SE4 Stock Balance Mod

[oleg]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Regarding balancing PDC's. Someone mentioned a long time ago, don't know if it was brought up in this thread or not, one way to balance the PDC would be to decrease it's range. That way at least you have to use a few on each ship, like the AI does anyway, instead of a few dedicated PDC ships covering the whole fleet. Does this seem like an AI friendly change? And is someone going to tell me it's in the Devnull mod?

Geoschmo

I might be a bad player since I often have troubles to cover fleet with dedicated PDC ships in auto combat.

Usually such ships end up in one end of the battle while my other ships get slautered by missiles few sectors away. Making ships to stay in formation helps but it introduce even more troubles. Now I simply put extra PDC on every ship just to be safe !

[tesco samoa]

geo i have them lose damage as the range increases up to 50% at the final range
and doubled the cost of research.
and as extra balance increased the damage resistance of the seekers alittle.

It seems to work quite well in testing As missles do hit as compaired to stock

[Suicide Junkie]

Why a reduction at range rather than a flat reduction?

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by oleg:
I might be a bad player since I often have troubles to cover fleet with dedicated PDC ships in auto combat.

Usually such ships end up in one end of the battle while my other ships get slautered by missiles few sectors away. Making ships to stay in formation helps but it introduce even more troubles. Now I simply put extra PDC on every ship just to be safe !

I wouldn't say you are a bad player, just maybe not using enough of them. You are right about the AI combat. To counter that I'd suggest more then one PDC ship per fleet. Three or four for a decent sized fleet should give you a good chance of having one in the right place.

Of course putting some on every ship works too.

Geoschmo

[tesco samoa]

sj preference....

[PvK]

PD thoughts:

For a simple balance mod, I don't think it's necessary to remove the existing interesting choice and trade-offs between PD ships and PD on every ship.

Current suggestion:

1) Use the new settings.txt entry for Seeker Defense Bonus to give seekers a chance to get through PD. I suggest about 60%, though this will get stomped by ships training and deploying Combat Sensors stacking with the PD bonus. Maybe for higher levels, the seeker damage resistance could be increased, and/or have the PDC damage taper off at range as Tesco mentioned.

2) Increase the effect of Small ECM for fighters. The unmodded game has it at +10/+20/+30, which gets outstripped by ships with +65 Combat Sensors +20 Ship Training +20 Fleet Training. Ideally, fighter defenses would be able to keep up via research, perhaps by giving Afterburners a defense bonus, adding more ECM levels, increasing the ECM levels' effects, and/or adding other defensive components for fighters (e.g. stealth/scattering armor?). By adding stuff at the end of the tech tree, it won't make fighters dominate low-tech ships. However, for this mod, it's hard to add stuff without seeming to re-do things. Personally, to make up the +70 advantage of high-tech ships, I'd split the Troop and Fighter Versions of Small ECM (to avoid causing balance problems with troops), and then make fighter Small ECM give +20/+40/+60, and then give Afterburners +10/+20/+30 defense.

PvK

[Edit: TDM->Tesco]

[ July 29, 2003, 21:58: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Captain Kwok]

4 days later and nothing is decided! Ha Ha Ha!
Some good ideas throughout, but who is going to start making some decisions?