Borg adaptation - suggestion

[Anonymous]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 1:18 am

Last edited by Anonymous on April 17th, 2009, 1:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

We've been recently discussing the introduction of borg adaptation, and I was thinking of a way to keep it different from experience.

IMHO adaptation is something the borg do after being damaged and attacked and as they learn to "adapt" to an attacker.

I would therefore view Borg adaptation as something that would affect borg offense and defense.
Given that an individual Borg ship is very important to smaller ship specific fleets that are inherent to the borg gameplay style, I would like adaptation to affect an individual ship gains after sustaining damage, and engaging ships of varied classes, and not necessarily by destroying each of them.
The adaptation would work towards increasing the defense strength of the damaged ship in direct proportion to the damage sustained.
For the offense increment, it would increase the damage dealt by the borg to a specific ship class in direct proportion to the survival of a ship against the borg attack.

To exemplify we should consider a borg assimilator with offense 60 and defense 30.

As a borg assimilator is hit, it;s hull decreases from 100 all the way to 0 wheni it finally blows up.
I would suggest that the defense adaptation work as a factor of the hull that is destroyed. I would view 1 hull unit as 1% of hull defense strength increase.

So if the assimilator at the outset of the attack has 100 hull @ 30 defense, if during the battle it is hit from 100 to 99 the defense increases @ 1/100 *30 +30 and so on.
If hull strenght drops to 50, defense of the borg vessel is [50/100*30] +30 = 45
Once the borg ship retreats and repairs, it will still retain the defense of 45.
However, if it re-enters combat, for balancing sake, further damage would continue using the orginal defense of 30 as the base multiple value, but will resume from 100 again... and so on..

there should be a max cap on the max defense adaptation - and that can be 50% or 100% depending on the ship class and what the mods find to be "balanced".. meaning we can have for an assimilator 45 as the max defense attainable or we can have 60 taking original 30 defense as the base.


For offense, I would look at the survivability of other ships of a particular class against the borg ship in question and adjust it in a similar base value %.
if a specific ship class is destroyed by the attacking borg vessel, it will add nothing to the borg adaptation.
However, if  a ship survives an attack from a borg ship AND the borg ship attacking it is destroyed, then other ships THAT ARE ALIVE AT THE TIME OF THE SHIP's DESTRUCTION should get a % bonus to attack the class of the ship which destroyed the borg vessel in question.
This % will vary based on class of borg ship destroyed.
The % will be higher as the ship class advances. meaning destroyed Scubes will give a lesser % increase than a destroyed Cube.. range from Scubes to assimilator to sphere to diamond to cube.
The % per ship against the enemy class will increase as more ships are destroyed but will cap at % gained by the destruction of a cube.

To exemplify we take our assimilator which is set up as assimilator with 2 torps and 1 disruptor beam. Offense is 60.
This assimilator comprised a fleet of 3 Scubes and 1 more assimilator of a diff config.

Our sample assimilator engages the dominion and is destroyed by a mixed fleet of dominion bombers and dreadnoughts.
The death blow was delivered by the bomber.

In this case the 3 Scubes and 1 remaining assimilator get a % increase of offense against bombers by 20%.

We create then 2 spheres. they do not get any bonus as they were not in existence at the time of the destruction of the lost assimilator.

The new fleet of Scubes and assimilator and spheres engage the feds.
this time akiras destroy an Scube.
since this is a lesser class the spheres and assimilator get a 5% increase for hte scube lost.

And so on.

We assume the % increase achieved at any one time for the destruction of one cube as 25%.
This means that losing ships smaller than a cube can give the alive ships an increased offense % upto a MAX of 25% per enemy class.
any further destruction caps once the offense bonus vs a particular enemy reaches +25% on a surviving ship.

Please let me know what you guys think.

** of course these numbers are ballpark. The mods will consider balancing stat concerns if this is ever accepted**

posted on April 17th, 2009, 1:27 am

interesting idea, there was acutualy a few post on this in the 3.0 borg thread.

I said it would be cool if instead of just the addaptor gaining a damage resistance.
Make it ship specific. The assimilation beam should also assimilate the ship not just the crew. The borg then gain a 20-25% damage resistance to that ship and immunity to its special weapons.

The idea then is that each ship aside from borg have a remodulate ability, it costs all special power and a fair bit or resources but undoes the damage resistance and the special weapon immunity.

What would also be cool is that a cpature ship can be disguised to look like a normal ship and set to yellow alert could sneak around an opponents base unnoticed unless it attacks or the player spots it and tells ships to attack it.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 2:05 am

Its a great Idea.  It is very cannon, but I don't think its possible to do it with out horribly unbalenceing the game.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 2:39 am

balancing will certainly be possible. All that is needed is the adjustment of the increase rhat we gain.
after all the benefits in question are only applicable to specific vessels and not all at any given time.
kinda like how experience works now. experience does not unbalance the game. and i dont believe this will

posted on April 17th, 2009, 2:55 am

I like the ideas you've posted Serpicus, so don't take this the wrong way... but the Developers announced (albeit a bit quietly) in a recent thread that they have implemented or are going to implement a Borg experience system (this patch or the next I think in fact).

Maybe it'll be like what you and others have suggested though... would be quite cool 

posted on April 17th, 2009, 10:18 am

I like the ideas you've posted Serpicus, so don't take this the wrong way... but the Developers announced (albeit a bit quietly) in a recent thread that they have implemented or are going to implement a Borg experience system (this patch or the next I think in fact).

Maybe it'll be like what you and others have suggested though... would be quite cool 

they did... awsome, could you post a link the thread plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Anonymous]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:31 am

Last edited by Anonymous on April 17th, 2009, 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nice idea and they should be able to balance it properly
It gets my seal of approval 

Oh and Dominus, they said they will let us know how the Borg will get veteran ships, not experiance system I have an idea how they could do it too!  (hint: Its very cool )

So I dont think it should be a problem to implement this into the game as well

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:40 am

hm, ice?

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:42 am

I said VERY cool, so dry ice

posted on April 17th, 2009, 11:49 am

The Borg will neither get experience nor veteran ships, they will "just" get another new gameplay feature (not themed around adaption)
We have some rough ideas for a race-global adaption system, but nothing that will make it into to next patches, as we do not like the way we could include it at the moment. perhaps we will find something better and canon in the future, however we are quite happy with the adaptor

posted on April 17th, 2009, 12:09 pm

Maybe you could make it where the enemy ships at first hit hard, but when the borg ships take about 50% hull damage they gane immunity to most damage from that race.  then Regeneration would be used more.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 12:49 pm

The Borg will neither get experience nor veteran ships, they will "just" get another new gameplay feature (not themed around adaption)

Well its a very cool gameplay feature I bet

posted on April 17th, 2009, 1:07 pm

There would be so many odf files if they did what serpicus was suggesting. Well at least the only way I know how to do it there would be.

[Anonymous]

posted on April 17th, 2009, 3:09 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on April 17th, 2009, 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There would be so many odf files if they did what serpicus was suggesting. Well at least the only way I know how to do it there would be.

ah. ok.

posted on April 17th, 2009, 3:40 pm

The Borg will neither get experience nor veteran ships, they will "just" get another new gameplay feature (not themed around adaption)
We have some rough ideas for a race-global adaption system, but nothing that will make it into to next patches, as we do not like the way we could include it at the moment. perhaps we will find something better and canon in the future, however we are quite happy with the adaptor

ok. but since the adaptor is practically irrelevant as regards normal gameplay, could we modify the construction ship so that it can build a mixed tech node, and allow the module that is currently on the adapter to be available for any ship that is buildable from a node. It will consume 1 module as it does, and for ships like the assimilator which have only 3 modules it would not be "unbalancing" as they are sacrificing firepower and tech for this resistance.

and instead of leaving it at 10%, we could have the adaptation module vary from 10% for Scubes to 30% for the main cube (assimilators @15% and spheres at 20% with the diamond at 25%... especially since cubes in normal gameplay are few and far between.

would this be possible?