The damage cap should be 3/5 or 2/3 for deck size. There is too much of a buffer for just one rank stat. A ship that has this buffer has a significant advantage from taking damage from similar class size ships. It doesn't require research in either weapons or defense to balance combat. It also doesn't allow for the bonuses obtained (or not obtained) from cloak or scanning.

If this explanation isn't good enough I'll be happy to write actual numbers and examples.

The damage cap protection "could" be applied many other ways as well. Some examples include level ratio damage reduction. Perhaps a new module/ ship component that increase range of guns (ability to hit lower level and/or smaller ships).

You say that without having any ideas about the draw backs of being a small ship build. Scan is limited, cloak is limited, you have to live basically off of your hull and that's it.

In fact, there are so many drawbacks on being a small ship build, I sort of wonder why some many people do it, but variety is the spice of life. I know one RL friend of mine tried a small ship build consisting of 20 decks (before the damage cap changed) and that's it. Sure, you can only take 10 points of damage... but you can't fit any good scan modules, barely any room for hull. He spent a while on this build BEFORE the damage cap changed and, then what? His whole class was screwed and he had to start over because people like you complained because you couldn't handle it and had pitiful understandings of the build.

I would prefer the damage cap CHANGED BACK to half decks and thats it.

Using 1 deck/rank basically puts the equation equal. Right now I have about 2x as many decks as that for my rank, so I asked myself, if I cut down to decks = rank, and my damage cap was 1/2 as much, would I lose enough from hull and defense to offset any gains from this ? This depends mainly on whether most of your stats are from modules or from AP drops; if you have high stats without modules for your rank, this can actually lower damage taken. This requires a high AP however to build up the ship.

I will break this down by numbers then.

Lets do two level 50 ships.

Each has either a 50/2 + 19 cap or a hull/2 cap.

They have a minimum of 20 deck space or maximum of 250 deck space. (May add more say 20 or 40 with artifacts.)

If the first ship is using weapons, defense, and hull here are the options.

We will say 220 deck space. Which is not too bad of a number if the ship started a big ship build early in the game. The damage cap here is 110.

Nanosphere plating x5 = 240x5 hull = 1200 = 21*5 deck = 105 deck
Dominion Cannon x2 = 50x2 attack =100 attack = 10*2 deck = 20 deck
Light Disruptor Cannon x 5 =117*5 attack= 585 attack = 29*5 deck = 145 deck
Spacial Thrusters - Mark II x4 = 94x4 = 376 defense = 36x4 deck = 144 deck
Internal Dampeners x2 = 66x2 defense = 132 defense = 30x2 deck = 60 deck

So a ship of this build can have a maximum of 685 attack, a maximum of 508 defense, and a approx. 451 attack/ 376 defense build.

Now lets do a ship of the same level utilizing the damage cap.

At level 50, we could reduce the damage cap by say 35 points by only having 150 decks. *A major sacrifice to note is less scanning power. But this can be overcome with planet sharing.*

This ship still has the same potential for maximum attack or defense.. without factoring hull integrity. For a mixed attack/defense build it would utilize the hull integrity.. which has say 3x nanosphere for a total of 720 hull. 720/ 75 makes for a minimum of 9.6 hits. 150 hull - 63 hull = 87 for attack modules left. So it has enough left for 317 attack power.

This seems balanced as ship2 has to take ten hits. Ship1 cannot be easily disabled by ship2 unless some hull is removed and more weapons are added. From a defensive point of view ship2 has a advantage. Ship1 though has a disadvantage because the cap is higher. Bigger ships can disable it more easily, and tactical bypasses can be used. Effectively eliminating the benefits from a larger ship build. Ship2 will always be able to fit all remaining hull onto the ship for maximum defense from *any* ship.

(I didn't factor energy, tactical officers, etc. because they would only factor mostly into the smaller ship size.. and a difference of only 40 defense or 40 attack would only support the smaller ship size position. Which also leads to an interesting conclusion.. are the stats for ranks in crew too low?)

So perhaps my second conclusion is best. Having only one factor as ship size doesn't effectively implement the idea. Only increasing the damage cap would further unbalance the larger ship size and it would make the smaller ship size less favorable/ almost useless.

The damage cap was put in place to give an advantage for smaller players over higher leveled players. Increasing the damage cap only effectively destroys that safe guard that lower level players have against higher ranks.

However, i have a better idea, why don't we just scrap the damage cap entirely, the nsee how you like it when you get in a legion war and someone 200+ ranks destroys your ship, because you don't have that safe guard.

Variety of ship builds is what gives this game so much class. People can do what they like, and design their ships in a way that best suits their preference. The half decks damage cap was a testament to this because players could literally have any ship built that they wanted.

But, because people like you complained, it destroyed that wonderful variety that this game had. People like you are choking the variety and versatility out of this game by forcing people to play a certain way.

Actually I'd appreciate it if you read my entire post. I concluded that I was wrong in my original conclusion. Making game suggestions is what makes games "better". Why shouldn't I explore ideas.. especially if I'm the one who thought of it? What did you do? Come here.. half read and respond to my post. Life would better serve you if you weren't so quick to anger/answer others. It does make me feel upset to have you target me as the reason a game mechanic was implemented. I've only played the game for a few months. So how am I to blame? All games mmorpg or otherwise usually require adjustments or changes. Have you even considered why i asked for the mechanic to be changed? Of course not.. as the bulk of your response is a venomous reference to something.. which is unrelated to anything I've ever mentioned or commented on.