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Game Balance and Warp Cores
dark4blood
Member Posts: 1,192 Arc User
Many comment on the need for game balance and also for Cryptic to follow the cannon Star Fleet that uses Cruisers instead of Escorts as their primary battleships, well with warp cores and the reveal of power adjustments Cryptic may have sold their own problem without changing the game too much. The idea is to make the warp cores act as they would in the show, thus the larger the starship, the more powerful the warp core. This mechanic is already seen with bonuses on shield, deflectors, and Engines. Now that warp cores have been introduced, Cryptic can make a clear distinction in power levels between the 4 classes of ships. Escorts will have a potential of 130 max power, Science 135, Cruisers 145, and Dreadnaughts 150. Having the warp cores display these differences will not reduce or nerf any attacks by current ships, plus skills like Rapid Cannon fire and Scatter Volley will still out fire Fire at Will and Beam Overload.
In addition to this, to address the obvious lean toward beams, changing the proc rate of beams to 3.5% instead of 2.5%, thus giving beams a reason for being less efficient than cannons.
With the difference in power and the slight adjustment in beams, Cruiser won't be quite equal to escorts but the difference will be based on the activation and use of skills instead of just clearly unbalanced lean toward escort and cannons. Personally, I have not watched the new Star Trek movie, however there have been many reruns of the TOS movies and the TNG movies in which Cruiser clearly are the lead ships in the federation and most escorts can't hold a candle to a the Enterprise except the Defiant, and even that is not in it's ability to survive hits. I implore Cryptic to revisit the structure of Federation ships especially when it comes to them using escorts as their lead fleet ships. Also, to really make the three factions feel different, why not consider having Klingons favor Escorts with quad disruptor Heavy cannons that are only used by Klingons, Quad phaser beams and 360 phaser beams that are only usable by the Federation, and special Romulan Enhanced cloaking (20% power and the ability to fire while cloaked), that way the game will have a completely new dynamic of choices and play styles.
The introduction of warp cores and the different bonuses make this possible, mainly because it addresses power levels without changing the nature of the weapons and skills. Cryptic, if you wish this game to last another 5 years, I would consider making these changes either before or during the next level cap change. If these changes were made in some fashion before the end of the year, maybe Cryptic would win MMORPG of the year from IGN or Gamespot.
In addition to this, to address the obvious lean toward beams, changing the proc rate of beams to 3.5% instead of 2.5%, thus giving beams a reason for being less efficient than cannons.
With the difference in power and the slight adjustment in beams, Cruiser won't be quite equal to escorts but the difference will be based on the activation and use of skills instead of just clearly unbalanced lean toward escort and cannons. Personally, I have not watched the new Star Trek movie, however there have been many reruns of the TOS movies and the TNG movies in which Cruiser clearly are the lead ships in the federation and most escorts can't hold a candle to a the Enterprise except the Defiant, and even that is not in it's ability to survive hits. I implore Cryptic to revisit the structure of Federation ships especially when it comes to them using escorts as their lead fleet ships. Also, to really make the three factions feel different, why not consider having Klingons favor Escorts with quad disruptor Heavy cannons that are only used by Klingons, Quad phaser beams and 360 phaser beams that are only usable by the Federation, and special Romulan Enhanced cloaking (20% power and the ability to fire while cloaked), that way the game will have a completely new dynamic of choices and play styles.
The introduction of warp cores and the different bonuses make this possible, mainly because it addresses power levels without changing the nature of the weapons and skills. Cryptic, if you wish this game to last another 5 years, I would consider making these changes either before or during the next level cap change. If these changes were made in some fashion before the end of the year, maybe Cryptic would win MMORPG of the year from IGN or Gamespot.
Post edited by dark4blood on
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Comments
Your idea of a varied warp core sounds good, but here's the thing: Larger ships require a larger warp core just to stay functional! What we, as players use as warp core power is what is left over after artificial gravity (larger ships require more fields), science labs, brigs, life support (again larger ships require more support), etc are accounted for.
And when those other facilities actually matter in this game, that will become relevant. Until that point, however...
oh god stop it.
The Federation had 2 major and one minor Borg Incursons (2x a cube, one time Lores rag tag bunch), a short but bloody war with the klingon empire after it went bat****,
and then a long and incredibly bloody war with the dominion.
As of 2409, the Federation has a new war with the klingons, a much broader borg invasion, breen tholians and romulan remnants coming out of the woodworks. Species 8472 skulking around, the looming threat of the iconians...
Star Fleet has noticeably changed. Just look at the ground equipment. Armor, personal shields, a wide variety of weapons. Turrets and drones, grenades, offensive science tools...
The proliferation of more war ships.
The blanket statement of "oh noes! the federation is about peace!" is utter and complete BS and always had been.
Yes the primary mandate is exploration, but the secondary mandate is "Beat down attackers hard enough so they go to the negotiation table!" .
Because the undeniable truth is: it does not matter how peaceful you are, you still need arms and people willing and able to use them to protect yourself from those who simply do not want to be nice.
The klingon empire and romulan empire didn't shy away from ganking the federation because they were scared of an angry protest from the president - but because of the size and overall better rounded equipment of Starfleet.
Starfleet got away with its multi mission ships partly BECAUSE its ships were better on an engineering level.
But the Dominion war has very coldly shown how that can come back to bite you in the TRIBBLE.
early things like the excelsior refits (like the one the lakota got) and galaxy refits (that into battle much lighter on science stuff) clearly show the willingness and need for star fleet to bulk up its stock of combat oriented vessels.
And by Q i hope you are not jaded enough to think starfleet would still allow families on bord its ships after the massaker that was the dominion war. It sure as fck isn't in 2409. I have not seen any brats on my galaxy X i can tell you that.
Ok that argument swatted away let me say this:
You can turn off science labs and other unneeded energy drains. You do not need gravity in places no-one is. even then you can tone it down to minimum.
I wonder just how often you want to field this strawman argument.
Brigs do not need force fields. A solid wall of "not getting through barehanded and almost naked like you are because we strip searched you..." Duranium alloy will do.
Life support only for the ship section that people are using.
How difficult is it for you to grasp this concept?
And btw:
With all the body armor one would think we got the whole heating thing covered, so you only need minimum heat and minimum air recycling....
As you see: your arguments about power drains are simply invalid + the valid arguments of minimum requirements also count for all other ships of any race.
There is a simple fact of star trek tech: The bigger the more. Give the same techbasse a bigger warpcore will net you more power.
A bigger ship also hosts more redundancy in its systems, also has more hull to work through to get at the juicy insides. A bigger ship also has, due to redundancy and simple SIZE more options to convert the power it generates into something useful.
You can build better and more redundant shield systems, you can fit more and bigger weapons. All that stuff has of course secondary requirement as far as infrastructure goes. All those factors make bigger ships better.
The reason smaller ships are build is that they are build faster, require less overhead and that they can make up individual weakness with wolve pack tactics.
STO, however is game.
And as a game it should strive towards balance. Balance here is best achieved if all ships, bottom line, could do the same damage, healing and CC. The only difference should be HOW they do it.
Guild wars 2 works splendidly with such a system.
Ok, labs, brigs and systems of the like aren't even in the game and interiors are mostly meaningless. None of that should factor in. We have a system where crew die and come back to life. That's about the extent of what's going on inside.