Damn this is an old thread.
Funny, I've never bothered to read it til now, took a while lol
was interesting reading the references to the Nemesis/SCION war as I was in Nemesis during that war.
Fun Times.

I've always thought the whole thing was a bit silly and unrealistic tbh.
1st of all we have a bunch of large ships out there with small crews and a bunch of small ships with large crews..doesnt really make sense, seems large ships should require more crew to operate efficiently while smaller ships would need less. Id hate to work for a crew on those small ships it must be elbow to elbow on there. Everyone wear your deodorant please and have fun sleeping at your station cause there's no room for sleeping quarters :p I dont think being a crewman on a large ship would be much better, so many decks and modules to operate and maintain but so little crew in comparison to do the jobs. Hope you like overtime and multi-tasking.You may have a big comfy sleeping quarters but you'll never have time to enjoy it because you will be working round the clock.
Also, I hear people say that "well, its a small ship so its harder to target thats why you deal so little damage"...BS, these are damn starships, all the scanning and targeting technology a starship has should be able to lock onto a small dog running around a building on the surface of a nearby planet. You're telling me that you cant target a starship in the middle of space because its "small" by starship terms? Not buying it.

Anyway, with all that said i dont think the system will ever be changed nor do I think it needs to be changed. Its fine the way it is and to change it now could completely screw those who have built their ships around this system.I'm a large ship build and I love my ship. It does what I need it to. I do avoid SSBs on bt cause i could kill 2 or 3 larger ships for the same energy. However if an SSB steals a planet or is alerted or Im having issues of some sort with them, I have absolutely NO problem taking them down as many times as needed. Just takes more energy is all..

Here is a question, when I attack someone and their ship returns fire, does the damage they do to me on a counter attack reflect the same damage they would deal to me if they were the attacker. Is return fire calculated the same as attacking?
I ask because when i do attack SSBs, even though I am doing little damage to them, they rarely do more damage to me than I do to them and almost always less. So it seems that SSBs although take less damage, they dont deal a lot themselves.seems like it balances out.

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you really wanted to disable a player, it doesn't matter what their damage cap is... You'd spend as much energy as needed to get the kill. This probably happens more frequently for higher ranked ships as they can afford to spend at least 500 energy per kill. Dan already changed the formula so you can't stay small forever. Your damage cap WILL increase if you stay small and rank a lot.

since the first dmg cap change ive felt screwed, and wasnt in my opinion able to adjust properly to the large ship build which in my opinion is boring, I never had more fun then when i was a SSB since i left that this game has been dreary, and thats honestly why i reset because my ship will never have the power of a Mojo or a Wolfy in a LSB since nor will i ever master Golga's MSB monster. Sure the Dmg caps are different but im pretty sure there are a Real rare few who are actually powerful enough to "unbalance"

Now if i may referance from a old MMORPG game i played called runescape SSBs are like pures, what they lack in defense they make up in raw power, i dont know if you have see Pk vids of pures but its insane and the reason why i quit is because Runescape started to cater to the pures heavily more so then the balanced player i was. and it was hard putting 6 yrs of effort into my Guy to see him smashed by a guy 40 ranks less in three hits. but in the beginning pures couldnt NPC very well unless they were a hybrid only when Jagex started to come out with some BS that made pures super powerful and unbalanced the game did i finally quit. Is RS still a fun game yea sure, dont know why Jagex is continuing with this ugly bubble cartoon #&$# making it hard to see anything in the game trying to mimic WOW to gain back users.

TBH Runescape died when they took away PKing but thats a story for another topic. Unless dan starts making modules saying if you have less then 1k decks you get a extra 4% bonus on hull, or attack or blah blah. The game is still balanced. Sure it may take a extra 45 energy to kill ya fireblade but how long can that SSB handle your 100k/h ap+ production? there are maybe a handful that could win in a war of attrition between two ships but no matter what you do there is always going to be someone better then you(general statement). There are alot of draw backs to SSB and the only real draw back for a LSB is your dmg cap and upkeep. you dont have to dominate all aspects of the game.

All i want to do is fly my little gnat ship around the galaxy micro manage it a bit, fight and have fun will i win fights sure will i lose some heck yea. but ive yet to see a ship with a SSB or a MSB abuse their dmg cap in a way to prevent game play of anyone.

Played runescape back in 2004 wasn't a problem then but by 2007 or so with the new weps yeah it started to be annoying, i left around then i still go back like once a year to check it all out lol

ap/h has got nothing to do with your ship though there is nothing to stop an SSB getting a high ap/h i ran 2k decks for the first year of my playing and managed to get about 40k ap/h

for a high rank example Sharnhorst is rank 2300 with 2850 decks with about 177k ap/h non excav.

FFS why is this still going?

SSB and MSB do only 1 thing, they reach higher min shots to kill and make it impossible to kill them online sooner. It takes over 130 shots to kill me w/o a torpedo I gain another shot ever 2-3 days soon I can get that down to 1, then hourly. Eventually everyone will have to add more decks as the cap is determined by rank as well so that makes everyone who is SSB/MSB become the same size as the bigger ships, it might take years, but the problem is that by the time they get there it will take over 1000 hits at cap to drop them. Who wants to spend 5k energy to someone? nobody.

% weapons, rework crit hits to exceed damage cap and/or a weapon based on # of decks have all been suggested as counter balances. Now unless you come up with a NEW idea, don't post your opinion about SSB. This is not the pub, it is the suggestions section.

IF the only objection is 1000 clicks, one of the possible solution is adding a 25e attack button

One of the downside (or upside) that should be added -> extra XP

I thought of an alternative that keeps it fair for everyone, Base it off of cargo instead of decks. say 1/10 of your cargo is your damage cap.

People are arguing that bigger ships should be hit harder, why not their cargo as well? it would make it a combat stat, I know how large cargos are which is why its fair, both SSB and LSB have HUGE cargos.

Do you know how huge people's cargo is? It also makes no sense to base it on cargo, because cargo has nothing to do with combat at all.

Exactly... If my cap was based off my cargo I would take more damage from regular hits than from gemini cannons

lol not only the increased damage for current players who have basically insane amounts of cargo, but imagine the game in a year or 2, having everything installed, high defence and the smallest amount of cargo possible - that would actually be OP or game breaking.

keep the current system as is or carefully implement some of the suggestions that dont involve changes to the damage cap formula from decks. From memory I think Golgotha made some good suggestions a while back.

if you want to rebalance things
just add a dammage cap based on crew as well

atm you can simply increase your stats (attack, defence and energy) by adding crew without increasing your dammage cap
that what realy makes the system break down, low rank ships with 200-400 decks and 100.000 crew

it could be something like: dammage cap = (decks / 2) + (total crew / 100) or dammage Cap = (Rank + 19) / 2

a small rank 150 ship with 200 decks and 10.000 crew would then end up with a dammage cap of 200/2 + 10.000/100 = 200 instead of the 100 it have now


as I see it Total crew should not include Scientists, as they dont help your combat stats exepct your raid chance
and where it should be total (crew / 100) , (total crew / 500) , (total crew / 1000) or (total crew / rank) is just a question on how mutch weight you want to put on crew

(total crew / rank) is the one I like most myself, as that one would give the greatest efect on ship freezrainking and just building up strength by picking up artifact points and adding crew
and the efect on normal ships with crew = 30-50 * rank would be minimal

but I don't think it will happen.....

Would a "ghost ship" no be simmer to a drone ship? Mostly operated, has no one ever wonder why it costs crew to increase decks. I thougth it as they are just unspilised crew members who were good at everything but masters of nothing.

Why is this thread not dead and forgotten?