How Dare You Say That Ship is Useless!

posted on March 29th, 2009, 6:31 pm

First I must state that this thread is really geared to people who play multiplayer, because strategy really doesn’t matter much playing against the AI. That being said I thought it might be a good idea to compile a list of ships/abilities that perhaps need some tweaking. I’d really like it if the number of posts devolving into “this race is more powerful than this one” would be ABSOLUTELY ZERO. This is purely on the basis of what units are useful in multiplayer, and which ones are woefully underused. This is also the “First Draft” and thus if some races (read Romulans) are more covered than others, this is because I just haven’t tested everything yet (as I play more avatars and races more frequently and talk to more people, I will put forth new drafts hopefully). So here goes and I apologize for the length...which will increase, naturally:

A: Romulans
The Griffin: as it is right now, the effect of its special could be useful… but unfortunately it doesn’t last for any significant amount of time to actually BE useful. Although the tool ticker states that the effect is for 3 seconds, compare this to “blackout” from the Canaveral, which lasts for 25 seconds. Now consider that on game speed 4 (which most players use), the actual length of time that the special ability of the Griffin lasts for is roughly 0.5 seconds. In fact, most players don’t even realize that I’ve used the ability on them, because it doesn’t affect the fire rate at all for their ships.

The Eresis: while the ship itself is moderately powerful, its special is also woefully underpowered. The plasma’s area of effect is about the size of a Bird of Prey… and can take down almost half the shields of a K’vort… even upon leveling up to officer rank, the AoE is still teeny, and the damage done is negligible.

The Shrike: I can’t even remember the last time I have used this ship. If you have been online, you may have realized that after the release of FO V3.0, almost everybody has stopped spamming shrikes as a way to win… and instead started spamming Rhienns (Torp/Disrupter refit). Thus the Shrike at the moment has one major problem: it is too similar to the Rhienn, yet just not good enough to cut it. It has a slightly higher base offense/defense, but also a slightly higher cost then the Rhienn…. and yet a significantly smaller range. However, once the Rhienn is refitted, it is superior in all ways (it can retreat and still fire, for example). You may notice that I did not mention the special at all: because everybody was too busy using the Shrike to spam in V3PR, it was hardly ever used… and now because it isn’t worth the cost… it still is hardly ever used. Perhaps a way around this is to make it essentially a spy platform: decrease its base cost and remove its weapons (or decrease their strength a huge amount) and keep the special, but give it the option of choosing an upgrades that make them do a large amount of damage to only a particular ship class: something like "study blueprints" or something. Perhaps the way it could work is that by setting a spy on an enemy ship the Shrike gains the ability to “research” that ship, and thus have powerful weapons against only that ship class. Because this is micro intensive, it would prevent the Shrike from being spammed yet would also make them more useful later game, as they could offer that critical strike on capital ships, and still be easily taken out (as they are destroyers). On a similar note, the Rhienn needs to be nerfed slightly, because it is too cost effective and can easily dispatch other races destroyers and mining outfits.

General Flaws: Although the Serkas has the potential to be a powerful artillery ship, it has one almighty flaw: friendly fire. Notice that, for example, the Klingons’ “Field of Fire (LuSpet)”  (check this!) or the Federations’ “Plasma Discharge (Norway)” only effect enemy ships, meaning that it is easy to close with the enemy and use these abilities, without fear of destroying your own ships. With the Serkas, however, this is impossible. Likewise, I mentioned that both of these other effects are special weapons. The Serkas unfortunately can only fire its artillery, and thus constantly trains its weapon on incoming fleets… and thus you get a splattering of explosions that deal damage to any of your own ships in the area. I suggest two methods of evening the playing field. If friendly fire were removed for the Serkas weapon, this would allow the ship to support your own vessels much more effectively in a similar manner to the above examples of special weapons. It would mean that people would actually USE the Serkas. If friendly fire was added to the other races’ special weapons this would also work to level the field… but it would mean that every few people would use the special abilities of Norways or LuSpets for fear of friendly fire (which is why I don’t use Serkas at the moment).

B: Federation

Not sure that there is much wrong with them at the moment (perhaps the Monsoon class is problematic…). The Newton class however is definitely too limited for fleet battles (only 3!), as you cannot effectively get them to repair a specific unit under fire before that unit is attacked and destroyed by 10 other ships (if the shields are down, generally the ship is already lost). Consequently, I never see them being used in MP. Perhaps if each one had an area of effect weapon that “transported repair crews” to nearby ships and increased their hull and system repair rate for a short while they might be more useful in fleets as support vessels (instead of only repairing your base structures… really a last ditch effort anyway). DO NOT mention the Sovereign/Akira issue here please.

Borg

General Flaws: The main problem with both avatars seems to be with Scout Cubes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone--myself included--choose either the Beam or Regeneration modules for the Scout Cube. At the early stage of the game, you can expect destroyer spam, so you want to build Scout Cubes with the anti-destroyer module of course.

C: Klingons:

General Flaws: The Bird of Prey. While it is good for extremely early game harassment, I think its usefulness ends there. As soon as any other race gets out its first type of destroyer (or protects each mining node with a defense structure), the Bird of Prey can and should no longer be built because it is simply too weak in both defense and offense and too slow. Sabers and Rhienns can outrange it, retreat from it, and outrun it. Scout Cubes will obliterate them. Any defensive structure quickly dispatches them. Even Bugs don’t  have a problem dispatching them. Although the gravity mine special is decent, by the time you have built the first research station, you want to pump out K’vorts or other more powerful ships. Perhaps a way to fix the “uselessness of the BoP” is to require NO research for the gravity mine, or put the research at the shipyard so that by the time that you have the first 2 or so BoPs you already have the special being parallel researched (ships are building while research is taking place). If the BoP had the gravity mine to start with, or at least very early on, it could use it to slow down other races destroyers and thereby allow the BoP to retreat from them without getting annihilated (right now you can’t retreat with the BoP really) and allow the BoP to de-cloak in the middle of the enemy’s ships, drop mines, and attack head to head without fear of being outranged immediately and thus forced to retreat.

Dominion:
Unfortunately I have not played either avatar enough to get even a good idea of what needs to be done. If someone would like to fill me in, it would be greatly appreciated.

posted on March 29th, 2009, 6:41 pm

I can't comment regarding the Romulans, since I've played them a grand total of once, but regarding the Klingons, it'd make more sense to me for their ships to be faster in general. Perhaps make the B'rel-class bird of prey eligible for a significant upgrade to speed, or give it an "impulse booster" special weapon like the Cardassian Kulinor-class in the stock game? If birds of prey were actually useful for fast strikes and raids on mining outposts and stuff, the way I'd expect them to be, that would make the Klingons a bit more dynamic.

posted on March 29th, 2009, 6:42 pm

hmm, well for romulans, i must say the griffin seems to be nice in early game, however i agree with most of what you say, i almost never build those ships,

b the federation, i very much like that idea, or we need more repair ships, also it could be very usefull if repair ships were upgraded with a tractor beam, and it was posssible for ships to only be destroye half of the time, so that fter the battle each side would come out with repair ships, or somthing peacful and take back some of there ships, to be repaired and refitted, on the subject of usless ships for the feds, i shall respect your request, however it is in my opinion, well, frirst i have a question, what does the acs torpedo do? and also i think it would be nice if the defiants anti weapon also did some damage, and then we need the posibility for more phalanx, for both avatars, or a different ship for mayson (such as miranda 2) because i find phalanx special isnt effective, and niether is only 5 avalons

the borg............ hmm, well, the ship between scout cube and ssimilator i find to be not very good but thats about it

c kligon, there battle chant special´weapon´ never seems to do any good for me, but there ships seem to be strong and cheap

d hmm, i personally fidn there torpedo ship quite usless, dosent seem to do any good, and i notice there hyperspace artillery dosent seem to ever kill anything, even when i build like 5 of them

posted on March 29th, 2009, 7:27 pm

and i notice there hyperspace artillery dosent seem to ever kill anything, even when i build like 5 of them

How can you build 5 of them when the maximum number you can have is 2?

posted on March 29th, 2009, 7:30 pm

oh..... hmm well that was before they took out stars, i havent tryed them since then so maybye there different, but back then even like 4-5 couldnt take out a small station

posted on March 29th, 2009, 8:56 pm

oh..... hmm well that was before they took out stars, i havent tryed them since then so maybye there different, but back then even like 4-5 couldnt take out a small station

At a guess, that was something they addressed in a patch...and at a guess, they became overpowered as a result, and at a guess, the cap of two was then inserted to balance them again. 

posted on March 29th, 2009, 9:49 pm

The Borg Adaptor.  In order for it to be useful, you have to have built the appropriate Mixed-Tech yard.  For it's price, I could build more Scout Cubes to sweep away the destroyers and have a more effective result.

I only tend to build the Adaptor if I've set some insane goal for myself like 'Only build Adaptors and try to win.'

posted on March 29th, 2009, 10:27 pm

@Dominus_Noctis
Hey, this is a very wellthought post, and I like your ideas too. 

Let me mention some additional ideas:

Shrike:
I totally agree with you! Since 3.0 I always use the  rhienn (esp disruptor refit because of it's slightly higher durability and it's passive ability, which makes it perfect for ambushes) and not the shrike. I'd especially like the shrike to have a role in end game.

I really love your "study blueprints" idea, but I think it's difficult to implement. If you study a ship, you have to change an internal value for the shrike. I don't mean it to be i the way of a refit, which had horrible amounts of odf files as a result. On the other hand, creating a whole new ingame-variable for the ship, that specifies it's profession, would have to be hardcoded, which I believe to be difficult. Ans then you have the unrealistic effect, that you study a ship at rank 1 and can't use that knowledge any more, when it reaches rank 2. So I believe that is very (and maybe too) complex task.

I once had the idea to add different spies (eventually via refits), additional to the scouting spy. E.g. a killer spyy, that deactivates life support systems to prepare boarding. Any other subsystem could be a target.

One slightly different idea: You can send a spy to an enemy ship, which will disable weapon and shields for several seconds. This shall happen cloaked and it may have a certain delay of a few seconds. You may count backward then, decloak with your approached fleet at the right time, and devast the helpless enemy. Such tactics are of course only interesting for first strikes or for especially heavy objects like a dreadnough.

The next thing I criticize about the shrike is it's rankup. An ship, that is made for destruktion (as the rhienn) may gain experience by fighting and destroying - experience in fighting. The shrike on the other hand gains experience in spying by destroying - not very sensible to me. I can't increase my skills in making th beds by practicing cooking. The same way as the Intelligence center gains experience by sabotage, the shrike shall gain experience by spying!

Serkas and Artillery:
As friendly fire is a realistic (though annoying) feature, it shall not be removed. Instead a Serkas may kept in green alert state (or cloaked) for most of the time. To compensate it's disadvantage of being seldomly and manually used, it may have different advantages like heavy subsystem damage, or a higher range, a stun-effect of whatever seems appropriate. I'd appreciate anything that gives you a change of  fireing more than 1-2 torpedos befor the enemy reaches you, which make the ship impractical at the moment.

Bird of prey:
The BoP could have the upgrade to lauch the gravity torpedo while cloaked. This would beway to give the BoP a role even in endgame, because it will hinder fleets in approaching a lot. Especially if you performed a distraction attack before and instand of prey, they just catch gravity mines. As a result you have loads of time to bring down the enemies base.

Tractor beams:
How to deal with following situation: Engines and life support broken, crew's dead. In a realistic world, everyone would send/beam crews there, which are prepared to deal with such situations (they will most lykly not go in there with airpacks) and repair that system without dying instantly. As this is not possible and everyone (except kingons, borg and jem'hadar) should have morale scruples to sacrifice that much crew, there has to be a solution.

My approach is to have a ship or station have at least one ship with tractor beam and at least one ship or station with an instant life support system repair weapon. I don't appreciate repair ships for any race but the feds, as it is their unique technology.

Scout Cubes & Adaptor:
In my experience the adaptor, as well as the scout cobe regeration and beam modules are reativly undepowerded. I'd suggest to nerf the intercptiion module a little and push the adapters values a little.

posted on March 29th, 2009, 10:31 pm

Shrike should keep the weapons, just making it a spy ship isn't a good reason to remove it's ability to fight.

[Borg101]

posted on March 30th, 2009, 12:44 am

Last edited by Borg101 on March 30th, 2009, 3:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

I would say for Borg the transwarp drive tech is virtually useless.  It a. costs too much and b. works over an extremely small distance.  Perhaps make it affect more ships? 

Also the random module tech (I can't remember the exact name) should be tweaked.  Perhaps make it so one module of choosing gets installed for supply costs only.  Or reduce the cost on it.  Its too expensive on random high-level ships. 

Other than those two things mentioned, I can't think of anything else....other than my already mentioned Assimilater beam/Holding beam module complaint (see below).

*EDIT*
//www.fleetops.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,3/topic,4675.0/

posted on March 30th, 2009, 3:31 am

good post.

i would like to add to the klingon story as i play them the most. right now it's true that the klingons r the most spamming race in the game and this suits them perfectly. the problem is their ships mostly have short weapon range and r not fast enough to catch up with other races ships.

a good player can easliy micro his ships around klingon fleet. spam arty ships or, with martok, tech asap to luspet and use field of fire is starting to be boring.

the way to fix this is imo changing global speed upgrade to upgrades per ship in the shipyards/research stations. it would also be nice if photon torpedos for b'rel, k'vort & vor'cha could be researched as a global upgrade. it's a simple idea that would be uniqe to the klingons & would suite them as they have more research stations then the other races.

posted on March 30th, 2009, 6:40 am

  Let's not forget the borg mining station. One can't choose where that yard spams, and I seldom have to decommission and build a new one because the mining ships gets stuck. And maybe the mining ships could be a little shorter. I agree with borg101, transwarp is almost useless because the range is too small. Doubling the range for scoutcubes would be a good idea, maybe adaptors could have the ability, but with a smaller range, like scoutcubes now.

[Tyler]

posted on March 30th, 2009, 10:11 am

Last edited by Tyler on March 30th, 2009, 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

@Tyler: are you referring to my suggestion, or to Mimesot's (by the way, thank you  )? If you mean mine, why isn't removing the weapons a good idea if you are giving them the improved capabilities and decreasing their cost (right now they serve practically no purpose afterall)?

Removing the weapons would mean it's defenceless and just sits in space doing nothing when not spying (it has to keep moving to find new targets or it's pointless to build it, unless you dump it in the the base which isn't likely to work because of cloak detection)

Though weakening it weapons a bit (not too much, it still has to compare to an average destroyer) and working best against the ships it spys on sounds interesting.

posted on March 30th, 2009, 11:50 am

Excellent thread Dom!  I agree with all your points here and might make some more later today. 

posted on March 30th, 2009, 3:42 pm

Right now the nebula is too slow and its shields are too weak to be and effective fighting ship. while it is meant to be a science vessel its just too slow to keep up. If i get it as a warpin ill just decommission it. I also dont use the adapter much.