CK69 Assault Sentry, but working on that one....
turns out, if you have the artifact production for it, and knows how to pick your targets, you can do PvP even with a huge ship

No mate, it wouldn't surprise me at all that people really don't care about PvP, because I don't really care about PvP.

My question was really to LSBs who do care about PvP enough to want to change the Damage Cap, which I don't think has ever been your position. Nonetheless, thanks for your feedback, I suspect the "Don't really care" answer would be widespread.

majority is > 50%. if you are saying that over 50% of the good planet you scan will have less than 10k cloak, then you are mathematically incorrect, unless your definition of 'good' is VL VR arti.

my scan is beside the point, but to satisfy your pointless curiosity, on my last scan run i had over 16k scan as a litheor explorer. the max scan for a litheor explorer using repeatable scan artis is over 27k scan.

the list of scan mods that i have in cargo but can not fit on my ship due to lack of deck space:
1 t-plasma dynamo
3 composite ray - type s
2 te'vul's core
4 litheor tetractic crystal
3 omni-field regulator
4 continuum parser
4 gravidynamic isolator
4 exo-temporal translator
3 titanproxy sensor
2 eye of andromeda
2 stryll transponder
3 tetra-seeker targeter
4 datastream compiler
3 litheor data interface

that is over 2000 base scan sitting idle now, but there were many more scan mods unavailable before i had my current 1137 decks.



lol lol lol. that explains everything. this topic comes up every 6 months or so ... and every argument you have tried to make this time has been made previously.

another reading fail .. i have NEVER denied that SSB provides a defensive benefit in PvP. i even wrote up a SSB guide specifically highlighting that fact. that is the WHOLE POINT of the build. what you fail to understand is that LSB has the advantage in EVERY other aspect of the game, including PvP ATTACK.

as for Dan, i already linked to the fracking wiki, but since you were too lazy to bother, here is the link again.

as i outline in the damage cap evolution section, in the first 14 months of the game, Dan tweaked the damage cap twice: the first time was to adjust the damage formula so that added hull did not automatically add to damage taken. the second time was 14 months in (april 2011) when he added the rank factor to the damage cap to nerf the scouts of mass destruction. in between he adjusted shield recharge rates and adjusted hull repair costs so that people would use those in their ship builds. he also supported the idea that players of the day should focus on adding crew which had been neglected at that point.

every one of those changes was designed to enhance the variety of ship builds, exactly the OPPOSITE of your contention, "If you have more, you should have the advantage".

I do want the Cap to change to change Deigobene

not becourse I think SSB ships are OP, but becourse it it broken for high rank
I have more or less unlimited energy as I have a 20.4 energy/rank ratio, so doenst matter if it takes 5.000 energy to kill a SSB ship
but sitting and clicking for 10+ min to get 1 kill just isn't any fun

I'll still do it, until I max my CK69 Assault Sentry.....


it just have to be done in a way that are fair to both huge and SSB ships

one way to do it would be to add an aditionaly dammage cap = your hull / 1000
that way, no matter if you are huge or SSB, the max number of hits needed to kill your hull would always be 1000 or less (if you can hit the cap)

or you could make it hull / 500 - that is just a question of how high you want the max number of hits needed for hull to be
but the number needs to be high enougth, so that SSB ships still keep theire advantages in PvP

and leaving shield out of it, would put some value back to adding shield to your ship

not sure Dan will reverse himself on taking hull out of the damage cap formula, but it is worth considering. i definitely like enhancing shield somehow.

i thought of an offensive gemini cannon that does a %damage to hull, but only if a krionite torpedo has not been lobbed at the target. that might require an extension of the current krionite effect timer to say, 10 minutes. have the offensive gemini sacrifice tac officers and players can choose between long.term attack power versus temporary attack damage today.

the other tweak for the damage cap might be using tac officers as a factor. or, removing tac officer attack from the attack power of a defending ship. this would nerf SSB, but also any ship that has relied on long-term arti pulls for the majority of their attack. it would slightly increase the value of ship mods for attack, but ship mods still need to be made much more attractive.

let me put it this way senatorhung

I dont like going back to a dammage cap based on hull....
but the way the game is going, something like this might be the only way to stop the unlimited hull vs a limited dammage cap problem


theire are lots of interesting sugestions out theire

let weapons instelled on your ship increase the dammage cap of your target
critical hits, that break the dammage cap, do a %of enemy hull, or is based on your attack/enemyes defence only and you can only get once shield is down
weapons / defence systems where the attack/defence increas is based on your total number of decks + modules installed
etc etc etc...

but unfortunaly, 99% of all posts about dammage cap always comes down to
SSB ships are unfair/OP and need to be nerfed
instead of making large/huge ships more interesting or trying to find a balance that keeps SSB in the game, but helps huge/large ships in other ways

Throwing around quantifications of planets being above/below certain scan thresholds and trying to argue that x% of planets can be scanned with just y amount of scan is pretty pointless when you can't back it up (Go do some sampling) and ignores another aspect of the scanning formula.

IIRC, the scanning equation gives you a higher chance of successfully scanning a planet, the higher your scan is the higher your chance of successfully scanning. Someone with 10K scan COULD scan a planet with 5K cloak, but it's not 100%. So having a higher scanning power has a clear advantage here.

I cannot find anything on the Wiki to support this statement however, so if someone could confirm/contradict that there is a chance, not a guarantee, of scanning a cloaked planet then please let me know.

theire isnt a fixed number of scan you realy need find a certain quality of planets
but when it comes to enemy owned planets, the more scan you have the greater chance you have to actualy log on to any x15+ enemy planets you find

the way things are suposed to work are that you can only find planets with more cloak then you have scan
so, if you find an enemy planet with 20.000 cloak, you only have a chance to actualy lock it, and get it in your data base if you are running 20.001+ scan

precise %chance based on your scan vs Planet cloak is only known by Dan, and theire are never a garantee to actualy lock any cloaked planet planets you scan

So how mutch scan you actualy need you need to find good enemy planets, depends 100% on how mutch cloak the players who owns them have put on the planets the RNG gives you



but planet cloak might be broken again...
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=43212

last time, it was some sort of bug, where legion bonus wasnt alwasy added on cloak, but not sure about the "new" one - might just have been a one time event, or the bug could be back, we wont know for sure until it's reported by more players and Dan starts to look at it