The new base eta feature
Since appocomaster's announcement i've had alot of questions about this new system and some people suggested i should try to explain it on the forums since i had a day or 2 more than the rest of you to adjust to the new reality.
How did the old ETA system work? PA had a system that consisted out of 3 different base ETA's. In this system your base ETA was tied directly to the class of the ship.
Alot of people will now go: why are ships now 1 tick slower? They are not. People are used to seeing the ETA's after the fleets have launched which would be:
But a fleet has an ETA too before it's launched. And those ETA's have always been 12, 13 & 14. The ETA of your fleet was detirmened by the slowest ship within it. If you had 1 Fi and 1 Bs in a fleet, the ETA would always be 14. If you only had Fi in it, it would be 12. How is the new system different? The following things have not changed: PA still has 3 base ETA's The ETA's after launch are still the same as in the old system Your ETA is still based on the slowest ship in your fleet But what has than changed? Upto now a FI ship always had to have base ETA 12 (TT-0) because it was a FI ship and the ETA was tied tot he class. In the new system the dependancy that your ETA was decided based on the class of the ship was removed. Now each ship has it's own base ETA which you can see on the stats page ETA column. Either 12, 13 or 14. Now the phantom which is a Fi class ship can have base ETA 13, while the banshee which is a Fi class ship too still has base eta 12. This allows the phantom to travel faster alone than when it's joined by the banshee. This also means that you can make a BS pod have base ETA 12 and a co pod base ETA 14. But for simplicity the base ETA's of pods were not touched and each attack class can still make it's traditional ETA meaning:
How will the new system affect our game play? You can't simply select all your FI and assume it's has base ETA 12. To help you PA team has already added a field on most pages which state the ETA of each ship. Both on the alliance pages as your fleets page. They are also still looking into making it more visible on the fleets page and adding an option to move ships based on ETA. But yes you have to be a little bit more carefull what you do now. In the past only the top alliances use what we refer to as prelaunch def. Defend an FR attack with BS because they JGP their members and launch their def at the same time as the attack. With this new system everyone can launch a BS fleet to defend an FR fleet if the BS base ETA is the same or lower without prelaunching it. So you have to be a bit more carefull when calculating your battles and check out which ships could be in an base ETA 12 fleet. It also adds in alot more tactical options concerning strategy. You an now combine different ships of different classes which have the same ETA into 1 attack or defence fleet. Hopefully the basics of the new base ETA system are clear now. It will certainly make for an interesting round. If you have any questions feel free to ask here and i'll do my best to answer them or visit one of the friendly helpfull people in #support. |
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What information or stats did Appocomaster use to determine this was a feature the community needed and wanted, and what is he trying to achieve with it?
I await your response, or his |
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Nice change, well done
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must be one of the worst changes ever done to the game
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Everything is terrible forever.
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Thank you, this always threw me off a bit when calculating LT's until the feature was added that told you once you launched your fleet.
Much easier now for my feeble mind to calculate and in my opinion makes complete sense. Before it was like we were saying zero isn't a number. |
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Edit: on a first look it only kills the need of activity to PL defense |
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Another "awesome" result is that one also cant use PL def effectively against certain classes, like CO. A bit messed up.
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Do Alliance defense fleets still get a 1 tick ETA reduction?
If i recall correctly, years ago when we had individual ETA's, We did not get an ETA reduction for defence. (This was probably because we didn't have in game alliances) thank you, |
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Even galaxy defence fleets will always take 5 ticks |
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Opens up stats and strategy planning. Is a good approach going back to oldschool.
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I like this change very much. Keep up the good work!
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ditto :up:.
Some people are complaining but, in my limited PA experience, it has opened up attacking (and some defensive) play a lot. People have been caught out sometimes and have lost ships but making attacking less predictable by offering more ship/race combos has made it a better experience. Perhaps not as much fun for DCs :P |
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I dislike it, after seeing this almost a full round in action.
I fail to see how this change is an improvement for the game. Seems very limitted which ships can have lower/higher traveltime based on metaclass/targetting. And going outside those limits just slightly makes totally unbalanced stats. So to summarize: unbalanced feature, nice effort tho. |
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It was a quick fix on already made stats... i'm sure if the stats are designed with that new eta in mind, it can make things interesting.
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Only thing it adds is more defensive nature to stats. So please elaborate what makes you sure, just don't say you are without anything to back it up. |
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it could allow you to hide some different class ships in your fleets, if the targetting is made right.
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Sorry, I was sure you were clever enough to figure it out.
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That's only your opinion... doesn't get you very far.
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How is it being abused?
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Abused wasn't the right word. Unbalanced on the other hand fits.
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OK, then how is it unbalanced?
(I'm not being rhetorical. I haven't really paid attention and I want to know.) |
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Do it on attack class ships and pods, and we may aswell scrap the original metaclass eta's. Do it just on the ships and not pods, could make scetchy scenarios where people analyze incs wrong, but most likely not. It is basicly a feature to help things get more defensive. As it "has" to be the higher class metas that gets reduction base eta and not Fi/Co class. In the current set only spiders was tampered with in Fi/Co meta. Giving it Fr/De base eta as a def ship vs DE. All other adjustments are Fr/De/Cr/Bs that attack downwards, or Fr/De that defends upwards. I'd love to see how any statcreator can do something different with that and yet have balanced stats. I try to imagine seeing a Co attack fleet having Fr/De base eta, and a Fr/De fleet having Fi/Co base eta... |
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In my opinion, Fi/Co has long been overpowered by the combined advantages of fewer potential alliance defense ships (increasing the odds of landing attacks), shorter research time (resulting in earlier attacks and more time to spend on other research), and low ETA (giving more attacks per round).
Compare that with Cr/Bs. They takes 6 times as long to research as Fi/Co. They can be sent less often than Fi/Co (assuming a landing, once every 20 ticks instead of once every 16). And they can be defended against by 4 classes at alliance ETA, to 2 for Fi/Co. Often (but not always), classes don't fire at themselves, skewing matters even more, to 3 def classes vs 1 def class. Fr/De is in the middle, though closer to Cr/Bs than Fi/Co. They take 3 times as long to research as Fi/Co, but only half as long as Cr/Bs. They launch every 18 ticks. They share the worst-drawback of Cr/Bs, though, which is that they can be defended against by 4 (or 3) classes. Given that, I think it's reasonable to hurt Fi/Co a bit by making most anti-Fi/Co ships able to defend at Fi/Co ETA. Does this make the game more defensive, in isolation? I'd say yes: more potential defense ships means the game becomes more defensive. The stats should be carefully balanced to counter-act that change, because Simtarion is no fun. I don't think the change necessarily means balance is now totally 100% impossible, though. Lots of changes have made the game more or less defensive, but we've always been able to compensate for that (though not always as willing as I would've liked). Personally, if balancing the metaclasses was the only reason this change was made (and it might not have been), I would've preferred to see a different approach: invert metaclass ETAs. Cr/Bs ETA 8, Fi/Co ETA 10. That way, the slowest ships take the least time to research, and vice versa. Alternatively, invert the research tree, Cr/Bs first, Fi/Co last. It's a much more elegant solution, because it doesn't add anything, just changes something that already exists. Admittedly it's not a complete fix, because the fastest metaclass will still only face half or a third of the potential defense ships than the other two, and better ETA is more important than shorter research time. |
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" Fi/Co has long been overpowered "
Not sure Co is overpowered really. In this round there was plenty of Fi because it is has been so easy to fake fleets in ST round, so most people naturally have a decent supply of Fi. Cath players were a bit OP last round and were balanced out by having only Fi ship with base ETA13. They still did their main job, support and def, quite well. "worst-drawback of Cr/Bs, though, which is that they can be defended against by 4 (or 3)" I think you are referring to MT ships again here. In this round, Cr has actually been quite effective. Most alliances part-covered Co/De quite well early-mid game and only later on did people have enough resources to spread defence to cover those bigger classes. Playing as Etd, the ability to mix in Priests with same ETA as Co fleet has been a good feature. Most Co fleets by default were def'd by Harpies and Recluse, so the ability to smash the low init and EMP with a hidden De fleet was great. " I think it's reasonable to hurt Fi/Co a bit by making most anti-Fi/Co ships able to defend at Fi/Co ETA " This is exactly what is happening now across all classes. Not sure why Roach and Clippers (De anti-Fi) were not also given lowest ETA, maybe to balance or experiment between races a bit. |
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Look at Broker, it makes "sense" but stealing and general steal init made it useless. If it was different, it would most likely be over-powered or slightly less useless.
I do like having different eta's based on the ship, not just the class in general. |
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Are you calling 21% of my fleet value useless? :confused:
While stealing Fr isn't ideal, Etd has been amazing to fake with! |
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Bump.
I still think this feature is shite, doesn't help that the current stats are somewhat unbalanced on top. Either do it properly well thought through, or just drop it as a whole. |
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