Good to see this thread come alive with a spirited debate about stats and other submissions. JBGs looks short and simple and to the point, I would like to see it fleshed out a bit more but good start.
Just straight into my usual tirades, I'll begin tonights' rant with EMP:
I don't much understand the current EMP formula other than it works but designing a set of stats around it and trying to predict effect can be an exercise in futility. Whereas with a NORM ship it may be desirable to concentrate T1 targeting on the heavier ship class in the sequence, following to lighter classes to distribute the most damage evenly with the diminishing effect of the targeting system. However, with an EMP ship, the effects can very wildly unless compensating the differences in cost between classes comes into consideration for adopting firing sequence. Therefore, the EMP class ship should first fire at the lightest class in the sequence.
The stick in the wheel comes with E/R providing a means of compensating against EMP to allow greater or lesser effect to a particular ship in question. Perhaps rather than relying on EMP gun count, treat the weapon as singular gun with damage calculated similar to normal damage, but allow the E/R variable to function as a damage modifier. In the current system a ship with four guns would disable four ships with a modifier of zero regardless of the relation of cost between the classes. Therefore, even by reducing the effect at T2 to sixty percent, the resulting effect on a heavier class may exceed in ship value the effected value of the T1 targeted class.
I'm not nearly the mathematician to prepare a new EMP formula to propose other than recognize their is something fundamentally wrong with the current one. My general rule of thumb is to reduce the number of ships utilizing EMP and to stagger the inits of such ships as such that any suitable defensive postures utilizing EMP ships on both sides can partially disable other EMP ships before they fire, in other words not everything should simply be lumped into init 1 or init 2 in the firing order. Honoring the complexities of gun numbers, firing orders, and E/R is a loathsome duty.
On to other subjects, a few other principals of stat design that I would suggest. Defense ships (by this I mean the classes of ships given to race without a pod) should be designed to have a "trump" effect upon attacking pod classes of the same race. Therefore, counter the other classes given with pods by giving the defense ship a lower init and other advantages as necessary (ie. higher A/C and D/C). Not always applicable when trying to balance the overall power of a given race, but the scenario I would highlight is that ZIK defense ships should have a lower priority steal than ZIK offensive ships, or that CATH defense ships should have a lower priority EMP than CATH offensive ships.
Anyways, I polished up my original stat submission and created a second variance to accommodate the feedback about light class dominance being less desirable in the immediate future... ala next round.
My original proposal, tweaked, and what I'd call
variant 1 or
variant 424: ('424' denotes 4 light/2 medium/4 heavy roiding options)
hxxp://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rwff6DHHEnOcMmg1-a12EAA
My alternative proposal, CATH changed to FR/CR offense, ZIK changed to DE defense, thus
variant 2 or
variant 334:
hxxp://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r_2Yqn_cRkF6FXG1S11fmMg
I'd go as far as to say that I'm 97% happy with the balance other than fine tuning EMP spec with a suitably programmed bcalc debugger.
Needless to say, if you want to view it copy and paste and change hxxp: to http:, maybe one day my post count will be high enough to post without all the mess. You probably heard enough... so I'll stop my ramblings here for tonight.
- budious