Redefine the races

[Ferretus]

As the game races continue to blur and move away from their original distinctness wouldn't it be better to take a moment to look at the original ideas of what made them distinct and return to it? Alternatively we should just use a single race tech tree method and have done with it.

I am not going to give full stats (as this cannot really be done without some detailed analysis), just what in my opinion the race focus should move back towards.

My concept on the races are as follows.

Cathaar
As I remember these were a highly developed peaceful race that preferred to quickly disable their enemies rather than shoot them.
Uses large ships as the EMP takes a lot of energy to fire. Wide spread of targetting with a few ships that fire 'normal' to combat popular ship choices or pod class (frigate perhaps for one?).
Nice low initiative with moderate armour and fire power.
Racial bonus: Research (due to higher developed mind). Minor bonus to Covert ops
Racial flaw: slightly slower construction time
Ship types: 1Fi, 2Co, 1Frigate, 2De, 4Cr, 2Bs
Pods: Corvette/Cruiser
base production time: 12
Base firing times: EMP- Fi=1, Co/Fr=2, De/Cr=3, Bs=4.
-Normal ships +8 to firing time
-1 stealer ship @+40 initiative to above (NB only other race with a stealer ship)

Terran
Terrans rule the universe by being big and have the sheer staying power to deter attacks.
Use of larger ships in order to cram as much armour and weapons on board as possible. Most ships prefer a bullying style of approach by targetting ships smaller than themselves and having the gunpower to target multiple enemy craft.
Racial bonus: Constructions. Minor bonus=None
Racial Flaw: none
Ship types: Co=2, Fr=2, De=3, Cr=2, Bs=3
Pods: De/Bs
Base Production time: 10
Base firing times: Fi/Co=6, Fr/De=7, Cr/Bs=8

Xandathrii
I get the impression that life for a Xan is shortlived anyway so it doesn't matter if you pilot some small ship to almost certain death. To represent this bonzai style culture Xans prefer to use small ships to swarm those larger ones.
Ships are fast and have high firepower concentrating their fire on ship class at least 2 classes higher, eg Fi targets Frigate or larger. Ships will however have appalling armour.
Racial Bonus: Cloaked, immunity to fleet analysis -Minor bonus: None
Racial Flaw: None
Ship types: Fi=3, Co=2, Fr=3, De=3, Cr=1
Ship Production time: 10
pod types: Fi/Fr
Base firing times: Fi=3, Co/Fr=4, De/Cr=5

Zikonian
Many of its ships are just automated drones which would explain the slow initiative and eventual staying power and commitment to the capture. Very few ships are piloted, must ships are tiny in comparrison to other races due to lack of cockpit etc.
Ships more focused towards targetting similar smaller sized vessels or go to an extreme of swarming very large vessels as a huge eg drone fighter force blankets a Bs, like flies to king kongs first dump of the day. Initiative on 'normal ships' should be comparable to that of Terran, stealing will add +40 as per usual. Armour should be less than Terran but more than the other races to represent the requirement to stay alive, firepower can be average.

Racial bonus: Covert ops bonus, immunity to civil unrest type covert ops due to brainwashed robotic populace. Minor Bonus: Improved production time
Racial Flaw: Research penalty
Ship types: 1Fi, 2Co, 3Fr, 2De, 3Cr, 1Bs
Pods: De/Cr
Production time: 9
Base firing times: Fi/Co=5, Fr/De=6, Cr/Bs=7
-normal ships: +4
-stealing ships: +35 Initiative to above

Other notes
All pods steal on a I25.
Struct killers should be a different ship class type to the pods of that race and MUST be either a BS or a CR to represent the firepower required.

[Clogg]

Well I like having more differances between the races since they are getting a bit blurry. But I do think the dfferences are already more clearer then in let's say r 11 and 12 IMHO.

R13 brought back some differances, and with exception of the stealing, this round has been an improvement aswell.

[Appocomaster]

I just created a Race discussion here:
http://pirate.planetarion.com/showthread.php?t=187151

Edit:
From reading it, I can already see there are problems. This would at most have to be a rough guide for stats. You can't really make inits so definate without then having to then completely compensate with the rest of the stats.

I would like to see a rough set of stats made to this specification though :-)

[Ferretus]

Cool thanks for the support.

As I said, it was only intended to be rough and the base initiatives were really meant to show the speed differences between races, obviously some ships will be slower due to more firepower or armour or such like and vice versa.

[Ferretus]

Ship stats (basic), first draft.

This is gonna be a quick run through of possible targetting etc of ship classes. This is by no means well thought out or definitive and I am writing it as I think it so there will be a lot of errors.

So constructive suggestions would be great thanks but only from people with half a brain cell towards doign this sort of thing.

Don't criticise at all unless you can offer an alternative that works better in the same post. Thanks

[Ferretus]

Cathaar

Fighter: Targets Co, Init 1 EMP
Corvette: Targets Fighter, Init 2 EMP
Corvette: Astropod
Frigate: Targets Frigate, Init 10 NORMAL
Destroyer: Targets Cruiser, Init 3 EMP
Destroyer: Targets Battleship, Init 3 EMP
Cruiser: Targ Frigates, Init 3 EMP
Cruiser: Targ Destroyers, Init 3 EMP
Cruiser: Targ Corvette, Init 43 STEAL
Cruiser: Astropod
Battleship: Targ Cruisers, Init 12 Normal
Battleship: STRUCTURE KILLER

Terran
Corvette: Targ Fighters, Init 5 (weaker armour/guns but faster)
Corvette: Targ Destroyers, Init 6
Frigate: Targ Corvettes, Init 7
Frigate: Targ Battleships, Init 7
Destroyer: Targ Cruiser, Init 7
Destroyer: Targ Frigates, Init 7
Destroyer: Astropod
Cruiser: Targ Destroyer,Init 8
Cruiser: Structure Killer
Battleship: Targ Frigates, Init 8
Battleship: Targ Cruisers, Init 8
Battleship: Astropod

Xandathrii
Fighter: Targ Frigate, Init 3
Fighter: Targ Dest, Init 3
Fighter: Astropod
Corvette: Targ Fighter, Init 4
Corvette: Targ Cruiser, Init 4
Frigate: Targ Cruiser, Init 4
Frigate: Targ Dest, Init 4
Frigate: Astropod
Destroyer: Targ battleship, Init 5
Destroyer: Targ Frigate, Init 5
Destroyer: Targ Corvette, Init 5
Cruiser: STRUCTURE KILLER

Zikonian
Fighter: Targ Fighters, Init 9 NORMAL
Fighter: Targ Frigate, Init 40 STEAL
Corvette: Targ Corvette, Init 40 STEAL
Frigate: Targ Destroyers, Init 41 STEAL
Frigate: Targ Corvettes, Init 10 NORMAL
Frigate: Targ Battleships, Init 10 NORMAL
Destroyer: Targ Cruiser, Init 41 STEAL
Destroyer: Astropod
Cruiser: Targ Battleship, Init 42 STEAL
Cruiser: Targ Fighters, Init 42 STEAL
Cruiser: Astropod
Battleship: Structure Killer

Overall ship balances (shot at by x number of ships)
Fighters: 6 (5)
Corvette: 7 (6)
Frigate: 9 (7)
Destroyer: 10 (6)
Cruiser: 10 (7)
Battleship: 6 (5)

[noah02]

So cat steel pure anti fi/des from xan and terran so all cats have is pure anti fi ships?

[Ferretus]

stats are incomplete still atm so please be patient. I will post again when I get the first draft down. I haven't even posted the Zikonian fleet yet !!!

A few key points though regarding your post. Cats are the only other race with a steal ship and this is deliberate to make them a little more varied and hopefully not so much of a target. If the ships they can steal are shit, then who cares... point is that they can do it and it gives them free ships for a ship choice that they would normally use as part of the pod fleet anyway.

I am ignoring natural race enemies as this was something very stupid introduced a few rounds ago, I hope to make a set of stats allowing players to be creative with their fleets and be able to hit any other race.

There are many things I may need to adjust. The one main one is to ensure that any race can defend against an attack sent at another planet and still get there without the -1eta for being in same alliance. So for example if someone comes under attack from a Fi/Co fleet its important to ensure that a races onoly defence is not CR/BS as they will not be able to get there in time.
So I gotta be careful with my targetting, hopefully you guys can help me on that and spot some of my errors.

[MAdnRisKy]

you play cathar right?

you can't have the xan sk ship being a cr i'm afraid. for one it's going to be obvious when they send it unlike other races, and secondly it has no flak unlike other races.

unless of course you just intended for xan to not use sks and others have the option, then it's fine

[Ferretus]

I don't play cathaar, the stats were written off the top of my head in the last 2hrs or so and WILL have errors. I aim to provide no form of bias to any race and if anyone feels that something needs changing then say so with a logical reason as to why and then hopefuly it can be sorted out.

Ideally I think we would all like structure killers phased out .
Yes by having that +1eta it is obvious what is on the way from a Xan but that is the one of the main points of this stats sheet, to make you work for your structure killers. Xans have the advantage of cloaking so should someone decide to include them it is trickier to calc (I expect).

Struct killers, by their very nature are used for planetary bombardment... to bombard a planet you need some big guns and a big ship to carry them. Yes this is negative to Xans, but fully intended to stop xans being the noob race of 'fighter swarming' and get them to think like everyone else :-)

remember xans historically can attack a lot easier compared to everyone else simply due to the light fighter base of the fleets, whereas everyone else is reduced to being that little bit slower.

[Ferretus]

Ok everyone.

I'm tired of looking at them. Lets have some constructive criticism to get the targetting correct etc.

Once we are happy with that we can look at armour/firepower etc and then of course costs.

I plan to use a strict formula on cost though. IE each race has a fixed point cost for its armour/fire power as well as a 'guideline' of armour/firepower ratio for each race. So for example a Xan would be more likely to have a high firepower compared to its armour, the opposite for terran.

But anyway, no comments on that at all please. Not yet. Lets get the targetting finised.

[MAdnRisKy]

xans are very hard to attack with actually.

In fact I'd go as far as to say that they're the hardest race to attack with historically. so you saying that they have it easy and need a handicap in any way whilst easy to shrug off, does then make me consider your opinions on other matters with a new light.

I love the strategy forums, even when people flame they're polite

[noah02]

Originally Posted by MAdnRisKy

xans are very hard to attack with actually.

In fact I'd go as far as to say that they're the hardest race to attack with historically. so you saying that they have it easy and need a handicap in any way whilst easy to shrug off, does then make me consider your opinions on other matters with a new light.

I love the strategy forums, even when people flame they're polite

Round 11 anyone?

[MAdnRisKy]

Originally Posted by noah02

Round 11 anyone?

you're not funny

bar any gross slantings of the stats, a race designed in the way xan is, can during a mid game phase when people are still growing spending nearly all their resources every night, find it difficult to find a target which he gains much xp on.

later on of course, you can mass swarm and try say to flak through beetles.

but end game has rules all of its own. :/

[isildurx]

r8 was prolly the nastiest xan round(xan truly owned), i do not want to go back to that with OB and millions of xan ships everywhere

[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

So constructive suggestions would be great thanks but only from people with half a brain cell towards doign this sort of thing.

Well, first off, i must say that MS Excel is your friend when you are building ship stats. It lets you arrange ships and races in such as fashion to make comparisons quick, easy and accurate.

The way i usually go about building ship stats, is determine how many ships each race is going to have, then how many pods. Then i usually put 2 escorts in each of those classes (though not necessarily - the BA/Syren is a good example). Then i fill out the other classes with the remaining 6 ships. Then once that is done for all races, i usually tally up the number of types in each class for all races - classes with lots of types (usually meaning that there are two or more pods in that class) get more type of ships targeting them. Keeping this in mind i then distribute targets in an appropriate fashion. Its hard to describe what is appropriate or not, but it tends to include things like making sense (ie, FI tend not to target Battleships just out of tradition), but its also where you can add race 'flavour' (that, and the pod classes). From here, i go about assigning strength (ie, high or low reletive firepower), strong or weak armour, etc etc. I go through this process about five or six times, refining at each level, and assigning more firm values for firepower and armour, and the total cost of the ships. stealing/EMP etc are shuffled around in accordance with this overarching feeling of 'balance'.

This feeling of balance is drawn up by calculations like armour/cost and damage/cost, but i (more so than Appoco) am more of a fan of making certain combinations of ships, and then balancing each combination with another combination. ie, an offensive FR Cath combo may be strong compared to a DE Zik attack combo, but weak compared to a CR Terran. Similarly, i tend to look at how a combination compares to the array of possible defensive ships (both low and high [in-gal] ETA ships), how they are targeted, how hard they are hit, etc. This is where initiative is extrodinarily important, and indeed initiative is the only area of ship stat building that i have the most concern over. Unlike most (it would seem), mixing up one initiative level can make or break a race, and thus the balance between all races, simply because the Pegasus fires before the Pulsar, or the BW fires before the Peacekeeper, etc. Strange as it may seem, balancing combos of ships tends to be easier than balancing individual ships, as you can much more easily judge whether a combination of likely ships will be able to handle the likely amount of defence arrayed against it.


If you really want my opinion, then the fact that you have only spent 2 hours on your stats, and the fact that you havent done much in the way of calculations, makes it highly unlikely that your stats are balanced. Indeed, its still unlikely that it is approaching balance in terms of offensive and defensive power between races, attack combos and potential defence ships. You might be 3/4 of the way there, but believe me when i say that the last 10% of the way to finishing stats takes about 500% longer to do than the rest. A set of quickly knocked up stats still takes me about 4 days to do, and i have been building ship stats since R4 havoc, and i still take at least a week of deep thought about the relationships between ships, their combos, and Initiative () before i then give it to someone else to have a look.

Building stats is alot harder than it looks, and if you think it looks easy then you arent looking hard enough, or thinking deeply enough, or doing enough calculations.

Excel is your friend.

[Ferretus]

blah blah blah blah blah

done all that so enough with the condescending speech and talk about the post please.
If it takes someone 5 mins to make the greatest stats ever does this mean that because you spent the last 5 months on it your will be better?
The post above was deliberately supposed to entice discussion and development, helping others appreciate game balance and basically not be a sounding ground for anyone with a superiority asfixiation like everywhere else on these forums!

I'm not a complete nooblet and I dont waste my time doing this sort of thing for fun. Im not a child who wants to make it so that 'my favourite race will always win' blah blah blah I wrote a set of stats based on what I believe the races should be differentiated on.

So enough with the sidetracking people and actually comment on the race info please. Armour and firepower can come later, this is pretty much worked out already (much the same way as the basic initiatives were) targetting and ship classes is the most important thing. Thre is no point me putting up the complete stats until I am happy that others are happy with the targetting.

[MAdnRisKy]

constructive?

ok

who do xan attack with the fi fleet? (because most anti fi seems to be co or fi, they can get the fi if they use co, but they can't seem to hit co without adding in de... i think that's a problem.

it's good that with 2 cruiser fleets you have a faster anti cr.

I think zik have it very hard on who to attack and with what combination, possibly dare i say it too hard though i can see why zik should have it too hard zik should be nigh on impossible to play!

I'm happy to elaborate on those points as to why i think that if you like, but i'm sure that you saw the points i made when you designed the stats, so i'd like to hear your thinking as to why it's that way first.

[Ferretus]

Thanks buddy. Some nice constructive comments.

[Ferretus]

My plan was to make each race 'evolve' from their original pod onto the larger pod, but I must admit that I was looking at trying to keep Xans fighter based.

Originally I planned to have a very loose basis of the racial trianlge with the development of siege weapons allowing the transition to the enxt stage of the game and better racial balancing. Terrans were designed to be simple and have no race enmity etc. So it would look like this (roughly)
Xans hit Ziks
Ziks hit Cats
Cats hit Xans

So in the original line up Xans would target Ziks with Fi/Co until the universe was technologically uptodate to have those Cr->Fi.

As the general player base develops the larger ships then as per usual players must use their initiative to work out better fleet combos.

makes sense in my head, although I hope that I wrote it down in such as way as everyone else gets it

[Ferretus]

Ziks do have it hard, I appreciate that and the manual states they should be the hardest race (currently its simply whoever has the most BS wins), but I have given them some lower class ship stealers and hopefully addressed some of the other issues with the stats this round concerning ziks (but no doubt by doing so have made some more, no doubt you guys can help me with that). This should hopefully allow ziks to compete.

[MAdnRisKy]

but xan can't hit zik because of the corvette...

a problem which only continues when you look at all the other races.

suggestion, that de to fr. make it an fi to co

[Ferretus]

wouldn't that create the same Xan fighter fleet problems that we had last round where players simply sent 100K fighters at you forcing you to run? I was hoping to force Xans to use a little more brainpower.

I do agree with you in that I'm not happy with the current Co targetting Fighter ratio, I wasn't when I posted it...hence me posting it for suggestions hehe.

Perhaps we should swap the Xan Fr pod for the Zik De pod. That way xans could raid Ziks with Des? I think I said earlier though that I didn't want to follow the race 'nemesis' style of stats though, but this would correct the problem.

[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by Ferretus

The post above was deliberately supposed to entice discussion and development, helping others appreciate game balance and basically not be a sounding ground for anyone with a superiority asfixiation like everywhere else on these forums!

Whilst i admit, the thread does lend itself to discussion, quite frankly i see no point in having a discussion without meaning. In the end, someone at some stage was going to have to sort out your post in such a fashion that makes it easy to see the links and differences between combos and such. This i have done - in Excel - and presently looking for a place to host it to help anyone who wishes to comment do so, without having to stuff around with your half-arsed stats first.

Furthermore, i think that assuming that describing how (at least i go about) building ship stats was solely aimed towards you is presumptuous. I did quote a section from your earlier post, offering a method to building ship stats - that can apply to anyone who wishes to try their hand at it, including you. In addition, if you had followed that proceedure (or something similar), you would notice the gaps that i will point out in short order.

I no way was my post meant to be condescending. If it came across that way, then it was unintentional. The point of it was to outline which i believe an effective procedure of building ship stats is, how to do a number of self-checks, raising an issue about looking at ship combos and their interaction and not just the ships themselves, and suggesting to you that there are steps that you can take to make it easier on any potential viewer to determine what you are looking for or trying to do, such that we dont have to do the work anyway to order to reply with some useful comment! I have found over the years of giving suggestions, is that you tend to get alot better feedback if you make it easy for someone to comment. Your despair over side-tracked comments means that you yourself probably recognise that fact.

I am taking the time to reply because i think that your ideas are potentially workable. I am all for people trying their hand at ship stats because there are so few of us willing to try. I think it is a shame that you arent putting your obvious talent to the best that you are able. Taking potshots at people trying to help you doesnt help. Creating mythical situations (such as someone coming up with "perfect" ship stats in 5 mins) doesnt help.

Anyway, i am short on time so comment on your stats your stats will have to be breif:
Ignoring the obviously important power/armour ratios and initiative, this is what i believe.

Terran DE: There is one pod and two escort ships in this combination. The only ships that target DE are a Terran CO, a Cath CR, a Xan and Zik FR. the two Terran Destroyers target both FR and CR, thus making only the Terran CO a zero loss defender - without the armour and initiative information its difficult to tell whether this is probably overpowered, but i would think that this fleet is in a better position than most others, and thus is likely to be overpowered.
Terran BA: Terran Battleships have one pod and two escorts, no stealers. Ships that target BA are a Terran and Zik Frigate, and a Cath and Xan Destroyer. The Battleships target Frigates and Cruisers, thus the Cath and Xan ships are zero loss defence. The nature of having both a cath and Xan being zero loss defenders means that you have two types of ships that are highly efficient can be sent in defence with a 2 hour window means that this fleet is probably too vulnerable. Though, again, without power, armour and initiative information this is potentially too hard to call, but at the very least it is more vulnerable than the DE - though this could be your intention.

Cath CO: Cathaar CO consists of one pod and one escort ship. This already places it at a disadvantage to Terran DE (2 escorts) and BA (3 escorts), Cath CR (3 escorts), Xan FI (3), Xan FR (2), Zik CR (2), but on par with Zik DE (1 escort). Ships that target CO include a Cath and Zik Fighter, a Zik Corvette, a Terran Frigate, a Xan Destroyer and a Cath Cruiser. Without armour/damage and initiative information, this combo is likely to be too over targeted, even though the fleet is faster in universe than all except the Zik CO, those Corvettes are stealers and thus provide a high incentive to steal those ships. This fleet is extremely vulnerable to in-gal defence. I would think that the sole Cath Frigate be changed to CO class, which indeed was the case this round solely for that purpose. For this fleet to be effective, the Cath would have to steal large amounts of Terran CO, Xan anti CR CO, and most importantly Zik CO to counter the huge variety of ships that can be used against it.
Cath CR: This fleet has one pod and three escort ships. There are three Destroyers, two Battleships, a Xan Frigate and a Xan Corvette that targets this fleet. Of these, only the Corvettes, Frigates and Destroyers are targeted in return and not necessarily with the initiative advantage which is obviously crucial for EMP ships. Whist i think this fleet is potentially workable, i think that it will likely degenerate into another R13 situation where ETA 7 in uni ships (Xan CO) inflict too much damage as there is so much time in which to gather enough defence, plus universal battleships are zero loss defence.

Xan FI: This fleet consists of one pod and two escort ships. There are three corvettes and one Zik Cruiser that target FI. None of the Xan FI target the ships that target them thus building the escort ships is pointless and you might as well load up and attack with the first Pod Only fleet since R4 :\ . This fleet is poorly designed and underpowered. I dont think it is going to be workable. Which is unfortunate, as the Xan FR fleet isnt wonderful either. The effectiveness of this fleet will be less than R13, where there is only two anti FI Corvettes to deal with zero loss defence.
Xan FR: There are two escort ships and one pod in this fleet. Ships that target this fleet are two Destroyers, two Cruisers, two Fighters and a Frigate. The Destroyers and Cruisers are targeted in return, however the opportunity for zero loss defence with 2 ticks for defence is likely to bring this fleet to its knees - especially the effectiveness of the Vsh being zero loss firing on generally weakly armoured Xan FR. And dont say that Vsh will be on attack because they wont be - pods only is better :\. tbh, i think Xan in your stats, and in the 'real' game need to be re-evaluated completely.

Anyway, i've run out of time, so the Ziks are going toh ave to wait - but you can prolly work out what i would say anyway.

[Ferretus]

Thanks for the comments, don't have enough time to comment properly atm but I will do later. So just to clear up a few bits...

I was rushing out when I placed the ship stats down to this thread... I wasn't even going to go as far as create the ship stats fully, just wanted to have the races properly defined ie

Create Proper Armour/weapon power ratio for each race thereby creating distinctive differences eg Terrans may be 70%armour 30%guns whereas Xans would be 20%armour and 80%guns (percentiles to be defined properly). This would of course then be priced accordingly with say armour points being more expensive to xan but cheaper to Terran. This then gives a far more mathemtical approach to the system leading to better balance rather than player whines influencing decisions (hopefully).

Similar to above I aimed to create ship stats with racially modified ship class initiative to ensure that we dont go having huge ships with low initiative again. Large ships SHOULD be slow but be compensated for having lots of guns and armour.

Re-evaluate the racial focus thereby ensuring we have 4 distict races. This would then be reflected in its racial bonuses and drawbacks etc while attempting to keep Terrans as simple as possible.

Attempt to get players to use MORE than one ship class and go back to using combos (and their brains). I think we have all had enough rounds of getting 100K incoming and then realising the panic is over as its just a single xan fighter fleet. Perhaps the one exception I may put in place would be terran whereby you cna just send a single ship class on an attack and maybe get away with it but Xan and cats I would like to see use combos, ziks of course cannot be so closely monitored as the fleet variation in the long run will put everything out of balance.

Anyway, the idea rolled and so I put the basic stats that were floating in my head down, whether that was a good idea or not ...

However the one important stat that IS marked above is initiative, we will then at least have a firing order. If you must have some sort of armour/power ratio to look at then look at the current stats and use common sense to adjust to suit what is being targetted. For me this isn't so important as the basics are easily put in place. I just don't think this is worth doing until the targetting/ship class is done.

[Ferretus]

Its important to note that the stats were designed to be basic and open for discussion so as a community we can develop a set that perhaps we would enjoy playing. If I was to make a complete set then let it loose to the community all that will happen is that it will be abused and my forum rep will once again plummet into the minus figures because I made an effort.

[Ferretus]

Ok here is a basic run down on my scribblings of my armour/firepower ratio thingy. As this is taken from a paper based copy I guess this must be my first draft rather than the modified one.

Base ship stats
Fighter
-armour 10
-Firepower 10
Corvette
-armour 25
-firepower 25
Frigate
-armour 50
-firepower 50
Destroyer
-armour 100
-firepower 100
Cruiser
-armour 150
-firepower 150
Battleship
-armour 200
-firepower 200

[Ferretus]

so to flesh that out a bit if we used my Terran 70/30 ratio it would look something like this

Fighter: Arm17 Fir13
Corvette: Arm42 Fire32
Frigate: Arm 85 Fire 65
Destroyer: Arm 170 Fire130
Cruiser: Arm255 Fire 195
Battleship: Arm 340 Fire 260

THIS IS BY NO MEANS DEFINATE AS THE SECOND DRAFT HAS AMENDED SOME OF THIS, IT WAS ONLY INTENDED TO BE VERY BASIC TO SEE IF IT CAN WORK IN THEORY.

[Ferretus]

minor adjustments can be made on a ship by ship basis when the stats are close to finished. Although I would prefer that initiative does not move more than 1 point in either direction and to do so would cost/gain armour and firepower or be fractionally cheaper/expensive.

I hope this helps clarify my ideas to everyone.

[Ultimate Newbie]

Ferretus, as a general aside, i think one way of distinguishing between races is in the size of their ships - and by size i mean cost (and armour and firepower is a function of their cost). Ie, one of the things about Xans is that their ships are cheap and small and thus able to be built in really large numbers - thus a Xan Frigate will be cheaper and smaller than a Terran frigate - ie, 7500 resources compared with 10500 resources total. How would your system work if you established a "size" ie resource cost of a class of ship in each race, and from there determine the relative firepower, instead of the other way around?

[noah02]

sorry of topic I know but you doing the stats this upcoming round Ferretus?

[furball]

Ferretus, I didn't analyse your stats because I couldn't make much sense out of them. However, I think you have basic targetting problems to solve before you start on initiatives/armour/firepower. Chika put it best in Round 13 when he pointed out that those three things don't really matter - all that does is what targets a roiding fleet, and what the roiding fleet has to counter it.




You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ultimate Newbie again.

[Ferretus]

My point exactly but everyone seems very keen for me to have armour/power levels etc which is something i didnt want to do until targetting is balanced. I merely included the stats above due to demand and let people have an insight of what I was thinking.

Noah: I've not been asked to do the stats for next round, I was hoping to retire at the end of this round. But before I went I thought I would throw some ideas out there to stop racial blurring.

[Ultimate Newbie]

Originally Posted by furball

Chika put it best in Round 13 when he pointed out that those three things don't really matter - all that does is what targets a roiding fleet, and what the roiding fleet has to counter it.

Chika is partially right, insofar as one combo's strength against another determines the general strength of a race. But imo initiative makes up a very large portion of determining a combo's strength - if you regularly have to play chicken with your fleet (eg a Dragon/Tarantula type situation), then the initiative of those ships can be crucial for determining the effectiveness of that combo and thus the race as a whole.

Also furbeh, happy 1500th post .

[furball]

Originally Posted by Ultimate Newbie

Also furbeh, happy 1500th post .

Ooh thanks