Welcome to State of the Mod Numero Uno, today I’m going to
be chatting to you the faithful fans of A3 around what our plans are.
You see you may think like other Mod DB operations now were
done, it’s done done done! (Sorry for repetitive words I’m a little hyper
lately) But that could not be further from the truth you see, were committed to
the glory of Armada 3, it’s not just a game you see it’s more like a child that’s
left home spread its wings but needs a little help from mum and dad now and
again to make it reach its true potential.
Anyway that’s enough waffle right, let’s get on with it
Bane! So yes I can confirm there’s a patch 1.2 in the workings (Yeh baby! I hear
you all shout …right?) So Patch 1.2 what’s it all about then bane?
Well don’t go expecting massive racial additions buts more
so fixes, tweaks, le balance! I should also shout out to a few of you in this
post people like fellrunner and pardepartisan who have been scrolling and
reporting numerous bugs to aid us the devs, were not perfect and we do make
mistakes.
Cardy/Dom
It’s fair to say I’m quite happy with the cardy dom
experience, not sure some people understand that both have unique playstyles,
cardy tends to suit me more than dom for example but I know our lead beta
tester prefers dominion so you know even the devs can’t agree.
We know that some strings need fixing in the diplomacy
research so were going to look into that one first and have Christian work on
some of those.
Next up is the widow and hornet squadrons who need some info
card work due to text errors, yep we got that.
The Domi alliance research card itself is also up for a
rework due to the text running off the screen edge whoops!
We missed an icon for the tain prototype dry-dock it’s
should be cardy but its showing fed, the union and ducat would not be pleased!
Sometimes the Nor Station shield doesn’t work… well that’s not
right is it?
Deployable Siege Turrets are stock… Including the info card HUD
icon… I knew I forgot to change that L
Cardy Construction ships have fed voices… well we did
mention cardys like slave labour right…. *coughs*
Janissary weapon damage per level increase is off making it
way too powerful.
Mission failure voice over is that of the federation…pact
issue as well possibly.
Ok a little worn out after some of those jokes! Balance wise were happy with the current
cardy and domi setup, one is tank and one is spank, you decide by your choice,
cardy ships can when kitted out with their damage reduction go toe to toe with
some of the best damage dealers out there and the dominion can perform scalpel
surgery on most targets with their speedy hit and run.
Federation Citizens….would you like to know more?
Of course you would but its minor fixes for now so let’s get
started…
Trade ship has stock icons…we here you, you want no more
stock!
Unity one strings are missing….Were on it!
Unity one has federation star base shield mesh… if we can develop
a specific mesh we will if not no mesh at all.
Looks like we need to look a bit closer into the intrepid
pulse beacon research! The ability doesn’t seem to be tied in correctly.
The rules of acquisition info card doesn’t quite explain
what it actually does… you guys do know these are ferengi no one quite knows
what anything really means until your tied into a contract scrubbing toilets
with a toothbrush for 5 coins an hour.
The outpost info card icon is stock…. Like from a warehouse.
And that’s it for bugs I know some of you have mentioned as
well your hate for feds bombing planets but I can’t see a way forward with the
way the engine works entity wise, my current feeling is we could make the
federation do more bombing damage but less pop damage as an example as for
overall balance again were happy with it feds are not perfect by any means but
they can bring the pain if they choose to engage on their terms.
Borg….. They are perfect….no really they are perfect.
*Hums a Klingon Theme in his head*
OK on to the honourable warriors who like to drink far far too
much a bit like the devs on a Monday night.
Ever had that moment when your piloting your B’rell and
lining up that perfect shot you press the trigger and see explosions but no
sound from the guns… ok slight oversight we accidentally left off a single
letter which means no sound for b’rell guns... whoops….
Heh’Dakka de dakka colonial ship the info card mouse over
for the outpost talks about the main star base.
Klingon battle station tug only consumes 5 supply – the other
faction’s use 10, so time to pump it up slightly!
Klingon Unity station is sadly showing fed bits and pieces etc.
it’s become a little bit of a nightmare so were going to look at the info cards
mesh etc. for the station and the strings for the tug as well.
Now somehow we missed that the beautiful Vorcha
damageperbank was set wrong meaning the back and the right bank have been
swapped! Great for rear defence, I did say that always take Klingons out with a
right hook right???
Finally and not least we kind of missed gowrons chance to
get the vorcha refit….ok ok I know you hate him but have you seen those eyes!
Overall again Klingon balance feels good and they are a
powerful force with naff defences for the most part…but no Klingon likes to
hide behind a defensive line.
ROMMMMMMMMARUNS! As Scooby would say!
So yeh we missed some game over dialogue string wise… no
worries were on it
For some reason we had a brainfart moment and called tactical
evasion evasive on the harpy’s info card.
Both the T’liss and Thalen are seeing a stock symbol so yep
we will get that sorted when they are selected.
So again we like to break the starter ships, the vengeance
has a weapon cool down decrease percent of 1 instead of 0! Oops!
And finally the Shadow has DamagePerbank on Left and Right…Great!
But it has no TargetCountPErBank….er so yeh it may have not been shooting
properly!
Again romulans feel right balance wise and were glad people
love the buzzard for what is is… a face wrecker!
SO now that all the racial guff is out of the way were onto
General Issues.
We have had reports of missing Industrial Freighters from
the resource focuses so were looking into that mechanic issue for a few races
we will keep you posted.
Diplomacy wise were looking into the antimatter in culture
research and how the AI utilises it and how the AI builds defences, AI is not
the easiest to deal with sometimes because were limited by hard coding.
Some reports shattered moon wise that the promellian weapon outpost
bonus allows for a star base to be built so were investigating this particular
issue.
And that’s it for now folks for what we are currently
looking into version 1.2. As always I’m Bane it’s been emotional and I’ll see
you all soon!
I can confrim that the Promellian Weapon Outpost on shattered moon allows outposts/starbases to be built.
Are there going to be any changes to the victory type Flagship Victory? I know stock Sins have each of those capitals very unique and powerful abilities so they could survive even into the late game. It just scares me ever so slightly to send out my Galaxy Class in the mid game knowing that any engine disable pretty much causes me to lose.
How exactly did that work in terms of code? would it be possible to graft abilities from other ships into that flagship and still make it relatively balanced?
the Flagships have there own entity files they just share the same mesh as the capital ships, so you could change the abilities to however you want them. I completely change the flagships on my game, I made them how they are in vanilla and it works just the same IMO.
If the Devs do change the Flagship meshes to update the mode here's my suggestions:
Federation: Nebula or Sovereign (Both have advanced technology)
Klingons: Neg'Var (they've already got increased impulse speed)
Romulans: Shadow or Valdore
Cardassian/Dominion: Keldon (the DS9 Episode "Defiant" does show the Obsidian Order modifying them with increased speed)
Borg: Tactical Sphere or Diamond (assimilation of Armor Tech during "Endgame")
I changed all of my flagships to the race Carriers but left the borg with the diamond. I wish I could make it where the game randomly selects a flagship but I have been told its impossible :(
This is not a rant rather an observation. When everything is researched and the large fleets are assembled with the best ships. I think it is important that no fleet can rip through another fully upgraded and similiar sized fleet the way the Dominion currently can.
I don't really think you guys have the balance correct for the dominion/cardassian race. They may be balanced toward each other but not the other races. I haven't tried the Romulans yet, but as Klingons and Fed if your fighting a Dominion player with a comparable size fleet mine hasn't stood a chance, especially in later stages of the game.
Just looking at the paper stats of some their ships: Sona battlecruisers are not capital ships yet they're stronger than the first 2 capital ships of the other three races. Galor refits are stronger than K'veks, Akira's, and the Falcon (or whatever the Rom late heavy cruiser is). I know Cardassian warships are supposed to be tough but come on 12 base armor on the Galor. That is way more than most capital ships and the Galor is a cruiser. Cardassian capital ships are insanely hard to take down.
To win against the Ai Dominion player I haven't been able to let the game develop to the later stages which is a bummer because that is when the game really starts to get interesting.
I agree to some of the points you made.
Galor:
The fact that a fully upgraded (cardassian unionist) galor gets 22 armor and 5000 hull seems ridicolous. I dont agree with a cruiser having more armor than almost any capitalship. Plus it still reaches about 200 dps.
Kvek:
Too weak compared to other late game cruisers and the ability is just not worth it. The first thing i used to do when a kvek finished building is to turn off autocast on its ability. The kvek receives about 30% more damage only to gain 10% more dps. I dont have a problem with abilitys having also a downside but when the downside is much greater than the gain its pretty worthless.
Thats why i changed a lot of ship stats and abilitys to my liking. You can do that too :)
Para if you contact me via the moddb mail im happy to discuss some points i wanted to get hold of you anyway about something else.
Galors are more for the sake of gameplay, since the Cardies are the exact opposite of the dominion. Where as Dominion is damage the Cardassians are all about absorbing damage. Also the Galor only has one target per bank.
The Kvek doesn't take 30% more damage, it gets a 10% lower mitigation for shields and 10% more damage. If you have a bulk of Kveks all doing 10% more damage in the initial attack run, you do serious amounts of damage. Don't forget this ability lasts only 20 seconds and has a cooldown of 120 seconds. So it is for that initial burst of damage.
We went through several testing phases as Bane explained, we have test environments without any outside interference. We also had a lot of testers to take in points of balance concern. Overall the races are pretty close together strength wise, but they all play a bit different. And this in balance is hard to balance out perfectly.
Normaly a ship under focus fire raises its shield mitigation to 57%. So it takes only 43% of the damage done.
Lowering the shield mitigation by 10% results in a peak mitigation of 47%, so it takes 53% of the damage done.
Just try it with lets say 1000 damage.
57% shield mitigation: 430 damage
47% shield mitigation: 530 damage
530/430 = 1.23....
530 damage is 23% more damage than the 430 damage
Thats an increase of roughly 23% in damage taken. Add the 10% more damage taken from the other debuff and you get about 30% more damage taken in total.
I know its hard to balance all the things but thats exactly the reason why i for instance wouldnt touch shield mitigation at all, whether its buffs or debuffs. It just has too big of an impact on the numbers that arnt obvious at a first glance.
That is if you only take shields into consideration. You also have hull which doesn't take mitigation into account. And Klingons rely more on their hull than shields. So when the shields are down it is just 10%.
Failed to respond to you directly (see below)
The shield mitigation is active even if the shields are "down" so 30% more damage all the way
This is my bad, the mitigation does indeed also apply to hull through the armor. However the Cardassians still only have 1 target per bank. And they don't have the same choice ship wise due to the split faction. This is just the way we balanced it and it works fine for our gameplay.
If you want to nerf the Galor in your own game and make the Cardassian Unionists weak, feel free to do that. It would require you to buff the other ships alot throwing out early gameplay balance. We tried several other ways, including having the Galor at other cruiser Hull/Shield levels. This is what worked best for us, to make them into a tanky faction. And you would be surprised how much speed matters in a game.
While it probably isn't perfect, it works fine. We will probably put more effort into balance in Axanar from the start.
in terms of testing we pit fleets of various make ups against federation as a basepoint with both level 4 capitals and level 10 capitals and then we apply each test by variables set as engagement range, warp in, warp out, land on top land apart, engage long, engage medium, engage short, Pre titan, Pre hero, With Titan, With Hero, With Titan and Hero.
So both cardy and domi were tested in this manor, the galor is an extreme case of cruiser power and im always open to player input into the balance however based on beta and dev tests we didnt find the cardassian or dominion forces at max slots player v player were anyway imbalanced to a degree that a pre CTA race could not win, point and note my fellow balance lead Draconis decimated a fully equipped cardassian fleet with titan with a klingon fleet of equal size which had a hefty amount of the Kvek Class.
Galor(fully upgraded): 13580 effective hp / 199 dps
Kvek(fully upgraded): 8526 effective hp / 203 dps
I fail to understand why the galor can sustain 60% more punishment than the kvek while having almost the same damage capability. The only real advantage the kvek has over the galor is speedwise which doesnt justify significantly less effective hp
No. Even if the shields are down the shield mitigation is active
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thanks for mentioning those bugs, i've learned enough that i can at least fix the ship related ones myself.
i've been doing my own fairly extensive ship rebalanced lately, biggest change are price ranges for various types of ships, frigates in the 150 to 400 cred range, cruisers in the 400 to 650 cred range, and capital ships in the 1000 to 1700 cred range. cause those are prices that actually match performance.
another major thing i did was open up the Gameplay.constants file, and set all the damage type and armor types to 1:1, so there aren't any bonus damage for having anti medium guns shooting at medium armored targets, etc. except for antimodual, i didn't take away its structure bonus. i suggest you devs do the same, its a stupid and unnecessary extra dynamic on top of all the other damage and armor values at best, and a random exploit at worst. damage should be damage, and armor should be armor. I eventually figured out that this is why half my 1v1 tests results made NO goddamn sense, i especially had trouble with the intrepid, till i fixed this.
im done with the FED and KDF so far, the KDF needed a LOT of work. had found that brel sound bug and fixed it. the poor raptor basically had no DPS at all with just cannons, a miranda wouldn't even lose shields fighting one. the only kdf capital ships that rate DPS wise are the vorcha and negvar, those 2 support ships did next to nothing. i made the green kdf torp the equivalent of a quantum, and redistributed what ships got red or green. higher end kdf cruisers and most capital ships had like 1 shot per cycle, when they fought it looked really dull. made them fire more volleys, and rebalanced damage accordingly
from weakest/cheapest to strongest/priciest, ordered cruiser like so- constellation, excelsior, defiant, intrepid, akira. in no version of star trek was the defiant superior to the likes of the akira, it was strong for its size, but its extremely small. also standardized beam array shot duration and bank cycling across the board, made the rest of the tweaking easier. gave the new orleans tricobalt weapon effects cause that made more sense, what a wasted ship on the dull anti modual role. the nebula is garbage, in all my 1v1, i dont think ive detected that anti shield beam doing anything at all, and it doesn't have aft torps like the phoenix does. the attack pattern beta on the promethius is HELLISHLY POWERFUL. at high levels, it can kill other capital ships before they lose shields! even at level 1 it can take out more then 1000 hull. the galaxy's torp spread is a sad joke now, and the sovereign's raw number of phaser hardpoints make it a DPS rock star no mater how much you might try to nerf it.
on to the romulans next, and then cardies after. don't know if i'll touch the borg, pretty much pretended they don't exist so far. at least 1 thing i'll look at is the borg corvette and frigate costing nearly the same, but having VASTLY different performance. wtf?
The Defiant is perfect how it is. Its suppose to be extremely powerful that one of the reasons it was designed for. In CTA it not better then the Akira, they are equal. The defiant isn't good for fleet combat its for hit and run deep behind enemy lines where as the Akira is for fleet combat since it is bigger and as more shield and hull points and with its special chain torp, cant remember the name.
Lots of feedback here guys and constructive criticism is always appreciated, understandably I wont agree with everyone's view on how ships should perform or whether or not we do balance the right way that being said i will be on contact with a few people personally :)
i really wished the borg had a bit more health then again if i versed them on hard. well i'm screwed but as you say the borg are one step closer to perfection added that i wish those cubes were faster but not star phased faster i mean moving from one side of the system to another oh well you guys know best on what to do with the patches
Is there any possibility of a balance pass or maybe cost reduction to the scarab class frigate for the dominion? At the moment the ship feels extremely sub par even compared to the odeki (spelling) class cardassian frigate which both outperforms it on damage, and costs less resources.
While I do like the feel of the dominion, I find that having the mantis as a capital instead of a Heavy cruiser option really locks you into a weird mid-game where you have to pump either cardassion or Breen tech, then go back for dominion weaponry upgrades after you pump out the capitals.
It's almost like you have to sacrifice heavily on your early game if you want to rush up to dominion tech (having a really bad frigate) and then only barely stabilize mid-game if you go breen.
What is the current status?
If there's a new version?
Waiting longingly out.
Is this Mod dead?
Will there be any new content / update?