Borg adaption to passives

posted on January 10th, 2011, 3:10 pm

[align=center]Motivation[/align]

As Borg your ships can be countered, but it can be difficult to escape from this since the Borg style requires building few ships and having to guess what is coming in advance. Once you have committed to the chassis you cant change. And each ship constitutes a large portion of your combat force.

Recently in a replay a Borg player made a Dodecahedron, then 2 Galaxies warped in and hard countered it to ashes.

I have 2 suggestions which I think would help this

[align=center]Idea 1: Time based adaption to passives[/align]

Scubes and below arent affected since they are too small to have these complex adaption systems. Scubes can already install EM modules to fight off passives anyway.

A Borg ship will slowly adapt to passives while in combat. This is similar to previous ideas where the Borg would take reduced damage from enemies while in combat, the difference is that the adaption is only to passives, so the damage reduction is only a reduction in the extra damage a ship would do.

Lets take a Dodecahedron vs a Galaxy for example, numbers just for illustration, at first the Galaxy will do 50% extra damage, for 8 seconds of combat. Then it will do 45% extra for a further 3 seconds, then 40% extra for 3 seconds, then 38% extra for 3 seconds, then 35% extra for 5 seconds.... eventually the time to adapt would get longer and the extra damage will end up between 30% and 35%

Bigger ships will adapt more, probably not faster though. So an assimilator might get down to somewhere between 25% and 30% from the Galaxy. A Diamond could get down to between 20% and 25%

A question is whether it should effect passives that reduce damage that the Borg ships does to another ship. There is justification for it as adapting to enemy defences. Again the adaption would only affect the passive.

So for example a Prime Sphere vs an Intrepid. At first the Sphere does 31% less damage because of ADAI, as the battle wages on the Sphere would suffer less from ADAI, maybe ending up dealing between 20% and 25% less damage than normal, instead of the full 31% less.

[align=center]Idea 2: Adaption Research[/align]

Currently we have the research called Partial Adaption which makes all Borg vessels do more damage. I suggest a second level of adaption research with a different name (lets call it Partial Adaption 2 until a good name can be invented) which immediately reduces the negative effects of passives, like above, but faster. It could reduce the negative effects by a percentage or just plain remove the negative effects.

[align=center]Balancing Ideas[/align]

• Reduce the hull hitpoints of all Borg ships slightly
• Make Partial Adaption 2 and the current Partial Adaption mutually exclusive. So you can either do +10% damage accross the board, or suffer less from counters, but not both. Justification for this is that a Borg ship only has room for 1 set of adaption tech

posted on January 10th, 2011, 3:42 pm

Why make it so complex? There was an introduction of "Synergy effects" in the last patches. I think, this synergy will be something for every race with different methods and approaches.

While I think that mixed fleets will get a bonus for every race in a certain way (feds defense, klingon maybe offens, rommies some 'special' and dominion a mix of def/off) the borg might get a nice adaption.

Take a prime sphere with its deflector domination and a diamond with "bring order to chaos" in two different ways:
The deflector domination will enable the pattern analysis of enemy ships and weapon/shield systems in real time. In the arty-radius of the deflector domination/order to chaos, a diamond may enable the "rapid adaption" that is an auto-passive, which will reduce the effects of enemy passive abilities by 50% within the field of analysis. All borg ships within that field might profit from it.

I think, this would be a cool synergy. No additional hard-code-content but a more dynamic way. This bring in more heat to the game

posted on January 11th, 2011, 1:03 am

Why make it so complex? There was an introduction of "Synergy effects" in the last patches. I think, this synergy will be something for every race with different methods and approaches.

Synergy is only for the federation i dont know why everyone thinks that all races will get synergys.

posted on January 11th, 2011, 9:03 am

I say redo ranged based counter type balance for borg.

Balance it so they get no penalty for ranged based balance issues, but no benefit either.

Simply put, the chance to hit rates that are set in the weapons .odf files (Im assuming thats how it was done at least) could be tinkerd with so Borg ships are equaly good against everything, but have no bonus against anything either, do the same with all of the damage modifiers as well.