Discussion topic for post: http://www.starsonata.com/blog/the-stat ... ar-sonata/

Coming at uni reset, soon (tm)

Sounds like solid thoughts in here. I'm all for making it much harder/totally removing tractoring the defenders' possessions.

Tractor ships are already very very OP in PvP, in BvB they are sooooooooooo important that it's a little unfair.

More base gear to build would be nice. There are a few holes that need work, we need more base OLs for different purposes. I would like to see more endgame alternative energies, maybe based towards HPS or DPS or range, etc. More alternative radars with different mods, etc.

I think OLs that increase trans power and others that increase damage (and maybe- trans power) would be good

I actually had a lot of fun making the new base OLs, there will be a new line available Adonis through Annihilator. My goal was to give them all a unique place with each one having a different combo of stats, with none being a direct upgrade from another. (Think how OS5 and OS6 server different purposes) Some of them are similar to certain ship OLs people are already using on their bases(such as OS6 and GVMO), while some are brand new stat combos that I hope you will find interesting.

Can you take a look at the existing base overloadres as well? Some of them are pretty useless atm.

Some good thoughts in there! I agree with playerbase stuff not being useable on bases and also with the attackers being unable to tractor unattached stations and drones. Just seems like a logical step to me since, like you said, it requires the defending party to be actively online in order for their galaxy to survive which is a bad design. People shouldn't be required to be online at a certain point in time for their gal to stand a chance to survive.

However, I would actually like for tweaks to still be useable on stations, but not the way it currently is. With the current system that we have right now we have two different problems in my opinion.

1. Long tweaks with (usually) small bonusses such as Adamantium Shieldings (10% shield regen for 5 minutes), Kotonjas (-10% recoil and +5% damage for 10 minutes) and Source of Energon (35% energy bank and 15% energy regen for 5 minutes) being used to beef a base by a very large margin for a good amount of time in order to increase the survivability of the base, the damage per second output or both.

2. Tweaks with very large bonusses for a small amount of time being spammed. Think of tweaks such as Assassinations (30% damage for 12 seconds), Swifty Spry Attacks (-40% weapon recoil for 2 seconds) and Last Stands (91.5% shieldbank and 61% shield regen for 12 seconds).

Now, the first problem is a very clear one. You increase a base his capabilities by a pretty significant margin for a longer period of time for free and ofcourse that's simply unfair, unbalanced and I think it shouldn't be possible to do this at all. So any tweak that lasts for longer than a 20 seconds shouldn't be useable on bases in my opinion.

Now for the interesting part. I think tweaks that give a large boosts for a small amount of time are actually incredibly fun to use on bases. It gives a whole other level to base combat and I think they're fine to stay IF THEY CAN NOT BE SPAMMED.
They need an internal cooldown. Popping Last stands one after the other is bad game design but if you're able to pop a well-timed one and save the kit for another orbit of the planet that actually gives such a great feeling to the player that just saved it (trust me, I know ). I would suggest a 1 to 2 minute cooldown for these bursty kind of tweaks but I would very much like to see them continueing play a part in base combat.


Please discuss, since I know one man's opinion won't be enough to persuade anyone these days

@DarkSteel: How about superitems instead of tweaks for serving that kind of a purpose?

Could work although as of now superitems activate on themselves whereas the timing of these bursty tweaks would be the most important aspect of the tweak. Just randomly increasing your damage by 30% for 12 seconds wont do anything most of the time. You have to hit it on the perfect orbit timing if you want to get any value out of it. I think keeping tweaks to fulfil this purpose is fine to be honest

It still is too easy, as the majority of the high end player base owns multiple or more accounts, which means two players in reality often means 7-8 characters. This is a change that has happened within the recent few years, but of course it would be ideal to have some numbers on it. You don't need more than 8-10 characters to pretty quickly take out galaxies defended by 3 Adamantiumized kits.

I guess it is also worth taking note of how much damage snipers do with full analysis, multifiring (did the class rebalance take multifiring into account) with with high critical hit chances and with fleet commanders amplifying.



I've still counted quite a lot of occurrences since the base rebalance where players simply go out and PvB or BvB teams within the lower range of their PvP ranges, without being at war or having a good reason to attack.



I don't see the benefit of this. Unless I've mistakenly observed the wrong teams the past years, my view on this is that almost any defending assets are permanently attached, and permanent drones are in most cases so outdated that they become a weak spot in BvB scenarios.

The most used tactic has been for the defending team to isolate attacking bases one at a time by dragging them into their Achilles Pulse Guns (and possibly player ship weapon range), while they try to keep the other attacking bases away, as well as trying to kill off enemy tractor ships. Memories of 12-13,000 range Ares Sappers on multifiring snipers and seers trying to sneak behind the enemy lines comes to mind. This leads to the attacking team trying to pull back the base that the defenders are tractoring towards the defensive bases, and this goes on for hours and hours, and is extremely tiresome.

Due to this style of gameplay, I can only say that what I feel needs to changed, is how BvB works alltogether. I don't have the time to write up all my thoughts on how I feel it should be radically changed, but I definitely think we need to get rid of all these hard capped limits and mechanics.

While of course this is mainly a scenario which occurs in most BvB scenarios in the high end, it still seems strange to me that the developers of this game seem to want this change to be put in game.



This is a good change, but it really should have been identified as a major issue in the base rebalance.

I've been thinking that maybe it could be an idea to compress the power of several bases into one base. This would both reduce the server load during fights, and make it less time consuming to manage and setup. This is just a philosophical thought, where I've been thinking that we've taken this game to a point where the game back in the day was about power being concentrated in one or two bases, and now we've mainly scaled the amount of bases needed, in order to balance the collaborative power needed to defend or attack with bases.

I guess I'll just finish off this post with a list of changes I would like to see, while I wait for the replies on my view on this.

- Base slots needs to be revamped
- Bases can easily do more raw damage
- Permanent drones needs to be revamped (this will also benefit Anatolia if there is no revamp of the Emperor mechanic)
- Achilles Pulse Guns needs to have viable alternatives (right now there is none, and due to the range of this weapon, it is also another contributing factor to the tug-o-war game we've allowed Star Sonata to become)

Seeing as the attackers are always online, this would benefit the attackers more than the defenders. While the concept of tweaks contributes to active gameplay, I'm just concerned that this will give the attackers an advantage that is too powerful. But I also acknowledge your argument of customization being incredibly fun. So I'm a bit split on the matter. It just feels like we're looking at something that will be very hard to balance, to avoid it either being too marginal to be useful, or being too unbalanced and giving too much advantage to attackers.

Yes, attackers are usually in stronger force since they did plan the attack. However, you seem to forget that 1 defender would make a big difference in being able to use a tweak at the right time whereas it doesn't matter if the attacking party has 1 person online or 50 when it comes to tweaking bases. So I actually disagree with you and I think defenders would benefit more from this than attackers would.

My point here was that this change isn't relevant to the game because assets are attached and permanent drones are ignored in a BvB scenario because they are too weak to make a difference.

As I tried to point out, the real issue is the tug-o-war scenario where the defenders try to isolate one of the attackers bases.

It isn't a bad thing, it just seems like the developer team doesn't seem to grasp the situation and manage to address the core issues, if this is their proposed fix to improve BvB.

It means that I believe we could allow bases to do even more damage, as to increase their DPH.

It also makes me wonder if it would be an idea to rebalance base weapons to have higher recoil and higher damage, and possibly set a new rate of fire cap to twice what it is now, or even higher.

As what concerns Achilles Pulse Guns, it is important to point out that in the past, MagCannons and Lasers were the big offense in BvB scenarios. This allowed a greater variety of tactics. This variety is what I feel we lack. Right now we've come to a point where the only viable tactic is Achilles Pulse Guns and tug-o-war. And that is extremely tiresome and time consuming.