I love my ship. I love the way i have to micromanage to play, to select specific modules for each task, etc.

However, there is a reason that everyone these days wishes that they have less decks. Smaller ships now dominate the galaxy, and other than ease of use, it is hard to justify being a larger build.

That needs to change. And there is an easy way to do it.

Cloak and Scan.

As a SSB or MSB, cloak and scan are difficult to accumulate. At over 2k decks, I still only rock 7k of each, with practically everything else uninstalled. This is where a LSB should shine, and only a few changes would be needed to make this happen. I suggest two changes to how they currently work to make this work.

First, Critical Hits.
Critical hits need to be more frequent, more obvious, and ignore the damage cap. I suggest that a critical hit deals a bonus 5% of the ships total hull in damage.
This will instantly go a long way to balancing ship power. Small ships take waaay less damage on average, but if that large ship manages to "lock on", the damage is overwhelming. And the SSB of course would struggle to ever crit the larger ship.

Second, Artifact usage.
Large ship builds stock huge amounts of scanners and counter measures... and it doesn't really do much outside of hacking. To be fair, hacking is very popular with the release of the latest ally, but it does not equal the disadvantages in damage. I suggest that all artifacts used offensively gain a chance of failure. Hang on, I am going somewhere here.
If the default failure, represented by physically dodging, electronic countermeasures, and firewall systems is say, a 20% chance, all ships have a chance to defend themselves.
That chance is then modified by the respective cloak and scan of each ship. If you have lots of cloak, and your opponent little scan, you can counter more artifacts used against you. After all, your ship stocks literally hundreds of square kilometers of cloaking systems, designed to resist electronic warfare.
If you have little cloak, and your opponent lots of scan, their computers processing power can overwhelm your defences, their artifacts effecting you each time.

What does this mean? Small ships may need to use salvos of artifacts to affect their larger counterparts, while large ships easily overwhelm their smaller targets with their banks of scanners.


Both these ideas i have suggested before, including more specific maths behind each suggestion. I am happy to find the specifics if these ideas interest people - I honestly feel like it could go a long way to making each ship choice valid, and thus more competitive.

i like it. Everyone says SSB isnt OP at yet how many high ranking guys have reset to go ssb? It is obviously unbalanced the way it is and I like your simple yet effective solution

I like these suggestions, but i personally feel the way the damage cap is formulated needs to change the first formula decks/2=dmg cap is fine.

But the rank+19/2 i think needs to change let people be ssb but as they get higher there damage cap should increase they can still keep a smaller ship but the damage cap would rise as they got stronger.

another thought i had was maximum crew per deck space with an exponential scale of crew allowed per deck.

Maybe 10000 crew/deck?

50k att vs 15k defence 100k hull @ 2k decks
You Deal: 544(321 to 728) Damage.
You Take: NaN(NaN to NaN) Damage.
You die in: NaN(NaN to NaN) hits.
Your opponent dies in: 184(138 to 312) hits.

50k att vs 58k defence 100k hull @7k decks

You Deal: 548(301 to 822) Damage.
You Take: NaN(NaN to NaN) Damage.
You die in: NaN(NaN to NaN) hits.
Your opponent dies in: 183(122 to 333) hits.



That's why i think ssb is overpowered the numbers really speak for themselves.

Those do seem like good ideas to balance the different builds.
+1, I hope this is implemented.

I'm going to be honest. I'm quite confused, insulted, frustrated, and kinda left a little speechless at the sound of your first idea. It's well thought out and I like it, but at the same time I really, really hate it.

The idea is a game changer, so you're walking on thin ice with it. I play a lot of games, and know that a lot of players hate big changes being made to "their" game. I am most definitely one of those people.

<Rambles On>

Anyway, I notice a flaw with Idea #1, and it is as follows:

Use the deck-space only for Cloak/Scan. That way you still have enough to strike critically and at the same time take less critical hits. Sure, it would take a very very long time to catch up with the lost attack/defense from modules, but in the end it would be worth it because you'd be stronger than ever.

Overall, -10000 from me.

The problem with SSB is that it makes you stronger than any defence module just look at the numbers with an SSB you can have nearly 4x less defence and still take the same damage with enough decks to add scan/cloak and some % mods this whole design just makes modules and ship building redundant you'd make a stronger ship installing nothing and that really just defeats a large point of the game.

Nice suggestions Golgotha. I agree with them, but not for the reasons you mentioned. I have always been a fan of greater crits. It would be cool if they did devastating damage like being hit by the Gem Cannons. Likewise, I have long been a supporter of more crits on resources. Hacking and raiding need to steal waaaaay more than a few thousand. Think about it from a role playing perspective. I just disabled your ship. You are completely dead in the water. I send my Tactical Officers over, and all they snag is 2% of what you have in your holding bays? WTH?!?! One raiding party should be able to get away with 10%-25% easy. But, I digress...


In terms of offering the suggestions to rebalance SSB, MSB, I am not sure it is really that necessary.

1. People will either attack you or they won't attack you for any number of reasons. If it is a random badge attack, and they decide you are not worth the hassle, then you have earned what you wanted from the ship build. There is nothing to rebalance here.

2. If you have provoked someone, chances are, they will shoot back until they get the disable no matter what the cost. If your legions are at war, you will still be shot down. If you steal a planet, you will still be shot down. If someone has a ton of energy and they don't mind spending it, you will still be shot down. Again, there is nothing to rebalance here.


But again, I do like the suggestions overall. I think adding a sense of "dodge and manuvering" with corresponding damage would be fun for the game.

That's the point though. It's a tactic, it's how you do things.

well I am a fan of stripping the damage cap in its entirety and let the chips fall where they may, make the damage based solely off attack/defense.

NO

care to provide a reason other than "no" I can say "yes" just as easily, give me a well thought out argument as to why this is a bad idea please?

It is extremely obvious, nobody should take the time to explain it to you

Dont mind you -10000, but allow me to make my response

Just remember that its going to take a ship of about 4k decks just to fit all the scan cloak modules on. That means to simply be equal in critical hits/artifact effectivness, they would need to be on the verge of a LSB. They would still have the advantage in damage taken of course, but the balance will have drasticaly shifted.

As to Draxsiss, its literally impossible to simply remove damage caps.
Keep in mind that attack vs defence is expressed as a percentage of damage cap to determin damage. Without a damage cap, the entire formulae fails to work. Trying to change that would completly change how all base battles, npc attacks, pvp functions as a whole.

The system would literally fall apart.

All you can really do is suggest changes to how the damage cap is determined, and only with great care. Thats the reason why my crit hit suggested was to bypass damage cap - because the slightest change will potentially destroy the game.

Thank you Golgotha, that was well explained I always thought damage cap was used differently,

you are not making any sense here.

i just finished going thru all 48 search result pages for 'ssb' to write up my SSB ship build strategy guide. the whole point of ADDING (rank+19)/2 was to address the complaints about the 'scout of mass destruction' at the then-mid ranks which were completely indestructible and devalued the use of hull and shield.

if you put a cap on crew per deck, then all you are doing is completely removing ANY type of ship build strategy. suddenly those android scientists and helmsmen will have to sit in cargo, while your rescued prisoners go into t.o.'s until you crew gets capped for that rank. after that, your rank points are FORCED to go into decks. rinse and repeat. the arti crew is worthless, and for every rank, there is an 'ideal' build, based on the 'ideal' decks for that rank. b*ttlestations had this type of setup and it sucked royally because everyone just used the optimized ship build for their rank. BORING!

but +1 to the OP. i think scan and cloak being used for some kind of crit.damage calc in pvp would be a great addition.

Funnily enough it already is - I can see the difference when I run damage tests against full sized ship builds. However, as its damage cap limited, and nothing actually tells you when they happen other than an unusually high damage they are easy to miss. You honestly need to chart it to see. If you want, i may have a few old spreadsheets that show this, or i can always do a new test.

in short: The problem is they do not occur significantly enough for people to notice, they do not deal enough damage - and they seem to taper off quickly if i have even as little as 3k cloak on.

well, crit hacks and raids get double the 'normal' amount, so i don't see why crit.damage can not be double of what damage would have been dealt with the damage cap calc ... so up to 2x damage cap possibly. the factor might be boosted even more, say up to 5x ... but then SSB will never be able to hang onto Exotica.

I notice crits as well, usually against me. I don't typically use much cloaking, but it's easy to tell. Usually I'll be winning most of the fights by a fair amount, and then I'll lose one fight by 200-300 damage (typically between 1/5 and 1/10 depending on, I'm guessing, the amount of cloak/scan they have).

I'm not sure 5% hull/shield without regards to damage cap would be very good (particularly if it's active offensively; at the rate I see crits that would be immensely damaging and remove any benefit to a ship build without cloak/scan), but at the same time a set damage increase or something similar may not scale well either. Perhaps a crit would be a guaranteed hit at their maximum damage cap, which wouldn't help much versus a pure SSB relying more on hull than defense, but could provide a little extra oomph against a MSB without completely invalidating the lack of cloak/scan.