This is my list of balance suggestions based on, admittedly, somewhat limited play. Some of them are more of “the current system is highly illogical and unintuitive” than actual balance issues, as the game is very well balanced, just in a really bizarre way. Here we go:
- Completely restructure torpedos. The way these weapons work makes very little sense, especially torpedos. They should be most effective against frigates and least effective against interceptors, not the other way around. As it is, torpedos are completely worthless against frigs because they have such large shield and hull pools that torpedos simply can’t put a dent in them. On the other hand, interceptors go down to 1-2 torpedos and don’t really have a good way of avoiding them. I know that this dynamic changes in higher tiers, but it really is quite confusing and nonsensical in lower tiers. This is an easy fix; have torpedos do exponentially less damage to ships further from their detonation point. This way, small ships can avoid most of the damage by simply flying away from the torpedo, but will still be crushed by direct hits (rewards skillful play). It’s much easier to hit frigs dead on with torpedos, so they will be the best targets. That said, I would also up the damage significantly, and perhaps add energy damage or something so that it’s harder to recover from direct hits. Even if you tripple the damage the torpedos do, causing damage to scale exponentially with distance from the center of explosion would mean that smaller ships can easily avoid being blown away by torpedos. This would also help greatly to mitigate friendly fire that results from torpedo blasts.
- Rework snipers (Disintegration Beams). Similar to torpedos, snipers obliterate smaller ships a bit too easily. I think against fighters they’re pretty well perfect, but against other frigates and interceptors, they feel a bit off. They don’t do quite enough damage to frigates, and do a bit too much to interceptors. This is likely because there’s no difference between what should be a direct hit and what should be a glancing blow (you either hit or you don’t). A possible solution is to somehow adjust damage based on how much of the projectile actually contacts the ship. That may be too difficult to program. Another possible workaround could be to simply boost the damage of this weapon against larger ships and reduce it against smaller ones. As in EVE, ships could have signature radii, and this could be used to determine damage of explosions, etc. Perhaps the sniper modules have larger or smaller shots. For example, a sniper module may deal only 1.2k thermal damage, but have a projectile size of 10m radius, whereas another module deals 3k damage, but has a projectile size of 50m radius. The smaller projectile delivers its entire payload to ships with 10m signature radius or larger, whereas the larger projectile only deals fractions of its payload to ships with smaller than a 50m signature radius.
- Change damage reduction to a percentage system with diminishing returns, similar to EVE’s system. If this is how the system currently works (I don’t suspect that it is, but the tooltips are unhelpful in determining if it is or isn’t), then make that more clear and definitely add diminishing returns. I personally believe that damage mitigation shouldn’t go over 50% for this game, so it could be diminishing approaching 50% to keep some ships from becoming untouchable. And, as always, you should have to (more or less) choose which type of damage you will be mostly resistent to.
- Apply a speed penalty to cloaked ships. It’s too easy to hot-drop on enemies since the battlefields are rather small. I can organize 1-2 friends to cloak from our warp in, move all the way to their rear line where the torpedo boats and snipers are, and decloak and kill them all with little to no resistence. Similarly, I can cloak and fly completely back behind my uncaptured beacons and often into complete safety from behind enemy lines without any trouble at all. It’s also near impossible to predict where a cloaked ship has gone shortly after it cloaked, making it nearly impossible to fire at it and remove it from cloak (it should be difficult, really difficult, but not basically impossible).
- Possibly increase the damage of the plasma net, or include a slow. That thing is almost completely useless for anything other than pulling Lynx types out of cloak.
- Either slightly increase the cooldown of flares, or else provide a maximum # of uses for them. I can’t tell you how invulnerable to guided missiles I am in my interceptors. 10 second cd on flares and a 4 second cd on firing missiles is silly. You will never be able to fire missiles fast enough to hit me with one unless you’re right on top of me.
That’s all I have for now. I really appreciate feedback, but even yes/no on each # is appreciated. Thanks for reading!