[Cochese]

Originally Posted by Shhhhhhh

By giving each race their own characteristics and preferably each ship too. You give the players choices on what to build and what to use.

To a certain extent, yes. You've also removed two classes (FI, BS) from the equation so removed a fair bit of choice there.

This is also a very blatant nerf to SK's, which need to be un-nerfed or removed entirely. That's a whole other issue so I'll leave it at that.

Armor efficiency is around twice as high as damage efficiency, meaning ships dont die as fast. Init is less important.

In every round I've played since r3, where this has been the case, it has ended up being terrible. With the "dumbed down" stats we've had since things like weapon speed and agility were removed, the only key ingredient left is Initiative. If that is less important, you might as well just have everything fire at once...or EMP, Normal, Steal, Roids, SK in that effective order in the stats matrix.

When ships don't die as fast, it's that much more difficult to win wars or defeat an enemy. Roid loss is typically negligible. You still have fleet to go get more. Value loss is the entire point of the game. Removing an enemy's ability to retaliate or go get more roids is the point. Making that more difficult to do leads to a situation where "lol waves" become the norm. It also puts FC'ing someone into limbo, for a couple reasons (paging MZ to this thread/point!). More on that below.

So if a ship fights itself in defense, whoever brings more will win the fight.

Dear Christ no, no, no. You clearly don't remember the Sentinel with T3=all. There's also another round with Zik ships stealing each other in a funky way that I can't recall but it was a ****ing mess.

It's not about throwing more ships at a fight...it should be about throwing the right ships at a fight, where even one or two fleets will "win" against a larger force because of things like initiative.

In a shrinking universe, it really can't come down to a numbers game like you're suggesting. It's bad for a whole lot of reasons, the least of which is the biggest group of players wins, by design. Use a scalpel, not an axe. We need more room for interesting game play, not less.

Added bonus of this is that you can have ships that steal their own class so they steal ships of a class they want.

I like this idea in principle, but having only played Zik once (terribly I might add) I can't really comment. Surely there's a way to build stats without the aforementioned flaws that would allow them to steal into their preferred roid-classes...

I like the general thought process...and the fact you put time and effort into it, rather than just changing some stuff around from a previous set and calling it "new".

Just adding my own .02 from what "experience" I can offer.