Rebalance Everything!

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Hello!
I've been doing some research (I asked 1 question. Lol), and thinking about rebalancing pretty much the entire game, in my head. Lol

The main focus of this idea is that, I believe (others may not), that no ship should be able to have high shield strength, high hull strength, high damage output, and high manoeuvrability, all at once. Which some ships can.

This idea is currently incomplete, and I'm mostly just jotting things down, so things may not make sense, or contradict other parts of my suggestion.

Shield Tank Vs Hull Tank
Due to the way the game is set up, it's possible to do both, your only compromise is SCBs Vs H/MRPs. No more!

To fix this, overall shield strength is now governed by your ships mass. The heavier it gets, the worse your shields perform, in a similar way to how thrusters work with mass.
Shield boosters and SCBs are now much lighter, but use more power.
Obviously, some ships base shield HP will need adjusting to keep them viable.

Armour remains the same, mostly. Maybe a slight mass increase.

Tank Vs Heavy Hitter
It's also possible to have extremely high damage output, and an extremely high tanking ability. No more! Again!

Weapons all now use more power, and weigh more, especially the top end weapons, like Railguns, PAs, and Torpedoes.

Armour tanks suffer with module malfunctions due to exposed hardpoints, but greatly reduced power usage due to lack of shields. So they can take the bigger guns, and hull tank... But...

Tanking Vs Speed/Agility
Thrusters are now more greatly effected by more. A hull tank will be much slower than a shield tank.
Boosting is changed slightly, so it does a while longer to reach your top speed, if you're too heavy.

So in theory, what does that mean?

A pure Shield Tank will now need to sacrifice as much hull(or mass) as possible to give them the most powerful shields, and as a side effect, make them faster. Shields will use significantly more power though, meaning more heat, and less available for weapons and other bits. It will be slowed down by weapon mass though.

A pure Hull Tank will remain almost 'as is', with the exception that they'll be much slower. Especially if it installs the heaviest weapons.

So, in theory, you need to pick what matters, weapons, shields, hull or speed/agility, then choose what less important, and sacrifice those.

If any of that makes sense... Lol

Still working on it for now.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[coca_fr]

Currently shield class strength is independant of hull mass. Each ship has a shield base value for each shield class.

For example a Prismatic Shield Class 7 will have 905 MJ strength on a 900T hull mass Federal Corvette and 700MJ strength on a 400T hull mass Anaconda.

All ships other than combat ships have very low shield strength with good shield class. But all multi-role and combat ship have good shield with same shield class.

Well for now shield class is not correlated to hull mass at all ! You can equiped a very low shield class that is supposed to fit for very lower hull mass than your ship and it'll still protect you well ! (For example a Class 4 Prismatic shield on a Anaconda will give you 432MJ shield strength).

Shield strength was arbitrary chosen by FDev for each ships : A multi-role or combat ship have better shield than a hauler for example.

If shield was based on hull mass and shield class all ship would be completly rearranged. For example a Type-9 could have the shield of an Imperial Cutter.

To solve that situation, a shield slot could be added for each ship. This way all ships could be given the correct maximum shield class to reflected their current maximum shield strenght based on their stock mass.
Then your solution could be implemented so that the more mass you have the less shield strength you have.

Well people will simply go for the best shield with no hull tanking : Better shield, better speed/agility (because of less mass)

To make hull tanking usefullness in your scenario, slow tank would need high turret class weapons to defend themselves and they are not available because turrets were too effective !

Some ships have already very low pitch, yaw and roll that you cannot make them even slower.

In fact i think only small to medium ship tanking is a problem because they can combine two benefit : hull tanking, speed and agility

Otherwise things are good as they are.

 

[goemon]

while i like the approach and general idea, the main rebalancing achieved here would be buffing number-crunchers and coriolis-heroes like me.

i still remember the times, when people couldn't fit a vulture for its powerrestraints and hated it ... beside the various threads where knowledge is spread a 6A shields isn't helpfull on an AspE. imho the mechanics and read-out of ED are complicated enough ("optimal mass multiplier, i'm looking at you!") for most players.

 

[Hydrino]

It seems the main thrust of the OP is that bigger ships need to be more like the naval ship analogy they are built upon and not be great at everything. I agree. The biggest ships sometimes seem to be just as maneuverable, almost as fast and have vastly superior weapons and SCBs to smaller ED ships. Combined with the cascade or heat weapons of single-shot death and most combat zones and anything above Level 1 USS seem like death traps to the ships that are smaller than the NPC RND ones.

Contrast to WWII-type naval engagement. A battleship can destroy other massive boats and land targets, but it has zero chance to outmaneuver a fast attack boat, that simply won't happen. A single torpedo had a chance to sink a battleship or carrier, really any ship. The battleship can't regenerate shields (it doesn't have them), or repair major hull damage during a combat engagement. All of that risk to bigger ships seems missing in ED at the moment. Of course, the battleship will have smaller point-defense turret weapons that can hit the fast-attack boats and those present an obstacle and challenge to attacking in a smaller ship.

Perhaps I need to experiment with torpedoes in the game, which I will admit I have not done. If a torpedo could cause severe 1-shot damage to bigger ships then the current setup might be viewed a bit more like a naval engagement.

Removing SCBs from the game or at least all but smaller ships could go some way towards a more naval engagement feel.

It could be interesting to know if FD have run millions of simulated battles with all types of variations and engineered ships to see the various distributions of outcomes and if so what the outcomes show with today's ship stats and engineer mods.

 

[coca_fr]

Yea but the 3 bigs ships are not battleship like dreadnought, capital ship are !

That's why they are still manoeuvrable.