Anti-Structure ships far to powerful!

Those ships die real easy to fighters, and it's actually worthwhile to get hangar upgrades on your starbase now. 2 hangar upgrades and a few hangar structures and repair bays and you're good.

Thanks for the advice I didnt know that they were weak against figters.

But I still think that they are overpowered. they could take out any defence even hanger bays if there is flack. and repair bays dont heal fast enough to recover 600 or so dmg in the cooldown time for the missiles.

I think they either should have a longer cooldown time or cost far more resources

I do not think the anti-structure cruisers are overpowered, I think the defensive systems are toooo weak

You would think that something as big and expensive as a starbase would have some sort of CIWS (Close in Weapons System) to shoot down any missles or small craft that are around it. There should be a saturation point where missiles and/or small craft make it through the defense grid and can actually cause some damage. That would mean you have to be SERIOUS if you are going to take one on.

I mean come ON, these are supposed to be defensive structures. Give me 5 or 6 anti-structure cruisers and I can lay waste to an entire SYSTEM in a matter of minutes. That is how it should be. But I expect a defensive structure to be a tough nut to crack.

Beef up the stations.

I thought the same thing. I was playing a 1v2 against 2 hard AI and They kept me pinned down to 4 planets for the most of the game.  I managed to get starbases at the flanks and one in the center phase lane. I kept getting massive raids and etc that blow up everything. Eventually, the Ninja star ships come out and kill the starbases.  I get mad and reload an autosave from 5 minutes prior and build a massive mine field where I knew they will attack from. 150 mines concentrated in one spot.  I was laughing at the ensueing chaos. 18 fighter squads + 150 mines is the perfect defense.

Its even better if you can get your starbase to be in the spot where they warp in from and get a few phase inhibitors to help keep them around.

Thats a great stratagy but as you said you knew exactly where they were coming. It is far too expensive to build mines, turrets and hangers on every planet that is open for attack. Unless you build a very small attack fleet. and then it wont matter how much defences you build.

I think another balance issue is that the vasari don't get an anti structure ship. The other races with these ships can take out all the structures in a grav well within minutes while the Vasari have to slowly kill them with their normal fleet. I think the lack of a Anti-structure ship takes away the late game advantage that the Vasari have always had. Now they are only average throughout the whole game.

I hope that somehow this is rebalanced Structures need to be stronger or anti structure ships weaker.

I have to agree with this. The Vasari do have an anti structure starbase though!, but you can only build 1 of them per GW. The other races can have heaps of them if they wish and can lay waste to all in their path in a short time. I guess if you are playing as Vasari and you have a good amount of time to build up a reasonable fighter fleet and lay a heap of mines, then everything balances out OK! But early on in the game it does leave you at a disadvantage

I recently attaked a Vasari system that had a starbace. My fleet had 5 ogrev's is what they're called I think and they absolutly wipped the floor with thier starbace, about 15 secs it lasted. Addmitidly I had a good fleet of 4 capital and 4 of everything else with them, and I was only playing easy difficulty but it just didn't seem to offer any resistance at all.

We agree that anti-structure cruisers are overpowered. The Vasari's starbase will also likely be getting a much better anti-structure ability.

  Thank you Blair!!!!   That will be cool!! 

-Teal

Ya, it's like this is some kind of Beta or something!  Seriously, if the "Missle Crusiers" seem overporwered, they may be, but is'nt tha ALL they are good for?  After all orbital stuctures are gone, they pretty much lay in hammicks and drink lemmonade if an enemy fleet jumps in after that. Seems if you spend all the money/resourses/fleetcap to get them, they should at least do their job.   They were complaining they were useless durring beta 1.

well, if there's one thing Ironclad/stardock excels at, it's communication. I've never seen so much feedback coming from developpers, and it's a real pleasure to witness. Larger studios should take you guys as an example. While I didn't pre-order the expansion, I'll be getting it as soon as it's released, because so far the feedback I've seen from the devs pretty much guaranty we'll be receiving a kickass product. (I'm just not a pre-order kind of guy :P)

Hear hear! I totaly agree. In fact thats why I discided to do the beta testing.

Thanks Blair for the heads up.

You make a good point! Maybee they could make the "Missle Cruisers" take up more fleet capacity points, say 30-40 points, closer to that of capital ships. That would encurouge players to not use so many. Well thats an idea anyway. Those missles do look pretty cool when they hit their mark, nice effects!

The Torpedo ships might be too tough, but the Starbases are definately not too weak.  Just finished a massive game where my ally and I were Vasari and didn't have Torpedo ships.  We had to kill a couple fully upraded starbases backed by slightly weaker allied starbases.  And it took a heck of a long time.

And please make the missiles smaller......

Yeah, the starbase buff atm is nice. As long as you have a support fleet, they can hold out for a looong time. Mines are icing on a cake. I just finished a game where an asteroid was the choke point, two incoming enemy lanes roughly 60 degrees away from one another. I put mines in that arc, as well as a starbase just behind the asteroid...it was able to shoot at anything trying to nuke the asteroid, and with the two dunovs (mostly in a fleet of kodiaks and flack) could push off two enemy fleets at once.

However, I would agree that the logistics points for the missle ships go up. At the moments the TEC AI tends to spam them waaay too much. They'll have entire fleets of them with their capital ships, only to get chewed up by the Vasari...who have no anti-structure ship added.

With the change in the targetting for the anti-structure cruisers, they are certainly not useless in a battle once defences are gone.  In one battle against the Advent, they had twenty of the thing pouring 58 plasma damage each (double that of the Destras) into my ships.  Chewed everything but capital ships to pieces.

no no no no no. [i THINK You should] Make starbases more powerful. That way, anti-structure cruisers are practically required to take out a starbase, with the aggressive fleet tasked with protecting them. That way, taking out a starbase is a serious endeavor that takes planning.

That's the only way putting over 20k into a single defense structure would be worth the money.

Adama, they are very very hard to kill without torpedos.....go look at the replay in my "Turtle!!" thread.  Neither JJ or I had torpedo ships, and it took us a long time to get to the point where we could fight some massive starbases.

They can't get much tougher without making normal ships obsolete.

Before I look at ur replay, did you guys try bombers against the SB?  I took out a fully upgraded Advent SB in seconds, chiefly with bombers.  Now, I did have 5 torp cruisers as well, and it's possible that they did most of the damage.  But I don't know.  We won't know whether SBs are tough enough (except against torp cruisers) unless we know they can withstand bombers with reasonable defenses (flak or fighter cover, etc).

Just to put my two cents on the table (and that's about what it's worth) - my bias is that if we are to err in the balancing of the starbase, we should err on the side of "a little too tough," especially if the game is called "Entrenchment."  The normal game already has a wide-open, offensive gameplay mechanic.  Let's give another gaming mechanic a try.

they did think of bombers, but it was more or less end game stand an we had all our fleets at those massive starbases with a lot of fighters. that said, if they had the resources and fleet capacity for starbase busters (even if the vasari had any), they could just as well have made bombers. that said, I dunno if such a situation really does arise. I mean we bunkered down on essentially two planets in a 30 planet map. I think that was more for fun and seeing what they can do rather than an honest belief that victory is still possible.

@ ratchit01: I wouldnt make the starbase busters too expensive or take up too many fleet slots. otherwise, they'd end up like siege frigates. no one really likes to build them, but sometimes, they're the only thing to get the job done.

I was starting to transition to bombers, but we were mostly using fighters because the Starbases were being given MASSIVE fighter cover.  The starbases were being used to maul direct attackers, and we had to get strikecraft superiority before we could go bombers.

Torpedos might well be too tough, but I can tell you the Starbases themselves are pretty enormously tough now against conventional attacks.

Thanks Blair sounds great

I agree that starbases are extremely effective against normal (especially cap) ships, especially if fully upgraded. BUt they are also extremely vulnerable to bomber attack, once its fighters have been eliminated. I didnt see any in my game, but does the starbase even have anydefence against bomber and fighter attack (other than the fighters obviously)

OH and the torpedoes are a bitoverpowered, but i just find it funny that the torpedoes are shown as a missile as big as a frigate! Maybe a smaller design is needed...

I think the starbases are pretty good against bombers, they have pretty much the same defence agains bombers as cap ships. They need to have some sort of weakness now more than before. With the secondary banks working better the starbase can attack multiple targets. Before you could just have 1 cap ship and a whole bunch of healing cruisers and you could take down any starbase. now you need to build a baqlanced fleet with bombers and stuff. 

The missiles are supposed to be big....... they do 600+ dmg to structures  

There are situations wher starbases are really effective, but there are also circumstances where they are practically worthless, fully upgraded or not. Something needs to be done about tactics that allow starbases to be destroyed to easily.

Some sort of rebalance is needed, maybe flaks and a special ability that can take out a anti-structure unit anywhere in the gravwell every 30 seconds or so. As it stands, starbases are not good defense structures without a huge fleet to back it up.

Maybe torpedo cruisers should not have a range advantage versus Starbases.....they SHOULD be fodder and should only get a lucky shot in every once in a while. Or slow down their rate of fire so much so that an opponet has time to react and counter.

BTW who's driving the TEC torpedo cruiser? I don't see a cockpit anywhere, is it robotic? Anyone know?