Discussion of IC Changes

[Broodwich]

expansion is not the problem, ic is not the problem, the problem is playing against ic on small maps where the need to expand is minimal to give your ints access to enemy mining sectors. Hihigher? 2 sectors is all you need ( in addition to your gar) to have 2 sector access from any possible mining location. Star? 2 at most gives you 1 sector access to every possible mining sector on the map. IC pushes early because it is strong opening. One op and you have almost complete map control. You want sup to have a better chance against ic? stop playing on maps where ic is dominant and minimal expanding is required

[Kap]

Why do IC have yield of 1 anyway? Aren't they a more brute faction? less technologically advanced than other factions like rix who have yield of 1 too?

From the academy:
"The Coalition has a weaker economy. Usually being funded by government, they resorted on escorting others to obtain funding. Since the destruction of Earth and the multiplication of deep space assignments, they did develop ingenious mechanisms for He3 collection. They never designed refinery stations to allow miners to do their job quicker, but instead, concerned with their safety, have the miners ripcord near a station. This is also extremely useful for miner safety. They even enabled their technological stations with He3 storage facilities, enabling their miners to dock at technological stations, a unique ability."

So they develop ripping ability for their miners instead of more mining efficiency or speed or capacity why? why develop ripping miners if you can escort them as the "escort faction" and military power they supposedly are?

Well the only answer is that they have a bunch of government paid scientists who are still developing seashells for toilet paper let alone he3 yield. So knowing this, you, as an interceptor pilot who escorts this mother$#@!ing miners all the time for $100 a week base salary, no dental plan and 7 vacation days per year, say to yourself "well wouldn't it be $#@!ing marvelous if someone invented ripping miners so I don't have to risk my $#@!ing life for 2000 credits per load of this @#(!-brained, $#@!-faced, ball breaking, duck $#@!ing pain in the ass miners??"

So you invent ripping miners and live happily ever after.

(Based on a true story)



In conclusion i think IC should have less than yield of 1...

[cashto]

Absolutely do not make IC galvable. Every faction deserves something radical that makes it unique. With IC, that thing is ungalvability and ripping miners. I'd no sooner make their bases galvable than I would nerf Dreg speed or take away Belter's ability to steal and keep tech.

"But no one goes sup against IC". If that's a problem, then no one going tac against Bios is a problem. Everyone going sup against Giga is a problem. Face it, not all tech paths are created equal, and some factions have inherent strengths / weakneses vs. certain strategies. Deal with it.

This thread has nothing to do with IC exp. It's really about IC as a whole. It's true that exp is IC's strong point (thank you, Captain Obvious), but really, IC has no bad techpath. It's quite strong as a whole. Which leads more to the conclusion that IC needs to be hit with the ugly stick overall -- again, in typical IC fashion, such as longer build times, more expensive light bases, or crappier miners. Notice that none of those have anything to do with exp. IC should build short more often. It should lose cons more often. It should need to mine more to get the same level as other factions. Etc.

But if you let IC get space, then Lord have mercy on you, because IC is all about keeping that space -- in stark contrast to Giga.

Nerfing exp across the board is another discussion worth having, but it is a totally orthogonal topic to this one.

[zombywoof]

It's less that 'no one goes sup' against IC, but more that 'everyone goes expansion' against IC. Where I find a huge problem is that it's not because exp counters IC, but exp is the only way to survive against IC.

1) Why does IC have 1.1 missile damage? Dreg is supposed to have the uber missiles and their damage is only 1.1.
2) Its ships are FAST to get. Basically, excluding costs starting with a basic expansion, it is just as fast to get heavy ints with IC than with Dreg... and Dreg are supposed to be a good 'research' faction with their 1 minute research speed. Only the Unity can research from exp to heavy ints faster than IC.
3) Its ships are CHEAP to get. 50k gets you heavy ints... including buying the expansion. Dreg costs 67500, Giga, Rix, TF cost 62.5 (and doesn't even have boost1), and GT costs a whopping 72.5k Only two factions are cheaper... Bios (32.5k) and Belters (40.75k)
4) Its ships are POWERFUL. GT, TF, and Belters are the only factions with higher hull than IC, which means that IC is above average in hull strength. Only Rix has more powerful guns, and that's only by .05, and no faction has more powerful missiles than IC.
5) Its bases are POWERFUL. They have the highest shield and hull for their stations... even before accounting for the fact that you can't galv them.

So Seeing as they're above average in terms of time to research ships, cost for ships, and most powerful ships and stations, you'd think their economy gets a fatty nerf stick, right? Well, ripping miners is a BLESSING for good commanders (I dare you to tell me otherwise spidey) as miners only need to walk one way at worst, and none at best. Plus it helps mine isolated sectors for assault mining, or for if you're mining, say, a forward sector and you accidentally get cut off. As for spidey's precious numbers...
Tied for sixth miner capacity
Fifth mining speed
Tied for third HEyield.

You'd expect a faction that's tops in virtually all categories for their ship's power to be at the bottom for virtually all the economy catagories, especially since they research their advanced tech so fast, but that's not the case. They're basically just below average for speed, and on average for yield, with only their capacity being nerfed. Even then, their capacity is .85, as opposed to GT (.8), Dreg (.65) or the worst of the bunch, Belters (.6).

Oh, but it gets worse! Their ops cost $5k... which is standard. Standard speed is 60 m/s, while enh cons move at 80 m/s. Their accelerations are the same.

So how long does it take for the enh con to travel the same distance as the enh con? Well, it takes 6.122 seconds for our regular con to speed up to 60 m/s, and it takes it 183.673 meters to get that fast, according to tek. It takes 8.163 seconds for the enh con to speed up to 80 m/s, during which time it covers 326.531 meters. During that same time, the regular con has traveled 306.122 meters. We'll call it 20 fewer meters. Bear with me because this is going somewhere. The regular con gets a 60s head start because it's coming from Bios, so it has now traveled 3416.33m when our enh con comes out. The enh con then takes the next 8.163 seconds and the bios con travels 489.78 meters while the enh con travels 306.122 meters.

So from the time for both the IC con to reach full speed and the Bios con to reach full speed, the bios con gets a 3579.58 meter head start. Now if we assume the IC con is moving ~ 20m/s faster (it is), then it'll take 178 seconds for the IC con to catch up to the bios con... which is ~11k meters. How far are alephs between sectors? They're often around 5500m iirc, can be more, can be less.

What's my point? On any money setting where IC can buy enh cons before their first op rolls out they only slightly slower than all factions except Rix, Dreg, and Giga (speed boosts and the others can get the enh con out faster) on all small maps and faster on large maps. That's right, IC can push their opening con faster on star, polished, Blender, IO, Bowtie, Sapphire, splitmix, starflake, chaos, octagon, topaz, Dual, Ruby, Silver, Obsidian, Escher, kill, destroy, gold, nova, quartz, rhodium and platinum. (this assumes that 'push' means 'put one sector from the enemy home'). Sure, when the other team finally settles down and pays for enh cons they can expand faster, but by that point IC is in their base looting their dudez.

So bomb back, right? Well if anyone would like to argue that light ints (let alone the best light ints from a damage and hull standpoint) are bad at defending then get that out of the way now. It takes three missiles to take down an IC heavy op, but only two missiles to take down a bios op (bios used for their baseline no perk to missile damage or station hull/shield). "Oh, that doesn't sound so bad" you say, except that TTk is 4.1 seconds for the bios op, 8.2 for the IC op. Twice as long. Even I won't admit it's that bad... but the techbase forces a reload until a 25 kb, while all other bases stop forcing a reload when you have 17 kb. IC is harder to bomb that other factions, even if marginally, simply by the nature of their stations being tougher.

As for the defense... well... early game IC has lt ints, which are fantastic for defense. Plus their getting ints as soon as their exp is up gives them interceptors quickly.

Basically, the 'nerfs' of IC are their sig and their mining speed. In practice, this merely means that IC tac is rarely played (since tac is the one that benefits the most from low sig), and the mining speed is awkward to represent because of the ripcording miners.

So I'll leave it to you, spidey: would you rather have ripcording miners or miners that mine He faster? I honestly don't know, I'm not good enough to make that call.

There, those are your numbers for IC.

[zombywoof]

This is a separate post because it is not number based and is a response to cashto:

When talking about any faction and comparing their balance, you have to compare their maximum to everyone else's maximum. What is the maximum that can be done? This is true in all balance... you don't playtest any game system with the mindset of, "Well, gee, is it balanced if the players don't take the best options available?", you playtest them with the mindset of, "Is it balanced when people try to make the most of what they have?" That means that when looking at IC, and why it's so powerful, we look at IC exp. Is IC Sup good? Sure it is. Is it dominant? I would argue both the Unity and Belters have better sups than IC, that Dreg and TF are close contenders, and that it's possible that because of the prox carrying and heavy cloaking, Bios comes close as well. Its sup is about average, in other words. How about its tac? Rix (station drone cheese), Giga (high speed + lxy stealths being awesome), and Bios ( that sig) all have better tacs, some people say that TF and Dreg have better tacs, and I've never even seen GT tac so I can't comment on that at all though I suspect it's worse.

I may not know much about allegiance but I have been playtesting different systems for five years now, and have contributed in the design of systems for the same period of time. I know how it works. You don't make sure that Wizards who take Weapon Focus(Longsword) are balanced, you make sure that Wizards who do Shapeshift cheese are balanced.

(bad example because D&D is anything but balanced, but you see my point I'm sure)

That's why I advocated nerfing expansion as a nerf to IC in general. The problem with IC is that IC is very powerful versus sup. This discussion is whether or not we should nerf IC by making their bases galvable. My argument is that this will work, but that the reason IC is powerful vs sup is not solely because their bases are ungalvable, but because their exp (which is by far one of the best if not the best in the game) is so powerful that sup teams cannot reasonably beat it. Therefore, if you nerf expansion as a whole, you may nerf IC enough to make it balanced.

Once again, since spidey doesn't like reading:

Problem: IC is amazing against SUP
Question: Should we nerf IC bases so that Sup can galv them?
One proposed solution: If we nerf expansion in general, IC may be more balanced against sup and we may not need to make IC bases galvable.

If the problem you have is "IC is too powerful" and you don't care how it preforms against sup, then do not make IC bases galvable. IC bases' galvability ONLY MATTERS IF THE OPPONENT GOES SUP. Making IC bases galvable will not make IC worse against tac or expansion.

[Drizzo]

I always find it amusing that whenever a topic like this comes up, someone always runs for the numbers like we haven't seen them posted before numerous $#@!ing times.

There are too many variables in this game for majority of your numbers to have any backing behind them.

Also you open up by stating that there is no viable techpath vs IC other then expansion but you fail to explain why and go ranting off on a completely different tangent about things like the speed of their cons and the durability of their bases.

This might be incomprehensible to you, but do you know why players such as Grimmwolf, BV, and even your beloved Spidey got reputations for being great Stealth pilots?

Because whenever someone would go IC Exp, people would counter with, zomg, Giga$#@!inTac. And Giga Tac would win. Giga Tac probably still is one of the few original powerhouse techs left in the game, along with IC exp. So don't come with this preaching of you must go exp vs IC or lose, because we've been going Tac vs IC for years and beating them.

[zombywoof]

I have been playing for over a year and I've never seen giga tac win a pug or a squadgame. If it's such a dominant techpath, why isn't it winning as often as IC expansion? Or as often as Belters sup? Or Rix supremacy, or rix tac, or rix expansion, or dreg expansion/sup, or bios sup/expansion/tac, or $#@! even giga supremacy?

Also, I find it laughable that your point is basically "ur numbers lie".

@the variables argument, if we're assuming equal teams, then what are the variables that I'm missing? What can possibly happen to an IC enh op con that can't happen to a Bios std op con? Is it not allowed to ram Bios op cons? Or is there some sort of interstellar wind that only affects IC guns so they blow sideways which makes fewer of their shots hit the enemy?

It's not useful to ask "is an IC heavy int overpowered" by basing it off me in a heavy int and you in a light int, because you'll kick my ass up and down even IF I have mini3 and you have mini1. Does that make IC lt ints overpowered? It's only useful to answer that question by basing it off pilots of equal skill and looking at everything those pilots can do with their ship. In other words, aside from luck, all variables leave the game.

Or if your argument is that the distance between the garrison and the aleph is variable, and the distance between the alephs you're looking for are variable, that's cool. I freely admit that if there's a shorter distance to travel IC ops lose their speed advantage. My point is that if you assume 5k to travel across a sector then IC's opening con travels faster if you have the money for enh cons than all but the cons of three factions. Wanna know the kicker? If we assume it takes 2.5 k to get to the aleph from the garrison then it really only takes 4.5k through two sectors to even up, and I'm assuming the con builds as soon as it gets into the sector it's going to!

If you're going to pull the "hahaha ur such a no-it-all" argument and not post any *real* evidence, you should a) try doing it against posts that aren't comprised mainly of evidence and b) try doing it to someone who doesn't readily admit that they aren't good at this game and don't know an extraordinary amount about it.

But if you back me up with data, games played, and you show me conclusively that giga tac beats IC expansion with equal teams on even settings, I will agree with you.

[cashto]

When I saw Phoenix_1 busting out crazy mad figures to six decimal places I thought to myself, "man, spidey is really going to regret what he said about backing up one's argument with figures".

Essentially he's trying to weed out ignorant opinions, which is good, but there are so many unquanitifiable aspects of allegiance -- it can't all be reduced down to numbers. I can tell you it takes 23.7 seconds for a faction X fighter to kill a faction Y miner at tech level Z. But there's no way for me to calculate how long it "should" take. I can't calculate that nerfing int damage by 10% will cause a 23.89% reduction in the usage of Exp and that will translate into a net 5.178% increased Allegiance Fun Quotient once you sum the average of "oh noz my Intz!" vs. "OMG we can bomb against heavy ints now yayayay".

PS -- if you've never seen GT tac, then you're really missing out on Gauss. The stuff is like hundred dollar Brie. It's one of the finest cheeses in the game.

[Drizzo]

Scouts that can't find alephs?

Alephs that don't always spawn 5500 meters apart?

My point was not only that your numbers are stupid, it's also stated here

QUOTE Also you open up by stating that there is no viable techpath vs IC other then expansion but you fail to explain why and go ranting off on a completely different tangent about things like the speed of their cons and the durability of their bases.[/quote]

It seems in your anger you completely missed stuff.

Gee what else is there, Did you forget cons have to sometimes slow down and turn if they're not lined up with their destination as they exit the aleph? Did you forget that if you have a voob behind it in a scout it will slow down and try to let the voob pass? Hmm or maybe you forgot that there's a chance that a noob will re-direct it while you're out defending your miners vs. an early miner attack.

Why isn't Giga Tac dominating like it used to? Why isn't belter's tac dominating like it used to?

Ego.


If you ask an old ACE for their SG records, you'll see that MadAcc has won quite a few games in 2005 with Giga Tac. If you want something more concise, you're welcome to take IC vs me and I'll go giga tac and show you why it's a powerhouse.

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (cashto @ Apr 29 2009, 11:31 PM) When I saw Phoenix_1 busting out crazy mad figures to six decimal places I thought to myself, "man, spidey is really going to regret what he said about backing up one's argument with figures".

Essentially he's trying to weed out ignorant opinions, which is good, but there are so many unquanitifiable aspects of allegiance -- it can't all be reduced down to numbers. I can tell you it takes 23.7 seconds for a faction X fighter to kill a faction Y miner at tech level Z. But there's no way for me to calculate how long it "should" take. I can't calculate that nerfing int damage by 10% will cause a 23.89% reduction in the usage of Exp and that will translate into a net 5.178% increased Allegiance Fun Quotient once you sum the average of "oh noz my Intz!" vs. "OMG we can bomb against heavy ints now yayayay".

PS -- if you've never seen GT tac, then you're really missing out on Gauss. The stuff is like hundred dollar Brie. It's one of the finest cheeses in the game.

1) just remember that I do play this game as well, and even though I can't command or pilot worth a damn, my ability to aim and micromanagement of miners doesn't hamper my ability to read and learn. Despite what people may think, I have read every thread in gameplay since august, every post made in my cadet, asked tons of questions, looked up stuff in IGC and TEK, and even read quite a few threads from the old DN forum as well as many of the more recent threads in the CC forum. I did all of this before I even bothered posting seriously here. You can say I'm bad at the game and I won't deny it, but I am not ignorant whatever you may think.

2) In comparative studies it's generally assumed that the random element will cancel out on both sides.

p.s. damn... if only gui would go tac instead of sup.

QUOTE (Drizzo @ Apr 29 2009, 11:32 PM) Scouts that can't find alephs?

Equally affects both sides, if the teams are even. Just substitute... oh I don't know, belters for bios if the sensor is bothering you. Then demonstrate why belters are more likely to find the alephs than IC are.
QUOTE Alephs that don't always spawn 5500 meters apart?[/quote]
I only said 5500 is the breaking point (and the breaking point is closer to 4.5k anyways, and that's, again, only for time to enter the third sector).

QUOTE My point was not only that your numbers are stupid, it's also stated here[/quote]
Numbers don't have any intelligence.


QUOTE It seems in your anger you completely missed stuff.[/quote]
Anger?
QUOTE Gee what else is there, Did you forget cons have to sometimes slow down and turn if they're not lined up with their destination as they exit the aleph? Did you forget that if you have a voob behind it in a scout it will slow down and try to let the voob pass? Hmm or maybe you forgot that there's a chance that a noob will re-direct it while you're out defending your miners vs. an early miner attack.[/quote]
Yes, with equal teams and equal commanders these effect both sides roughly equally. Or we can try to balance CC so that whenever a bad team has techpath A they can beat a good team with techpath B.

Oh wait...

QUOTE Why isn't Giga Tac dominating like it used to? Why isn't belter's tac dominating like it used to?

Ego.[/quote]
Ego? Ok then start playing squadgames with giga tac and winning. If it so dominant, you should be able to do it. If you start winning with Giga Tac, then I will concede. Or belters tac. Whatever.

QUOTE If you ask an old ACE for their SG records, you'll see that MadAcc has won quite a few games in 2005 with Giga Tac.[/quote]
Ah... yes... good ol' 2005, when we first started playing with CC_03.

Do you seriously think we should use data from games on different cores to balance CC? Might as well use $#@!ing RPS to decide whether or not to perk belters sup.

QUOTE If you want something more concise, you're welcome to take IC vs me and I'll go giga tac and show you why it's a powerhouse.[/quote]
So we're equal level comms now? I wasn't aware you thought that highly of my command skill.