I posted this in the combat thread as well but you can see what we're looking at for the new combat values / ship costs in the future. In general the cost of the ships should be more consistent in terms of cost per point of defense / damage.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...0JBM013djlwX0E
Wow this looks more realistic and balanced!Originally Posted by Leedot
One comment though, shouldn't a 1mil colony have at least equal attack/def as an outpost? Just looks a little too vulnerable vs. cost.
Fair point on Outposts vs. beginning colonies, Royce mentioned that as well in the other thread so I've adjusted the sheet accordingly.
Battleship was 100 rare and now it is 720? Am I reading the chart correctly?
I do not understand the point in raising the costs? I have to survive the traders battleship fleets. I know one trader had hundreds of them early in the game. Without a way to meet a trader's production it really does not matter what the costs are in a sense.
The priority of the game right now (to me at least) is balancing the character's abilities. I do not want to nerf the trader as much as boost the other two.
Last edited by GeeWhiz; 06-08-2012 at 01:35 AM.
GeeWhiz - The prices wound up going up because I was trying to keep the costs internally consistent so high end ships don't have a disproportionately high cost. Also, at the old costs RO was proportionately cheaper than CO considering the generation rates so they're now more balanced / consistent.
As you say without a way to meet the trader's production it doesn't really matter what the costs are since regardless of what they are the trader will always have more. For the this specific problem we're focused more on getting the costs of the ships to be internally balanced / consistent along with reworking the combat system itself to be more balanced while offering greater strategic depth.
After we have that problem sorted out I think we'll have a better foundation from which to address the greater balance issues with the specialties.
If you put those prices in to the game before balancing the specialties, there will be no point in playing anything other than Trader. Cruisers and battleships are the only thing non-Traders can produce in quantities large enough to be effective. With these prices you take that away.
I'm not sure you have actually played the game as a non-Trader. If you cannot capture and hold a number of Jovian planets (and you can't if there's a Trader around who wants them), a non trader will have sub 1000 RO until deep in to the game. At a time when you need stacks of dozens of ships, you'll only be able to make a handful. These costs are the exact opposite of what is needed.
The new ship prices look quite high. Battleship 720 RO? 7 times more then now? Indeed it will tip the balance of the game towards traders. These feels too drastic .
Jet - The specialties are definitely out of balance, there's no doubt about that. As it stands it doesn't matter what I make the resources costs as Traders will always have more resources and access to build the same ships (other than the highest tier) so whether I make a battleship cost 50 RO or 500 RO doesn't really matter in terms of specialty balance. As it currently stands Traders will always be able to build proportionately more units, faster than anyone else because they'll always have more resources and faster build times.
So, I agree the specialty balancing does need to be addressed but it's a separate issue. I think I probably just confused things by cross posting the new ship balancing spreadsheet in this thread.
I guess i did not make it real clear why this Situation would not happen if the costs were brought up so high. Money is very limited early game, even for traders. Its all about the co the first week or so, and that week makes or breaks budding empires. We up the costs to these numbers then you wont see more than a few ships produced a day unless im missing something.
The fact that the specialties are unbalanced does not mean you should give up making costs reasonable. Cruisers, for example, level the playing field. There is no imbalance in ships that only require CO, since CO is effectively unlimited for any speciality. While Traders can build faster, in practice it will also come down to how many factories each side can put to use, etc.
If you increase the RO cost of everything, that's what shuts out non Traders and slows down the game. If anything, more ships should cost CO only. There is a HUGE difference between not being able to build the same ships at quite the same rate as a Trader and not being able to build those ships at all, to say that it just doesn't matter since Traders build faster is an oversimplification.
And by the way, if you ask me, th current cost of the Planet Killer is grounds for an emergency patch. I truly believe it is impossible for a non-Trader to reach 440k RO right now (let alone multiple times if their Planet Killer is destroyed), which means it is currently impossible for a Warlord to win the game. If you can refute this, I'd love know how it can be done.
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