Klingons vs long range; the B'rel

posted on October 27th, 2010, 4:46 pm

@ Marian Hope (Original Poster)


  May I first commend you for having quite possibly the most well-thought-out, reasonably toned, example-backed-up and least whiny balance thread to come out of a new member EVER .  It really pleased me to no end .



  I will say that I do agree on the fact that most early-mid game long range ships that the B'rel is intended to counter do indeed counter them back in some way.

  I think the biggest problem is just that most ships with TWA or FTC (fast tracking computers) are too specialized to really be useful as mainstream units.  You only build them when the need arises, but if the unit doesn't do well against the ships it supposedly counters, then it's clearly not gonna be built.


  Rhienns - phase plates  (@ Dom, yes you can just wait out the phase plates.  That's a good strategy and I agree with you, but that's 30 seconds where you're losing miners or having your B'rels popped with a defense of 11.  KBQ all around do better imo with a b'rel or two to provide cloak detect).

  Cehlaer - B'rels slaughter these.  Use em .

  T-15 - Ablative armor and faster firing long range pulses.  Nearly a perfect anti-counter.  Plus their officer rank is just ... suited to ruining groups of small ships.

  Sabers - Pulse avoidance and a special that reduces damage from short while upping avoidance even more.  B'rels will still work because you can generally micro ships home away from the low damage output of the Saber.

  Excel I - Falls like a hooker to B'rel.  Too bad their only situational .

  Excel II - Falls like a hooker.  This ships is the ONE ship that I always build B'rels for.

  Phalanx - Large size and with pulse weaponry / AoE weapon.  Most people don't ever get them out .

  S-7 -  Large sized as well.  Usually never alone.  Biggest target dies first?  Not usually.

  Bombers - Nice counter, but if the things hit they do 50% extra with FTC .  D'oh!  Get them to run and they're aaalllllll yours .

  Sangs - Exellent counter vs. Sangs.  Generally the only problem is that Sangs are backed up, so your B'rels die first .

 


Anyway .... I have to say that I still like the 3.1.3 B'rel, but I build them because I like to play around.  In a very competitive game, the Kvort has a more useful passive, still lasts longer than the B'rel under fire, has the same setup (short range, fast speed, pulse/torp weaponry) and lasts longer to fight another day.

  Overall I think it's just a problem of the B'rel being a specialist unit that isn't very useful against anythign that doesn't cloak or have long range.  Sadly, most of the long range units in the early-middle game have some kind of resistance to the B'rel anyway .  I really just find them to be a waste of supplies unless I wanna make a wolf-pack and eat miners.  K'vorts do that better, however.

posted on October 27th, 2010, 5:28 pm

@ Marian Hope (Original Poster)


  May I first commend you for having quite possibly the most well-thought-out, reasonably toned, example-backed-up and least whiny balance thread to come out of a new member EVER .  It really pleased me to no end .

sgt cortez isnt new lol

posted on October 27th, 2010, 11:30 pm

Erm, well how was I supposed to know that Marian Hope was actually Cortez?

  Mr. Myles-it-all 

posted on October 27th, 2010, 11:42 pm

The B'rel just doesn't have the shield/hull strength to be effectively micro'd out of a fight with more than 5-6 ships.

I don't even buy it as an effective counter to Excel 2 in a standard fleet engagement.

posted on October 27th, 2010, 11:53 pm

The B'rel just doesn't have the shield/hull strength to be effectively micro'd out of a fight with more than 5-6 ships.

I don't even buy it as an effective counter to Excel 2 in a standard fleet engagement.

Yup, for the most part they are just swatted out of combat too early to really be a cost-effective counter.  It's sad too because the B'rel now is a pretty cool ship, but Klingons just can't afford to throw supplies away on ships that can almost assuredly be killed immediately.

  I had made a suggestion that B'rels either:

A) have a significantly reduced supply cost

or

have them cost the same amount of supplies but gain MUCH more per rankup.


  I feel that the ships themselves are plenty cheap in terms of di/tri, it's just the supply that cannot be thrown away when you've got the early-game ubertank KBQ that will last long into the game and fight better against nearly everything.

  My concept was to have the B'rel basically be a supply-farmer.  We've heard numerous times in DS9 that a B'rel assignment is one of the greatest honors a Klingon Warrior can receive because you're almost guaranteed a glorious death!    Having the B'rel gain an enormous number of supplies per rankup would cause people to choose them over the low-supply-gaining K'vort at times and also encourage you to raid with them aggressively.



  B'rels as they are cannot be spammed the way they were in .07 or .12 ... they are too weak against most other race's even basic ships to truly be overpowered.  76 second build time from even two separate yards will not yield the massive firepower / resilience that other strats would provide.


  Anyway ... didn't mean to hijack the thread ... just agreeing that the B'rels intended use is not really one it lives up to effectively for a number of factors.

  With that being said, I think it does perform MUCH better in 1 v 1 than it does in team games.

posted on October 28th, 2010, 12:34 am

What if....the B'rel cost 1 supply?  Spam shouldn't be that big of deal because they are so weak.  They would be a supplement to Klingon efforts against Borg and long team games...

posted on October 28th, 2010, 12:40 am

Not 1, that's too low. I'd say somewhere between 5-8 so that it is cheaper, but still not too cheap. Currently, it's only 3 higher than a Sabre, so not too greatly reduced.

[Elim]

posted on October 28th, 2010, 12:56 am

Last edited by Elim on October 28th, 2010, 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I completely agree with Boggz and Clint. I don't really play klingons, but as dominion im always happy when my opponent starts to build brels, as he is only throwing away money. 

Even if he manages to kill some miners, his main fleet will be much weaker with too many brels. Nice idea to wolfpack them and munch miners, but for a cost of a brel you can build almost 2,5 miners  and if I see him splitting his fleet that gives the opportunity for a nicely timed counter attack.

The basic game mechanics of fleet ops  makes miner losses less critical than for example in starcraft. I find it more important to keep you combat ships alive, than saving some miners, because you won't have that many production facilities (mostly 2 yards) to replace combat ships. So if a player builds brels for harassing he must be incredibly succeful in it, and completely starve his opponent, because in large fleet encounters brels die before you can get any profit from thier presence.

posted on October 28th, 2010, 1:24 am

Just remember when considering the cost of the B'rel what happens when the cost goes down too far in 3.1.3. Try editing the game or just 'giving' yourself extra supply to compensate - you'll find you'll soon be able to tripple yard B'rels and spam quite effectively because you'll just never run out of supplies, and when coupled with Weapon Fatigue...  . There's a fine line with that unit, along with other tier 1 units like the Bug, Saber etc. Especially when you consider it negates cloakers and has cloak itself

posted on October 28th, 2010, 1:58 am

Just remember when considering the cost of the B'rel what happens when the cost goes down too far in 3.1.3. Try editing the game or just 'giving' yourself extra supply to compensate - you'll find you'll soon be able to tripple yard B'rels and spam quite effectively because you'll just never run out of supplies,

  I completely agree with this statement .

  But on the other hand, it's a specialized ship with a major offensive passive.  It has PLENTY of counters that would render a 3-yard spam a terrible idea in my opinion .  Monsoons alone spammed from 2 yards would take apart triple-yard B'rels.

  Shrikes / Leahvals are more expensive and wouldn't be able to cloak retreat, but they'd take B'rels apart in seconds.

  Scuuuuuuuuuuubes. 

  IMO double Bug spam would easily overpower mass B'rels.  Throw an S-2 with White in there and you're still better off .

  I feel that the build time increase and the fact that it 150 (75 Martok) supplies would have to be spent just to BEGIN triple production is a simple hindering fact. 

 

  I totally understand your reasoning for not wanting to reduce their supply cost, Dom.  I just don't feel the result would be the same 

posted on October 28th, 2010, 2:23 am

I encourage you to test this rather than just say what you think might happen . You can get roughly 10 B'rels in 7 minutes for TaQ, with 3 popping out every 76 seconds. Or you can slow down production to get out Weapon Fatigue a bit earlier, which will be a most welcome boon if the supply cost is dropped down too far. Monsoons don't do so hot against B'rels, unless you are willing to go for an early Starfleet Science and Proximity Torpedo  . Triple yard B'rels seal the deal very quickly there, but that's what Intrepids are for  .

[Anonymous]

posted on October 28th, 2010, 7:33 am

Last edited by Anonymous on October 28th, 2010, 7:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

@ Marian Hope (Original Poster)


  May I first commend you for having quite possibly the most well-thought-out, reasonably toned, example-backed-up and least whiny balance thread to come out of a new member EVER .  It really pleased me to no end .

Thanks for that one  . It took me half an hour to write the stuff  .
It's an interesting thought to reduce the B'rels supply costs. I'm not sure though if it solves the problems I mentioned. In order to balance it early game one could introduce a research decreasing the B'rels supply costs middle game or so.
I think Boggz pointed out quite nicely the restricted possiblities of using a B'rel: short range, low hp, restricted firing arcs, disruptors and many of the ships it can counter, counter the B'rel in some way. That way the B'rel is not an "always useful" ship like the KVort. However, despite the build time and supply costs I think the B'rel is quite fine, you just have to know when to use it. Regarding its limitations we should still discuss the suggestion of additional long range Klingon counters.

posted on October 28th, 2010, 1:30 pm

Erm, well how was I supposed to know that Marian Hope was actually Cortez?

  Mr. Myles-it-all 

Its very possible uve never seen him on tunngle.

The most obvious giveaway can be found under his avatar:
'in tunngle sgt cortez'

[Boggz]

posted on October 28th, 2010, 7:56 pm

Last edited by Boggz on October 28th, 2010, 7:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I encourage you to test this rather than just say what you think might happen . You can get roughly 10 B'rels in 7 minutes for TaQ, with 3 popping out every 76 seconds. Or you can slow down production to get out Weapon Fatigue a bit earlier, which will be a most welcome boon if the supply cost is dropped down too far.

   You can't have any more B'rels out in that case than you can now .  You'll run out of supply sooner right now, sure, but B'rels definitily have plenty of counters for a player who's paying attention.

  I'd be happy to test it with you. I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from a test of supply cost though.  The only difference would be that one could continue to create B'rels for longer.

   Again, happy to test if you're convinced this suggestion somehow needs it


EDIT:  Also, it's a pretty easy notion that weapon fatigue might need adjustment if other things about the B'rel were to change a bit 

posted on November 2nd, 2010, 5:10 pm

Once again I thought about all those B'rel and long range Klingon issues. And another idea came into my mind:
what would happen if K'vorts and B'rels exchanged their passives?  Think about it, right now the K'Vort has nice stats and a useful passive agains many ships while the B'rel is just cheap, fast and can't really counter that many long range vessels out of the reasons Boggz mentioned. So let's think about it, Klingons would have a nice long range counter or need B'rel mass to counter medium range ships. Weapon fatigue would decrease the danger of subsystem failure caused by SSEC.

Let's look at the counters for a TWA K'Vort:
Rhienns - phase plates would still be nice to defend, however, KVorts wouldn't fall that fast against long range disruptor rhienns. You'd still need B'rels for their decloak ability --> mixed fleets necessary as FO likes it.
  Cehlaer - K'Vorts would counter them nicely

  T-15 - They wouldn't own Klingon early ships that well anymore, K'vort could stand a little chance against them.

  Sabers, EXcels: - K'vorts would counter these

  Phalanx - not used that often, can't really say.
  S-7 -  K'vort could become a nice threat for them.

  Bombers - Nice counter, but if the things hit they do 50% extra with FTC, however, K'vorts would stand better against them as B'rels do now.

  Sangs - Exellent counter vs. Sangs.  Unlike B'rels K'Vorts could reach them to do damage.
Assims - a KVort wouldn't be that useless against an Assim assim due to higher crew

Now let's take a look at the medium range targets for a SSEC B'rel, as there are many medium range units I'll just concentrate on a few.
Borg: many medium range targets which can get dangerous for the fragile B'rel. You'll need a mass against them and help by KBQ and KTinga. Or just do early battle yard . Not a real change to the situation now
Feds: The Duras Bird of Prey in Generations must have had SSEC already  , that way it could counter a Galaxy. Leaving aside Nova all of Fed medium ships are cruisers or larger, so pulse damage is reduced, again you'll need many B'rels and back up by still useful KVorts and KBQ.
Romulan: The B'rel would do much better against all those warbirds and Griffins(not frigate of course). the frigate wouldn't lose its strength against Kli early game and behave even better than spectre.
Dominion: Bugs would be countered by B'rels instead of KVorts, just like the Rotarran did. there are many Dominion medium range ships, especially the larger ones. You'd have to go for Vorcha or Sang against them.

Well think about it. The B'rel would become much more useful because it counters many more ships, while the KVort would be a decent long range counter(with better subsytems) to back up the B'rel.