2.2 Update: Combat Balance Adjustments
Greetings Commanders!
The next release we're currently working towards is a 2.2 update which will be arriving soon, along with a short beta.
We wanted to take the time to discuss the changes we're making to give you folk a heads up, and explain our thinking a little. We've separated the various changes out into their own posts to keep the feedback channel nice and clean. Mark and I will hopefully be able to jump in to answer follow up questions.
So have a read and feel free to discuss in the threads, your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
General Combat Balance
We'd like to continue the process of combat balancing based on feedback from 2.2 and watching how things have evolved since. Sandro, Mike & I have been discussing some quite extensive changes that we'd like to share before the beta goes live and let people chew on what might be coming. These suggestions aren't final until they've been tested in fire! Our primary goal has been making a lot more loadout choices viable for a combat ship. There is a small change to gimballed weapons that mean they need slightly more skill to use at full efficiency, the rest of these changes are about rewarding player for successful use of the more difficult weapons, or about opening up new options.
Comments from me in Italic are explaining the rationale behind each set of changes.
Fixed vs Gimbal Weapons:
We think there’s still too big a gap between fixed and gimballed weapons – fixed weapons do have a substantially higher damage in most cases, but this isn’t offsetting the current benefit to time-on-target the gimbals provide. We’d like to make the choice between these two more interesting, but without making the raw damage gap wider. To do this we’re looking at giving fixed weapons improvements to efficiency and their ability to sustain fire, and making gimbals less of a guarantee to hit – they will still perform the intended job of levelling the playing field a little for new players or those using less accurate control systems, but do so in a hopefully more interesting way and to a slightly lesser extent.
•Increase Clip sizes for all fixed Multicannons to 100 (from 90).
•Clean up reload time for all fixed multicannons, it is now 4 for fixed and 5 for gimbals.
•Clip size for all fixed cannons increased to 6 from 5.
•Reload time for all fixed cannons reduced to 3 from 4.
•Increase Ammo reserve sizes for all fixed cannons (100 -> 120).
•Reduce weapon capacitor drain by 10% for all fixed pulse/burst/beam weapons.
•Gimbal weapons tracking angle now linked to the ship sensors, and rebalanced.
In general with a high-end sensor you should have similar gimbal tracking as before, but with the maximum angle reduced from 30 degrees to 22.5 degrees (approximately the same size as the hardpoint HUD ring). With weaker sensors the tracking angle reduces, in a similar way to how distant/cold targets currently reduce this size, in the worst case with the weakest sensors the angle will be slightly more than half of what it is currently. Broken sensors will also disable gimbals - In a future build we’d like to make sensors explicitly targetable, but need more time to think through the ramifications.
Defending modules:
We want players to have a little more choices available to defend their modules once shields are down, and reduce the reliance on a shield-heavy metagame.
•Add Module Defence Packs purchasable in outfitting.
These modules are a lot like Hull Reinforcement Packs, but provide no hull health and instead act to protect modules. Each Module Defence Pack has two key stats: what percentage of damage it can absorb, and its own health. When weapon damage would hit a module the defence pack will absorb a portion of that damage to its own health pool, until it becomes broken and no longer functions. Multiple Module Defence Packs will apply multiplicatively (so two 60% absorption packs will absorb a total of 84% of damage (1-0.4*0.4). However they will only protect against direct damage that penetrates the hull, and cannot help against indirect sources like emergency drops or heat. These packs can be repaired by AFMs. Hardpoints only receive half protection from these modules.
We’re hoping that this addition gives people a way of defending their key modules once shields are down, and continue the fight past this point. It’ll be interesting to see if this opens up options in the meta that move away from relying on titanic shields and fleeing as soon as they burst.
Cannons:
These weapons are relatively powerful, but generally not enough to offset their current downsides. They’re also one of the weapons that have the highest difficulty to use when fixed rather than gimballed, so we’d like to reward players that can do so successfully a little more.
•As mentioned in Fixed vs Gimbal Weapons, all fixed cannons have increased clip size, reload time and ammo reserve. These changes work out to an 8% sustained DPS boost.
•All Gimbal/Turreted Cannon damage increased by 15%.
•All Fixed Cannon damage increased by 25%.
Plasma Accelerators:
These weapons have many of the same drawbacks as cannons, with the added cost that they are very power hungry and hot. Rather than just buffing them to be “hot purple cannons” we’d like to carve out a distinct role for these powerful weapons – breaking through the heavy damage resistance of tough engineered vessels.
•Plasma Accelerators now have access to the Plasma Slug special effect, which allows them to consume fuel rather than ammo.
•Reload time for all plasma accelerators has been reduced to 6 seconds from 8. Which is about an 11% increase to sustained DPS.
•All Plasma Accelerator damage increased by 35%.
•Plasma Accelerators now totally ignore damage resistances and deal Absolute damage.
These changes relate to each other: against stock ships, switching to Absolute damage is a penalty that offsets the damage buff a bit. Against heavily hardened ships it is a huge win. In practice we expect this to work out to between a 15% and 250% (yes, 250%) damage buff depending on your target, with the upper end requiring massive damage resistance from multiple engineered defences. Note that ignoring damage resistances means that any kinetic/thermal/explosive multipliers are ignored, but currently damage resistance from SYS pips still applies, this is under consideration.
Beam vs Burst Lasers:
At the moment these two weapons fill a similar role in a lot of ways. Beams see a fair amount of use but there is not a clear reason for people to choose burst laser. We’d like to adjust the trio of Pulse/Burst/Beam so that there is a clear choice that leads to each weapon: Pulse is the efficient compromise, Burst is the most efficient at turning WEP energy into damage but requires a lot of reactor power and increases heat, Beam generates substantially the most DPS, but drains WEP heavily and generates the most heat.
•As mentioned in Fixed vs Gimbal Weapons, all fixed pulse/burst/beam weapons have 10% reduced draw from the WEP capacitor.
•Reduce main reactor power requirements of Beam weapons (10%).
•Reduce WEP draw of burst weapons by 15%, (fixed get both buffs and have a total reduction of 23.5%). Burst lasers are now the most Damage-per-Energy efficient of these three weapons.
Torpedos:
These weapons are punished too heavily by ECM at the moment. We’re going to make a focused change and see how things settle before further adjustments.
•Rather than ECM permanently breaking a torpedo’s guidance, it will now lose tracking for (2-8 seconds) and then re-acquire a target. ECM will buy you time, but it won’t stop the danger by itself.
Slugshots: Frag Cannons
Slugshots: Frag Cannons have immense burst DPS until their clip runs dry, but were not pulling their weight in most combat situations. Their current incarnation has lead to them being used by a very small number of people, and most commonly in ambush/griefing attacks. We’d like to make them more widely useful without losing their distinguishing traits.
•Slugshots: Frag Cannons all have their reload time reduced to 2.5 seconds from 5 seconds.
•Slugshots: Frag Cannons all have their armour piercing reduced (to 15/25/35 for Small/Medium/Large, from 20/35/52)
•Slugshot: Frag Cannon ammo capacity increase from 90 to 180.
The Effect of this is that their burst DPS against shields is unaffected, but because of the reduced armour piercing they lose a fair bit of burst damage against hull, which should reduce the “one-shotting” nature they can have, while retaining full damage against shields. The reload time reduction gives them an 85% increase to sustained damage, and doubling their reserve means they can keep this up for longer. Slugshots: Frag Cannons are now one of the highest raw DPS weapons available - offset by their short range, the difficulty of hitting small targets with multiple projectiles and their reduced ability to damage hulls.
Railguns:
These weapons are very under-used at the moment, but we’re holding off on changes to them until we see how related changes take effect. Already in this build the Module Defence Packs will likely increase the reliance on hull and make module sniping more useful, and changes to NPC accuracy with railguns should make them less uncannily good with them. Our best guess is that they need a heat reduction, and the ability to pierce all or some of the absorption of Module Defence Packs, but this will be considered later.
Missiles:
Missiles feel like they need some improvements again, but as with railguns, we need to see how things settle again before changing things further – they could be extremely powerful if hull-tanking becomes more common.
Reboot/Repair and Shields:
We’re making a change to reboot/repair and how it interacts with shields - primarily as an experiment to see how it reduces downtime between combats, especially for ships with very large shields.
•Reboot/Repair will now jump-start shields to 50% on completion.
Full patch notes on other related changes will be available nearer the time.
Fly safe Commanders
2.2 Update: Engineer Blueprint Balance Adjustments
Greetings Commanders!
The next release we're currently working towards is a 2.2 update which will be arriving soon, along with a short beta.
We wanted to take the time to discuss the changes we're making to give you folk a heads up, and explain our thinking a little. We've separated the various changes out into their own posts to keep the feedback channel nice and clean. Mark and I will hopefully be able to jump in to answer follow up questions.
So have a read and feel free to discuss in the threads, your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
Engineer Blueprint Balance
There are one or two focussed changes to reduce the power where blueprints are overpowered or too prolific, the changes here are primarily about buffs to make making a lot more blueprints into competitive choices for players, and defining roles for some where their intent wasn't clear. Note that while there are a lot of buffs, we're not intending to increase the maximum power of engineered vessels (it's actually shrinking slightly compared to base ships), but there will be a lot more ways to reach that power. None of these changes are final until they've been tested in Beta, feedback welcome!
Where Blueprints have been modified this will affect existing items, which will be updated as if they had been always rolled with the new recipe – removed attributes will be stripped off, new ones will be rolled, existing ones will be mapped into the new range (for example if you previously got an 8 on a 0-10 attribute, and the attribute is now 5-25 you will get a 21). These changes are based on discussion from Sandro, mike & myself, comments in Italic are explaining the rationale behind each set of changes.
New Recipes:
•Unlock Grade 5 Burst Laser from Broo Tarquin.
•Unlock Grade 5 Beam Laser from Broo Tarquin .
•Unlock Grade 5 Mines from Juri Ishmaak.
•Unlock Grade 5 Missiles from Liz Ryder.
•Unlock Grade 5 Torpedos from Liz Ryder.
•Unlock Grade 5 Railguns from Tod ‘The Blaster’ McQuinn.
•Unlock Grade 4&5 Hull Reinforcement Thermal/Kinetic/Explosive resistance Blueprints from Selene Jean.
•Unlock Grade 4&5 Armour Thermal/Kinetic/Explosive and Advanced Blueprints from Selene Jean.
•Unlock Grade 4&5 Shield Booster Thermal/Kinetic/Explosive Blueprints from Didi Vatermann
Blueprint Changes:
Overcharged (Weapon):
This Blueprint is just too powerful overall, and used ubiquitously. We’d like to rein it in overall (while still leaving it king of raw DPS), especially when combined with projectile weapons that are not affected by the active power draw:
•Damage Modifier slightly increased (to 35%-45% from 30-35% at G5).
•Fire rate modifier removed (was 8%-20%), primarily to differentiate from rapid fire.
•Added clip size reduction modifier (-15% to -25% at the top end, though as the fire rate modifier has been removed you get more damage per bullet and don’t fire for much less time).
Overall this will reduce its DPS boost with a perfect roll from +62% to +45% before side effects, this is still the highest of all Blueprints.
Focussed (Weapon):
This recipe didn’t express a clear purpose, and was generally underwhelming. It is now being improved to hit harder but less often (overall DPS boost) while gaining more ability to pierce targets. With its existing hardness piercing this weapon is very capable of punching at ships above its own class.
•Range modifier removed (conflicted with Long Range too much).
•Damage increase added (+27%-+40% at G5).
•Rate of Fire reduction added(-22% to -35% at G5).
•Active heat penalty flipped around to avoid overly penalising low level versions.
•Armour piercing increase added, increasing chance to breach the hull by up to 25%.
EDIT: Sorry, Rapid fire was missed from this post entirely! And there was an error in the source document I was assembling this post in anyway, Updating to include changes to rapid fire:
Rapid Fire (Weapon):
Rapid fire was a defacto recipe for energy weapons that wanted a DPS increase, but gives a little bit too much of a boost to energy efficiency and wasn’t attractive to projectile weapons. These changes also bring it in line DPS wise with Overcharged, with some differences to account for their respective alternate effects. Either should now be a valid choice depending on player preference
•Active power reduction reduced at the top end (now -25% to -35% rather than -30% to -50%).
•Armour piercing modifier removed (unusually out of character).
•Reload speed improvement added (-50% to -65% reload time at G5).
•Lower end of the range for the rate of fire change has been brought up, making the results more consistent and higher overall. Now -35% to -40% firing interval at G5 (was -25% to -40%). this equates to ~ 54-67% rate of fire increase up from 33-67%).
•Damage reduction increased to correct total DPS, damage per hit now -13% to -15% at G5 (from 0% to -2%).
Short Range (Weapon):
This Blueprint wasn’t in a terrible place, but needed a bit of an improvement.
•Active Power increase removed (was +10% to +30% at G5).
Long Range (Weapon):
This blueprint was heavily under-used, and quite underpowered to go with it. While the increased range does affect damage falloff, this isn’t as big an effect as it needed.
•Damage Penalty reduced (down to 10-15% from 15-25%).
•Active power increase removed (was +20% to +50% at G5).
Double Shot (Weapon):
No major changes here, but coupled with our separate improvements for slugshots, the Grade 5 version gave a little bit too much.
•Clip size for Grade 5 version reduced to 6 (from 8).
Light Weight (Weapon):
Another highly under-performing Blueprint, straight up buffs here, it’s similar in theme to Efficient but still distinct.
•Damage Reduction removed (was up to 5%).
•Reactor power requirement reduction added (10% to 20% at G5).
•WEP draw reduction added (10% to 20% at G5).
Sturdy (Weapon):
This blueprint is the least used across almost all weapon types. We think the purpose of it is fundamentally a useful one (especially as we open up options to fight as shields drop) but the effect needed to be much bigger.
•Health increase doubled (from 50-125% to 100-250% at G5).
•Heat reduction added (20%-30% at G5)
Optimised (Shield Generator):
The intent of this blueprint is fine, but it's underwhelming compared to alternatives, so it's getting some improvements
•Reactor power draw reduction improved (20%-40% from 13-30%).
•Mass reduction doubled (16-40% from 8-20%).
Thermal/Kinetic (Shield Generator):
These two recipes have exactly the same change, to make them a little more attractive when compared to Reinforced.
•Module health increase added (+20%-40% at G5).
Kinetic/Thermal/Explosive (Hull Reinforcements):
All of these single-type resistance blueprints have the same change, reducing the penalties to make them a more competitive choice compared to Heavy Duty or Advanced. Especially if you are willing to sacrifice resistance to one type in favour of the other two.
•Penalties for off-types on all single-type resistances reduced (to 10%-15% from 10%-20% at G5)
Kinetic/Thermal/Explosive (Shield Boosters):
All of these single-type resistance blueprints have the same change, reducing the penalties to make them a more competitive choice compared to Heavy Duty or Resistive. Especially if you are willing to sacrifice resistance to one type in favour of the other two.
•Penalties for off-types on all single-type resistances reduced (to 4%-6% from 12%-13% at G5)
Resistive (Shield Booster):
Just a little bit too good as it was, though the change here is relatively small.
•Resistance to all types reduced by 2% (to 10-13% from 12-15% at G5).
Special Effects:
Auto Loader:
While this is a useful effect, it’s not really performing up to the level required for now.
•Reload rate increased by 50% (now reloads one shell every 2 fire intervals rather than every 3).
•Clip size reduction removed (was 20%)
Concordant Sequence:
Shield restoration effects are cool, but this one pales in comparison to Regeneration sequence.
•Duration of regen boost doubled.
•Effect of regen boost doubled.
Corrosive Shells:
This is a special that is a bit of a non-choice as it is very effective but has no scaling with size/number. We’re not making changes right now, but we are looking at adding some kind of scaling here.
Dispersal Field:
We’re removing the innate damage penalty from this one.
•Removed innate 10% damage penalty.
Emissive Munitions:
Emissive munitions are a bit too good at their job, and the side effect of increasing emissions so far that gimbal weapon tracking automatically maxes out isn’t really what was intended.
•Duration Reduced (to about 30% of previous)
•Emission increase reduced, it’ll still light you up to about the level of a hot anaconda, but will not automatically max out all gimbals.
Feedback Cascade:
This is a bit too much of a “must have” special effect in many cases, and doesn’t scale with the number of guns or their size at all, making it a bit of a non-choice. The effect is semantically similar (though overall weaker if you’re only using a single small weapon), but should feel more interesting.
•Effect of feedback cascade changed, rather than setting the healing rate to 10% on the first trigger, each hit will deal bonus “damage” to the pool of health to be healed, so multiple hits will reduce the shield healing received. With a cap at the old 10% mark being their maximum effect. The number of hits required to reach this cap will depend on the power of the railgun and size of the shield cell, but is in the range of 2-5.
Overload Munitions:
We’re removing ammo capacity penalties to make this one a little more attractive.
•Remove 20% ammo capacity penalty.
Smart Rounds:
We’re removing Flight Time penalties to make this one a little more attractive.
•Remove 20% increase to flight time.
Full patch notes on other related changes will be available nearer the time. Balance changes/improvements to non-combat recipes will come in a future pass.
Fly safe Commanders
2.2 Update: Powerplay
Hello Commanders!
The next release we're currently working towards is a 2.2 update which will be arriving soon, along with a short beta.
We wanted to take the time to discuss the changes we're making to give you folk a heads up, and explain our thinking a little. We've separated the various changes out into their own posts to keep the feedback channel nice and clean. Mark and I will hopefully be able to jump in to answer follow up questions.
So have a read and feel free to discuss in the threads, your feedback will be greatly appreciated.
The changes to we're making to Powerplay are to address some issues raised by the community. The focus is to reduce the effectiveness of internal sabotage, and to make NPC ships belonging to the various powers more discerning, only getting in your face when you are actually engaging in Powerplay activities.
LOGISTICS CONSOLIDATION
Issue: Players have limited means to combat internal sabotage by preparing expensive systems that drag a power into a CC deficit.
Fix: Allow players a democratic vote to slow, or even stop preparation for the cycle.
•The preparation top ten becomes a top nine.
•In place of position ten is a new entry that looks substantially different from the other system preparation entries.
•This new entry is called logistics consolidation. It signifies a brake for expansion on any systems placed below it in the top ten.
•Players can no longer nominate systems to increase their preparation in the top ten.
•Instead, in the overview selection screen, players can vote for either continued expansion or logistics consolidation.
•The ratio of votes determines the position of the logistics consolidation entry in the top ten.
•At 25% votes in favour of logistics consolidation, the maker reaches 5th position.
•At 50% votes the marker sits at 2nd position.
•At 75% votes the marker sits in the number 1 position.
•A small number of expansion votes are precast to ensure that the marker does not jump straight to position one after one vote.
•At the end of the cycle when the power is spending CC to purchase expansion attempts, when it reaches the logistics marker all remaining CC is used up, preventing the purchase of expansion attempts further down the list.
•For each 10 CC consumed in this manner, the success trigger for undermining control systems belonging to the power increases by 1%, up to a cap of 50% (assuming 1000 CC was consumed) in the following cycle.
•The overview selection screen also clearly explains how logistics works and shows the current voting ratio for logistics consolidation versus continued preparation.
POWERPLAY AI AND SYSTEM SECURITY UPDATES
Issue: players pledging to a power are constantly targeted by NPC power ships regardless of their intentions. Additionally, police response in high security systems makes Powerplay activities overly dangerous.
Fix: Powerplay NPCs use more discerning rules to decide when to engage pledged players, only doing so if the player is actively taking part in a Powerplay activity. In addition, Powerplay NPC ship spawn rates are rebalanced to use less traffic, and authority response to Powerplay crimes are rebalanced to allow Powerplay activities in high security systems.
•Replace Powerplay pirates and assassins with a single pirate archetype that can perform both duties, reducing the number of Powerplay ships needed to spawn in a system.
•Ensure that Powerplay aggressive ships (essentially defence ships and assassins/pirates) will only decide to attack players if the following criteria are met:
•The player is pledged to an opposing power
•The player is carrying Powerplay commodities of the controlling system‘s power OR the player has unclaimed kill vouchers for Powerplay ships of the controlling system’s power OR the player is wanted in the system
•The NPC ship must perform a manifest (cargo) scan to gain knowledge of carried Powerplay commodities and Powerplay kill vouchers.
•The NPC ship must perform a basic scan to gain knowledge of wanted status, as per normal.
•Additional comms responses are used to inform the player of proceedings.
•When a player pledged to an opposing power commits a violent crime against a ship (NPC or human) pledged to the power controlling the system, the security rating of the system is halved (or reduced even more if necessary) when considering how fast police arrive and the strength of the police. This allows players to carry out illegal but necessary Powerplay activities in high security systems without being mobbed by overwhelming authority forces, whilst still retaining high security for non-Powerplay crimes.
•Aggressive Powerplay ships now all have interdictors.
•Powerplay pirates will only visit control systems.
SUCCESS VALUE TWEAKS
Issue: players were able to gain success in opposition and undermining through undesirable exploits, such as collusion piracy.
Fix: success value tweak and bug fix.
•Powerplay commodities will only be worth a single unit of success when used for undermining.
•Powerplay undermining and opposition vouchers can only be obtained from ships belonging to the Power expanding in to or controlling the system.
