Bombers and Phase Missiles

from Sins Forums

Greetings, fellow Sinners.

Though I do not play enough competitive Sins to have an accurate grasp of the metagame, I get the impression from these forums that bombers and phase missiles are considered essential, owing to their overall effectiveness.

I have a few ideas as to how to address some of these issues, and I would like to put them forward for discussion.

If you feel my ideas are stupid, please say so -- I welcome (constructive!) criticism. Ideally, this thread would lead to a degree of consensus as to which issues should be addressed and how.  

Also, please bear in mind the following disclaimer: I am an idiot.

Bombers

Here, I have three primary suggestions, some combination of which I feel would address the problem of bombers.

  1. Increase acceleration, deceleration, and turn-rate on fighters (additionally: reduce flak accuracy against fighters [thank you, Seleuceia])
  2. Anti-strikecraft point defenses on capital ships
    • Either available by default or contingent on research
    • Amount of point defenses on a capital ship is based on the number of squadrons it starts with at level 1; capital ships with lots of squadrons get few point defenses, capital ships with no squadrons at level 1 get lots of point defenses
  3. Rebalance antimatter costs for construction of fighters and bombers

Suggestion 1: Fighter acceleration, deceleration, turn rate, and vulnerability to flak frigates

Here's another popular scenario: your fighters sweep across the gravity and perform one pass against the incoming wave of bombers... at which point they overshoot and have to turn all the way around and accelerate back to attack speed, crossing half the gravity well whilst the bombers are busy pecking away at your poor ships.

The solution?

Allow fighters to slow down quicker, turn quicker, and come shooting back at the bombers quicker!

This little change would dramatically increase the effectiveness of a fighter screen.

***

In addition, Seleuceia points out that flak frigates HARD counter fighters (owing to their damage type and accuracy against fighters). Seleuceia also notes that rebalancing damage values is dicey at this point, owing to the current balance between flak frigates and LRM frigates. Accordingly, he suggests lowering accuracy against fighters to compensate, therefore allowing fighters to thin out bombers with impunity.

I fully agree with this suggestion, but as it's primarily useful only when there are flak frigates around (or point defenses [see Suggestion 2 =P]), I still feel fighters should still be buffed with respect to their acceleration, deceleration, and turn rate, in order to make them more effective against bombers when flak is NOT around.

Suggestion 2: Point Defenses on capital ships

We've all seen this happen: your colonization ship is forced to leave a gravity well because it simply can't chase down the carrier that's pelting it to death with bombers.

But what would happen if your capital ship had teeth? Enough teeth to shoot down those bombers after two passes or so?

Of course, this would potentially neutralize carriers as viable starting capital ships, UNLESS point defenses were made available based on research. So: after you research Flak Frigates, you can research capital ship point defenses, and BAM -- suddenly, your capital ships are bristling with weapons.

On the other hand, small maps will give you no time to research flak frigates. Consequently, I'm on the fence: point defenses right out of the gate, or not?

I should note that not all capital ships should be created equal with regard to point defense. The way I see it, carriers can field fighters to knock bombers out of the sky, so they get the fewest point defenses (maybe four guns, total). By comparison, capital ships that start out with a fighter squadron tend to bring a lot of utility to the table as well as a single squadron, so they might get six point defense guns total. But battleships and dreadnoughts might get as many as EIGHT point defense guns, since they don't start off with any fighter squadrons (and can't colonize planets).

Suggestion 3: Antimatter costs

I've seen it suggested that the antimatter costs associated with constructing fighters and bombers ought to be looked at.All things being equal, I agree.

However, rebalancing antimatter costs doesn't help at all against an alpha strike. If you're facing 24 squadrons of bombers, it doesn't matter how much they cost to build -- what matters is getting rid of the damn things.

Furthermore: if suggestions 1 and 2 are implemented, then bombers will be more vulnerable -- and you might have to DECREASE their cost to compensate for how many bombers are being lost.

At this point, I lack data -- though it's a valid suggestion.

Phase Missiles

Seleuceia points out that phase missiles are primarily a problem against the Advent; consequently, agree that an excellent first step in addressing this issue would be to provide a buff the the Iconus Guardian, either vanilla or via research, that provides a bonus to phase missile block when Guardian Shield is used, on the order of 15-50%.

I provided such a large range for the hypothetical phase missile block ability provided by Guardian Shield primarily because I don't know how phase missile block works: additively or multiplicatively.

  • Multiplicative: [Shield bypass chance (30%)] * [phase missile block (50%)] = 15% chance (overall) for phase missiles to bypass shields

-OR-

  • Additive: [Shield bypass chance (30%)] - [phase missile block (15%)] = 15% chance (overall) for phase missiles to bypass shields

It has also been brought to my attention that the same advantage could be conferred through shield research. Since the Advent have earlier access to more shield research than the TEC or the Vasari, this could deal with the problem without pigeon-holing the Advent into even MORE use of the Guardian.

Since this might take care of the issue, I've grayed out my previous suggestions.

Before I give my suggestion, I need to break phase missiles down into two components:

  1. Shield bypass
  2. Ignorance of shield mitigation (all the time or just when they bypass shields?)

Now, bear in mind that I haven't labbed this, but it strikes me that the real problem of Phase Missiles is NOT that they bypass shields, but that they ignore shield mitigation.

For example, let's take a look at a Kanrak Assailant versus a Cobalt Light Frigate.

Cobalt: 635 health, medium armor

Kanrak:

  • 13 damage per missile, on average
  • 30% chance of ignoring shields entirely when fully researched
  • 1.5x damage to medium armor
  • 32.6 missiles needed to take down a Cobalt's health (ignoring armor)

Basic probability (.3^32.6) tells us that the Kanrak has a roughly .000000000000000000899% chance of destroying the Cobalt without damaging its shields at all. 

This means that most of the time you're gonna have to eat through the target's shields before you can destroy anything with Phase Missiles -- the shield bypass just makes things a LITTLE weaker in the hull department once you've gotten through the shields.

By comparison, ignoring shield mitigation has a HUGE effect.

Shield mitigation increases over the course of a battle.  It starts at 15%; if a target starts taking damage, it skyrockets to about 57%, and continues to mitigate damage in this way even after shields have been depleted.

So: during long engagements against targets with high Shield Mitigation, either 30% of the time or ALL the time (I'm not sure which), phase missiles are doing 2.33x more damage than everything else.

Even if phase missiles ignore shield mitigation ONLY when they ignore shields (or, at maximum, 30% of the time), they're STILL doing 1.699x damage overall.

Compare this to the Stilakus Suberter: Shield Disruption reduces Shield Mitigation by a mere 8%.

I have two possible suggestions:

  1. When fully upgraded, Phase Missiles bypass shields 30% of the time; but when they bypass shields, they only ignore 30% of enemy shield mitigation
    • It's possible to play with this (i.e. bypass shields 45% of the time, but only ignore 15% of enemy shield mitigation when they do)
  2. When fully upgraded, Phase Missiles bypass shields only 12% of the time; they continue to fully ignore shield mitigation when they bypass shields

I'm in favor of some variation on Suggestion 1.

Closing Comments

I'm aware that there are other issues in Sins of a Solar Empire besides those listed above. For the record, I will list them here:

  • Advent needs a buff
  • Refineries aren't usually worth it
  • Culture doesn't do much, or very quickly
  • Lots of underutilized research upgrades (not worth the cost, only effect a few units, etc.)

TLDR:

  • To address bombers, I suggest some combination of the following:
    • Increase fighter acceleration, deceleration, and turn rate; reduce flak frigate accuracy against fighters
    • Point defenses on capital ships, either vanilla or via research
    • Rebalance antimatter costs
  • To address phase missiles, two viable suggestions have been made:
    • Provide a phase missile block bonus via the Iconus Guardian's Guardian Shield ability (either vanilla or via research)
    • Allow shield research to provide a phase missile block bonus (I'm in favor of this solution because it doesn't rely on the Guardian OR the late-game Subjugator AND compensates for the Advent's dependence on shields) 
  • My older suggestions are as follows
    • Phase missiles no longer COMPLETELY bypass shield mitigation, only partially (such as a 30% reduction to shield mitigation during the 30% of the time when phase missiles bypass shields)
    • Lower the rate at which phase missiles bypass shields

Comments?

105,694 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Bombers are a very complex issue, and there is a lot of controversy over how to solve the problem or even if there is a problem...

Flak vs. fighters is one of the hardest counters in the game (possibly second only to LRFs vs LFs) and giving fighters more breathing room allows them to effectively counter bombers...increasing the speed or acceleration or damage or accuracy of fighters may sound good, but if they get shot to pieces it doesn't matter how good they could be against bombers since they won't be around anymore...

In my opinion, decreasing flak's accuracy against fighters would be the best approach...you can't change the damage table of anti-very light weaponry against light armor without compromising flak's effectiveness against LRFs, but if you decrease the accuracy of anti-very light weaponry against fighters then you don't have that problem...with this change, fighters will last longer to whittle down bombers...

I'd see how that change alone affects things before advocating any other changes...of course, in general it wouldn't be so bad if bombers (and LRFs, for that matter) were a little bit weaker against capital ships....

As for phase missiles, that is pretty controversial....PMs really are only a problem against Advent, which means that weakening PMs balances the Vasari/Advent matchup at the expense of ruining the pretty balanced Vasari/TEC matchup...that doesn't really accomplish much...

I do think PMs are an OP element, but the Vasari as a whole are not OP (at least against TEC)...this means that if you weaken PMs, the Vasari need to be compensated somewhere else...

I think the best solution would be to increase Advent's defense against PMs rather than nerf PMs in general...there are two solutions I like: 1) Give the shield projection ability on the Iconus Guardian a PM blocking buff and 2) Give shield techs a PM blocking buff...

Which shield techs to give such a buff is debatable...you could give all shield techs for all factions a small PM blocking buff, a bonus that would help Advent more since they have twice as many shield techs...or you could simply give the highest Advent shield tech a substantial PM blocking bonus (since PMs only become really dangerous late game)...

If PMs were to be nerfed, I think the easiest nerf would be to simply nerf the damage increase techs (the 4th level of PM research)...I'd put them at 5% each (just like all the other weapon techs) instead of 10% each...if you really want to decrease PM's ability to bypass shields, then you need to increase the base damage of all Vasari ships with PMs...PMs aren't too OP against frigates or SC, only against capital ships...

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

@Seleuceia: In a word, I agree. With everything.

I'll add the bit about flak accuracy against fighters to the above post under the "rebalancing fighters" suggestion, with credit to you.

Likewise, I'll add a section on Phase Missiles vs. Advent to the section on phase missiles -- since, as you said, Advent (with their paper hulls) suffer more from an attack that ignores shield mitigation than a race with beefier hulls.

EDIT: I like the suggestion of providing a phase missile defense buff, either via research or straight up, to Iconus Guardians. It's a REALLY good solution.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Frostflare, reply 2
EDIT: I like the suggestion of providing a phase missile defense buff, either via research or straight up, to Iconus Guardians. It's a REALLY good solution.

That's been thrown around before, and taken as a positive idea as I recall.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

A (relatively) recent update allowed PM blocking to be granted via technologies, as it previously was only a entity modifier allowed through abilities...

Before that update, the primary discussion was whether the domina subjugator or the iconus guardian should be the Advent ship granting PM blocking...

Many advocated buffing the domina's perseverance ability by giving it PM blocking...since the ship was one of the weakest support ships (down there with the cielo), many felt it was the most in need of a buff, and PM blocking seemed like a useful bonus...

Some advocated giving the guardian's shield projection the PM blocking...doing so would make PM blocking more accessible early on, and it also would help protect all ships instead of just a few as shield projection is an AoE ability...some however felt PM blocking was only needed late game...furthermore, many felt PMs were only a problem against capital ships and not against fleets, so having fleet wide PM blocking would be too powerful...

As I recall, most people favored buffing the domina...personally, I favored buffing shield projection (and even did so in Project Equilibrium)...my reasoning was mostly that the domina could be buffed in many other ways to make its abilities more useful...furthermore, I believed AoE PM blocking was essential since the Advent depended heavily on higher shield mitigation (granted through culture bonuses and their higher shield tech) and all their ships were disproportionately vulnerable to PMs, not just Advent capital ships....

But then the developers allowed PM blocking to be granted via technologies, and I think it's safe to say most people would prefer that mechanism over support ships providing the PM blocking...the only real controversy is whether it should be all shield techs, only Advent shield techs, or only the highest level Advent shield techs...

The problem with doing anything to PMs is that it is not an isolated issue at all...for example, what if bombers and LRFs were significantly nerfed against capital ships?  Well, then PMs might not be so much of a problem...furthermore, if the Advent receive some much needed economic buffs, they may end up being on par with Vasari and therefore the PM thing would no longer cause a heavily one-sided Vasari/Advent match up...

Giving shield techs some PM blocking is the simplest and most direct solution...it is viable, easy to implement, and gives the greatest help to the faction needing the most help...that being said, the problem with phase missiles goes much deeper than this and is interconnected with many other OP elements...

Sins as a whole is fairly "balanced", but mainly because 1) All three factions have access to the same OP units like LRFs, carrier caps, and bombers and 2) All three factions have severely overpowered and severely underpowered elements that come out to a wash, giving the illusion of balance...

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Here's another popular scenario: your fighters sweep across the gravity and perform one pass against the incoming wave of bombers... at which point they overshoot and have to turn all the way around and accelerate back to attack speed, crossing half the gravity well whilst the bombers are busy pecking away at your poor ships.

The solution?

Allow fighters to slow down quicker, turn quicker, and come shooting back at the bombers quicker!

This little change would dramatically increase the effectiveness of a fighter screen.

Or they could change the fighter AI (MoveLikeFighter or something) to not waste half or more of their potential DPS by flying many squares past the enemy. That would be a more elegant solution IMO.

Suggestion 2: Point Defenses on capital ships

We've all seen this happen: your colonization ship is forced to leave a gravity well because it simply can't chase down the carrier that's pelting it to death with bombers.

But what would happen if your capital ship had teeth? Enough teeth to shoot down those bombers after two passes or so?

Wouldn't those flak weapons also attack enemy LRF? A capital ship being able to shoot down a few bomber squadrons entirely after only a couple of passes would increase the capital ship's firepower (against strike craft and frigates) by a whole lot. The cap might be able to take on as many as 20 LRM alone, which shouldn't be possible.

On the other hand, small maps will give you no time to research flak frigates. Consequently, I'm on the fence: point defenses right out of the gate, or not?

Those situations are a bit too rare to care about, I think. In nearly any map that isn't decided by the initial rush, flak frigates will almost certainly come into play...

Suggestion 3: Antimatter costs

I've seen it suggested that the antimatter costs associated with constructing fighters and bombers ought to be looked at.All things being equal, I agree.

However, rebalancing antimatter costs doesn't help at all against an alpha strike. If you're facing 24 squadrons of bombers, it doesn't matter how much they cost to build -- what matters is getting rid of the damn things.

Furthermore: if suggestions 1 and 2 are implemented, then bombers will be more vulnerable -- and you might have to DECREASE their cost to compensate for how many bombers are being lost.

At this point, I lack data -- though it's a valid suggestion.

It already takes a very annoyingly large amount of time for carrier cruisers to regenerate their antimatter, especially if they're also trying to make even one or two phase jumps along the way, especially if you're Vasari - if anything, I think that should be buffed.

Phase Missiles

Seleuceia points out that phase missiles are primarily a problem against the Advent; consequently, agree that an excellent first step in addressing this issue would be to provide a buff the the Iconus Guardian, either vanilla or via research, that provides a bonus to phase missile block when Guardian Shield is used, on the order of 15-50%.

Phase missiles are a general problem, it just hits the Advent in particular because of the Advent's horrible capital ship durability.

Now, bear in mind that I haven't labbed this, but it strikes me that the real problem of Phase Missiles is NOT that they bypass shields, but that they ignore shield mitigation.

For example, let's take a look at a Kanrak Assailant versus a Cobalt Light Frigate.

Cobalt: 635 health, medium armor

Kanrak:

13 damage per missile, on average
30% chance of ignoring shields entirely when fully researched
1.5x damage to medium armor
32.6 missiles needed to take down a Cobalt's health (ignoring armor)

Basic probability (.3^32.6) tells us that the Kanrak has a roughly .000000000000000000899% chance of destroying the Cobalt without damaging its shields at all. 

This means that most of the time you're gonna have to eat through the target's shields before you can destroy anything with Phase Missiles -- the shield bypass just makes things a LITTLE weaker in the hull department once you've gotten through the shields.

By comparison, ignoring shield mitigation has a HUGE effect.

Shield mitigation increases over the course of a battle.  It starts at 15%; if a target starts taking damage, it skyrockets to about 57%, and continues to mitigate damage in this way even after shields have been depleted.

So: during long engagements against targets with high Shield Mitigation, either 30% of the time or ALL the time (I'm not sure which), phase missiles are doing 2.33x more damage than everything else.

Even if phase missiles ignore shield mitigation ONLY when they ignore shields (or, at maximum, 30% of the time), they're STILL doing 1.699x damage overall.

Each missile actually does a lot more damage, around like 70-80 damage - but they're fired every 6 seconds or so. (I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers). That's how it is for all frigates - the "average (weapon) damage" refers to the damage done divided by the cooldown. Most weapons have a cooldown in the range of 5 to 10 seconds.

The shield mitigation-ignoring aspect is definitely the most problematic part of Phase Missiles.

So: during long engagements against targets with high Shield Mitigation, either 30% of the time or ALL the time (I'm not sure which), phase missiles are doing 2.33x more damage than everything else.

It depends on what the target is. "Shield mitigation starts at 15%, increases 1% per 10 points of damage, and reduces 1.25% per second. Under normal circumstances 450 damage must strike a frigate (single one second salvo), or 600 damage for capital ships, to maximize shield mitigation." If you have 30% shield negation researched, then when you're attacking a frigate (maybe 1000-1500 hull/shields combined), during the first 450 damage you do, your PMs will have a 30% chance to ignore the (averaged) 37.5% shield mitigation and do about 1.6x more damage. The rest of the time, when the target already has maxed mitigation, your PMs will have a 30% chance to ignore the 60% shield mitigation and do 100% damage instead of 40% damage (2.5x more damage).

Since capital ships when fired on have a higher mitigation limit, and since they stay at that high mitigation for much longer than frigates (which die), shield negation has a much larger effect when targeting capital ships.

So Phase Missiles are most effective against targets with a lot of durability and are (relatively) less effective on small ships (think: Disciples, Seekers, LRM).

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Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Seleuceia, reply 4
Some advocated giving the guardian's shield projection the PM blocking...doing so would make PM blocking more accessible early on, and it also would help protect all ships instead of just a few as shield projection is an AoE ability...some however felt PM blocking was only needed late game...furthermore, many felt PMs were only a problem against capital ships and not against fleets, so having fleet wide PM blocking would be too powerful...

As I recall, most people favored buffing the domina...personally, I favored buffing shield projection (and even did so in Project Equilibrium)...my reasoning was mostly that the domina could be buffed in many other ways to make its abilities more useful...furthermore, I believed AoE PM blocking was essential since the Advent depended heavily on higher shield mitigation (granted through culture bonuses and their higher shield tech) and all their ships were disproportionately vulnerable to PMs, not just Advent capital ships....

But then the developers allowed PM blocking to be granted via technologies, and I think it's safe to say most people would prefer that mechanism over support ships providing the PM blocking...the only real controversy is whether it should be all shield techs, only Advent shield techs, or only the highest level Advent shield techs...

Thanks. I'll note in the above post that adding PM block via shield research might be viable, as well the note about the Domina.  Personally, I think the Domina AND the Cielo need a buff, but I also think that's another thread. :P

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
Or they could change the fighter AI (MoveLikeFighter or something) to not waste half or more of their potential DPS by flying many squares past the enemy. That would be a more elegant solution IMO.

I'm not sure I see the difference. In order to move like a fighter, fighters would HAVE to be able to decelerate, come around, and approach faster.

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
Wouldn't those flak weapons also attack enemy LRF? A capital ship being able to shoot down a few bomber squadrons entirely after only a couple of passes would increase the capital ship's firepower (against strike craft and frigates) by a whole lot. The cap might be able to take on as many as 20 LRM alone, which shouldn't be possible.

Yes. On the other hand, since they have short range, and capital ships are, in general, very slow, you can micro your LRMs.

I'm not trying to be elitist, but a classic example is Marines vs. Banelings in Starcraft 2. In this analogy, your Marines are your LRFs (a ranged glass cannon) and the Banelings are your capital ships w/ point defenses.

The Baneling is a little rolling ball of death, employed because it is (relatively) cheap and deals large amount of splash damage to light units like Marines.

Unfortunately, all the Baneling can do is roll toward the Marines, and Banelings are rather slow under most circumstances. Though this isn't too much of a problem if the Marines stand still (since Banelings tend to appear in large groups), Terran players can split their Marines into scattered small groups to avoid the splash damage of the Banelings.  Cost for cost, a split Marine group will almost always come out ahead.

My point is: if Starcraft 2 players can do it, so can Sinners!  Split your LRFs into small groups (three or so) and have individual groups fall back as the capital ship approaches -- other groups can continue firing with impunity.

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
Those situations are a bit too rare to care about, I think. In nearly any map that isn't decided by the initial rush, flak frigates will almost certainly come into play...

I'm trying to account for as many situations as possible. 

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
It already takes a very annoyingly large amount of time for carrier cruisers to regenerate their antimatter, especially if they're also trying to make even one or two phase jumps along the way, especially if you're Vasari - if anything, I think that should be buffed.

Hence: I lack data, therefore I withhold judgment.

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
Phase missiles are a general problem, it just hits the Advent in particular because of the Advent's horrible capital ship durability.

Noted.

Quoting Wrath89, reply 5
It depends on what the target is. "Shield mitigation starts at 15%, increases 1% per 10 points of damage, and reduces 1.25% per second. Under normal circumstances 450 damage must strike a frigate (single one second salvo), or 600 damage for capital ships, to maximize shield mitigation." If you have 30% shield negation researched, then when you're attacking a frigate (maybe 1000-1500 hull/shields combined), during the first 450 damage you do, your PMs will have a 30% chance to ignore the (averaged) 37.5% shield mitigation and do about 1.6x more damage. The rest of the time, when the target already has maxed mitigation, your PMs will have a 30% chance to ignore the 60% shield mitigation and do 100% damage instead of 40% damage (2.5x more damage).

Since capital ships when fired on have a higher mitigation limit, and since they stay at that high mitigation for much longer than frigates (which die), shield negation has a much larger effect when targeting capital ships.

So Phase Missiles are most effective against targets with a lot of durability and are (relatively) less effective on small ships (think: Disciples, Seekers, LRM).

Also noted. Thanks for the analysis -- it basically confirms what I was thinking. Mad karma for you!

Question: are you for a GENERAL phase missile nerf (let's say 30% damage mitigation reduction 30% of the time, for a hypothetical nerf), a buff to Phase Missile Block research or abilities, or all of the above?

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Frostflare, reply 6
I'm not sure I see the difference. In order to move like a fighter, fighters would HAVE to be able to decelerate, come around, and approach faster.

The problem is that the current MoveLikeFighter? AI is bad at finding its targets by the time the weapons cooldown (12 seconds I think) has expired. Simply buffing fighters' stats could help solve this, partially, but isn't the (initial) best solution in light of the flawed AI.

Yes. On the other hand, since they have short range, and capital ships are, in general, very slow, you can micro your LRMs.

I'm not trying to be elitist, but a classic example is Marines vs. Banelings in Starcraft 2. In this analogy, your Marines are your LRFs (a ranged glass cannon) and the Banelings are your capital ships w/ point defenses.

The Baneling is a little rolling ball of death, employed because it is (relatively) cheap and deals large amount of splash damage to light units like Marines.

Unfortunately, all the Baneling can do is roll toward the Marines, and Banelings are rather slow under most circumstances. Though this isn't too much of a problem if the Marines stand still (since Banelings tend to appear in large groups), Terran players can split their Marines into scattered small groups to avoid the splash damage of the Banelings.  Cost for cost, a split Marine group will almost always come out ahead.

My point is: if Starcraft 2 players can do it, so can Sinners!  Split your LRFs into small groups (three or so) and have individual groups fall back as the capital ship approaches -- other groups can continue firing with impunity.

LRF max speed / acceleration is 500/150

Cap max speed / acceleration is 525/100

They're somewhat comparable, and the capital ship actually has the advantage after the first couple seconds of the battle. But also, Sins is not Starcraft. The most important difference is that in Sins, ships take a LONG time to rotate around; if you tell a group of units to move in some direction and then hold position, it could take like 20 seconds for them to start firing again if they have to rotate. By that time, the capital ship would have ripped one LRF group to shreds.

The capital ship would essentially function as a group of ~25 flak frigates taking on LRF. Competitive online players know that trying to micro LRF in response to that sort of thing rarely works out well, because the enemy will simply micro their flak in return; and, while flak can easily continue doing most of their damage while moving, LRF can't, unless they happen to be facing forward against a good targetable enemy frigate. The capital ship (or flak group) could easily kite through the LRF groups and wipe them out, while the LRF waste most of their firepower just moving and turning, trying to get into range.

Regardless, this sort of thing shouldn't be the role of choice for capital ships (which is what it would probably turn into if caps had these deadly flak guns).

I'm OK with how things are currently. Massed bombers are actually not as common as one would think in competitive online games, due to the critical mass / resources necessary.

I'm trying to account for as many situations as possible.

Look at it from this perspective, then... on those maps, are bombers a problem? I don't think so, they'll be balanced out easily if you invest in strike craft of your own.

Question: are you for a GENERAL phase missile nerf (let's say 30% damage mitigation reduction 30% of the time, for a hypothetical nerf), a buff to Phase Missile Block research or abilities, or all of the above?

Maybe the later-tier PM research should be changed, maybe so that the tiers 3 and 5 only give +3% shield negation per level and so that the damage increase is only like 5% per level. Or something like that. The nerf shouldn't be too heavy, I think, because the advantages of PMs are the only strength the Assailant has (it sucks in most other respects when compared to the LRF of the other races).

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

You could easily make a passive ability that has an AoE effect doing DPS only to SC...capital ships still have one extra ability slot so this solution is entirely viable and doesn't affect LRFs in the slightest...

I'm not saying it is a good idea...I'm just saying you can make capital ships shoot down SC without them being anti-LRF bastions...

 

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Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Wrath89, reply 7
also, Sins is not Starcraft. The most important difference is that in Sins, ships take a LONG time to rotate around;

I'm well aware of the fact that Sins is not Starcraft. I was simply pointing out that Starcraft 2 players face a comparable situation with MUCH less time to react (accurate clicking and reaction time requirements for Starcraft 2 are insane -- Sins is slightly more forgiving in this department owing to slower overall speeds and better AI, but you need that extra time to manage your empire).

Imagine that you jump your LRFs into a gravity well and see a capital ship with point defenses.  The first thing you do is split your fleet in half.  Then you split the halves in half.  That should do it.

Also: LRFs can fire on the move -- even Advent LRFs, owing to their side-facing lenses (speaking of which: would it not be AWESOME if the side lenses were actually DRONES that floated around the ship and could be manually switched from focusing forward to focusing to the sides? You could even get an upgrade later on so you could get double the number of lense drones, allowing you to fire all six axes!)

Quoting Wrath89, reply 7
The capital ship would essentially function as a group of ~25 flak frigates taking on LRF.

I think you DRASTICALLY overestimate my suggestion.

I suggested, for example, giving assault and dreadnought capships EIGHT flak guns. Even if their damage is on the order of double that of a flak frigate (which is not unreasonable), that means that an assault or dreadnought capital ship will only be the equivalent of four flak frigates (twice as many guns as a typical flak frigate [so two flak frigates worth of guns], twice the damage output [2x2 is four]). Granted, it's a very, very DURABLE four flak frigates, but it's still only four flak frigates.

Wait a sec...

4x Junsurak Sentinels: 5700 health/shields

Kortul Devastator: 4075 health/shields at level 1

On the other hand, a capital ship doesn't lose DPS as it is damaged and it gets more of a benefit from shield mitigation.  That said: flak frigates are tough!

Returning to the subject at hand: though I think point defenses are a good suggestion, I'm still up in the air on whether or not point defenses ought to be researched first. Your point about close quarters games and bomber critical mass is a good one.

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

Again...just make it an ability, and most of these problems go away

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

imho. flack could use a hp nerf.

Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Pbhead, reply 11
imho. flack could use a hp nerf.

Could only agree if they got a damage buff vs bombers. As they are, flaks main job is anti fighter and damage sink. Yes some people use them to take down lrf/lf but thats not their primary/most effective functions. If you take away the damage sink side of things, then we should make them true Anti-SC and up the effectiveness vs bombers.

Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top

Better to increase the accuracy against light armor rather than increase the damage against light armor...that way flak doesn't become stronger against LRFs...

Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top

{Bumping this as I actually wrote a lot of this reply on February 12th, didn't get around to posting it sooner and was also hesitating about whether I needed to clarify anything, but then I can always clarify in later posts anyway, so here it is.
The order of information may jump about a little, so my apologies if that is the case. I've now added even more to it too.}

EDIT: Just a note, the post was a little wider than most, probably because of the charts, so just SCROLL to the right, from the bottom of the post. All that you miss out on by doing so is my [lack of an] avatar. ^_^"

"Basic probability (.3^32.6) tells us that the Kanrak has a roughly .000000000000000000899% chance of destroying the Cobalt without damaging its shields at all.
This means that most of the time you're gonna have to eat through the target's shields before you can destroy anything with Phase Missiles -- the shield bypass just makes things a LITTLE weaker in the hull department once you've gotten through the shields."

If that is what it calculates, that doesn't matter at all. The idea is not to hope that it ALWAYS destroys a target without ever touching their shields, it's that it destroys them before wiping out ALL of the shields.
If 99.5% of shields are knocked out by the time all of the hull disappears, you have still avoided the shots required to deal the remaining amount (0.5%) of damage to shields, which would also be mitigated of course, so you save more shots than if those extra shields did not mitigate (this is the difference between that extra life being shields that would otherwise mitigate damage and the extra life instead being armour that would not mitigate, not counting the lesser reductions from armour).
These calculations all suppose that whatever chance causes the effect to trigger precisely that amount of times.

Either way, as I understand it, there is no point in dealing any damage to the hull before removing the shields unless you can wipe out all of the hull before wiping out all of the shields, but, as I say, you don't NEED it to wipe out 0% of the shields to be useful. The one exception is with abilities like Disintegrate added into the equation, abilities that remove an amount from the hull directly as well, so that having first weakened more of the hull with Phase Missiles means that the ability destroys the ship before removing the last shields. Unless the ability is one like Nano-Disassembler, which only affects the hull, or any affect (I can't think of any) that deals damage to both shields and hull but MORE to the hull, however, a percentile chance of phase missiles hitting the hull would still need to be greater than the percentage of overall life that the target ship or structure has in HULL, otherwise, if it it equal, shields will still all be removed at the same time or (far more likely) before the hull. Obviously, if phase missiles just happen to kick in far more often than their percentile chance suggests it will, then the very occasional early kill (well, it's not alive, so destruction really) will occur from Phase Missiles, but then that's going to happen so rarely and if anything, are more likely to find PMs kicking in less often than their percentage suggests, according to the following:

Multiple chances of an event occurring at a given percentage have a lower percentage of occurring once than the number obtained from multiplying the decimal value by the number of chances.

For example, a coin has two sides. If we flip it twice, what is the chance that tails will occur even once?¹

Each side, assuming it doesn't land on an edge or something odd and unusual, has a 50% chance (supposedly ^_^) of landing upright.
If you simply tried 0.5×2(1.0) from 2 chances, you'd be convinced there was a 100% chance, but we know that this is not the case.

The correct formula is 1-(1-x)^`
where x = the decimal value of the percentage, e.g. 0.25 for a 25% chance each time
and where ^` is "to the power of" whatever number of attempts are made.

For the coin flip (try it in your calculator): 1-(1-0.5)^2 =0.75.
2 Heads = failure
2 Tails = success
Tails first, Heads second = success
Heads first, Tails second = success
"Three out of four ain't bad!"

—————————————————————————————————————————
¹An interesting story, to me at least XD, I always choose tails and, while it's different for each person and some people even swear by heads, I once predicted 7 coins in a row, choosing tails each time. The coin was not rigged and was part of the change my friend had from purchasing lunch at a café. He would sometimes swap the side the coin started on, sometimes he would choose to catch it, sometimes not, but 7 times in a row, I was right (calling it each time only directly before each flip). He was ready to flip it an eighth time, but I declined to bet.
He flipped it anyway.
Heads! :D
—————————————————————————————————————————

So, applying this to 5 phase missile shots at full upgrades without the additional aid of a Stilakus' Shield Disruption, for 30%...
1-(1-0.3)^5=0.83193.

5 chances of 30%, you might think about 1.5 should, on average, bypass shields, but there is only around an 83.2% chance of it happening once.

With only 10% shield bypass chance, after firing 10 shots,
1-(1-0.1)^10=0.651321559
there would only be a 65.13% chance of one bypassing shields.
If you instead were just reliably dealing 10% more damage, the 6 shots would deal a little more damage than you would from dealing 0.6513 of a shot (out of the ten) directly to the hull and the other 9.3487 shots normally distributed to the hull and shields (I did factor in mitigation and armour).

So, here's another example. If you look at plenty of TEC and Vasari ships, most of them have somewhere from 60-67% of their life as hull. Even amongst the Advent ships, they're either just under or exactly 50% hull (Disciple+Seeker+Destra, Illuminator) or over 55% hull (Purge, etc.), with the SINGLE exception of the Iconus Guardian, which regularly donates a lot of its shields to protecting the others anyway, so phase missiles only seem good at all when targeting either Iconus Guardians or ships that are benefiting greatly from the cuddle of an Iconus' shields.

If we consider that plenty of ships also have over 65%, I would like to take 64% as an average. It may be just a tad higher than the overall average, but then neutral ships are also TEC and they are scout/light/siege/flak/heavy, which have 72%/63.1%/64.1%/66.7%/66.7%/63.7% hull. The average of those is 66.05% too, so again, 64% as my average seems fair enough.

If said unlisted ship shoots 10 times with a 10% chance of going straight through to the hull each time and we take the realistic floating point number of PM shots that bypass shields as 0.6513 and we also suppose that the ship is 63% shields & 64% hull, with straight 50% shield mitigation when being fired and 2.5 armour, also supposing armour precisely divides damage by 1.x where x is .05 per armour, so that damage is multiplied by 0.5 versus shields and divided by 1.125 versus hull, then
~36% of 9.3487 shots go straight to the shields
~64% of 9.3487 shots go straight to the hull because the shields would have gone by now
All 0.6513 (pfffft) shots go straight to the hull regardless.

Comparing to the imagined damage if you saw total life, ignored Shield Mitigation and ignored Armour,
0.36×9.3487×0.5(shield mitigation) = damage value of "1.682766" shots
0.64×9.3487÷1.125(armour) = damage value of "5.31837" shots
0.6513÷1.125 (armour still applies to Phase Missiles that get through) = damage value of "0.57893" shots
1.682766+5.31837+0.57893=7.580066 shots worth of damage compared to damage from 10 shots against 0 defence.

A straight 10% damage bonus upgrade instead would deal
0.64×10×0.5×1.1 = damage value of "3.52" shots
0.36×10÷1.125×1.1 = damage value of "3.52" shots
(See why I was keen to choose 64%/36% and 2.5 armour exactly? ^_^)
3.52+3.52=7.04 shots worth of damage compared to damage from 10 shots against 0 defence

Random Minnesotan: "But 7.580066 is often recognized as being a larger number than 7.04, don't cha know?"
The Phase Missiles seem to be 7.67% better!
¤¤¤¤¤¤
Now let's try with 30%:

1-(1-0.3)^10=0.971752475
10-0.97175=9.02825
0.36×9.02825×0.5(shield mitigation) = damage value of "1.625085" shots
0.64×9.02825÷1.125(armour) = damage value of "5.13607" shots
0.97175÷1.125 (armour still applies to Phase Missiles that get through) = damage value of "0.86377" shots
1.625085+5.13607+0.86377=7.624925 shots worth of damage compared to damage from 10 shots against 0 defence.

A straight 30% damage bonus upgrade instead would deal
0.64×10×0.5×1.3 = damage value of "4.16" shots
0.36×10÷1.125×1.3 = damage value of "4.16" shots
4.16+4.16=8.32 shots worth of damage compared to damage from 10 shots against 0 defence

"Ha! 30% consistent damage is superior!"

Now these formulas are only taking into account the chance of bypassing shields ONCE in that many shots, so of course there is a chance that more will get through, but the problem with this idea is that the number is still less than 10, so if 10 shots were required to destroy the ship normally, we've dealt more damage NOW, but if we've determined we're very likely to still remove all of the shields before destroying the hull anyway, the remaining shots will deal less damage, obviously, seeing as we'll still have to go through whatever shields might be remaining and the phase missiles do nothing once the shields are gone anyway. A 10% bonus to damage will just continue to deal 10% more to either, regardless of type. After the calculated amount of shots have been fired, more shields will be left than without phase technology, so there are plenty of shields that still have to be depleted and much damage is yet to be mitigated. If you've dealt more to the shields already, future damage will be greater overall because less mitigation is left. Most often, phase technology swaps the order or some damage amounts, but that's about it.

The simple concept you have to understand is that if you cannot bypass shields often enough to remove ALL hull before ALL shields have been depleted, Phase Technology has done nothing for your ships.

Compare it to a straight 10% bonus and it's pathetic, because dealing more damage to a ship initially means nothing if it takes the same time to destroy it and if you remove all of the shields first despite some PMs going through, you're destroying it at 90.909..% (1÷1.1) of the speed that you would with a straight 10% damage bonus.

The higher the shield mitigation on the target, the more useful Phase Technology is at that point. The highest you would see it peak to in normal conditions (no late game 2% or 4% Advent bonuses) is 65%, not counting culture, which I think I've seen cause it rise to maybe 67 or even 69%, but only in very strong culture.

Is the base maximum 50%, but common amounts of culture raise it to around 65%, or is 65% the normal maximum and culture only boosts it that little bit? The exact detail evades my recollection at this point in time, so if someone could remind me, that would be nice. ^_^
Shield Mitigation only starts at 15% though and lower shield mitigation means that there's even less gain from bypassing a small amount of shields. During big battles, plenty of ships will be around 25-35%, so using 50% is probably generous.
Armour is often only 0 or 1, true, but it's a smaller difference and then, of course, the base armour is sometimes greater than 2.5 and ships can be upgraded to much higher amounts for a much greater benefit to the hull than the 2-4% to shield mitigation that only one race has. If the hull negates even more, again, it doesn't seem as beneficial to bypass a small amount of shields if destroying the whole lot of shields and hull would have been faster with normal upgrades.
Yes, you can get phase missile damage upgrades, but they come much later than normal 10% upgrades for other weapon types and you're paying a lot more for them.

Now it is time for some more examples. Due to the mixture of post editing dates, some of my points below might feature quite a bit repetition, so my apologies and you can just look at the examples and text directly relating to them below. I shan't apologise for an overall long post though, as complainers should "l2read" and plenty of people regularly read very long novels throughout the entirety of their lives anyway, so zip it and just pay attention! :D
If someone wishes to dispute some point I've made, I recommend you go over ALL of the text below first, to make sure you haven't just missed something I did state, just not in this first section.

¤¤¤¤¤¤

"Kanrak: 1.5x damage to medium armor"

Anti-medium (long range) damage vs medium (light assault) is 1.3333×, not 1.5×, it has been for quite some time, so my first examples will use the newer 1.3333×, but for consistency, I'll post the relevant 1.5× anyway, just after the first.


With only a fairly small chance of destroying hull first, the amount of shots fired required for enough phase missiles to go through(ignore/bypass) shields and destroy hull first is most often greater than the number required to just destroy it outright. By hitting hull earlier, you deal more damage early on, but so what? If you don't destory it all before depleting all of the shields, all you are doing is gradually destroying both instead of slowly going through shields and then tearing through hull. You chjange the order, but that is all. The only likely benefit in this situation would be if there were some abilities, likely Capital Ship abilities, which ignores shields (and thus both the damage mitigation and the large amount of remaining shields) and will swiftly wipe out whatever reamining hull there is OR abilities that deal damage to both at once, such as Disintegration, which would deal the same DPS to both shields and armour (damage to shields may or may not be mitigated, but it doesn't matter in this instance), possibly leaving many shields left but wiping out the far lower remaining amount of hull points.

From my calculations, Phase Missiles seem mostly useless and apart from Iconus Guardians, no target is really affected by them by any more than they would be if it were instead a consistent percentile increase in damage (and just hit shields first, like other weapon types) and a minimum of 41.5556% ((Disciple Vessels) phase mitigation is neceesary before phase missiles actually cause less shots to be needed to destroy a ship sooner (by destroying the hull before removing all shields) than they would without the phase effect.
In the case of Iconus Guardians, it's only about 19.8%, but Disciple Vessels, Seeker Vessels and Destra Crusaders are all around the 42% mark (~22% research of 30% required WITH Stilakus' Shield Disruption).
It only gets even less impressive in other cases, even for other Advent ships. Illuminators require 44%, while hull-heavy ships (Envoys, colony frigates, starbase builders) will be in the extremes and in general Vasari ships, or to a greater extent, TEC ships, with a greater percentage of hit points being made of hull points, require high phase percentages like 75.513514% for Cobalt Light Frigates (impossible in the game)!
These calculations are based on armour providing a ~5% decrease in damage (calculated by 1+x, where x=0.05×armour, so 2 armour divides damage by 1.1, rather than multiplying by 0.9) and shield mitigation being at a set 50%.
If mitigation is at the extremes of around 60% (I've seen above 60%, which confused me, but I expect it was to do with culture and it was a capital ship too, if that makes a difference), a little less phase chance will be required to actually make it destroy the ship sooner than it would by targetting shields first, but in a battle with many ships all naturally spreading damage over many targets, imagine only 15% shield mitigation. With shields being far less useful (actually less protection from damage than hull provides with 4 armour!), the gain from ignoring them occasionally will become even more negligible. If too many ships fire at one target, you boost their damage mitigation and instead of even only 'overkilling' them by wasting too many shots to actually destroy them, you also waste shots while weakening it; constant overkill, so again, using 50% shield mitigation is optimistic or generous, because it's not generally wise to manually lower your own ships' damage actual output.

With all this, imagine how much more useful percentile damage upgrades are! Shield mitigation mitigates the bonus damage, but only by exact amounts, not by percentage. What I mean is that a 15% increase will still (basically, but I'll address this) increase damage by 15% against shields, it'll just be a smaller bonus amount to damage than it is without the mitigation, of course. The exception is that shield mitigation increase is based on the exact amount of damage taken, so the last sentence isn't entirely accurate and a small dampening effect may be applied to the percentile damage increase. The change should be far, far too small to make phase missiles comparible in efficacy of hastening the destruction of enemy ships.

Some charts, indicating the number of hits for a Kanrak Assailant to destroy an Iconus, a Cobalt, a Disciple and an Illuminator, supposing 50% Shield Mitigation and 5% protection per armour.

The format:

Unit Shields Shield Hits Phase Hits
  Hull Hull Hits Phase %
  Hull% Total Hits Killed by?

The above is placed side by side four times, showing the results with 30%, 40%, 50% mitigation and then finally, from my calculations, the approximate minimum % mitigation required for Phase Missiles to destroy something more quickly than it would with a straight percentile damage increase instead of phasing.

It might be a little harder to follow outside of Excel, but do try! Note that extra spacing you may see before and after the chart below is so that I can easily edit this if necessary, as the post with trying to remove the charts using delete or backspace (chart highlighted or cursor in front/behind, it doesn't matter).

† Mitigation required to be destroyed faster by PMs than by normal with equivalent percentile damage upgrade.

‡ Mitigation required to be destroyed faster by PMs than normal.



                        † ‡
Ico.G 675 76.2 254 675 76.2 190 675 76.2 152 675 76.2 384.6  
  1500 308 30% 1500 308 40% 1500 308 50% 1500 308 0.1980 0.1983
  31% 384 Pha   384 Pha   384 Pha   384 Norm  
Cob.L 635 40.3 134 635 40.3 101 635 40.3 80.6 635 40.3 53.37  
  370 42.7 30% 370 42.7 40% 370 42.7 50% 370 42.7 0.7551 0.4856
  63% 83 Norm   83 Norm   83 Pha   83 Pha  
Dis.V 425 27 89.9 425 27 67.4 425 27 53.9 425 27 64.9  
  450 51.9 30% 450 51.9 40% 450 51.9 50% 450 51.9 0.4156 0.3419
  49% 78.9 Norm   78.9 Pha   78.9 Pha   78.9 Pha  
Illum 500 40.2 134 500 40.2 100 500 40.2 80.3 500 40.2 91.27  
  500 73 30% 500 73 40% 500 73 50% 500 73 0.4400 0.3549
  50% 113 Norm   113 Pha   113 Pha   113 Pha  

 

The Iconus Guardian should typically be destroyed by PMs before it would have from straight damage at 30% SM, hence "Pha" in the "Killed by?" box.  "Shield Hits", "Hull Hits" and "Total Hits" show how many hits it would take to destroy the ship normally, Phase Hits shows the number of phase missiles that would have to be fired (with the phase% chance in "Phase %") to destroy the hull before wiping out all shields, i.e. the number of hits that must be fired for the given Phase % chance to be at all useful. You can see that it should take 384 Kanrak hits normally and 254 PMs to destroy the hull 675 Hull Points ÷ (13 damage ÷ 1.1 for armour × 0.75) = 76.1538, or 76.2.

In case you wondered, I did test and they require the approximate mitigation to be destroyed faster by PMs:
Ico.G - 19.83%
Cob.L - 48.558%
Dis.V - 34.1865%
Illum -35.49%
You can see that in the ‡ column.

In the † column before it, you can see that for Phase Technology to be more useful than just having the equivalent level damage upgrade, those ships need the following phase chances:
Ico.G - 19.80%
Cob.L - 75.5135135% - NEVER!
Dis.V - 41.5556%
Illum - 44.00%
All other frigates/cruisers - over the 41.5556% of Disciple Vessels. Advent capital ships start with more armour than frigates and more hull than shields, so you should need notably more than 42% for them, although less once they get to very high levels, as they end up with more shields than hull. Hard to say with a 10th level Revelation with 14 armour (8 base + 6 ability armour)!

~~~

Just for the OP, this chart shows what it would be (for the two ships it applies to) if Anti-Medium damage was 1.5×:

                      † ‡
635 35.8 119 635 35.8 89.55 635 35.8 71.6 635 35.8 47.44  
370 37.9 30% 370 37.9 40% 370 37.9 50% 370 37.9 0.7551 0.4856
63% 73.8 Norm   73.8 Norm   73.8 Pha   73.8 Pha  
425 24 79.9 425 24 59.94 425 24 47.9 425 24 57.69  
450 46.2 30% 450 46.2 40% 450 46.2 50% 450 46.2 0.4156 0.3419
49% 70.1 Norm   70.1 Pha   70.1 Pha   70.1 Pha  


You can see that while the actual number of hits changes, it changes in both cases by the same percentile amounts so that the same phase missile percentages are required for both † and ‡.

The percentages are based on the target ship only, it seems, regardless of the exact base damage dealt by the ship firing with phase missiles, or of damage multipliers.

~~~


It's a pretty weak ability if, with maximum upgrades, phase missiles won't be of any use against Disciple Vessels unless you have a Stilakus for it too.

It is possible that there is some detail I've missed, or that I may have used an incorrect formula at some point, but I'm 99.999999999999% sure that's not the case. Feel free to politely point out any mistake you think you have found though.

Discuss!

HERE ENDETH THE SECTION OF THE POST RELATING TO PHASE MISSILES.

 

Just touching on the topic Fighters and Bombers, if you make it too much easier for Fighters to stay alive by weakening the damage, accuracy, damage bonus of Anti-Strikecraft vs Fighters (1.33333 currently), they have full reign of the skies and no adversaries if you have enough to negate the AS threat.
The danger of weakening Anti-Strikecraft vessels is that neither fighters nor bombers are very good at taking down assault vessels quickly as both (probably fairly) deal only 50% damage to Medium armour, while assault types deal 50% more vs carriers (Heavy armour). If you make it so that strikecraft are not taken down as easily (even just bombers), players will generally require more Anti-Strikecraft vessels, which allows a player with carriers to get more fairly cheap light assault units to directly engage the AS.
Fighters being stronger will FORCE more AS, which allows the carrier player to lamely pre-emptively counter by already having a good (appropriate) portion of their army composed of assault types.
Currently, I believe you only need around half the cost in AS to deal with Fighters (per squadron, based on half carrier costs/third of Aeria DH costs), so I wouldn't rule out making AS a little weaker or more expensive for their purpose, but you must keep in mind how screwed someone will be if there are simply not enough AS units. It's the same as having no anti-air in a mostly ground based game or having absolutely no detection when invisible units arrive. Seeing as carrier class capitals are available from game start in Quick Start and almost immediately without Quick Start, it would be pretty bloody lame if anti-strikecraft were not available quickly enough to defend against the rush even when scouted (never mind lame, actually, that would just be a case of imbalance -_-). You need either AS, some sort of static defence that can handle it or to have enough ships/more than one capital ship to be able to destroy the charging enemy carrier capital before the superior number of fighters/bombers (and their capital ship) destroy too much of your fleet for you to be able to ever destroy the capital. Carrier capitals need to not be so strong that they and their supporting fleet beat another capital and its SUPERIOR fleet in the early game, we really need it to only be an issue once people can actually REACH Anti-Strikecraft and only then, if the opponent doesn't have enough, should Strikecraft prove so powerful, punishing the opponent for not making enough AS/Fighters.

Part of the strength of Strikecraft comes from them FORCING the opponent to get a decent amount of Anti-Strikecraft vessels, but obviously that's no much of a strength if AS actually are so efficient that you are only forced to invest significantly LESS in AS than the opponent has already invested in SC.