Solar hulls are overpowered

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Voker57
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Solar hulls are overpowered

#1 Post by Voker57 »

In our multiplayer battles, very often gaining access to solar hulls decides the endgame. They have WAY more internal slots than any other hull, plenty external ones, can get up to crazy speeds if you fill these internal slots with N-Dimensional Engine Matrices and cheap for their slots. Of course, they are rather hard to build, but that only forces players to plan for solar hulls early.

My proposition is: cut it down to 16 external, 3 internal slots. That makes it close to Titanic hull, but still faster and stealth-reducing (mostly irrelevant by that point). They will be possible to intercept with titanic hulls boosted with local bonuses and not so invulnerable anymore.
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L29Ah
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#2 Post by L29Ah »

But it's the point of a strategy game: outplan your opponent or be crushed. You need to synchronize your whole empire to be able to build a solar hull a bit earlier. Also it's quite easy to screw up their production as the black holes are quite scarce of a resource, disregarding the fact that you need to populate them, defend them and build one of the most expensive structure there meanwhile, giving a total of ~20 turns and >2000pp between bringing in an outpost and the first solar ships coming out. Also they aren't exactly the cheapest source of firepower so a lower tech opponent can throw cheap trash at them quite efficiently.
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MatGB
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#3 Post by MatGB »

Is the main problem too many engines?

I've been planning, at some point, to make all the engine parts one-per-ship, with some improvements overall, pick an engine, that's your lot, but doing that requires more internal slot parts to make up for it. In the short term I'll think about increasing the solar hull cost a bit and possibly changing the cost for engine parts a bit: when I last costed the ship hulls, I basically ignored internal slots as there wasn't much to do with them, that's no longer the case so it's been planned for another balance pass.

I don't want to reduce the slot count too much, they're supposed to be a massive scary thing, but I'm quite happy to do other balance work to make them less overpowered.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

MatGB wrote:I've been planning, at some point, to make all the engine parts one-per-ship, with some improvements overall, pick an engine, that's your lot...
The original design was for there to be no engine parts, and for engine-type characteristics to be determined just by the hull...

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Voker57
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#5 Post by Voker57 »

L29Ah wrote:But it's the point of a strategy game: outplan your opponent or be crushed.
Strategy game where there's only one meanningful thing to plan for is boring one.
L29Ah wrote:Also they aren't exactly the cheapest source of firepower so a lower tech opponent can throw cheap trash at them quite efficiently.
They are, actually. They have lowest cost per slot in game. Cheap trash gets disintegrated in round 1 and does not count for the rest of combat while solars can be quickly drydocked after the fight.
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MatGB
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#6 Post by MatGB »

Voker57 wrote: They are, actually. They have lowest cost per slot in game. Cheap trash gets disintegrated in round 1 and does not count for the rest of combat while solars can be quickly drydocked after the fight.
That's actually not true. I've just updated the spreadsheet I used last time I did a balance pass (here), and they're 14th, even removing non-combat hulls they're not in the top 10, the Heavy Asteroid Hull comes in at roughly the same cost and virtually all the Organic hulls do as well.

Having said that, it's too cheap, the cost doesn't take into account the value of internal slots having gone up a LOT and it still has a very high base structure making it by far the best cost/benefit hulls, it's the cheapest Flagship and probably the best.

I will spend some time this week on a balance pass, it's been needed since Fighters were introduced and I'd forgotten to do it, at least I have all the tools I need now.

(by the way, if anyone notices an error in that spreadsheet do please say, I noticed a few so I've probably missed some, I didn't update it after I made some changes awhileback and it's harder to retroactively fix these things)
Mat Bowles

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Voker57
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#7 Post by Voker57 »

MatGB wrote:
Voker57 wrote: They are, actually. They have lowest cost per slot in game. Cheap trash gets disintegrated in round 1 and does not count for the rest of combat while solars can be quickly drydocked after the fight.
That's actually not true. I've just updated the spreadsheet I used last time I did a balance pass (here), and they're 14th, even removing non-combat hulls they're not in the top 10, the Heavy Asteroid Hull comes in at roughly the same cost and virtually all the Organic hulls do as well.
Heavy asteroid hull doesn't have a core slot and is slow as hell with no hope of getting anywhere near Solar speed. Scattered asteroid is the same price for hull, but slow and generally worse in every aspect.
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MatGB
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Re: Solar hulls are overpowered

#8 Post by MatGB »

"Lowest cost per slot" is what I said wasn't true. Core slots hadn't come into this before and, given the low number of core parts, don't really make a massive difference here anyway.

Is the biggest problem the speed? Because that can be sorted in multiple different ways.
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Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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