Discussion topic for post: http://www.starsonata.com/blog/base-rebalance/

I like it. Cheaper alternative end game base gear is a good idea, then them pesky connector galaxies won't be such a pain to fortify. But if there are going to be cheaper alternatives to base gear, are there going to be more base kits? Or is this going to stay the same? If you could build a cheap tech 20 base kit with 6 augs and lower resists then that would be pretty useful, at least I think so.

i assume that there would be a timer for bvbing off a owned galaxy so you couldnt go laying outposts and instantly bvbing off of them? other than that i quite like the idea happy that the 10x shield bank suggestion i saw got ditched that would have been way too much of a beef in my opinion.

but personally dont want to see cheaper kits with more aug slots its already possible to upgrade kits which can make it cheaper to base overall, and making cheap 5-6 aug kits widely available would really disencourage the idea of using more expensive versions when you can spam these, unless they had crippling weakness's

i hope there will be a beef on perma drones too. . . will they get more stats too or not?

as mentioned in the blog post, the 24hours requirement would still be here. You cant bvb off a galaxy you haven't owned for 24hours.

So this cheap disposable base gear, it sounds an awful lot like achilles gear. Except for t20 bases already have cheap gear, meaning you're adding t20 disposable gear that pretty much does what achilles gear is supposed to?...

Just rebalance the base gear so that achilles-> armada isn't so huge. Even then I doubt the andaman/achilles kits of a smaller team would stand much chance.

I like the changes made a lot, especially the BvB changes, those are gonna be a ton of fun!

However, theres 2 things I'm concerned about that will turn out pretty badly.

1. "Base gear will have most stats increased by a factor of 2." - I think this is simply too high. A 50% increase is already a lot. Hell, even a 20% increase is alot. If kits do 100% more damage and healing, and are 100% harder to kill (as in breaking the regen and healing they receive), PvB will simply die. It will be impossible to kill a "medium-strength" galaxy. I think you might be missunderstanding what medium strength means these days. If someone asks what I think a medium strength gal is, I'd say it would be like 2 dem DPS kits supported by 2 Dem HPS kits and a Dem SL kit with a load of grem drones(very easy to get). Those gals are actually already quite challenging to kill with a large PvB squad (trust me, we tried).

2. If these stat increases actually do go through, it will be completely and utterly impossible to ever cap a base ever again. There's no way you can break a kit with a rad damp if its getting 2x the HPS and regen that is has right now. Not even if its a non-HPS kit. We'd need base rad weapons to even attempt capping anything of value.

As I've posted before, I think the biggest problem bases have right now is the scaling of the gear. Anything non-armada / ada (with a couple of exceptions) is quite weak in my honest opinion. So yes, a beef to that basegear would be great to help the noobies out. But if you want to defend ur gal against a squad if 10 prawns it wouldn't, and imo, shouldn't hold.

Also, Annihilator Augs would help in this aspect

I hope you can reconsider on the numbers you've posted. Thanks for reading

~DarkSteel

Any chance of getting the basic achilles and up station gear bps out of dgs and made available to purchase directly at a station, andaman and below gear? Also same with station aug bps of every level, would make the bps easier to get and clear up a lot of clutter in the dg/random drop tables. Possible same thing with the improved station kit line, fortified/laconia/demented/ada.

I wonder how many newer or smaller teams dont have as good of stations due to not knowing better gear exists?

This has been long overdue but finally it's here!

Darksteel the issue you brought up... the increase of base strength will indeed make pvb harder which I think is intended. You have to keep in mind that T20 bases were designed to defend against t20 players using UZ ships/gear, while the release of armada gear/augs did help a little bases have been in desperate need of help since the release of t21. Your idea of gals being impossible to kill however is totally negated by the allowance of bvb off any gal you have owned for 24 hours. This will simply mean less cases of people taking out gals for minimal reasons but allow you more freedom to wage war against your true enemies. Removing the bvb slot limit will actually make it vastly easier to kill enemy gals it will just cost more and that is not a bad thing, you will have to answer the question every time of is what they did to you or in the case of worth the cost of killing their gal.

urzaserra great idea.

I like everything besides the cheaper alternatives. Players who own large swaths of galaxies gross an ENORMOUS profit each uni. Where would the cash and resource sink go if you made base gear cheap and easy to get? Nothing in this game needs to be cheaper, please keep this in mind.

Remember that players will fight over resources and money (colonies) if it has value in the game. If base gear is expensive, resources and money will be more valuable and fighting for territory will be more lucrative because of the base gear drops.

totally agree with acid here, dont go the cheap way

Second and more important from my view of the things is, make T22 bases, really that would balance off the bases more than most of the tweaks u intend to do to t20 bases ,,,,, if u want to secure your gal vs t22 ships nothing will be better than t22 bases ,,

Would love to see PvB more often

I also do not like the cheap alternative .

Wow, thanks for all the great feedback so far!


I can tell this one touched a nerve, so here is what I am currently planning. For starters, there will be no new 6-aug cheap kits. I will simply be revamping the current "Complicated Station Kit **" items to deploy with a full set of lower tech gear. For example, the tech 16 version will deploy with a full set of regular Ambrosia gear. Even a Complicated Station Kit IX (not in game yet) will only deploy with a set of regular Achilles gear (and 4 aug slots), which will be nothing special even after the rebalance. The purpose of these kits is to give inexperienced players somewhere to start and everyone the convenience of dropping a functioning kit if they aren't super particular about its strength. They definitely shouldn't be turning the tide in the middle of a galaxy assault, or anything of that nature.

As I mentioned, the "disposable" base gear aspect of the project is still a work in progress so I will hold off on announcing exactly what we have planned for a little while. However, I can share our basic approach: we believe that the main cost of building should be in per-universe expenses (e.g. kits, augs, terraforming) and not in the up-front cost of a big stack of reusable base gear. The reason is that we don't see a good reason to "frontload" the cost of building any more than it already is; making the task of obtaining (or replacing) base gear more difficult just artificially raises the barrier to entry of building. Unfortunately, content devs have strayed from this philosophy over the years, resulting in several endgame base gear items that are extremely annoying or costly to replace (dampeners and Aku Qa come to mind). Even just Ada/Armada gear can be a pretty big hit to the wallet if you think about building whole sets of them at once. To reply directly to AcidFlame, I want to emphasize that I am not trying to make building directly cheaper but rather to give players the option to spread out the cost instead of having if focused at the beginning. Please stay tuned as I'll announce my specific proposal on this soon.


We aren't forgetting about these, but the matter isn't totally resolved either. I personally would like to make all permanent drones and bases untractorable except by squad- and teammates. I find it pretty lame that advanced autonomous weapon systems are unable to carry grav blockers (not unlike some of my teammates… I think everyone knows a guy like that)! Of course, we could just code bases to use grav blockers if they have any and they're being tractored by an enemy, but that just seems like an unnecessary complication to me. If we made this change, I would feel a lot better about beefing perma drones. Right now they just seem pretty weak and would only get weaker with the rebalance if unchanged. Thoughts on this?


I am glad someone is thinking ahead! Indeed there are plans in the works to finally bring out SM 22 and Tech 21+ base gear, kits, and augs. However, there will be at least 1 uni between the base rebalance and that, to give everyone a chance to get used to the new system. However, I do not agree that SM 22 would be the best way to balance bases. It will only affect balance for the most endgame teams who start using T22 bases extensively; lower tier teams will not be using much T22 at all and making sure that bases are balanced for them as well is just as important to me.


The player heylo brought up some nice points that I want to make sure to address. Of course my statements about "weak" and "medium-strength" galaxies are subjective based on your personal understanding of what that means. However, based on what you have said I think we are mostly in agreement here. The 5 dem kit example you bring up would be a case where success in PvB will probably depend on whether the defenders have "cut corners" while building. For example, if the bases are missing dampeners or have suboptimal augmenters / low StM level, it may still be possible. If not, then the change is "working as intended" and it's probably better to BvB the galaxy.

In fact, this is a great example of what a newer team might consider a really strong galaxy and I do not want such galaxies to get facerolled with ease while the owners are asleep. You said: "if you want to defend ur gal against a squad of 10 prawns it wouldn't, and imo, shouldn't hold." I think there's no better way to sum up our difference in opinion. In fact, I don't believe that showing up with 10 Prawns gives a team the right to roll over any galaxy they like. A major part of this project is to make assaulting a well defended galaxy take time, planning, and resources from the attackers. In return, we are removing all limitations on how much you are allowed to spend on your attack. If you really want that galaxy, you can hit it with as many Ada kits as you can lay at once.

I am glad you mentioned base capturing because I didn't have a chance to cover that in my post. We are going to streamline the process of capturing bases so that the challenge is in the actual radiation part and not in the aftermath where you wait around for the galaxy to lose ownership. When you irradiate a base, it will now go into destroyed mode (but not drop anything) in addition to becoming abandoned as it currently would. You will be allowed to capture it even if the galaxy is still owned by another team, but you won't be able to repair it until ownership is lost.

You mentioned "We'd need base rad weapons to even attempt capping anything of value." I think this is a bit exaggerated, but I understand where you are coming from. For sure there will be kits that you could capture before with PvB but which are too hard to capture after the change. However, it's important to keep in mind that the capturing potential of a large number of BvB kits is extremely high. With that being said, I will be doing a special design pass on available radiation weapons and may decide to put in some new ones if I find them to be lacking.


It's not really part of this project but I would also love to get all those base gear BPs removed from the drop tables.

cheaper base alternatives will mean cruddy gear to pros, good gear to noobs just starting out. Its a good idea imo. Dont worry cheap base gear will likely still get roflstomped by any pro kit after all currently a whole galaxy of gear of this sort of caliber can be wiped by one pro base.