Ship balance?
 

Does anyone else find the ship class balance alittle... off?

I just did a simulation in which my 950 kt Battleship BARELY beat my 425 kt frigate using the same level tech. Given the size difference, you would think the Battleship (using 5 Heavy weapon mount lvl 20 APB's) would beat my friate (using 2 Large weapon mount lvl 20 APB's) rather easily. But when it was over the Battleship had half its structure points left and obviously no shields or armour.

This isent the first time ive noticed that frigate seem to outclass much larger ships, I think its the defense bonus since it seems the Battleship had alot of trouble hitting the frigate while the Frigate just blasted away at it.

Thoughts?

Re: Ship balance?
 

Sounds out of balance to me.

Certainly smaller ships should be harder to hit... at the same time I'd expect a larger ship to be wary of this advantage and thus have much more impressive targetting equipment.

I don't like the way % to hit adds linearly - i.e. adds 10% to hit means add 10 to the percent chance to hit. Seems like adding 10% to hit should multiply some attack number by 1.10, which is then compared to a number on the other ship... very similar to civ4.

Re: Ship balance?
 

It would have been nice if it was just correcting a previous imbalance. One thing that's bothered me with most of the 4 X games is you always build your largest hull type available, so you would have fleets of Dreadnoughts and BB's roaming space.

Smaller ships should give a capital ship's main battery trouble. Think of a WWII BB trying to hit a PT boat with its 16" guns - wouldn't happen. That said it's why large ships carry a very large secondary (and in some cases tertiary) battery.

If large+ weapon mounts had this inaccuracy I'd be ok. We could then design ships with a reason to include a secondary battery. Load a few heavy mount Proton guns, but don't forget normal mounts for all those frigates!

At any rate, I agree it sounds like something's "off".

Re: Ship balance?
 

In fleets the smaller pickets sort out the small fast ships.Larger ships are the artillery.

Re: Ship balance?
 

Part of the problem is that frigates can use large mounts... there is a huge difference between no mount and large (1x compared to 1.33x damage), but a smaller difference between large and heavy (1.33x compared to 1.5x damage). In SE4, frigates had no mount, so were easily outclassed by larger ships (esp. battleships). Just another result of the lack of math in stock SE5...

Re: Ship balance?
 

Design seem to be more important than ever, I'd say. Armor is far more valuable than guns, for instance.

Re: Ship balance?
 

Part of the problem is the fact that frigates can carry mounts (when they are large enough), thats true. But the Battleship WOULD outclass the frigate easily if it could hit it at all, the frigate has 78% defense bonus compared to 41% for the Battleship with each having 43% attack bonus I believe.

Armour is important for sure, but both have maxed armour and the Battleship has 2880 shields with 2880 kt armour while the Frigate has 480 shields with 1440 kt armour. The battleships shields are eaten through pretty quick though with the frigate landing most of its shots and the Battleship hitting nothing but space with like 9 outta 10 shots.

Edit- Gnome, I agree with your post as well, I didnt like how in SE4 smaller ships were totally useless in late game (well I used them as fleet support ships anyways for realism in my games) but here its the opposite, the thing is in Naval warefare while smaller ships have their purpose you would never see a small frigate or destroyer kick the butt of a battleship in a 1 on 1 battle in WW2 for example, the battleship would laugh off the puny guns of the smaller ship and annihilate it with its own.

Re: Ship balance?
 

How about if you give the battleship a point-blank strategy?

Re: Ship balance?
 

Thats a good idea, it definatly gave much better results though with "point blank" strategy the battleship and the frigate seems to try to become "one" with each other http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif So I tried it with "short weapons range" and it gave the same results but without the whole becoming "one" with each other thing. In the end the battleship beat the frigate and still had 1800+ shields left.

I still maintain there should be some tweaking on the balance here, even at optimal weapons range the battleship should outclass a frigate IMO.

Thanks though.

Re: Ship balance?
 

For better balance, you can try the Balance Mod. Stock just has too many niggling issues to be fixable piecemeal...