[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by AdmV0rl0n

Its in the thread for people to discuss. Not just sit there and reposte with 'superships by default, no. no. no.

It was already pointed out why superships fit bad into the current combat engine.

The ship stats are riddled with ships that are useless against certain other ships. Again, to be clear, its the Reason TER have BS fleets, Cat have CR fleets, Xan have FI fleets.

The ships stats are riddled with useless ships, occasionally, yes. Like the Chimera of round 21, which was pretty much unused save one player of significance. It's not a goal we strive for when stats are thought about, how to fill up the races with ships that people think about as "trash".

Again, why I was talking about podclass fleets, is that once you allow one race to have these "marine carriers" of pod class and deny others it, you're already causing a significant balance issue. If you're planning on making the flagships and marine carriers just a trinket that has little game impact, you don't have to deal with the issue, but if they're going to have game impact, the chances are these are the sorts of holes that will draw abuse. A little careless mistake like this (or the thief, or the covert operations for this round) can quickly blow out of proportion. Whenever you add things that have impact of significance to the combat engine, or do experiments there (again, this is why the thief example was brought up), you need to be very careful not to create something that has an anonymaly effect (ie. no amount of harpies can ever do anything about thieves alone), or some other dramatic effect (CBA getting mashed down to 0 structures in a couple of ticks).

This is why the idea gets critisized - to avoid such incidents. The second thing you might get critisism about, is, that posting a lot of posts in a form of a monologue isn't a great way to brainstorm, you'd be better off just collectign and summarizing in one post.

Let me elaborate yet further how the mechanics of the targetting problems are. First, you have a marine carrier of class "a". And a flagship of class "b". Flagship has some devastating effect (be it an alliance level or a planet level flagship), such as demolishing 10% of the target's structures. One race is given a flagship of their podclass "b". This podclass "b" (look at it like you look investors, tycoons, and shadows of round 21) has ships that utterly devastate ships of class "a", be it the class where the marine carriers are located in.

Because the marine carriers shoot late to prevent conflicts with asteroid capture and such, you are going to have to, by default, sacrifice a huge amount of resources to get a tiny touch at the enemy flagships. The chances are you'll still fail, as you'll be overwhelmed by your enemies class "b" ships that target your class "a". This race gets inevitably trampled by this problem, suffering of it excessively - a problem other races won't suffer, because of the different planning of the podclasses, flagship classes, and marine carrier classes. Again, this brings three more moving bits into the ship statistics design, which isn't easy as it is with pods and structure killers. This is why I find that the idea fits badly into the current combat engine. What comes to future combat engines, that's a whole another story, because we don't for now know what they'll contain even initially.

What the **** is the point in saying no new ships, no no no, because woooooo wooooo woooooo if we don't think about it, the whole game is unbalanced.

The point is, the generic agenda is that the game should be less unbalanced, in order to make for a scenario where f.ex a bad race choice won't ruin your round (terran round 21).