Joubarbe wrote: ↑Mon, 13. Jan 20, 10:30
What's your opinion about ship stats?
In my opinion 3 general topics are worth thinking about.
1) Ship Speeds:
- if NPC shipbuilding has any connection to their economy, all TS ships should be nearly equally efficient.
- Unless you want certain ships have a special strategic purpose (for example TL's carrying jump beacons, Carriers repairing docked ships, M5 Scouts being super fast but having almost no weapons), "normal" combat ships should have less speed differences. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to send a 30m/s dreadnought without a jumpdrive on a long journey if you could send 170m/s corvettes instead.
2) Combat Power:
- again, if factions can't spawn their ships like in Mayhem 2, i'd say comparable strength gets more important than ever
- their power almost exclusively depends on shield/hull strength, and damage (amount of turrets, weapon damage) vs. amount of ships (cost)
- you should try to balance this out more than it is in Mayhem 2. Allowing certain factions to build more, but cheaper ships seems hard to balance (in Mayhem 2 NPC fleet sizes are also capped and spamming cheap ships isn't an option for the factions). So roughly equal combat strength is probably easier to achieve.
- little variance for shield strength sounds solid for a first balance pass. I think this has the most impact on combat outcome.
- more gun slot ships should eventually get less defense or made more expensive (if this actually makes them harder to build for NPC's)
3) Battle Duration:
- right now combat is a fairly quick matter, especially OOS and once shields are down
- from what you've revealed, it seems that in Mayhem 3 it's getting harder (if not impossible) to retreat from a battle (no jumpdrive)
- it might be a smart move to make ships tougher and therefore give the player more time to react, bring in reinforcements, or maybe even retreat some faster ships
Ideas to increase ship resilience:
- basic decrease in overall damage for everything
- making hulls way tougher than shields could be interesting (but this could also be annoying, and damaged ships are slowing down so it gets even harder to retreat)
- maybe combine this with the refinement of some ship roles. Like leaving capships slow to move, but their capital weapons being the only ones which deal good hull damage which is needed to destroy stations and other capships in any reasonable amount of time. Making it risky to attack with them because it takes them forever to come back and defend.
In the end it's your vision and equalizing everything also takes some magic away
On invasion costs in Mayhem 2. From my experience high cost invasion factions often have bigger battlegroups and end up winning most of the time (Slow and steady expansion). Low invasion cost factions often throw understrength BG's on well defended sectors. In the long run they always seem to loose territory.
When it's equal BG vs. BG, i really think it mostly comes down to shield strength. Even more so than the amount of turrets and weapon damage. Because offensive focused ships like the ones from the Split don't survive long enough to utilize their firepower.
But the game is fairly slow paced already, so i'm really unsure if slowing everything down even more would be an improvement. You'd probably get countless complaints about underpowered weapons and having to dogfight pirate corvettes for hours on end