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Unread 24 Nov 2015, 21:26   #3
Mzyxptlk
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Join Date: Aug 2005
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Re: How to make stats, Best practice approach requested

OK, so you basically asked two questions.


1) How do you get into stats making?

I feel the biggest thing is to just get involved with other people's stats. SD is a scumbucket, but it has its moments. You can also help your alliance pick fleet strategies. The former helps you learn how to balance stats, the latter how to take advantage of imbalances.


2) How do you go about making a set of stats?

This one's a little harder. Unlike what you said, it's actually the tweaking that's easy, it's just tedious: you make a bunch of bcalcs, see which races are strong and which are weak, then fiddle with the effs until everyone's about equally bad. The hard part is what you asked me to explain: making the fundamental structure interesting and fun to play with.

The first thing I usually do is to think of something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done often, or recently, or whatever. This is optional, really. You can make a perfectly fine set of stats doing roughly the same thing everyone else has been doing for years. It's probably better to follow the beaten path, actually! It's there for a reason. Also decide whether to go ST, limited MT or full MT.

Next up is deciding which classes fire at each other. It's usually best to have Fi/Co/Cr/Bs fire at 3 classes and Fr/De at 4-5 classes, though that's not set in stone. The more interaction there is between classes, the more defensive a set tends to be, and the the fewer the more boring, because it means players have no choice in deciding which ships to build. This is also true for the number of ships races have. Having too many ships makes the stats overly defensive, too few makes them boring. It's not required to give all races exactly the same number of ships. Also note: if Fr/De together shoot at all classes, you're enabling forting. That's not necessarily bad, nor necessarily good, it's just another thing to be aware of.

You should also decide now whether you want 0 loss defense in your stats. Options here are no, EMP-only, and yes. Most people don't call EMP-only 0 loss defense '0 loss', but I do. Personally, I dislike all versions of 0-loss defense, because it's so hard to balance. My opinion is not gospel, though.

At around the same time you can start allocating roiding classes to the races. Try to avoid giving 2 races 2 (or more) teamups, as that makes for a very strong fleet strategy. I usually try to team at least 1 of Zik's fleets with an EMP fleet, preferably both. I avoid Xan/Cat and Ter/Zik teamups, as they have similar inits anyway, so they don't gain as much from a teamup. This is also where you decide how you want to solve the 5 races/6 classes problem. Either some races get more roiding fleets than others, or some classes contain more roiding fleets than others. If you have a really amazing idea for a sixth race, that'd be even better!

Once you know which classes fire at each other, you can give each roiding fleet 2 or 3 combat ships. First set just the classes of ships in roiding fleets. This gives you an intuition as to how many off-class ships there remain to create. Keep in mind that 3-ship roiding fleets are worse offensively and better defensively than 2-ship roiding fleets. When you've created your roiding fleets, you can start assigning targets to the ships, as well as giving inits and types. This is the most complicated part of making stats. Every time you pencil in another set of numbers or targets, you'll notice some side effect you don't like, which will cause you to make changes in other places, ad nauseum. Step back every now and again to look at the bigger picture. It's surprisingly easy to get lost in the details and accidentally make one ship hilariously overpowered. The way I tend to go about targetting is to start with 1 fully fleshed out roiding fleet, containing two ships with average inits. Ter is best for this. I then more or less arbitrarily give the four other races one ship that beats the one of the ships, but not both. If you put those ships mostly in roiding classes, then those are ideal starting points for creating the second roiding fleet, and so on.

As you start to fill in more and more classes, targets, types and inits, you'll want to start striving for more and more balance. The way stats balancing tends to work is that there's two different levels of impact a change can have. Changes to the upper tier of class, targetting, type and init have can have huge impact, so you do those first. Changes to the lower tier of armor, guns, power, ERes and cost have little impact: you can do fairly crazy things here without creating major problems. There's no real point in doing delicate fine-tuning with effs and then completely overhauling the balance by changing the inits on half a dozen ships, and likewise, you can't compensate for huge imbalances in the targetting by changing the effs around a bit here and there. Ideally, you'd balance those 2 tiers separately. First the upper tier, then the lower. In practice, you can't fully balance the upper tier, so you use the lower tier to try to fix problems you can't solve in the upper tier.

While you're fleshing out the roiding fleets, you'll automatically start thinking about which races you want to be able to stop each fleet. Since you can only have so many ships in roiding fleets, you'll need to start creating offclass ships to achieve your vision. Don't worry too much about filling in all the details of offclass ships though, since you can shuffle them around more easily than ships in roiding fleets. Once you start running out of offclass ships, you may want to start jotting down little notes next to the ships you've created, to pass your upper tier balancing problem to the lower tier to deal with. Don't worry about specific numbers yet, though, stick to generic things like 'low a/c' or 'high e/r'.

When you're done with the classes, targetting, types and inits, fill in the other fields with generic values, except where your notes say otherwise. It's OK to have a couple of blank spots in the upper tier values before you start with the lower tier, but no more than that. Look at old stats for inspiration of what each race's effs should approximately be like.

And at that point you're ready to show your set to other people to see what they think!

All of the above is a rough guideline. It's perfectly reasonable to deviate from them sometimes if you have a good reason. However, if you find yourself ignoring the guidelines for half of the ships in your stats, there's probably something wrong.



I skipped EMP completely. EMP is a bitch to deal with, because it needs special treatment. but this wall of text has made me tired. Maybe someone else can step up?
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