Capships vs. illums/lrm/assailants

Some people are proposing buffing battleships.  What about making battleships more resiliant to the attack of the lrm class frigate?  That would give them a distinctive role of sorts, and allow them to be used as a "meatshield" between the attacking lrm class frigate and the rest of your caps.  I'm just brainstorming, but it's an idea, anyway.

a general buff to cap battleship's HP and shields is needed. 

Caps should counter Caps.  I prefer a more severe counter system that forces players to maintain a mixed fleet.

You know what?  I'm just going to outright agree.  I've flip-flopped on this issue myself, but I'm tired of just seeing simple focus fire causing capital ships to melt in seconds.

DOes the Kodiak/Crusader/Enforcer not fix this problem? 

You know, I actually thought of this idea a while back, but I didn't propose it here because I thought it would be considered too radical.

I'm glad we agree.

I guess you are saying that heavy cruisers counter the lrm class (so do scouts, fighers, etc).  I don't think it fixes the problem.  You still couldn't send your caps to accompany your hc to go in and kill the lrm - it would take a while for the hc to do their job, so your caps are still sitting out that battle.  And who's to say your opponent doesn't have a counter to your hc?  Besides, illums DO counter HC!

Even in a somewhat mixed fleet (a fleet containing the counter to your hc), there will still be enough lrm to kill your cap in seconds.  I mean 30-something illums in a fleet is nothing - I see that every day.  I see 50-something illum fleets and 80-something illum fleets too.

Do you not have this problem (I thought everyone did)?  Do heavy cruisers work for you to fix the problem?

Strictly speaking, heavy cruisers counter illums.  The problem is, in practice the counter is very subtle, and the illum spammer has had a lot longer to build illums than you've had to build heavies, so it's non-trivial to build up the numbers you need.  The final problem is that if you throw enough bonuses on to illums (such as guardians, shield restore, energy amplification, etc) they can actually beat their own counter quite handily.

There's no question that right now, illums are much too effective and difficult to counter.

Plus, guardians actually repel heavy cruisers, allowing the illums to kill them with impunity.

I just think it's ridiculous how easy it is to kill capships.  The only way I can keep them alive once critical mass fleets hit the map is to keep them out of battles.

No, I do not have this problem.  The only way to prevent this problem is to keep attacking whenever possible to wreck your opponent's economy and ship count.  If you manage to let your opponent to spam illums/LRM/Assailents before you can react, you lost already, game over.

You guys want less lrf in fleets then vote for a buff to fighters as they counter lrf.Fighters do pitiful damage to caps.

Anything that makes carrier-cap rushes stronger, I'm not gunna support.  If you wanna talk about buffing carrier cruisers, be my guest, but if the carrier caps get an improvement I'm just not going to support it.

The real problem is that LRF are effective against too many different types of ships.  The game might be much improved if LRF were to counter support ships and LF were to counter LRF.  Fast agile ships should counter ranged ships.  Then scouts could be freed of the burden of being a counter to LRF, and return to recon, trade interdiction and anti-colony/siege roles. 

The comparison I would make is between the torpedo-boats and destroyers of the dreadnought era.  Torpedo boats were a threat to dreadnoughts and even more so to ships without underwater compartments.  'Torpedo-boat destroyers' with their speed, agility and light guns were intended to protect the fleet from torpedo boats.  Sins has the torpedo boats as a threat to the agile destroyers... 

With this simple rebalance the Guardian becomes far more tolerable, and the Hoshiko more vulnerable.  Also the basic assault frigate becomes a basic assault frigate, rather than a specialist ship. Carriers that have bombers to kill caps become vulnerable to LRF.  Caps would finally have two types of escort, one against LRF and another- flak- against carriers.

Also the Illuminator needs a nerf as well as the bug fix, this was needed before the next patch.  To simply fix the bug is not enough.   

I do agree that LRFs currently do too much damage against capital ships. There's two main reasons for this; it's still far too fast to mass LRFs, and Bombers are far less viable. Carrier cruisers are currently not viable until late-game, whereas reducing LRF damage to caps would make the carrier cruisers (With Bombers) more important to come out earlier.

Well darvin fighter dont kill much and if we buffed them it would be a nerf to bombers which do damage to caps as well.So it wouldnt be a direct buff to carrier caps.There would be much more lf to counter carrier which also do little damage to caps.If fighters could make lrf pay even tho there is flak then we would see a more diverse fleet than 80 ilums Also fleets would be more composed of ships that dont snipe caps.

Other option is to make bombers effective vs lrf.

Then Fighters will be completely obsolete. And Bombers already do somewhat well against LRFs.

No fighters slaughter bombers.

Carrier cruisers would appear earlier if LRF countered carriers and LF counter LRF instead of support. Ships appear if their target is on the field, so the option that Swordsalmon outlined for altering the counters might not make carriers appear earlier, as one of their targets would have been nerfed- and their counter buffed?

Whereas, with LRF the anti-flak and carrier unit rather than the low-tech LF, carriers would appear earlier, and the problem would be whether the carrier cruisers would become a major threat to caps.. without flak being so vulnerable to a low-tech unit the strikecraft counter would get a buff, and this would apply to carrier caps as well.

Then you're the only one.  I've seen every top pro out there lose multiple caps in a game to lrm.

This simply isn't true.  Games are full of illum/lrm/assailant spam, and always have been (except in the uber-carriers patch).  Sometimes those spammers win, sometimes they lose.  When they lose, sometimes they lose to other spammers, sometimes they lose to non-spammers.  Just today, I played a game where I lost 4 capships to an illum spammer.  But I won the game.  I wasn't allowed to have my capships support my fleet though, which I think is ridiculous.

I hear ya on fighters, Eye.  Thing is, I'm not necessarily saying there should be less lrf in fleets - that's a decision for God, the devs, and the lrm spammer to make.  I just think those lrms should have diminishing returns on damaging caps (not other ships) once they hit critical numbers.  It would be different if capships cost 200 credits/minerals/crystal and you could spam them out like any other frig, but that ain't the case.  It would also be different if their role wasn't to support the fleet, but that ain't the case either.  Plus, let's assume fighters got buffed.  You still couldn't send your capships into a grav well with 80 illums in there - you'd have to send the fighters and the flak and everything else alone, and let them kill the illums first.  So the capships still sit the battle out.  I understand your suggestion, and I think it would have an indirect impact on this capship thing, but I think a more direct approach is needed.

 

The LRF only counters capital ships and light frigates.  That's two unit types, hardly an excessive count. Consider that the LF counters scouts, flaks, carriers, and support cruisers. The real cause of the LRF's strength are those raw combat stats.  Simply put, the only unit that compares in terms of bang for your buck is the heavy.

Rebalancing the LRF to be countered by "fast and agile" units would probably be impossible without completely rewriting the entire counter system, which would require at least half a dozen iterative patches to get right. That's just not in the cards.


A second problem with increasing fighter damage is that this doesn't just punish LRF spammers.  In fact, it punishes people who mix in small amounts of LRF more than it does the spammer.  Think about it; if I have 80 LRF, you I can take a few losses before my DPS starts to sink dangerously low.  If I have 20 or 30 LRF, you could seriously knock out that entire segment of my army before it fulfills its role as a counter.

I think that may just make spamming problems even worse.  If you can somehow protect them, LRF are just as no less dangerous, but if you can't they're not even worth building because fighters can pick them off.  This is already the case early game, where it's easy enough to suppress small numbers of LRF just using a carrier cap, which was my initial objection to the proposal.

To be clear: I am very much against any buff to fighters. The fighters themselves are fine; if anything it's the carrier cruisers that are weak right now.  The fact that players are spamming carrier caps is indication enough that this is the case.



Now, one possibility to make capital ships tougher could be to rework shield mitigation.  Right now, any realistic scenario will max out shield mitigation practically instantly.  This means that focus fire is the best course of action; mitigation is already maxed, there's no further penalty to piling on more DPS.

My idea is to raise the maximum shield mitigation values, and also make mitigation fall faster when at higher levels.  The result would be it will take a lot more DPS to max out mitigation.  This means that there will be diminishing returns for focus firing a capital ship with your entire fleet.  This would have the added bonus of not making capital ships any tougher in the early game.

So no one thinks a simple hitpoint/armor buff across the board for all caps would do it? The Distant Stars mod succeeds in this way, by making caps tough enough to actually survive a good while. Focus fire on a cap kills it instantly, and is just not acceptable.

 

LRM's are still very good ships, and need some sort of nerf or improved counter. The problem is WHAT.

Flak is the answer. While Fighters do the most damage as a counter to LRF, boosting Flak to deal damage to Light armor would be fantastic. Flak does sort of counter LRF, but only when massed and with all of their weapons being fired. And Sentinels don't do a good job at this.

Instead of a flat LRF nerf, decreasing their multipliers against Capital armor and increasing Flak's multipliers against Light armor would work very well to put them in line.

Is this chart still valid? https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/177682/page/5

It seems odd that ANTIMEDIUM would outgun ANTIHEAVY for the damage modifier on VERYHEAVY and CAPITAL. Would it make sense to atleast nerf ANTIMEDIUM to 50% on capital ships and very heavy?

Has it ever been suggested in the past to have capital ships do the max damage, or atleast higher modifier, to all armor types below capital? It seems odd that frigates can get 125-150% boost for some damage modifiers but capital class ships do not. In fact if the chart is correct they get a negative modifier when it comes to fighting LRM's.

I like this idea. Wouldn't this also provide an indirect buff to Vasari for both their phase missles and their early game Starbase approach? Would starbases in general become more viable with increased shield mitigation?

idn... i agree that Caps melting against FF sucks... but think about just how much firepower there is in a late game fleet... dozens of ships, potentially hundreds of SC plus orbital defenses etc... its really an unimaginable amount of power... or, if you want to put in scientific terms, a really large number...

so unless Caps have a new and revised mitigation system that really stops incoming damage from focus fire effectively, as well as higher armor and HP levels, there is no way to stop high value targets dropping like flies to big fleets

and yes, you dont have to be talking about late game, but the principle still applies...

i suppose it does suck having a level 8, 9 or 10 cap ship dropping in the beginning of a battle, but i think by that stage they should be about as difficult to take down as maybe an un-upgraded SB or more...

but like i said, with enough firepower, everything drops pretty quickly... and to be honest... it should be a valid tactic... if you want to take something down quicksmart, you turn all your guns on it and dont stop firing till its like a bug on the windshield