Comments - shockmesane

I'm curious: is there is any scenario other than a massive multi-star map that someone would use a scarab? Money is the limiting resource far more than supply until the endgame, at which point unless you have made a deal with your buddy that you won't attack for an hour, the game has almost certainly been won by a decisive battle. I guess maybe they are viable in a huge multi-star game where everyone has unlimited resources and supply is the determinant factor in fleet composition, but on small maps they are completely unusable.

Once money becomes trivialized, sure, Scarabs become usable. But it seems bizarre to me that they cost almost the exact same as Manticores and are absolutely outperformed by them until you've got more money than you know what to do with and need to make every supply slot count. It seems to me there should be some reason to use them early game. I'd just drop the cost on them personally, as by the time they become efficient money isn't really a big deal, and you could use them in the early game without gg'ing yourself.

Well, the Dominion certainly looks underwhelming. What'd they kill, one or two ships with that entire fleet?

Everything else looks nice, though. Especially the new Klingon titan. Thank you for adding a new one.

Dude, Voyager was protected by plot armor, the most powerful defensive tech possible.

The fleet cap is practically an arbitrary number, though. I mean, if you make the basic dominion attack ships cost 2 supply, having the same supply cap as the other factions they would still have a lot more ships. Just as an example.

Other than using a lot of the basic jem'hadar attack ships, our only real reference for Dominion fleet composition is from "What You Leave Behind", and the two battles for DS:9. We know they built ships a lot faster than everyone else, and not much else. Which makes sense, as having guys coming out cloning tanks that can operate starships apparently by instinct is a lot more efficient than waiting for children to grow up and send them through years of school.

As for their frigate/cruiser/capital ship ratio, who knows really. I'm guessing that the Battleship will be a titan though, as it was way larger than anything the allied forces fielded.

Just be careful you don't break the AI by having starbases super durable AND deal any noticeable amount of damage, its a rookie mistake I've seen made by a number of mods. The 100% damage reflect looks particularly problematic. While that is easy to avoid as a human player and basically just buys the starbase some time, the AI will suicide on it every time.

The point of starbases and static defenses in general ought to be to buy time to react to attacks that catch you out of position because your scouting was poor or you were playing a little risky. In your testing if you ever see a planet with maxed out tactical slots and a maxed out upgraded starbase stave off a significant assault by itself, the game is going to be pointlessly easy. Very annoying speed bumps is fine, not stop-signs. :)

Though interestingly if you look at screenshots of the final assault on Cardassia Prime, the Dominion Battleship is shown at two scales. In one scene it appears about twice as large as a Galaxy (when the Vorcha is firing at one), whereas in orbit around Cardassia they are almost 4x that large, or 8x a Galaxy.

So there are either two versions of the battleship, or more likely a continuity error. The ones in orbit around Cardassia would be NOTICEABLY longer than a Cube (cubes at just above 3km vs closer to 4km for those battleships), whereas the one seen fired upon by the Vorcha would be "only" 1300mish.

Just curious, but why the different nacelle coloration? I know they kind of alternated blue/purple in DS:9, but don't you think consistency looks nicer? Also, my vote is for purple, it looks kind of scarier than blue, plus the federation have blue covered.

That's just nitpicking though, looks fantastic as always!

Well, seeing as I have no experience in modelling whatsoever, it would take me a long time to learn a new program!

I'm glad you are working on a new Klingon titan though, that's awesome.

I think most of the negative comments about the Klingon Titan aren't in reference to its uselessness, it certainly isn't useless. Most people that dislike it would simply rather have a huge Klingon Battleship to play with than a mobile bomb. My other issue with it is that the AI makes horrible use of it, and since half my games are against AI or with AI players, it kind of messes things up.

Quite honestly I'd die of happiness if they just released a zip with a Klingon titan that was a battleship in a zip that would just replace the existing entity file and toss in some meshes. Though I understand modelling a new Titan is time consuming work.

Well, seeing as only deus ex machina could save the Alpha quadrant from either, it'd be an interesting conflict.

The Borg would obviously win if they functioned in any sort of logical way. As in sending more than a single cube to assimilate an entire quarter of the galaxy when they apparently can't even conquer the delta quadrant with tens of thousands of them. Don't even get me started on the time travel crap in First Contact, and pretend Voyager never happened. Because yea, the Borg just forgot they could instantly transwarp into earth's orbit at any time with those dozens of cubes floating around at the unimatrix doing nothing. Oops.

Fortunately the Borg are portrayed as perhaps the most idiotic species to ever achieve spaceflight. I mean, Voyager figures out how to use Borg technology to defeat species 8472 in about 3 minutes, when trillions of Borg drones all attempting to solve this problem can't. That is a level of stupidity perhaps unmatched in the entire history of writing.

Hey guys, good work! I like how you reduced the supply costs on the Borg caps so that using mixed fleets with them actually makes sense. Also, Locutus is terrifying. He's basically a fast Cube. Awesome.

Of course you are correct. What I meant to say, and said very poorly was that in comparison to a ship firing with equal power from all four arcs, the Defiant's display DPS looks 25% in comparison.

For example the Excelsior displays 65 phaser dps, because it has 3 arcs, although the forward arc is only dealing 21.6ish dps. Only in a situation where there are enemies in three different arcs does it actually deal that 65 dps.

The Defiant deals 16.875 pulse phaser dps and displays some version of that number, because it is only firing in that one arc. Now this is obviously too low for a ship costing that much supply and requiring that much tech, but even if you doubled it to 33 phaser dps it would still display at 33, quite a bit lower than the Excelsior while in actuality dealing a fair amount more damage. If that makes sense.

I was more pointing out that ships with more firing arcs display at substantially higher damage numbers, despite banks or what is actually a reasonable single target dps number.

The way the Sins calculates display damage is over all four arcs. Some people have mistakenly said that the Defiant's dps is higher than displayed because it fires rapidly. However, increasing a ships firing speed does increase the dps display appropriately.

In the case of the Defiant I believe what you are seeing is that it only fires in the forward arc, so it is actually only displaying 25% of the actual DPS in the display. In large battles the DPS will tend to be closer to 4x displayed as there will generally be something in its forward arc to shoot at.

I'm fairly certain that displayed DPS does not take into account the number of banks firing, and in that case the actual DPS would be closer to 8x as the Defiant has 2 forward banks, as long as two targets exist in its forward arc. I could be wrong, but I'm almost certain that I'm not or the Borg DPS would display even crazier higher if Bank #s were accounted for.

Well, for the AI at the very least. All it does is blow up its own fleet with it. I've watched it do it any number of times.

Can we be cautiously optimistic for an update for this weekend? Even a .951 beta with only the Klingon titan replacement would be worth downloading. I don't like having to either play as the Klingons or leave them out of the game when I play against the AI, it makes me sad!

Pretty please guys?

President's day update? You could re-name it the Gul'Dukat Day update or something ;) /wishful thinking

I know, every time I look at the screenshots for the Dominion stuff I get sad because I know it'll still probably be months till we get to play them. But it'll be worth it!