Room size should never be capped, that would be bad. However, there should be diminishing hull returns above a certain amount of hull, and having so much hull should help less in aethercraft combat than it does.
Room size should never be capped, that would be bad. However, there should be diminishing hull returns above a certain amount of hull, and having so much hull should help less in aethercraft combat than it does.
Why? each room is only worth 50 hull as it is which isn't much to begin with. Honestly I do not see this being an issue, and it is not like this is one sided. You want a big ship, great! pool your gold and go get one there is nothing at all stopping you from doing it. Munsia and I did not build Blob over night and I know Kari was not either. They are both pretty old ships that were built up over time. The only one that was kind of built over night was the Glom one and just goes to show, an organization is fully capable of producing a ship like this more easily than even the private citizens.
There isn't much of a gold dump in game other than credits and that is just lining the pockets of someone else with massive amounts of gold and it is not actually taking the gold out of the game. Did I mention there is a LOT of gold in game? If anything, I would like to see that once a ship hits a certain number of rooms it starts qualifying for extras, every +300 rooms get another turret or something (even at the cost of credits). I'd like to see ramming changed too, if a ship like blob actually rammed a little ship (ya, blob does have a ram, go figure), there is no way a small ship would ever survive that ram! but, that is thinking all RL type situation type thing I guess.
Also, giving diminishing returns on the hull of the ship isn't quite a good idea either.. I see it.. I am just going to build up one of my shock ships instead until it is at the same state as blob then go on to the other one and so forth. You end up with a worse deal than what you are dealing with now. I am on the side of the fence the fence that says, offer incentives to those who do build up bigger ships, offer extras, instead of screaming for the nerf bat.
The soft, hollow voice of Nocht, the Silent resounds within your mind as His words echo through the aether, "Congratulations, Arimisia. Your mastery of vermin cannot be disputed."
That's not how good game mechanics work. Just because something can exist on all sides does not make it a good mechanic. As I said, we could fairly easily have a ship that dwarfs these existing ships, but I don't think anyone having such ships is good, or that anyone having giant ships makes the game more fun or accessible, quite the opposite.
Nor does the state of gold dumps have anything to do with this. I'm 100% fully aware of the state of gold in the game: Serenwilde could drop seventy or eighty million gold into ships and no one but the treasurer (me) would even notice the gold was gone. The economy problem has talked about over and over, beaten to death. These ships exist and the gold glut is still an issue... so they clearly aren't the solution. Anyways, organizational gold is already taken out of the game, It very very rarely leaves coffers to re-enter circulation in any large quantity.
I don't understand what you mean here: If you had diminishing returns, you'd just have several ships that are below the soft cap? Fine, that's good, you can't be a crew member on more than one ship at once. The problem is that you get to a point where grid heals are repairing more than several rounds of fire from another ship, and you cross a threshold where one ship is playing by entirely different (superior) rules, that new players trying to get into the aethercraft game can't even begin to compete at. Offering incentives for the powerful established players/groups that make them even more powerful is a positive feedback loop we can avoid. Buffing huge ships beyond the already massive benefits of being huge is so out of the question.
Room size should never be capped, that would be bad. However, there should be diminishing hull returns above a certain amount of hull, and having so much hull should help less in aethercraft combat than it does.
Why? each room is only worth 50 hull as it is which isn't much to begin with. Honestly I do not see this being an issue, and it is not like this is one sided. You want a big ship, great! pool your gold and go get one there is nothing at all stopping you from doing it. Munsia and I did not build Blob over night and I know Kari was not either. They are both pretty old ships that were built up over time. The only one that was kind of built over night was the Glom one and just goes to show, an organization is fully capable of producing a ship like this more easily than even the private citizens.
There isn't much of a gold dump in game other than credits and that is just lining the pockets of someone else with massive amounts of gold and it is not actually taking the gold out of the game. Did I mention there is a LOT of gold in game? If anything, I would like to see that once a ship hits a certain number of rooms it starts qualifying for extras, every +300 rooms get another turret or something (even at the cost of credits). I'd like to see ramming changed too, if a ship like blob actually rammed a little ship (ya, blob does have a ram, go figure), there is no way a small ship would ever survive that ram! but, that is thinking all RL type situation type thing I guess.
Also, giving diminishing returns on the hull of the ship isn't quite a good idea either.. I see it.. I am just going to build up one of my shock ships instead until it is at the same state as blob then go on to the other one and so forth. You end up with a worse deal than what you are dealing with now. I am on the side of the fence the fence that says, offer incentives to those who do build up bigger ships, offer extras, instead of screaming for the nerf bat.
About ramming, in fairness, the blob goes really, really, really, slow. I could imagine the little ship just gets harmlessly pushed away by the massive wall creeping up on it!
Hull size in aethercombat matters in exactly 1 way:
When you have so small a ship that a single burst of a reasonable amount of hits takes you down before your empath can heal.
Other than that, hull doesn't affect all that much. Once you reach a certain threshold of health, the only thing that would take you down is afflictions. For a long, long time, Ilosia was the strongest battleship in the game with just a few thousand hull. Basically, it was in the perfect zone of hull and manuverability. I've empathed for Ilosia quite a few times, and I can tell you that keeping up with hull damage has never been a problem in any scenario except when command denials or aether afflictions are overwhelming me. I could take on multiple ships hitting Ilosia at the same time as long as they didn't have competent turreters giving the right afflictions, and Ilosia's hull was nowhere near the fortresses in the game right now.
If your opponent doesn't worble or muckle properly, you're unlikely to get dropped, regardless of your hull level. If your opponents are doing their job properly, more hull just means a longer time before you blow up.
Of course, that doesn't mean hull is useless. There's a reason why orgs are prioritizing floating fortresses instead of Ilosia-class battleships. The more time it takes before you blow up, the higher chance there is for your empath to cure out of the command denial hell. Basically, the bigger the hull, the more forgiving the environment for a less optimized empath. It becomes much less significant if you cure the wrong module or the wrong affliction. You can just wait for balance and try again, without compromising the ship while waiting for it. There is a hard limit to that, however. At a certain stage of "you're screwed", it simply becomes impossible to cure out. The ship is more or less doomed.
The number of properly sized and outfitted ships is always, always, always more important than the hull size of a single fortress. This is because of aether power mechanics. Unlike normal combat, there is no REFRESH POWER for clutch power and burst. And power is used for healing as well as afflicting. As the number of ships on your side increases in relation to your opponents', the offensive AND defensive capabilities of your team increases exponentially, and at the same time, the offensive pressure greatly reduces the opponent's offensive options, because THEIR power has to be turned to defense to clear the afflictions you can throw out. The only reason why fortresses are more popular nowadays is because there is a lack of crew to man ships. You need a 5-man team to fully man a battleship. If you have 3 battleships, you can scrap through by doing a 3-man team on each. But that's 9 people at least. How often do you see 9-man raids? Not very often, even when the timing is up to the players to decide. To field a 9-man team on a randomized event like flares almost seems like striking the lottery, especially since flares happen once ever 12 days (almost a fortnight) instead of once a week.
In the face of a very real lack of crew, what is better? A fully manned, Ilosia-class battleship? Or a fully (or even half) manned fortress? Long term stability and strategy dictates the latter. That's all there is to it.
TL/DR of Lerad's post since he basically nailed it:
"In the face of a very real lack of crew, what is better? A fully manned,
Ilosia-class battleship? Or a fully (or even half) manned fortress?
Long term stability and strategy dictates the latter. That's all there
is to it."
When everyone is running skeleton crews, of course the huge ship is going to be better. Capping the hull size won't change anything, then the new fad would be to make a fleet of large ships ran by skeleton crews.
2014/04/19 01:38:01 - Leolamins drained 2000000 power to raise Silvanus as a Vernal Ascendant.
2014/07/23 05:01:29 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Munsia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:07 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Arimisia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:58 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Lavinya as a Vernal Ascendant.
Then the real answer is to fix the hull problem not by capping it, but by overhauling aethercraft, something probably long due anyways.
And yeah, it's an org based lottery that depends on individuals in that org investing in a skillset (over 200 credits worth!) that they cannot use at all on their own, heavily powered up by artifacts (bubblixes) that have close to zero personal use either.
I think the fortress-class arms race is charming. It parallels real world arms races: Oh, you have an old wooden ship? HAH, look at my ironclad!
In the end though, I guess the ship funded by the richest organization/group/individual will win. Even with good strategy I doubt a 2k hull ship could beat a 30k hull ship. It would be forced to retreat every time. The same concept applies to a 30k hull ship vs. a 90k hull ship. Except that they can barely move so may not even get out of range before they die.
Then again, combat has always been heavily influenced by who has the bigger wallet =P.
Yeh, well. We could go on for ages about it (I have a bunch of ideas on how to change aethercraft to make it less borky and more fun), but it'd just be us spinning our wheels pointlessly.
Hmm... Maybe that's what I should be saving all my gold for. Dropping 50 million gold on a personal aethership seems perfectly reasonable, really. ... would take me forever and a half to make that much, but still.
I'm Lucidian. If I don't get pedantic every so often, I might explode.
Hmm... Maybe that's what I should be saving all my gold for. Dropping 50 million gold on a personal aethership seems perfectly reasonable, really. ... would take me forever and a half to make that much, but still.
we didn't make the ship over night, want to make the perfectly clear! We have been working on our ship for over a year and are not adding anymore hull until I get around to arranging the rooms correctly (jokes on me, last time I did that I delete a room by accident oopse).
Not gonna tell you how to make gold cause well.. we all have our secrets. 50 million would take at minimum 6 months I would gauge and that is working pretty damn hard. Thing that happened with our ship was that we kinda got into a match with Ixchilgal, he'd expand and make his ship bigger than ours and not to be outdone, we'd add more and out do his. Over so many months, it got huge.
The soft, hollow voice of Nocht, the Silent resounds within your mind as His words echo through the aether, "Congratulations, Arimisia. Your mastery of vermin cannot be disputed."
Viravain, Lady of the Thorns shouts, "And You would seize Me? Fool! I am the Glomdoring! I am the Wyrd, and beneath the cloak of Night, the shadows of the Silent stir!"
Comments
There isn't much of a gold dump in game other than credits and that is just lining the pockets of someone else with massive amounts of gold and it is not actually taking the gold out of the game. Did I mention there is a LOT of gold in game? If anything, I would like to see that once a ship hits a certain number of rooms it starts qualifying for extras, every +300 rooms get another turret or something (even at the cost of credits). I'd like to see ramming changed too, if a ship like blob actually rammed a little ship (ya, blob does have a ram, go figure), there is no way a small ship would ever survive that ram! but, that is thinking all RL type situation type thing I guess.
Also, giving diminishing returns on the hull of the ship isn't quite a good idea either.. I see it.. I am just going to build up one of my shock ships instead until it is at the same state as blob then go on to the other one and so forth. You end up with a worse deal than what you are dealing with now. I am on the side of the fence the fence that says, offer incentives to those who do build up bigger ships, offer extras, instead of screaming for the nerf bat.
I don't understand what you mean here: If you had diminishing returns, you'd just have several ships that are below the soft cap? Fine, that's good, you can't be a crew member on more than one ship at once. The problem is that you get to a point where grid heals are repairing more than several rounds of fire from another ship, and you cross a threshold where one ship is playing by entirely different (superior) rules, that new players trying to get into the aethercraft game can't even begin to compete at. Offering incentives for the powerful established players/groups that make them even more powerful is a positive feedback loop we can avoid. Buffing huge ships beyond the already massive benefits of being huge is so out of the question.
When you have so small a ship that a single burst of a reasonable amount of hits takes you down before your empath can heal.
Other than that, hull doesn't affect all that much. Once you reach a certain threshold of health, the only thing that would take you down is afflictions. For a long, long time, Ilosia was the strongest battleship in the game with just a few thousand hull. Basically, it was in the perfect zone of hull and manuverability. I've empathed for Ilosia quite a few times, and I can tell you that keeping up with hull damage has never been a problem in any scenario except when command denials or aether afflictions are overwhelming me. I could take on multiple ships hitting Ilosia at the same time as long as they didn't have competent turreters giving the right afflictions, and Ilosia's hull was nowhere near the fortresses in the game right now.
If your opponent doesn't worble or muckle properly, you're unlikely to get dropped, regardless of your hull level. If your opponents are doing their job properly, more hull just means a longer time before you blow up.
Of course, that doesn't mean hull is useless. There's a reason why orgs are prioritizing floating fortresses instead of Ilosia-class battleships. The more time it takes before you blow up, the higher chance there is for your empath to cure out of the command denial hell. Basically, the bigger the hull, the more forgiving the environment for a less optimized empath. It becomes much less significant if you cure the wrong module or the wrong affliction. You can just wait for balance and try again, without compromising the ship while waiting for it. There is a hard limit to that, however. At a certain stage of "you're screwed", it simply becomes impossible to cure out. The ship is more or less doomed.
The number of properly sized and outfitted ships is always, always, always more important than the hull size of a single fortress. This is because of aether power mechanics. Unlike normal combat, there is no REFRESH POWER for clutch power and burst. And power is used for healing as well as afflicting. As the number of ships on your side increases in relation to your opponents', the offensive AND defensive capabilities of your team increases exponentially, and at the same time, the offensive pressure greatly reduces the opponent's offensive options, because THEIR power has to be turned to defense to clear the afflictions you can throw out. The only reason why fortresses are more popular nowadays is because there is a lack of crew to man ships. You need a 5-man team to fully man a battleship. If you have 3 battleships, you can scrap through by doing a 3-man team on each. But that's 9 people at least. How often do you see 9-man raids? Not very often, even when the timing is up to the players to decide. To field a 9-man team on a randomized event like flares almost seems like striking the lottery, especially since flares happen once ever 12 days (almost a fortnight) instead of once a week.
In the face of a very real lack of crew, what is better? A fully manned, Ilosia-class battleship? Or a fully (or even half) manned fortress? Long term stability and strategy dictates the latter. That's all there is to it.
"In the face of a very real lack of crew, what is better? A fully manned, Ilosia-class battleship? Or a fully (or even half) manned fortress? Long term stability and strategy dictates the latter. That's all there is to it."
When everyone is running skeleton crews, of course the huge ship is going to be better. Capping the hull size won't change anything, then the new fad would be to make a fleet of large ships ran by skeleton crews.
And yeah, it's an org based lottery that depends on individuals in that org investing in a skillset (over 200 credits worth!) that they cannot use at all on their own, heavily powered up by artifacts (bubblixes) that have close to zero personal use either.
It'll be the second time it's redone, but it definitely could use an overhaul with the combat overhaul.
Not gonna tell you how to make gold cause well.. we all have our secrets.