Star Sonata :: View topic - Weekly Dev Blog

MasterTrader wrote:

Fyuryus wrote:

Quote:

What will happen is that your Wild Bots will do less damage unless you pick the Advanced Class Subskill (which we will be adding as an option, it will most likely be Wild Man) that gives you their damage back. However, making this decision will prevent you from using Fighters. We may include an alternative for fighters, which would lock you out of Wild Bots in exchange for more powerful fighters.

Prevent slaves from using fighters, or just no fighters entirely?

Right now, we're working with the model of no fighters at all. Wild Bots are currently very powerful, and we do not want to push Fleet Commander back into the realm of being overpowered again. We may be willing to revisit this choice should it prove not to be as big of an issue as we first believed.

EDIT: Here is a link to the proposed stats, they are listed as multipliers. This means 1.2 = 20% and .8 = -20%. 2 = 100%, and so on. If a cell is blank then it means that the multiplier is set to the default of 1 = 0%.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1285066390

MasterTrader wrote:

The Controlbots are balanced the same way that Augmenters are balanced now, so their stats are the stats that would be acceptable on an augmenter. All of these stats are additive, so the less of a particular stat you have the more valuable it is marginally. One big reason MF bots are so good is that multi-firing is a very rare and hard stat to get, so +100% multi-firing is (in almost all cases) exactly double your DPS. The issue is that, because of the strength of multi-firing controlbots, they were outshining every single other bot choice. When you have multiple choices in game, and none of those choices are viable compared to one or two of them, something must be done to encourage people to use them.

One way of doing this would be to make controlbot stats multiplicative on the backend, meaning that the end effect would be very similar to the way Evil/Radioactive/Resonating mods currently work. This idea was deemed unacceptable, and instead it was decided to buff the other combat controlbots until they were worth using. Due to MF bots being, close to 100% of the time, double DPS it is impossible to make bots that scale at a similar rate as MF bots. Because of this, MF bots needed a harsher downside. Why? Because getting a bot to power one weapon is not very difficult, and with nothing else for bots to use electricity on a Multifiring controlbot would continue to be the obvious answer.

Players tend to search for the most efficient options, and in order to get them to make different decisions and choose different paths I decided the best way to do this would be to further decrease the efficiency of Multifiring controlbots. I originally wanted to make MF bots use 4x the electricity vs 2x the electricity they currently use. It was decided that we would instead cut that down to 3x the electricity used, and if it turns out to be too negligible we may look at increasing it in the future.

MasterTrader wrote:

Tomzta09 wrote:

Ugh, please don't add anymore completely unnecessary and pointless boundaries like the one you've just proposed with Wild Slaves and their fighters. Adding Wild Man into the game, effectively opening up the possibilities of Wild Slaves being used effectively, made Fleet Commanders actually feel like a Fleet Commanders, a slave swarm with some slaves launching fighters. Now you're going to put a barrier up to stop FCs from using Wild Slaves with Fighters unless they get another class skill.

I don't think you should be forcing people to make such massive decisions with Advanced Skills. Choosing between them is already difficult enough, as you get different outcomes depending on the combination. By forcing players to make even bigger decisions on whether or not their wild slaves fully function or not is a terrible idea. Advanced Subskills are extremely valuable, after all you only get two and creating what is essentially a two-part skill where if you want Wild Slaves to function properly, you need to use both of your skills in order to do so.

I strongly urge you to reconsider. If you're that "afraid" of FC becoming overpowered again, even though I'd say the reduction in number of Wild Slaves has significantly reduced that, then maybe the problem lies in how powerful fighters will be once the change comes in, and not the class.

Players have access to 3 Advanced Class Subskills on the Test server at present. We plan on keeping this the same.

Fighters being powerful is much more desireable than Wild Bots being powerful, because Fighters actually cost you something (Energy and Hull Space) while Wild Bots do not take any resources. The issue is Wild Bots, because they are free DPS. I personally do not have a problem with throwing the Fighters into the game as they are, because they require a significant amount of energy. The problem is that there is a concern that a player being able to launch fighters and use wild bots and regular bots will return to the very high DPS they were doing prior to the nerfs to Wild Bots.

sabre198 wrote:

so how do you envision people power thier MF slaves now? theyeve just taken a 50% elec hit nerf

basically youve handed a collection of shit in return for nerfing mfbots. Cant you just leave mfbots alone, i wanted to resub at some point.

its not like slaves are OP, even with MFbots they still struggle to dps stuff even at endgame.

basically who complained slaves were OP DPS with mfbots?

The issue isn't that MF Bots do too much damage or that slaves are OP, if the issue was damage then the damage on the MF bots would have been affected. The issue is that no other bot is used because the MF Bot is the best, and the downsides (Less weapon diversity = less DPS in certain situations, more electrical consumption = less sustained DPS) are not enough of a drawback to encourage the consideration of other choices. I am in favor of just making all stats on bots multiplicative so that they scale and are desirable in some situations, but this is not the path we decided on as a team.

MasterTrader wrote:

sabre198 wrote:

then back off until you have a suitable solution, people still wont use those other shitty bots and you will just piss people off when thier slaves cant power when its taken bils and getting all the way to end game to finally be able to power them.

if the lower bots suck then improve them! all those improvements suck, you know they do!

I know exactly why they suck compared to MF bots, however my hands are tied when it comes to addressing that issue head on. Thus, in order to achieve my goal I needed to hit the MF bots at the same time. I explained why in earlier posts.

If you haven't already, take a look at the tentative stats:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1285066390

iwnh01 wrote:

iirc wild bots cost you 1 wep slot that might otherwise be usefully occupied.

is there a reason you clever guys can't make fighters + wild slaves balanced without an advanced skill, then make one more powerful at the cost of the other's strength via advanced skills?

Wild bots don't cost you any weapon slots that might be otherwise usefully occupied. They literally cost you nothing to use.

Making fighters and wild slaves balanced together wouldn't be hard, but there's a bigger issue at play here: I do not believe it is justified for bots that are free, and do free damage, to constitute a significant portion of a Fleet Commanders offensive power. Fleet Commander's currently do nothing with their energy banks, allowing them to launch fighters that are actually useful and worth using (for a large upfront energy cost) along with all of the quality of life changes will give FC's bonus DPS.

I definitely think that having to spend a resource, in this case Energy, in order to do damage is highly preferable to that damage coming from Wild Bots (Which do not cost you anything, resource wise or time wise). This is the perspective I am coming from.

Author:	iwnh01 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 7:43 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
MasterTrader wrote: Wild bots don't cost you any weapon slots that might be otherwise usefully occupied. They literally cost you nothing to use. Sorry if I wasn't clear, but the point I was trying to make is: capital ship = 3 wepon slots. If capping wild bots, 1 capping slot + 2 otherwise useful weapon slots. Personally I disagree with this arrangement but I'm not going as far as to say that it isn't balanced. As far as I'm concerned it is a cost; that slot could be occupied with a bindo'd radio, trans, whatever wep of a higher tech than xxx conversion. If you disagree though I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Author:	sabre198 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 8:08 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
I checked the new tentative list and theres still none of them I would switch out for my mfbot, so would just have to take the nerf? was there one you think might be used instead? which one?

Author:	Tomzta09 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 9:22 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
sabre198 wrote: I checked the new tentative list and theres still none of them I would switch out for my mfbot, so would just have to take the nerf? was there one you think might be used instead? which one? They won't be using them out of choice. They'll use them out of how close it is to the original.

Author:	Masterful [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 9:41 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
The 50% Elec Temp is a monumentally stupid idea.

Author:	Pontius123 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 10:10 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
1. Everyone used MF bots. Including Berserkers and Gunners. 2. The only bot that made a credible threat to MF bot meta was the Snownet, which at maximum could equal a MF bot and at worse gave a ~20% effective bonus. Most of the time it was at the worst, because people use things called augmenters on their slaves. 3. Multifire is such a rare stat (only Berserker and Gunner having natural MF on T20 ships and below) that Multifire was always going to be a 2x modifier for the two slave classes. 4. To have a competitive SF bot, you would either need a weapon that was monumentally large and overpowered, or the bot needed a masssssive damage aug modifier. We're talking about bots with at minimum 200% damage bonus, plus Rate of Fire and utility aug mods.

Star Sonata http://forum.starsonata.com/

Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=62894	Page 2 of 5

Author:	sabre198 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 10:15 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
whats wrong with .4 then? the new bot balance shits will easily tell which stats to set to make equivalent right?

Author:	riel017 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 11:02 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
Pixel has also finally has a look at the “Chid Adiz Mardana Var” drones and removed their ability to have infinite energy charge. This has been related to the changes regarding to the in-built energy charge in drones and bases being fixed. will this mean that sup/ult elec controller will be useless now??? D:

Author:	thecrazygamemaster [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 11:12 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
I'm personally on board with Hober here. Wild Slaves should be one "branch" of FC while fighter swarms are another. If used together, neither one should be 100% as powerful as they would be with specialization. However, I do see the point about hard limiters. Perhaps Wild Man could carry a -50% "Fighter Power" penalty, with whatever makes fighters powerful on that branch carrying a -50% wild slave power penalty? Side note: non-Flight Controller (FC with fighters) fighters should not be remotely as powerful as the FC ones.

Author:	SI [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 12:19 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
I just want to chime in here to point out that even with MF bot nerf, FC slaves should be getting an effective buff in the next patch due to the fact that base aug stats are being doubled (and, in current aug tweak terms, this means they're going from 60% aug tweaking to 100%). I loaded up the slaves on my two old characters that use MF bots (a FC and a ShM) on test, and they're doing more DPS than they currently do on live.

Author:	sabre198 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 1:11 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
Are fighter gen recharge elec effected by the mfbot elec temp? Spose if Augs doing that then might be a good time to get in the mfbot nerf.

Author:	The Salty One [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 1:26 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
Maybe I'm crazy here but uh, multifire bots already have less sustainability because two weapons. Instead of nerfing MF bots and tacking big numbers on other bots why don't you make controlbot stats multiplicative? Also doubling aug stats will make a lot of AI very OP

Author:	Fyuryus [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 2:21 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
MF Bot nerf was unneeded

Author:	MasterTrader [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 2:40 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
sabre198 wrote: Are fighter gen recharge elec effected by the mfbot elec temp? Spose if Augs doing that then might be a good time to get in the mfbot nerf. No, Electric Tempering only affects weapons. To everyone else, I'm paying attention to and reading every single post and comment you made. The reason I may not directly respond to you is because I'm pretty certain that I have addressed your comments in previous posts: MasterTrader wrote: Fyuryus wrote: Quote: What will happen is that your Wild Bots will do less damage unless you pick the Advanced Class Subskill (which we will be adding as an option, it will most likely be Wild Man) that gives you their damage back. However, making this decision will prevent you from using Fighters. We may include an alternative for fighters, which would lock you out of Wild Bots in exchange for more powerful fighters. Prevent slaves from using fighters, or just no fighters entirely? Right now, we're working with the model of no fighters at all. Wild Bots are currently very powerful, and we do not want to push Fleet Commander back into the realm of being overpowered again. We may be willing to revisit this choice should it prove not to be as big of an issue as we first believed. EDIT: Here is a link to the proposed stats, they are listed as multipliers. This means 1.2 = 20% and .8 = -20%. 2 = 100%, and so on. If a cell is blank then it means that the multiplier is set to the default of 1 = 0%. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1285066390 MasterTrader wrote: The Controlbots are balanced the same way that Augmenters are balanced now, so their stats are the stats that would be acceptable on an augmenter. All of these stats are additive, so the less of a particular stat you have the more valuable it is marginally. One big reason MF bots are so good is that multi-firing is a very rare and hard stat to get, so +100% multi-firing is (in almost all cases) exactly double your DPS. The issue is that, because of the strength of multi-firing controlbots, they were outshining every single other bot choice. When you have multiple choices in game, and none of those choices are viable compared to one or two of them, something must be done to encourage people to use them. One way of doing this would be to make controlbot stats multiplicative on the backend, meaning that the end effect would be very similar to the way Evil/Radioactive/Resonating mods currently work. This idea was deemed unacceptable, and instead it was decided to buff the other combat controlbots until they were worth using. Due to MF bots being, close to 100% of the time, double DPS it is impossible to make bots that scale at a similar rate as MF bots. Because of this, MF bots needed a harsher downside. Why? Because getting a bot to power one weapon is not very difficult, and with nothing else for bots to use electricity on a Multifiring controlbot would continue to be the obvious answer. Players tend to search for the most efficient options, and in order to get them to make different decisions and choose different paths I decided the best way to do this would be to further decrease the efficiency of Multifiring controlbots. I originally wanted to make MF bots use 4x the electricity vs 2x the electricity they currently use. It was decided that we would instead cut that down to 3x the electricity used, and if it turns out to be too negligible we may look at increasing it in the future. MasterTrader wrote: Tomzta09 wrote: Ugh, please don't add anymore completely unnecessary and pointless boundaries like the one you've just proposed with Wild Slaves and their fighters. Adding Wild Man into the game, effectively opening up the possibilities of Wild Slaves being used effectively, made Fleet Commanders actually feel like a Fleet Commanders, a slave swarm with some slaves launching fighters. Now you're going to put a barrier up to stop FCs from using Wild Slaves with Fighters unless they get another class skill. I don't think you should be forcing people to make such massive decisions with Advanced Skills. Choosing between them is already difficult enough, as you get different outcomes depending on the combination. By forcing players to make even bigger decisions on whether or not their wild slaves fully function or not is a terrible idea. Advanced Subskills are extremely valuable, after all you only get two and creating what is essentially a two-part skill where if you want Wild Slaves to function properly, you need to use both of your skills in order to do so. I strongly urge you to reconsider. If you're that "afraid" of FC becoming overpowered again, even though I'd say the reduction in number of Wild Slaves has significantly reduced that, then maybe the problem lies in how powerful fighters will be once the change comes in, and not the class. Players have access to 3 Advanced Class Subskills on the Test server at present. We plan on keeping this the same. Fighters being powerful is much more desireable than Wild Bots being powerful, because Fighters actually cost you something (Energy and Hull Space) while Wild Bots do not take any resources. The issue is Wild Bots, because they are free DPS. I personally do not have a problem with throwing the Fighters into the game as they are, because they require a significant amount of energy. The problem is that there is a concern that a player being able to launch fighters and use wild bots and regular bots will return to the very high DPS they were doing prior to the nerfs to Wild Bots. sabre198 wrote: so how do you envision people power thier MF slaves now? theyeve just taken a 50% elec hit nerf basically youve handed a collection of shit in return for nerfing mfbots. Cant you just leave mfbots alone, i wanted to resub at some point. its not like slaves are OP, even with MFbots they still struggle to dps stuff even at endgame. basically who complained slaves were OP DPS with mfbots? The issue isn't that MF Bots do too much damage or that slaves are OP, if the issue was damage then the damage on the MF bots would have been affected. The issue is that no other bot is used because the MF Bot is the best, and the downsides (Less weapon diversity = less DPS in certain situations, more electrical consumption = less sustained DPS) are not enough of a drawback to encourage the consideration of other choices. I am in favor of just making all stats on bots multiplicative so that they scale and are desirable in some situations, but this is not the path we decided on as a team. MasterTrader wrote: sabre198 wrote: then back off until you have a suitable solution, people still wont use those other shitty bots and you will just piss people off when thier slaves cant power when its taken bils and getting all the way to end game to finally be able to power them. if the lower bots suck then improve them! all those improvements suck, you know they do! I know exactly why they suck compared to MF bots, however my hands are tied when it comes to addressing that issue head on. Thus, in order to achieve my goal I needed to hit the MF bots at the same time. I explained why in earlier posts. If you haven't already, take a look at the tentative stats: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1285066390 iwnh01 wrote: iirc wild bots cost you 1 wep slot that might otherwise be usefully occupied. is there a reason you clever guys can't make fighters + wild slaves balanced without an advanced skill, then make one more powerful at the cost of the other's strength via advanced skills? Wild bots don't cost you any weapon slots that might be otherwise usefully occupied. They literally cost you nothing to use. Making fighters and wild slaves balanced together wouldn't be hard, but there's a bigger issue at play here: I do not believe it is justified for bots that are free, and do free damage, to constitute a significant portion of a Fleet Commanders offensive power. Fleet Commander's currently do nothing with their energy banks, allowing them to launch fighters that are actually useful and worth using (for a large upfront energy cost) along with all of the quality of life changes will give FC's bonus DPS. I definitely think that having to spend a resource, in this case Energy, in order to do damage is highly preferable to that damage coming from Wild Bots (Which do not cost you anything, resource wise or time wise). This is the perspective I am coming from.

Author:	Sypom3 [ Fri Dec 23, 2016 10:03 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
I've told you once and im telling again, the electric tempering is retarded because it affects all classes and not just fcs. We all get it that you want diversity, but combat slaves are only going to be weaker than what they currently are, for now you need hundreds of billions to make any slave semi decent, and mf bot is the only thing that makes a slave "ok ish" The nerf is also retarded becouse you have to either make a much stronger nerf and effectively destroy the mf bot, or people still will use the mf bot 99% of the time because it is the best period. There os no inbetween. I honestly think that regualar bots need multiplicative stats, nothing will beat mf bot becouse it multiplies dps by 2, while regular bots are addictive and overshadowed by class skills entirely.

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Author:	Tomzta09 [ Sat Dec 24, 2016 10:25 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Weekly Dev Blog – 21st December
Hober, are you trying to say that there will be 3 Adv. Skills you can choose now instead of two?