hm.

my future pirate career cries. x3
or is this just the beginning...

Mind explaining to me how the fuck, ada/armada gear become a convenience item or "particularly useful in BvB" when it's actually more inconvenient and more prone to mistakes to individually gear and aug kits, and how is it particularly more useful in BvB when cheaper than the Ada gear I can just make more ada kits that come with gear that is very nearly as strong as ada gear...

Oh and tell me how you haven't been misinterpreting things intentionally? You said tanking and survivability doesn't noticably factor into BvB which is just about the most ridiculous damn thing I have ever heard, considering BvB lasts hours and is usually a game of keeping your tank alive and in front of mags...

Nope read the sentence 5 times can't figure it out, I guess you mean that I had it easier to go to end game then other people in the past? I assume.

If that's so, then let me reply with this: Every single T22 boss I have figured it out by myself with people that haven't done T22 bosses, the first T22 skills I've gotten are where I've played a major role in actually doing the content. That's with a T21 ship that isn't oly ship or a Prawn.
For T21 I've done it via Shard Missions, which assumingly, is easier then before indeed.
As for gear, everything I own are stuff I've farmed myself, or have rolled on group runs. Only thing I've bought is Bindomite for the most part, getting 1-2k Bindomite without buying it is bleh, I don't like prospecting.

There are no shortcuts to end game, it's just everyone trying to take one and failing misserably, so misserably that they quit because of it. I've taken no shortcuts in making Adamantium gear, and in the end, when I've started producing Adamantium gear, you read a post saying "Everyone gets free Adamantium gear". That's a damn issue in my books.

Being ignorant of not wanting to give in to it is fine by me. But trying to talk the people that aren't ignorant of the fact that people having free Adamantium gear is a bad idea, is just a waste of our time.

yeh that would seem a shitter if you've just got to that level and after having Ada gear rammed down your face constantly as the must have thing. The reality is you will wake up with it all gone likely as people like you with good intentions get farmed by the scumbags.

Actually, right now Ada Gear isn't strictly needed. You just need to finish X gear in a week and you have the less strong varriant of Ada Gear. That's how I've done it up untill now, and that's how I've been able to extract commodities to get Ada Gear myself. The only thing you need to have as knowledge is how to defend your galaxy, and what to do when you get attacked. Plus, you're not alone, if you can't afford Ada Gear easly, it can be made a team project. I assume that was how it went in the beginning?

Now with ICs, you can just buy the Adamantium Sheets just like that & make the Adamantium Gear that way. The only issue of Adamantium Gear is farming the Love Cilinder Remains, Hell Fire Remains and getting Hazard Dissipator Ultra's. With ICs basing has become so cheap, can just do no lockouts, and just buy everything of the market and you'll get everything for 10 Ada Kits, augmenters, Ada Gear just easly.

Atleast XYZ gear is a brake on the money flow of ICs at the start of each uni, just like colonies getting to a decent population is, but seems like it isn't anymore.

As veteran players, you and I both know that what makes someone good at this game is far more than having the right gear. That is doubly true for something as technical as base combat. I am not in the least bit worried about some new players waltzing into SS and becoming the next BvB lords because of this change.



Raising the skill floor, i.e. improving the worst performance. If you feel that you can be more effective deploying more kits without Ada/Armada gear, that is your prerogative. As I've said before, I am not telling you how to play the game.

I guess I will recap my point from earlier here as well. When you BvB this uni, would you consider using regular Annihilator gear instead of Ada/Armada? It's much cheaper, after all. You could lay tons more kits without putting the expensive gear out. It sounds like you don't think the tradeoff is worth it with regular Annihilator gear, though. See below for the punchline (and the tl;dr below that for a quick summary).

So what about Anni X? You will be getting 25% better shield regen and a few percent better dampening, compared to regular Anni gear. However, you have plenty of BvB slots to throw around, don't you? Then those stats don't matter because you can just go ahead and lay as many T16-18 healer kits behind the front line as you want. What I am proving here is this:

1) Assuming you can afford plenty of Anni gear and Lac damps, and
2) assuming you have BvB slots to spare,

you can do just as well with plain Anni gear as you can with Anni X gear in a BvB. Granted, if you are low on BvB slots you may not be able to get enough healing in the back lines to support the lower regen. But if you're so low on BvB slots, you won't be trying to get around Ada/Armada by spamming Anni X bases in the first place. Likewise, maybe you don't have enough Lac damps to go around. But then how exactly are you affording all the base augs that go into those extra kits?

tl;dr: If Anni X makes BvB spam too strong, then we should all be spamming regular Anni kits already. The difference of 25% is only relevant to the tankiness of your kits, and if you're already in the BvB-spam business a few extra cheap healers in the back is no problem.



As I was saying above, this change doesn't make BvB spam measurably stronger than it already is with plain old Annihilator gear. That 25% increase with inbuilt gear may feel a lot stronger, but when it comes to actual BvB you aren't getting the bonuses where you need them (DPS).



Those players would definitely stand to gain the most from this change, but I think the future of the game will gain as well. I have lost count how many people have quit SS because of losing their hard-earned base gear. It just costs too much to play the Wild Space game, when you stand to lose it all some night while you're asleep. Pushing the cost of building to kits and augs (which can't be recouped anyway) means that players will have a better idea going in exactly what they stand to lose or gain.

I do want to thank you for your thoughtful reply to my post and I hope we can keep up the conversation.



I think most of your questions are addressed above. To this one I'll repeat that we don't want basing to carry an upfront cost of gear investment. This is because it increases the chance of "catastrophic" loss, which leads to quitting. Once the cost of basing is more centralized on a per-uni cost, players will be able to more accurately assess the costs and risks associated to it. Humans are just pretty bad on average at dealing with low-odds but high-damage risks. We can't really get around that as game designers so we are going to work with it instead. Since Ada/Armada gear are still the premier modular base gear in the game, they retain their value as the premier BvB gear. I don't believe I used the word "convenience" here at all.



As I've recapped above, if you wish to use the inbuilt gear in your kits instead of Ada/Armada gear, I have no problem with that approach. I will however point out that for those of you who were talking up the value of a few % in the endgame, you still can't beat Ada/Armada gear for BvB. Again though, I'm not telling you how to play the game. If it makes more sense at your wealth and base slot levels to spam BvB kits, that is OK with me.



I don't know how to make it any clearer than I have done above, so please take a look through what I've written if you would like to know my answer to this question. Tanking and survivability are VERY important in BvB. If you think that is what I'm saying, you are not understanding my argument.

Other than that though, I generally just completely disagree with all your points... If Ada gear is only a few percentage points above Anni X, then yes I can kill it with now Vanilla kits. Because I can just bring more kits and get more DPS for less input resources.

Misspoke. I've been writing an awful lot of words in this thread, you know. Let me rephrase my statement.

We want Ada/Armada gear to be an elite item and particularly useful in BvB.

Can you clarify your statement? I don't understand if you are referring to using Anni X gear as the attacker in BvB, or attacking a galaxy that is using Anni X gear instead of Ada/Armada for defense.

If it is an elite item, then why is starter gear giving it a run for its money? You say it doesn't, but now with all the stuff that comes standard on kits, I can just make 3-4 more kits instead of making one set of ada gear. across the 15 odd sets of ada gear that I have, and 1500 ada, it does turn BvB into purely a game of outnumbering the competition.

Specifically referring to the new viability of attacking ada with anni x.

I will say this though, limiting base slots for attackers would do a lot to help balance this, because as it stands ada basically becomes useless for defense, because now if you run full ada sets, I can count your kits and +1 or +2 them with anni x and kill your shit. Limit attackers to 5 or 6 base slots and maybe this change is viable. But with unlimited slots, it is just a clusterfuck.

As someone else said in this thread, elite gear means a few extra % for a lot more money. That's how itemization works in these games.



I don't agree at all. I've done my fair share of BvB and it has never come down to a sheer game of numbers. Even when we did 30 v 15 against EF it was hard going and we had to know exactly what we were doing, with what kits, and when. Inferior strategy could have easily wiped on that gal, even with 40 kits. I will say that it can depend on your opponent, though. If you are both just magging each other till someone says "uncle," maybe it does reduce to who has more kits. I don't think that accurately represents all BvB has to offer, though.



As I have been saying, Ada/Armada is now being stylized as the elite modular BvB gear. I don't expect people to use it for defense of their galaxies much anymore, for the reasons you have stated.