game balance

posted on September 2nd, 2017, 2:32 am

I kind of feel like the borg may be a little underpowered from a perspective of actions required to create ships. In my multiplayer games (of the base mod, tryptics mod, and deep space 9) it frequently comes down to popping out several shipyards and just pushing the key on the keyboard like 10x per shipyard. So say i have 6 shipyards and push the key to build the ship 10x on each of 6 shipyards. That may be like 60 ships created in like 20-30 seconds (of my gameplay time not actual build time). The borg on the other hand, have to create a station, then select which ship design, then click several times for the modules. ( I am not even going to talk about not being able to micro your existing fleet while you do this lol) If it takes me .5 seconds of labor to create a sovereign class from the example above, and it takes 10-30 seconds to create a cube or sphere, the borg can wind up massively outproduced. While i do realize that the borg are meant to have fewer ships, I am not sure if it is worth it as you scale upwards in to fleets from individual vessels. I am not actually playing the base mod right now but i believe it was something like 5k dilithium for a tactical cube? How many sovereign class can i build at .5 seconds each for that 5k dilitium and what is the attack value of the fleet of sovereigns vs the 1 cube?
While I am talking about game balance it really seems like if i could select all of my shipyards at once and order the same build que at the same time rather than clicking each of 10 shipyards 10 times and pressing the key 10 times to create 100 ships that would make it a little easier.

posted on September 2nd, 2017, 10:32 pm

Sovereigns shouldn't be only taking 0.5 seconds to build. Did you change the ship building speed slider in the game's options? Changing the ship building speeds will break the game's balance pretty quickly, which may explain the apparent underpoweredness.

posted on September 3rd, 2017, 3:26 am

"(of my gameplay time not actual build time)" meaning that it only takes .5 seconds to push the keyboard button to order its construction when i want that many built. I can just rapid fire the key to build them but it is ridiculously harder to rapid fire the clicks to build the station select modules etc. It still takes the default time to build, i just have all this extra time to micro manage my fleet because I am not screwing around with placing borg construction matrices and selecting modules which will likely translate in to more miners or better fleet trades or map control or something.

posted on September 3rd, 2017, 4:38 am

You know, I've considered in the later game allowing the Conduction Matrix to spawn several Uplinks at once.

One option is to allow it to spawn 4 uplinks in the area around the Conduction Matrix, but this might have issues if everywhere around it is blocked.

Another would be to give it a special ability: you target the ability near the Conduction Matrix and then an uplink starts to build there. Since I believe the greatest barrier to Borg construction is the time it takes the Constructor to travel from one uplink site to the next. It isn't a pain to click a bunch of times, it's a pain to click and have to wait, click and wait, click and wait.

What do you think? I'm always ecstatic to get feedback by the way

posted on September 12th, 2017, 2:58 pm

If you're using vanilla 3.2.7, then learn to love and embrace nanites. Hits every enemy in radius of effect, actual effect radius substantially larger than the sprite, long lasting, long range, and can be used several times in quick succession from a full special weapon charge. The disruption it creates utterly wrecks your opponent's ability to micro. Used to great effect in this match:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Jp_57Ddw0&enablejsapi=1&amp%3Bhl=en_US&amp%3Bautoplay=0&amp%3Brel=0&amp%3Biv_load_policy=3&amp%3Bversion=3&amp%3Bshowinfo=0&amp%3Bstart=0

Note that the map Duel II is also now recognized to substantially favour Borg.

Edit: YouTube embed tag seems to no longer work, so swapped to a link.

posted on November 18th, 2017, 6:23 am

That is a valid point Hart, however, one could argue that Borg takes less micro than the other races because, overall, there are far less units the player has to manage.

If you're using vanilla 3.2.7, then learn to love and embrace nanites. Hits every enemy in radius of effect, actual effect radius substantially larger than the sprite, long lasting, long range, and can be used several times in quick succession from a full special weapon charge.

To quote someone from a long time:

A GIANT map is going to be a game of "who can most quickly mass the best unit", with little tactical or strategic skill needed .

Fleetops isn't about building 10 shipyards and spamming sovereigns, and a sovereign is indeed no match for a cube. It can definitely be fun sometimes, but when your enemy can spam ships like there's no tomorrow, you haven't done a good job of keeping your opponent at bay. As Borg, you can easily destroy mining and prevent players from expanding, even on large maps. Borg gameplay is unique

I believe the greatest barrier to Borg construction is the time it takes the Constructor to travel from one uplink site to the next.

I used to feel the exact same way until someone showed me that you can build uplinks on top of one another, so there actually isn't any travel time for the constructor. As soon as you select a Borg vessel chasis you can build another uplink on top of it