Also when 'spam' (LRM) must be 'supported' by (flak) in order to 'survive' then its not truly spam.

I seriously doubt that a player builds ONLY LRM (spam) and wins unless its against the ai or a seriously noob player

@Derek06

yeah, so you are saying, by mid game, you shouldnt be producing LFs, and by late game you shouldny be producing LF's or LRF's, because you have heavier cruisers plu support cruisers?

this is wrong, each ship should have a market it can cater for. for instance, HC's should be heavy, slow moving power houses that tear most other ships to shreds, while LF's should be less powerful, but fast and manouverable, good for breaking through battlelines and takin out your long range stuff (carriers/LRF) or, alternatively, just running around and causing havoc. LRFs are useful because they are just like artillery pieces, sit far out of range of most other units and fire in for massive damage (or, at least, AoE damage) if you can spam artillery pieces and protect them with some flak, and win a battle, there is something wrong.

i do agree, however, that flak should be able to counter SC. i mean, its logical. the effeciency however is up for debate. im not into all the exact values etc, but, the basic fact should be, if you push through and drill his flak with LF's, then your SC should have a much easier time of taking out the LRF

however, i really dont think that happens atm.

thats the point, people want their counters o be uncounterable. i really dont think thats right. however, having a ship or a small number of ships that counter too many things at once, especially when there are so few options early game, is wrong. AND, when a certain strategy cant be beaten by the same strategy (i.e. LRF spam with Flak cant beat LRF spam with Flak given superior tactical command) then its back to whoever made the right Scissors Paper Rock choice wins

No im not saying this exactly. But you are close...

LFs, LRMs, Carriers (bomber SC) and HCs are the main assault units of this game. -Carriers maybe not so much- So they will usualy make up the bulk of your fleet, but, MUST be supported in order to survive. And as the game progresses tactics will change. The earlyier game units role will diminish with the rise of the later game units. But they will still posses uses. Once you get HCs are your fleets still going to be mostly LRM? No they will have more and more HC and less and less LRM.

If late game you are still going around with LRM swarms (supported) and i come at you with my NEW fleet of HCs (supported) and who wins? prob the HCs...And if you 'outrun' my fleet away? thats fine i let you and take your planets that you just retreated from

LRM swarms with flak are hard to counter. LRMs counter (fighter) gets pwned by the flaks while the flaks counter (LFs) get pwned by the LRMs. But LRMs supported by flak is a BALANCED fleet. not spam. Spam would be if he only sent LRMs, which would then get mauled by fighters

There is a very simple and elegant way to solve spam and it's called upkeep costs. This can be done in several ways but the one that takes up least resources is to increase the cost of a unit the more you have of it. So if you have no LRF's and you buy one it will cost ie. 300 credits. Then if you have 1 LRF the next one will cost ie. 310 credits for a total of 610 credits. To buy a 3rd LRF would cost 320 credits for a total of 930 credits. When you've reached 20 LRF's the cost to benefit ratio has fallen off and it is now better to purchase other ships.  You could then add some research to lower the increase for each new ship so that your economy isn't bogged down at 20 ships each for the entire game. Maybe the tech could have a research that interrupts the opponents supply lines and increases the cost. Lots of neat ideas!

It's a lot less messy and a hell of a lot easier than finding the perfect balance of damage, range, speed and hull points. This method will smooth the fine details out of balance, encourage well rounded fleets and eliminate spam. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid! Yippee!

Really would dislike this game if there were 'cost' penalties.

Do you spam? HAHA jk

Any reason why besides just not liking it? What are the downsides?

i agree, thats a mixed fleet, except no one builds LF anymore, they just build up their LRF and Carriers and fire away at each other.

also, you said that Flak > SC, but the LF > than the carrier and flak, however for some reason LF never seems to be able to counter the flak frigs and carriers

i agree its a balanced and mixed fleet... but it seems unbalanced in that the counter does not seem very effective.

look, aside from all the artificial scissors paper rock crap, lets look at this logically

the LF is a light ship, but nonetheless an early game front line unit. its fast and has close range weapons.

the LRF is an even lighter ship, and serves a role out the back of your fleet out of harms way firing in for massive damage.

a carrier is a medium style ship, but has no weapons, means he has to be out of harms way as well. however he hosts fighters and bombers, which are his contribution to combat.

Fighters have (and ive said it in the past) weapons that are at most (for TEC lets say) 20 or even 50MM cannons. lets be crazy, and give it 100mm cannons. with armament that small i cant see it taking out large shielded, armored targets

Bombers have heavier weapons, missiles etc, designed for taking out larger ships. i mean, honestly, a missile will be better than a cannon and a beam will be better than a laser etc etc

a Flak Frigate has 4 banks that cant focus on the same target, and fires, again, lets say at the most 100mm rounds, because anything bigger would be a waste/ineffecient against SC, and, lets be honest, its pretty useless against larger ships

so, looking at it logically: a fighter should not be more effecient vs a LRF, simply because of the size of the LRF and the weapons of the fighter. i could imagine a bomber being more effective yes, due to the larger payload and the lighter armor of the LRF.

A LF should be, at close range, more effecient vs an LRF simply because the LRF has lighter armor. however the strength of the LRF is its long range and high damamge.

Flak should take a support role and counter SC, as they do now, but honestly, i think carriers can take up the role of flak frigate, since in the game they already mix in with the fleet anyway.

so, long story short, realistically, at least in my opinion, LF and LRF should counter each other pretty effectively. a fighter should be realistic and be effective vs bombers and other fighters only, and maybe unshielded, lightly armored targets. bombers should be effective vs structures, ships, caps, etc, but susceptible to flak, fighters, and should be unable to engage fighters. flak can remain where it is, though i think adding flak to carriers is viable... on second thoughts... it might contradict with lore, since what is stopping friendly fire... but then what is stopping friendly fire right now so...

this makes it much more realistic and gets rid of the currently very annoying system. i dont see why things have to be so artificial anyway. i mean, a cielo, for instance, very niche market, very high tech, why does it only have a medium power laser? there is no reason it cant have a much higher power laser and give enemy ships a hard time. to balance lets say it has a slow refire rate. then you could say its effective vs other utility cruisers, light frigates and good for generaly fleet support (offensive)

anyway, thats the end of the rant

i do have to agree if there were economic penalties ala Tkins suggestion i would not like it at all and would not upgrade

downsides to the penalty system are early game there arent that many resources to go around as it is, and, when you are ready to build your bombad planet smashing fleet, you have to take 30% whatever more time and resources to build it.

that, and it wouldnt fit into lore or economic rules. there is a thing where if you buy in bulk it becomes cheaper. same thing goes. if anything, the first frigate you build should be the most expensive, then after 20-30 or so of the same ship, the price should have halved. but im happy with where it is now

I'm agreed that a cost penalty is the exact wrong direction to solve this - afterall, what may seem reasonable early on starts falling apart once you've got a galaxy-spanning empire with hundreds of ships, and the lore just wouldn't cope with such an arbitary restriction. It'd feel terribly artificial; not something you want in a 4X style game (Or RT4X, for that matter).

Well I'm not exactly sure how the game's lore goes, but I think the initial cost of the ship includes the lifetime support costs to simplify things. If this is true, that is where the added costs come from. It is true that things typically get cheaper the more you  make, but things become more expensive to manage the more you have.

For something that requires support, like a ship or an infantry unit, it becomes more expensive to have more of that unit. The initial cost reduction is usually offset by the added upkeep costs which does not make the increased costs arbitrary at all. Think about it, if you have 1 soldier it's really easy to house and feed them, give them new clothes and equipment and repair any damages. Having hundreds of thousands of soldiers requires massive amounts of procurement details, transportation planning, medical costs, training etc. That's where the logical side of the increased cost comes from.

As for early game resources, they don't have to change at all. If you are building a fleet and it is well rounded then it would cost the same as a fleet does now. The cost would only go up if you spam one unit.

Your logic makes no sense Tkins.

If i have to take care of ONE person, car, spaceship (whatever) its gonna cost far more PER UNIT to manage it than if i were taking care of hundreds.

And how i would hate having to pay more for more of something... bleh

And besides...spam SHOULD be a viable (effective or inefective) tactic in any and all RTS games...

Penalizing spam is 1: a cheap and crappy fix to a probably unbalanced game. 2: too controlling (less power to the player)

I am sorry but this sounds stupid.  The fact that someone can spam one unit to the exclusion of others means that something is wrong with balance.  Spamming gives LESS control rather than more because everyone is forced to build this 1 unit in response or lose.  They don't get to use the other units in the game and get to try other things because they will be crushed in an avalanche of spam.  As for viable being effective or ineffective, the word viable would mean effective only for it to meet the meaning of viable.  You can spam anything ineffectively already.

[_]-Greyfox

i agree with Greyfox2, i hate the spamming thing

i think a more conservative way of looking at what Derek06 was saying (at least how i first and will continue to look at it) is that rather than spamming ONLY one unit, you cant spam one unit as part of building a large fleet

for instance, i play large fleet sizes. when it comes time to build a second fleet, i often like to build all at once, not 1 by 1 by 1 etc. So for a large fleet id like to build say 20-25 LRF, 30 HC etc, and if im just building my fleet up quickly, i dont want a 10 credit surcharge on each subsequent ship.

but yeah. i mean, if you want to spam a certain unit fine, but spamming a single unit without backup should be so easy to counter that spaming becomes useless as a tactic other than maybe a quick win or a win against a spammed fleet or inferior ships (i.e. player 1 spams X for whatever reason, player 2 should be able to spam Y in order to wipe the first spammed fleet off the map)

i also strongly believe that a smaller, but more technologically advance fleet (i.e. more weapon/shield/armor research) should beat (well, not every time, but it should be viable) should be a less advanced but larger fleet.

so if i build a smaller fleet of say 5 LF and 5 LRM plus a cap with maxed shields, weapons and armor (up to say, level 3?) it should be able to drill a fleet of say 20 LRF and 5 Carriers and a cap

As a dedicated advent player, whatever you do to balance LRMs, please do not nurf the illum to much. The advent LF just sucks, they can't hold their own in combat at all (I usually build less then 10, and even when carriers were supreme it was usually better to just build more carriers than to waste money on LFs). The only thing they kill faster than the illum is carriers but their extremely low hp and armor makes it useless to have in any fleet after lvl 3 military research (unless you are using them as antimatter batteries for your cap ships, but its generally to much management than its worth; also I always though it odd that "long range" ships, which should be farther away from the action, are harder to kill that close range "frigates"). Basically, just don't make LFs replace LRMs as the main fleet unit, then the only thing advent will have going for them is culture and cap ships.

so you want us to nerf the Javelis and Assaillant but not the Illum... very fair...

so buff the advent LF?

i agree, so drop LRF armor whatever and boost LF armor whatever!

BUT THATS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE! before heavy cruisers at least, and even then, they should have a niche as fast attack raiders good for breaking through battlelines and taking out your LRF and carriers

its like you completely missed the point of this thread. at the moment, LF's are useless and LRF spam seems to be the only way to go. so drop LRF health etc to a point where it should be a LIGHT frigate, and boost the LF's armor to that of something that is still light, but can survive close range encounters like it should be able to. dont whine about not nerfing your precious LRF's

Scout's counter lrf's. Have I not handed enough people their butts with this technique yet to validate this?

Yes yes but it's not practical. Scouts weren't desing to be used as a front line unit. Also advent scouts are once again best at this so if I was playign advent I wouldn't even bother using scouts to kill the enemi I'd just build by overpowered lums.

So it ends up Advent use lums and kill everything. And TEC Vasary use substandard scouts and get pawn the moment advent takes out the gardians.

This was what i was going for. No game should penalize for spam. Whether spam works or not. (preferably it doesnt work)

Aaaah, ok, I think I can follow a bit more now. Here goes my best shot at explaining my opinion. Maybe you'll agree, maybe you won't.

From what I've seen, each of the LRF's are different enough that they each have distinct fighting flavors compared to the others. They're so different, that each has its thing that it best accels at.

- The LRM is a unit meant to come out in VERY large numbers. It only takes 4 ship slots, the lowest possible for a non-scout ship. The idea is to churn out so much that your fleet can take acceptable losses with these suckers

- The Assailant is designed almost purely for using a swarm to take out one unit at a time. Because of phase missiles, Assailants accel at taking down one unit with high mitigation because they can just ignore it. The strength here is they can take out the enemy cap early and hopefully weaken the enemy fleet enough by doing that to take out the rest.

- The Illum accels at fleet destroying. The beams not only shoot in three directions, but they're also instant hit. Very little damage goes to waste because of the instant hit. That's actually where the OP comes from. Missiles take time to get to a unit and if you watch, you'll see that the units WILL shoot way too many missiles at one unit only to see the unit die but an entire volley of missiles hit the dead space where the unit used to be. This is why the Illum kicks so much ass. Their damage doesn't go to waste.

So how do you counter them? Well, unfortunately for TEC, the LRM can be fought off with Assailants and Illums. It really shouldn't be that way, but it is. Unfortunately for Vasari, once they get the enemy cap, the Assilants will struggle taking down Illums.

The games poeple play now are close proximity games where you WILL fight in the first 30-45 minutes. This means people do annoying spams. By that I mean get three planets, get X number of necessary military labs, tech their LRF, and just start churning them out.

THAT STRATEGY PISSES ME OFF. IT'S MINDLESS AND REQUIRES NO SKILL.

My best advice is in the early game is get two frigate factories and churn out scouts as quickly as you can. With the minerals you're not spending on fleet now, use them to upgrade your fleet, (up armor, shields, health, weapons, all TIER 1 upgrades possible for making units stronger). An inital LRF spam can easily be pushed by a scout counter. It works for all three races. I know this because I've done it as each, even Vasari. I thought Vasari scouts would be too weak, but it turns out I was wrong.

Now, in later stages of the game, thats where it gets complicated. People will typically make HUGE fleets of lrf's that are difficult to take down, especially if the Advent is abusing repulse.

In these cases, I advise TEC go Kodiaks and get the level 6 ability if they're abusing repulse. It helps somewhat which is better than nothing. Try to get your opponent to jump around more than he wants to. You need to get rid of the Guardian's antimatter.

I advise Vasari to go Assailants + Flak. You're lucky. Assailants can be upgraded like crazy, and are BETTER than Illums in late game in my opinion. You need to upgrade them though. The flak is so your opponent can't hit you with fighters. Don't get your HC. The vasari HC is pound for pound the worst HC in the game.It takes 12 ship slots instead of 10, and it's ability blows. It doesn't have armor as good as the Kodiak, and can't be upgraded as much as the Advent HC (although no one ever uses it)

Advent, you can do what you damn well plz if you make it to later stages. You've got options. HC, Illum, guardians, Carriers, Enjoy.

Just to explain my solution a bit further, You wouldn't only receive the penalty when building the ship in sequence. the penalty would be thre all the time for all ships. So whether you built 20 illums at once, or 20 illums mixed with other ships, all those ships would receive the penalty based on how many units are in play.

There is a mechanic already in the game that uses very similar principles and that's the research to increase fleet capacity. It lowers your total overall economic output with the more ships you have. This one would just be more specific to which unit is being built.

If anyone else is still confused, look how Rise of Nations did it. It's very similar to that.

EDIT: Here is a little article that covers some different types of caps and population control in RTS's. The comments add a bit to it too. http://phazon.joeuser.com/article/316908

I'll try to look for some more if anyone else is interested.

If your saying get rid of the fleet logistics upgrades and instead charge a per-ship rate then thats really not a bad idea. however if your saying keep the current upgrade system AND charge a per-unit pop cost then i disagree that its a good idea

Yeah, you are completely right, having the two together would destroy the game. I'd only support this if it was a replacement for that fleet upkeep. And  replace that research with research that lowers the penalty by X % and max pop increasd to X. That way you could maintain a larger fleet easier.

 My big gripe with the current "upkeep" is that it is static. If you are widdled down to just a few ships you still get penalized like you have 1000 ships.

The per unit system would be based on the number of ships you have currently, so if you have 1000's of ships the next one is going to be expensive, but if you get widdle down to less ships then they will be cheaper.