Looksl ike he is kicking your ass with disruptors, those have massive bonus against shields, once shields are depleted the lasers take over...on the other hand you are mainly relying on the artillery, which does not well against small ships at all. So you might see a higher evasion rate on his side and a higher miss rate on yours. And your torpedos probably die to his flak barrier, so those are negated too... i wouldnt want to be you in this setup i guess. Did you have a look at his admirals skills? and yours?

Hm. I'm using neutron torpedoes, though, which can't be shot down. Or is that one of the balance changes?

Do lasers do better against evasion than kinetics? I was hoping that the cruisers would deal with the smaller craft, and they've got railguns and autocannon. I was also expecting that the artillery would be fired at their battleships, which (I thought) typically have terrible evasion...

Originally posted by Hyperlynx:

Hm. I'm using neutron torpedoes, though, which can't be shot down. Or is that one of the balance changes?

Do lasers do better against evasion than kinetics? I was hoping that the cruisers would deal with the smaller craft, and they've got railguns and autocannon. I was also expecting that the artillery would be fired at their battleships, which (I thought) typically have terrible evasion...

Your problem is weapon size balance. you don't have enough medium guns.

Outfit your cruisers with medium plasma. if you can't go plasma right away, go with medium lasers.

oh, and get rid of your point defense. it's useless against lasers so put something useful in that spot or scrap the destroyers and build moar cruisers.

I see...

So the medium and small railguns on the 30 Valiant class cruisers is still wrong? Is it that they should all be mediums, that they should all be lasers, or both?

you're leaning too much on kinetics. you have to diversify.

The following works well as meta, so it likely works with the corvette balance mod as well.

for defense, outfit all your fighting ships (cruisers and battleships) in such a way that includes at least:
* two shield capacitors
* four shields
so all those afterburners and crystal hulls can move aside for capacitors. this will make you massively tougher. right now you're flying nearly naked.

you can either go all plasma (still a solid choice) or try this:

outfit your cruisers with at least the following:
* one neutron torpedo
* one bomber strike craft
* two point defense (any including fighter strike craft, regular PD, or flak)

outfit your battleships with at least the following:
* arc emitter
* two bomber strike craft
* two missiles (any kind, but don't count torpedos as missiles)
* two point defense (any kind)

If you get the techs, slip in about 1/4 of your battleships as highly shielded giga cannon ships and 1/4 as highly shielded tachyon lance ships

try to achieve those numbers as cheaply as possible (but still upgrade to the top tech available) and roll with a 1:1 or 2:1 cruisers/battleships ratio. probably 2:1.

Thanks for the advice. Can you elaborate on why those specific weapon choices are preferred?

e: I'd like to understand the reasoning and mechanics behind the build, rather than just implement it blind.

the choices are based on META which is the most universally effective application of resources at the least cost. it is done by countless iterations of sandbox testing, no real theory behind it beyond "this is what wins most"

I hate when games do that. I'd like to be able to look at the information a game gives me and make sensible judgement calls as a result, not just have to look up "the best thing" and copy that.

Oh well. I guess if I want that I'll need to implement it myself.

e: I mean, metagame is one thing, where one particular build might predominate and so you might want to use xyz to counter it, and then abc to counter xyz, and then def to counter abc. The meta is the state of the game overall. But if one build is just The Best At All Times, then mechanically speaking the game is broken. "Imba, needs nerfed". All the other content in the game which is not The Best Thing is garbage, then, and simply should not be in the game at all. Otherwise you're effectively punishing the player for having fun, for not knowing what the magic combination is. To say nothing of implementing content that is actually supposed to be discarded instead of experienced.

Even if there is actually a way to counter the preferred build but the only way to work it out is iterative brute-force testing then the game is still broken. In that case, the game isn't "make sensible decisions", the actual game mechanics are "brute-force builds until one works", which is... questionable.

If a game has so many moving parts that a player can't make sense of them, imo they should be reduced in number until they can.

Trust me i tried for weeks but the setup of the game is really quiet complex, there are many variables at play. DPS, Range, Bonus Damage, armor, shields, shield regeneration, repairrate, hit chance, evasion, size, hullpoints, focus fire vs non focus fire ai, over firing, price of the weapon,hull, equipment (ship in total) therefore numbers in battle, fleet cap, admiral skills, empire modifiers to range, firespeed, evasion etc. and many more. Eventually it comes down to an overall efficiency calculation but to take that all into account is near damn impossible. I did with most of the things you can get to a minimal comparable number, but thats not possible with everything and often a thing of interpretation.

But if you wanna try be my guest i can give you access to my google spreadsheet calculations which took me weeks to complete (including a battle calculator to not be required to playtest so much)

And i still am not satisfied from my perfectionistic point of view, but its better than vanilla as far as i am concerned even though i wished it wasnt...i would love to abandon the mod cause paradox did an outstanding balance job, but it looks to me like they went half way and left it there.

i consider your mod to be the single most important mod one can add to the game. before your mod, there was a One Build That Ruled All and your mod is the only one that destroyed that without simply making something else the "one build that rules all" as other fixes ended up doing. i appreciate the artisanship of your approach and how forthright you are about the compatibility problems. so many mods have deep compatibility issues that the authors either ignore or lie about. i hope you keep working towards perfection and maybe a patch for the "NSC Lite" mod. actually, if there's anything I could do to help I would be willing to assist.

I was thinking of actually removing stuff until I could balance the game, rather than leave the existing stuff in the game and attempt to retool it. But yeah, I guess I'm really underestimating the work involved in that.

Oh well. Thanks.