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.
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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.

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?

"A smaller ship build with fewer decks should be harder to target and hit then a larger ship. So the game gives smaller ships a relative advantage by capping the amount of damage other ships can do to them. " -wiki

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.