What good are balance sheets if you have to manually tweak every item that is used? Doesn't that leave all the un-used gear still worthless as it is now? Would it not be better to find out why the balance sheets keep requiring you to tweak items after they are re-made?

The amount of agreement i have with this post is so high that i cant even express it.

Please do fix that, i use some non-standard stuff on my account (Which i have stopped paying for at the moment.)

When he says tweak he means we need to tweak the items to fit into the new balance formulas. They have a certain power rating they need to hit so we need to make sure they hit it.

On live the vulture has higher speed and much higher capacity than the DS. Does this mean vulture is getting a speed and capacity nerf in exchange for an aug slot, or that the DS is getting a MASSIVE beef to make it overtake the vulture in capacity?

Vulture has 9 more speed then DS and 120 more hull space. On test that will change. The DS will have more hull but the Vulture will be faster, my idea was that Vulture would get 200 hull while the DS will have 350 hull. Balance sheet didnt like those stats though but we'll sort that out.

Current stats on these ships on test are not the final stats.

Thank you, Voomy, for clearing that up. TBH, I'm hoping the balance sheet is telling you that a T20 ship can't possibly have 200 hull. Even a basic T20 (actually T19 on test) wep like a Vmag takes 289 space.

Nearly all the light fighters have gotten significant hull boosts, including both the Vulture and DS.

As for tweaking things within the new formulas, the formulas say how much total power an item has and how much power each stat on the item contributes. Within that, there are endless possibilities for adding to one stat and taking away from another. Also, there are some things that can not be simply balanced, like tweak effects and the value of built-in items. For those, I just have to try to pick a number which represents how powerful those are to keep the item balanced.

Well LFs are mostly meant for recon focus which gets a hull bonus when using LFs so you will have a lot more then just 200 hull even when not counting hull increasing augs. We'll see what it ends up with. Dont want to make the Vulture too close to the DS since the cost and rarity is very different.

lol

200+20+40+40. That is 300 space if you use 2 super combis on a ship with 200 base space. And no one really uses more than 2 super combis on a ship.
I am hoping that 289 size on a venu mag isnt final.

And I apologise for commenting on unfinalised stats but when an admin tries to justify the stats I see my way clear to criticise the stats.

So the balance sheets don't basically generate stats for you? Then were do these seemingly arbitrary numbers coming from on some of theses items (like merc gears size)? Surely you guys didn't put those sizes into your formulas just to check the power and accepted that they were going to be insanely large, did you? I don't mean to criticize your methods here. I'm just wondering why you are tweaking individual items rather than tweaking the system that puts out these item stats that need tweaking.

Ships with built in items and similar situations I can understand, that's not really what I'm commenting about.

i guess caly+ augs are coming into style!

The new balance system generates the stats from categories and some inputted numbers. For example, size is a function of many things, include power, size class, size per power, and depending on the item, either total bank or total range. In the old system, size was just a function of tech level and there was few variations on that. Long range guns are now much bigger in size and short range guns are now much smaller in size. This adds more variety. I will look at the Mercurian Pulse and if I decide it's too big, then I can either reduce the range or change it's size class which would make it both smaller and less powerful.

If the balance sheet filled in all the stats all items would be identical you know. What the balance sheet does is if I for example increase the range of a weapon it will automaticly increase the size of it too. Like Pip said earlier we have a power rating number that everything needs to hit. If we make a item too good the power rating will be too high, we then have to tweak the stats until the power rating is what it should be.
The whole idea with the balance sheet is that if the power rating number is where it should be the item in question will have a good balance.

Personally I am terrified to see the outcome after this. It is going to be a completely new game.

Personally I feel that the changes are in reality pretty minor, they wont change anything. You will be able to do pretty much anything you could before, with some tweaking of your setup of course.

You wont have to change how you play much, minor tactic changes for some.

Im very excited to see how next uni will be. A lot of fun and interesting changes.
New uni shape and ownership rules are what I look forward to the most though.