How would you fix Ship Yard?

[Malicious Wraith]

QUOTE (cashto @ Apr 5 2012, 11:32 AM) The basic problem is people keep trying to put SY on equal footing as the other three techpaths, and it never works.

SY is supposed to be massively OP. That's why noobs love it so much and always want to see capships and are so disappointed when they never come out. Massively OP ships is what makes up for the utter blandness of turreting and completely lack of any subtle strategy.

SY should be considered Mark IV tech. Put it essentially at the end of the tech tree, get rid of corvs as a midgame ship. Make SY in general crazy expensive, put tons of prereqs in front of it. Make it an option only to be considered by a team that has already established complete map domination. Make it the anti-turtle win button.

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[Mastametz]

QUOTE (Phalanxe @ Apr 5 2012, 10:55 AM) sy on xc was silly, garr tech could counter them

garr tech can counter sy on any core with an aleph camp
a fleet of dumb1 dis1 prox1 scouts camping an aleph will shred a cap in seconds

what I really think should happen is have a large game/small game toggle instead of a sy flag
and the ability to launch a small game and then enable big game later on when more people join (but not able to roll back to small game after-the-fact) (also turning on big-game will require at least 10 people a side)
and sy can exist regardless of small game/big game but small game will have weaker caps
and then big game will have much durable caps

which should be relatively simple to implement and less problematic than capship shields/hull updating in real-time based on team size

[Nightflame]

Lets add up some points.

1: The game has to be balanced if SY is on or off.
With the way games grow out of nothing, you can't even assume SY will be on in large games. Therefore, techpaths have to have equal capability to stop capships, and similar gains from SY.

2: No one can play with or against SY well.
Cadet will get you to understand that you want a dis3/galv/DF/minepack fig against capships. ACS completely ignores SY. As a result, I've seen even supposedly good vets screw up horribly when SY is on. Even fewer people will have any clue once SY is changed. As such, initial balancing is going to be wildly off no matter what.

3: SY scales horribly.
Cost per ship is bad enough, but that's not all. When you have five people on a cruiser, you have all their firepower until the cruiser dies. When you have ten people in two cruisers, you lose half your firepower halfway through. Other problems like having three players on an assault ship oob constantly add even more scaling issues, and don't get me started on eye in small games vs large. SY simply will not scale well without a complete overhaul. Any attempts to make it do so are likely to fail spectacularly.

So what are the options?

1: Redo the numbers of the current SY.
This requires very little work, and it would make SY at least usable during weekday primetime. All the fogies that never play outside of squadgames and big events would likely complain, but at least the majority could play SY.

2: Rework SY to be a standalone techpath, ala XC. This fixes a LOT of issues, but makes SY seem kinda bland.

3: Rework SY so that it's incompatible with current techpaths. For example what cashto is saying: just make it endgame money for power. That fixes the normal balance issues just dandy, but opens up other problems. Remember why giga SY didn't always get up to battleships? There was a reason for that. Belters have a similar problem. Actually, every faction with a different economy has such troubles. That's why every single SY we have right now works differently! It would be a painful amount of work to balance a rework of SY between the factions.

4: Make SY something else entirely. A techpath with access to all GAs? Support ships for every techpath? This is the sort of thing I'd play with, though it makes the other options look like finished products in comparison.

[BillyBishop]

The big/medium/small game flag instead of or in addition to the sy flag I support.


I think the probelm with changing the flag in game is that there's like an issue with the fact that in effect the core would change (and that probably can't happen) during the game, at least for now a dynamic setting like that could be a problem. Then again I'm not entirely sure.

[Nightflame]

Nah, such an implementation could just activate/deactivate a def as SY does now. If you're hoping for a code fix though, be prepared to wait another two years. Another problem is GCs messing with the flag for their own benefit. Can you imagine a comm switching up to big game just before launching a capship? If that's what you really want, it could be done today. Just add a dev for med game, then a dev for big game. If you trust the comms not to hit it without asking, there's no reason it couldn't work.

[Phalanxe]

QUOTE (Sheriff Metz @ Apr 5 2012, 10:45 AM) garr tech can counter sy on any core with an aleph camp
a fleet of dumb1 dis1 prox1 scouts camping an aleph will shred a cap in seconds

what I really think should happen is have a large game/small game toggle instead of a sy flag
and the ability to launch a small game and then enable big game later on when more people join (but not able to roll back to small game after-the-fact) (also turning on big-game will require at least 10 people a side)
and sy can exist regardless of small game/big game but small game will have weaker caps
and then big game will have much durable caps

which should be relatively simple to implement and less problematic than capship shields/hull updating in real-time based on team size

i was talking of only 1 guy

[jbansk]

You all are trying to circumvent the real problem here which is team size. Fix the player base issue and SY can be properly balanced.

Fix / Release R6 FIRST, pound the streets for players, get community back to a proper size and THEN address the faction / tech issues.

If you put half the effort into increasing the community as you do in tweaking sh.t, we'd have 1000 players.

[cashto]

QUOTE (Nightflame @ Apr 5 2012, 12:39 PM) For example what cashto is saying: just make it endgame money for power. That fixes the normal balance issues just dandy, but opens up other problems. Remember why giga SY didn't always get up to battleships? There was a reason for that. Belters have a similar problem. Actually, every faction with a different economy has such troubles. That's why every single SY we have right now works differently! It would be a painful amount of work to balance a rework of SY between the factions.

Giga didn't get up to even cruisers. Their cruiser was "light". That wasn't done for balance reasons, btw, but for thematic reasons; Giga is the "cheap and shoddy" faction. As for battleships, not every faction has them.

Belters SY is notably cheesy for being cheap, easy to get, and strong. Basically the same problem as any other SY, except on steroids.

The problem of balancing SY among the factions is exactly why it shouldn't be a fourth techpath. If you put SY at the end, then nothing changes for the first 40 minutes of the game. We really don't have to worry about $#@!ing that part up; there's nothing to balance!

Honestly, most of the ships in SY are pointless. What I would probably do if I were CC lead is get rid of everything except assault ship and cruiser, maaaaaybe keep an escort ship like the corv or destroyer around. GT's cruiser would be the HOD. If SY is Mark IV tech then there's no need for a frigate/cruiser/battleship progression.

Freighter would be an interesting $250 ship free in garrison that could ship out missles to an empty bomb run somewhere. It has no reason to be a capship. Should be no stronger than any other single-pilot ship. Or we could ditch it entirely. I'm cool with that. Freighter right now is a complete joke.

I would probably reduce the number of turrets on cruisers, or replace them with AC, and make it an SR receiver, because again, turrets are $#@!ing boring. I'd rectify the shield/hull balance a bit so that EMP actually has some use.

The big change would be to slow cruisers down. Like 50mps top speed. SY has no business relying on the element of speed or surprise. I also don't like how currently, if a cruiser gets within 3k of a base and is going full speed, then that base is toast.

(Yeah yeah, shoot missles. You're very clever. Now shut up. If a real game developer came up with "shooting missles" as a key mechanic in their game for defeating boss ships, they'd get their ass fired. It's a goddamned retarded idea).

It also sucks how easily a succesful capship can simply roll on to the next base. Pods should be able to easily pk themselves on a cap. I'd even give some thought as to making them completely unnannable (they are already nerfed against nan as is). People can just keep rushing at a capship, getting podded, coming back and doing it again multiple times; it won't be all about camping for them at an aleph. I'd have to look at ICE to see if this is doable, but I'd totally nerf prox against them. Camping is such a @#(!ty mechanic.

I'm not saying any of this would be easy, and maybe we're just better off ignoring SY like we currently do. But at least it's not a step in the wrong direction, which is what making SY a fourth techpath amounts to.

[Psychosis]

SY cannot be balanced for all game sizes, you have to pick a size and balance for it, and judiciously use the SY flag. The other issue is that SY is heavily dependent on the skill of the team. Good team with SY will steamroll, while a poorly skilled team will fail to come together.

Balance sy for 15v15+ as a stand alone techpath.

the way it is now, every time that SY flag comes off, everyone goes SY

[jbansk]

QUOTE (Psychosis @ Apr 5 2012, 05:27 PM) SY cannot be balanced for all game sizes, you have to pick a size and balance for it

+1

QUOTE (Psychosis @ Apr 5 2012, 05:27 PM) Balance sy for 15v15+ as a stand alone techpath.

I'd start at 20v20 which brings us back to the lack of player base. How often do we see 20v20 games and of those games, how many have SY turned on?

If you want to see plenty SY games that aren't silly, you absolutely MUST have a large VET player base. Fix / deploy R6 FIRST, build community size and the rest is cake.