That would be the worst way to do that, it would be like when you dont like a girl and to get rid of her you start to be an asshole to piss her off, bad bad bad; dont do the asshole, just tell her you dont love her anymore, it is better.

SOOO if admins dont like slave grouping, instead of making the game into a chore, just reduce the maximun number of slaves you can have ( but words of warning that would require a lot of balancing in other areas, like for example, the price of the damn stasis generators)

I feel that stasis generators are an irrelavent issue because they don't drop, it is a one time investment and you keep it forever. If you want a good slave its gonna get expensive....I used to have good slaves, right before the aug tweak nerf, then the next day or two my team went to war with UB.

my slaves died quickly, to players I would usually be challenged by but not anhilated by, and I lost some good stuff.

Then of course there was the issue of the lvl 1000 guys who were able to attack me because they had war mongering set, while I was only like lvl 470ish, but I couldnt attack their lvl 250's. comon, they were half my level, how come I get attacked by someone more than twice my level while someone half my level cant get attacked by someone twice their level? dunno if this has been fixed or not though.

First a link to this great thread http://www.starsonata.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10219


Any admin input after all these pages of ideas/discussions/flaming?

Hmmmm I am really not sure I like the part about slave getting half the owner's bonus...

It is a big boost to other ppl's slaves while masters only get a ridiculous 0.5%. MErchants would get 6% hull on their freighter slaves, monkeys 6% regen, snipers 3.5%.

Give more to slave masters, I still cannot fight properly alone... I have the feeling snipers slaves would be nearly as decent as mine

That whole post is irrelevant actually anyone leveling an SM as an SM is confined <200 anyone leveling a char as something like a fighter spec with sm skills will level easily, but more to the point what would be the point in a high level SM alt?. You cant make level 16+ bases with Anda on a level 18 its impossible and even if it wasn't pvp is so narrow on these bases that they cant attack very many people at all, and I've yet to see anyone greif with a low level mastery base.

My main is around 600ish, I have 140SM, a 200 main and a couple of low level commod slavers (50ish), although my level is also completly irrelavant. If you look to Jeffs original post this is nothing to do with slave mobs this has everything to do with high level slaves being really weak, weaker in fact than similarly level'd players and AI.

If you going to quote me at least argue points I've raised and not resort to demeaning my character. My fountain of knowledge comes from playing the game, as I'm sure yours does.

I've always had a slave char every since the mastery skill existed and also have 2 more slave alts which is why you see most of my post related to slaves. I do comment on other skill classes but usually state the fact I do not have this skill just to keep it balanced.

Jeff asked for suggestions, that is what I've done

~ferret

First, I forgot that slave masters get 2% per level bonus and Rad experts get 2% per level. So a rad expert gets a total of 4% per level for each attribute. That makes his slaves *way* tougher than any other class's slaves who get half their skills as a bonus.

Second, a modification to the above. Slaves will not get half of all the class skills of their owners, they will only get half of the "outside" skills on the skill chart. The skills that would impart half bonuses to slaves are: Seer, Multifire, Sniper, Speed Demon, and Merchant. A multifirers slave will not have both double dps and the berserker shield bonus.

I don't think this would make the game significantly harder to balance because 1) these bonuses are not huge, 2) slaves aren't nearly as smart as players and will never be as good, 3) no one seems to use combat slaves anyway.

Finally, I've been talking with Atlum about the slave tweaking, and we are now thinking about something more along the lines of a skill that maxes out at level 50 instead of 100 and gives 1.5% per level

Rad X's slaves arnt way tougher, Slave master was desgined to use Slaves and drones together so most people use the drones which are stronger than slaves DPS wise.

Rad X's slaves are pretty weak when it comes to killing mobs even with a lot of diffs 2 or 3 BG will murder them.

I really dont know where you get these ideas from but you want to try playing these things before you say they're so powerful. before we lost AT I could take 3/4 BG including assisting fighting myself. Now I cant even get to them.

Point 1: The bonuses arn't small, 200% DPS would be MF's bonus for a start.

Point 2: Slaves are faily stupid but that only increases the argument for having them stronger, especiall for RadX which has their main source of combat from slaves.

Point 3: Whats the point of being RadX if they arnt used for combat, give us some combat stats then...

If you cant see that a MF1 slave will be better than a slave master slave then I really am playing the wrong game...

I'd love to have a proper convo with you sometime I think you really need to play the game at various levels and from various points of view before making these decisions.

~ferret

Well if for instance snipers do not get FA and zerker bonus to their slaves I think it is ok... But for a rad exp I still think that 4.5% instead of 4% is still not much, keeping in mind that RC above 15 is really hard to get... I am not saying it is neglectable, but when you take into account that when you use swarms many will die, some run out of GG, and the mess it is to understand what is going on during a swarm VS AI swarm fight, this wont make me fight with slave more than I really need.

I am not complaining about the skill itself, 4%, 4.5%, 5% bonus and all. What I am trying to say is that managing slaves is tedious, I would prefer for instance taht GG is not needed ( ) simply because it means you dont have to remember that s258Enji has only 1 GG left and should be docked soon (I dont know, maybe when a slave dies, instead of loosing 1 GG, the amount of cash to buy the GG is removed from ure character money... Or the slave's money... Same money pit, easier to manage... Or let us use the extra hull we get from mastery to store a loooot of GG before going hunting)

Another thing related with slaves... I noticed that when I hunt with slaves if they deal the death blow to the AI, the chances to get loot seams to be lower than when killing using on board weapons. Am I right ?

If so it would be good (maybe only for masters? ) that the chance to get loot from a kill are the same when killed by slaves (I am thinking about piracy skill too)

Another suggestion: as we now have to use GG on slaves, it would be nice that the number of GG show in status report, so we know when to get some. Here the goal is to make it easier for players to maintain slaves.

I agree, or at least they could still drop commods maybe.

~ferret

I think there should be a cash penalty when slaves die, else it would be unfair for others.

But it should not be such a pain in the ass to manage slaves. IMO, it is the only reason why only a few ppl fight with slaves... It is the reason why I gave up.

Cash penalty would be a bad idea unless there was a way to regulate i. I.e with piracy.

~ferret

Madferret, what I had in mind when I spoke about cash penalty is a way to loose cash as if we just used up 1 GG at slave death, without having to go through the process of having to check and replace GG in 15 slaves... I was not thinking about cash spilling out of the ship for pirates to get, only an alternative to GG that would be fair and easy to use