thoughts - the source of all problems and disbalances

[Taera]

... is the Weapon Mounts.
If you think about it, remove the weapon mounts and puff, the weapons are not as devastating anymore, regeneration becomes a must as well as damage resistance, smaller ships finaly get their stance against bigger ships. Technology difference between player becomes less important, and range is a must.

Even the almighty Allegiance Converter is only 70% effective, so its not a full convert, whether you have talisman or not.

and everything else.
Yet, it is a great feature to the game, but it breaks the balance in pieces.

So now i say. Next update should review the weapon mounts. Also i say that only penaltisized(sp) ships should get mounts - meaning BB, DN and BS. Only then it makes sense. Bases and WPs should have their mounts cut down too, though not as hard.

Anyone with opinions?
I will e-mail this suggestion to MM shortly.

[PvK]

I'd say it's a slight exaggeration, but basically on target. My approach in Proportions mod was to give larger mounts greater and greater to-hit penalties, as well as higher costs. Combined with my sliding scale of to-hit penalties based on ship size, this means that large ships with heavy mounts start to have a hard time hitting small targets. I also added a sliding scale of maintenace reduction to ships based on size, so the large ships are more expensive, as well. Then with the scale mounts I added in Proportions 2.5, there are also good tradeoffs based on hull size for armor, cloaking, emergency propulsion, and other components that make sense to be more expensive in proportion to the size of the ship.

PvK

[geoschmo]

Yeah, I had basically this thought a while back as well. It's also the biggest change from a pure gameplay perspective from SEIII to SEIV.

It might be interesting as a test to simply play a game without the compenhancments.txt file and see how things work.

Geoschmo

[Erax]

In SEIV, big ships rule. I see this more as a premise than as an imbalance. But even if we agree that it is, in fact, an imbalance, I think the real source is the propulsion model, although the mounts are also an important factor.

In the unmodded game, a battle cruiser and an escort with the same speed will have the same tonnage set aside for engines. This obviously benefits larger ships and is the reason why QNP was developed.

Allowing larger ships to have larger, more efficient mounts seems reasonable to me; allowing them to have vastly more efficient engines does not.

That's my 2 cents.

[Fyron]

Both of those are equal culprits to the imbalance of larger ships.

[Taera]

im not talking about the imbalance of small vs big ships or whatever, but about the overpowering of certain weapons over others, plus the early bonus to whoever gets LC first (i see absolutely no reason to be able to put L mounts on it, its a LIGHT cruiser after all).

What i am talking about realy is that many parts of the game are ignored due to mounts. Think shield regenerators. think emmisive armor. think the new OA. think EVERYTHING.
This also would solve once and for all all issues with the overpowering of psychic races as 70---50 is a decent chance of conVersion, and if you fail, you're dead meat.

[Wardad]

I also experimented with cheaper Bridge, Crew Quarters, and Life Support. This expense + Engines + Mounts combine to kill the small ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

How about one sided battles?
Having weaker or leaky shields, and a greater dependence on armor which must be repaired after combat could also have a big effect. If combat were to generate lots of damaged or crippled ships on both sides, then a slight advantage wouldn't result in a routing.

[Krsqk]

In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships. Many/most players use compact formations which allow concentrated fire on a few targets, rather than spread out fire. If one player concentrates fire and the other doesn't, the spread out player will die. He will constantly lose firepower, while the concentrated player stays consistent throughout the battle. The exception is if the spread out player has vast numerical superiority (which results in concentrated fire on a different scale).

Two reasons concentrated fire is so common on PBW are 1) it works , and 2) strategic combat tends to use concentrated fire.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships. Many/most players use compact formations which allow concentrated fire on a few targets, rather than spread out fire. If one player concentrates fire and the other doesn't, the spread out player will die. He will constantly lose firepower, while the concentrated player stays consistent throughout the battle. The exception is if the spread out player has vast numerical superiority (which results in concentrated fire on a different scale).

Two reasons concentrated fire is so common on PBW are 1) it works , and 2) strategic combat tends to use concentrated fire.

This is why we need area effect weapons and collateral damage. Currently there is no 'downside' to packing your ships together in ranks like Napoleonic-era soldiers and mowing down the opposition with concentrated fire. If one weapon could hit several ships that were close together, and if a ship blowing up could damage other nearby ships, there would be counter-tactics to this method of slaughter.

As far as mounts are concerned, yes, these are what have rendered Emissive Armor almost useless, and broken a lot of other features of the game. Torpedoes are also nearly useless in SE IV due to the fact that any once-per-turn beam weapon can be made stronger by a mount and just as effective at breaking Emissive Armor as a torpedo would be...

I think that the idea of having a penalty to-hit for larger mounts instead of a bonus is a good idea. We also need to scale-back the degree to which mounts increase weapon power. It's one thing to have larger weapons with larger damage in the same proportion. The original reason for mounts was simply to decrease the number of wepaons that large ships had to fire in combat and so speed up combat resolution. But the VERY large bonuses in size/cost to damage dealt out is a real problem. Moo II actually offered a LOWER ratio of size/damage output for the 'heavy' mount. Remember? Some testing of new proportions for mounts is in order.

[ December 04, 2002, 02:13: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]