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[Margrave]

Those battle results are incredibly surprising. Clearly Nova tactics don't work here anymore. I had no idea PSYCH damage would be so effective.

I have to agree with Kebooo I see no reason to waste resources building Dreadnoughts with the superiority and time it takes to swarm bombers/fighters and PSYCH units. The only time I could see it is invading, but even then the odds are high the defender could attack and merely wear down the attacking fleet with waves and waves of cheap fighters. At the very least higher class warships need considerably more armor for their cost.

I do not know how you all want to resolve this.

[Kebooo]

I don't think there's anything to do in this game, the balance is what we started with and what we should end with. Perhaps swarms and swarms of bombers/carriers/psychi units will be something new for a change, rather than capital ships being the premiere unit. I honestly don't see any reason whatsoever to build a dreadnought - not even for bombardment, since you could have a cruiser and a bomber in the same amount of time and cruisers actually have a wider array of attacks (close space ability).

For long term solution, capital ships either need to be cheaper, or more effective. If we added up all the resources/maintenance/turns spent building, I'm sure it's incredibly lopsided.

For example, the six dreadnoughts alone are 30 turns worth of starports. So in that same time someone could have had 30 bombers. I think there's somewhere around 50-55 turns worth of build in that stack, so someone could have almost 3 full stacks of bombers, or that. And if that stack isn't effective, why on earth wouldn't I want 3 stacks of bombers instead? Just look at the 2nd round of combat there - it's laughable the results, not one Hazat unit was lost that round. It's stunning how ineffective these capital ships are showing themselves. In my opinion, even a frigate should be able to handle at least one regular bomber or fighter on its own. A dreadnought surely should be able to handle a handful. Where is the allure of huge, technologically advanced spaceships?

[Kebooo]

Turn sent. There's more motivation knowing it wasn't a bug that was the cause of my misfortune, although still a ridiculous game balance that makes it feel like I wasted six months of strategy. Now begins the era of nothing but bomber spam.

I'm also still interested in seeing how the combat fairs if I'm on the attacking side at Criticorum.

[joulupunikki]

Those battle results are incredibly surprising. Clearly Nova tactics don't work here anymore. I had no idea PSYCH damage would be so effective.

Hmm, do psy attacks come first in space combat ? Most psy attacks are high acc and dam. Also ground units fighting from carriers can not be hit by space attacks. On the nova web site it says "In Nova, we've greatly increased the PsyDef of spaceships to stop psychic units from dominating space combat." In nova most space units have a psy def of 400. In our mod most have 40.

I have to agree with Kebooo I see no reason to waste resources building Dreadnoughts with the superiority and time it takes to swarm bombers/fighters and PSYCH units. The only time I could see it is invading, but even then the odds are high the defender could attack and merely wear down the attacking fleet with waves and waves of cheap fighters. At the very least higher class warships need considerably more armor for their cost.

It would seem that space carriers loaded with manitou irregulars would be a cost effective solution for space assaults
And for defence against such assaults, the Obun Diplomatic Vessel might be surprisingly good since in has psy def of 90 (if only it was not so expensive to build)

Also, the much dreaded Imperial Fleet might not be worth that much dread ...

I do not know how you all want to resolve this.

Once more unto the breach, dear manitou irregulars ... cry havoc and let slip the antinomist sorcerers ?

[Il Palazzo]

Test turn sent. Let us know how it goes if you're the attacker, Kebooo.


Re: balancing of this and Nova:
It's pretty obvious this mod did not go through terribly extensive testing by obsessive-compulsive players that like to take a system and make it work for them. How the previous game ended is as good an indication as any (making bombers land-attack capable landers, effectively turning them into cheap, better marauders).

However, as far as I remember the Nova game with random map, it also ended up with massive fighter spam (archangels in this case), and we also complained about how their mobility makes them vastly superior to conventional fleets.
(I'm also pretty sure that was the game where I complained about not getting a notification of my relic being active when I was attacked over Byzantium - by Kebooo, I think - in the final moments of the game).


So I think this whole system would need a thorough rethinking, and simply adopting Nova for all future games does not solve the problem either.
Changing the damage table is a given, but that also requires rebalancing of all units, and likely changing initial unit placement on the map.

[Kebooo]

I always though psy came last, so I was surprised to see it first. I believe it comes last in ground combat. If you notice in that battle, there's a close combat round first, THEN psy, then ranged space. This leads me to believe that when there are ground units in space battles, they will attack in the ground close combat phase first (the noble eliminating the psy unit first). This could be completely wrong, but at least visually that's what it appears to be.

Archangels were definitely too effective in Nova for their cost, but since they were a late game, high wetware unit, I didn't mind it as much as cheap units negating the more sexy, expensive units. I would be curious to know which consistently wins between 20 dreadnoughts, 20 archangels, and 2 carriers, 8 archangels, 10 dreadnoughts in Nova. We'd probably all like to see the latter kind of fleet win, variety is nice in EFS. It's hard to balance something like that into the game with the EFS combat system. I would love to see a more flexible combat system in the remake.

Back when I was trying to make my own unit mod based off of EFS 1.4, but with balanced combat, I was using the map editor to test a wide range of 1 vs 1, 5 vs 5, 10 vs 10, 20 vs 20, and also mixed half stack units, to try to tweak the results to something that seemed reasonable. What I was really trying to do was make frigates/destroyers dominate fighters/bombers, but fighters/bombers very effective against cruisers/dreadnoughts, while cruisers/dreadnoughts stomped on frigates/destroyers. Something similar with ground units too, and I was sticking with the direct and close combat vanilla EFS differences to help accomplish that. It was coming along pretty well, actually. I can't get the map editor to work anymore unfortunately. Nova has its balance problems - 20 DNA Assault legions beats virtually everything else, including mega tanks (I posted about that 13 years ago here http://www.kborek.cz/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=311). So Nova has the opposite problem, super units negate other units and turns it into a very basic affair toward the end. This mod has weak units being too effective, at least in space. I'm not sure how it might play out on the ground. I love the galaxy and the fluff units in this mod, but it needs some serious re-balancing work. Also I have some serious gripes about the maintenance/firebird economy gameplay too, which I'll leave for postgame observations.

I'm also somewhat skeptical of whether relics are registering while on defense in EFS as a whole, even if they show up for the attacker. I definitely want to perform some tests on this. If it turns out that's true, I would think relics need a big nerf. I don't know how they balance into this mod, but in Nova they're stupidly overpowered, especially given the generally higher magnitude of values Nova has.

[Il Palazzo]

I always though psy came last, so I was surprised to see it first. I believe it comes last in ground combat. If you notice in that battle, there's a close combat round first, THEN psy, then ranged space. This leads me to believe that when there are ground units in space battles, they will attack in the ground close combat phase first (the noble eliminating the psy unit first). This could be completely wrong, but at least visually that's what it appears to be.

Yeah, that's correct. I'm pretty sure I mentioned it somewhere in the notes I gave for changes to the unit.dat file. That's one of the reasons for not giving e.g. landers any ground attack capabilities - since they'll start shooting each other and any land units on carriers during ground phases.

[Gollor]

Here is my proposition:
1 - Fighters and bombers should remain as they are, with maybe only a bit tweaked damage output of the last one. They should have only 2 movepoints, though.
2 - All ships should have psydef of ~200.
3 - The armor of escort ships should be increased in 2 times (from 60 to 120 for example).
4 - The armor of capital ships should be increased in 2.5 times (from 90 to 225).
5 - Precision of all space combat strikes should be increased by 3 points.
6 - All war ships should have 1 movepoint.
7 - edit: The armor of transport ships should be increased by 1.5 times. They should have the same amount of movepoints as now.

There is my plan. This way it will be much harder to destroy spaceships, and instead of instant losing all ships you will have to draw them back and then repair them on spaceports. Space bombarding will remain almost untouched since with increased precision it will be much easier to hit land targets, what will somewhat negate the reduced amount of movepoints.
This movepoints reduction will not allow to use a big amount of fighters and bombers, and it will be harder to finish enemy ships.

[Margrave]

Gollor makes a good point, perhaps the easiest way to devalue space combat from being so critical to this game is to limit the amount of damage that any one space fleet can do.

Consider that an invading fleet with 18 warships with perhaps a carrier or  2 and 2 bulk transports would probably survive against a planetary defender fleet with a full stack of warships but only two move points. Giving the invader at least enough time to funnel in some ground troops and perhaps replacement warships.

Is this preferable by any defender? No, but if we want this game to be about the vastly more intricate ground combat then it is an easy way to enable that. I also always took Fading Suns combat to be about Houses attacking and defending everywhere, raiding becomes a possibility and instead of maybe fighting one two or three planets for the entire game all worlds get their share.

I'm not sure how much armor should be increased on ships, only rigorous testing would help there, but I like the idea of space combat being a multiple turn affair. Perhaps to give the defender a better chance we could increase the accuracy/damage of PTS ground units.

I've always wanted some kind of "dropship" unit that could be loaded onto haulers but jump incapable. It might only have a few transport slots and move points, but it would function like a marauder for other units.

[Il Palazzo]

The way I see it, giving all spaceships 1 mp and fighters 2 mp will only accentuate the mobility of fighter-type units. Their capability to be shipped to a new place and conduct an attack is unchanged, and their 2 mp means it's the only type of spaceship a player may accumulate on the surface of a defended planet that can raise from the surface and attack the invading fleet in the same turn, hence it will only serve to make players more reliant on building those.

@Margrave, I'm not sure if the game would even allow a transport-capable unit to be loaded onto other transports.

[Margrave]

@Margrave, I'm not sure if the game would even allow a transport-capable unit to be loaded onto other transports.

It doesn't which makes it more of a pipe dream.

Not necessarily 1 MP but 2 for most combat ships perhaps 3 for more powerful ships to  encourage the investment for higher tier units. Transports would keep the same move points so ascending/descending doesn't become even more or a chore.

But regardless reducing the move points across all warships would give invaders a chance to maintain a presence in orbit for troop transports and give a combat defender the opportunity to replace losses and not gamble his entire fleet on one jump.

[Il Palazzo]

Reducing mp to 2 would not affect the last battle, though. I never needed the third point.

[Gollor]

Reducing mp to 2 would not affect the last battle, though. I never needed the third point.

It will have a bigger sense combined with increased hp.
What I don't like in my concept that it will give much bigger power to allied players. If in 1vs1 combat you can hardly destroy the enemy ships, the invasion of 3 players can easily do it.

[Margrave]

The psy defense of space ships is something around 40, just reducing MP wouldn't solve the issues I think. A combination of balancing resource costs, build time, tech requirements, armor of spacecraft and of course psy defense value might help mitigate some of it.

Ultimately I just want to see a game where war isn't decided in orbit but on the ground where it seems like the game creators intended. Reducing the capacity for both invaders and defenders to clean the skies of enemy ships gives players more opportunity for ground combat.

It also might make the endgame rush less about controlling Byzantiums orbit with as many relics as possible with deadnoughts and more about fighting off rivals in the crowded streets.

Of course the nature of the game mechanics makes this difficult to correct. The attacker is given such an incredible advantage but how do you balance that in a PBEM game?

[joulupunikki]

I always though psy came last, so I was surprised to see it first. I believe it comes last in ground combat. If you notice in that battle, there's a close combat round first, THEN psy, then ranged space. This leads me to believe that when there are ground units in space battles, they will attack in the ground close combat phase first (the noble eliminating the psy unit first). This could be completely wrong, but at least visually that's what it appears to be.

I think the difference between space and ground is that in ground there are no space attacks and in space maybe all attacks are possible. And they always go in the order of water, indirect, air, direct, close, psych, RS, DS, CS ...

Archangels were definitely too effective in Nova for their cost, but since they were a late game, high wetware unit, I didn't mind it as much as cheap units negating the more sexy, expensive units. I would be curious to know which consistently wins between 20 dreadnoughts, 20 archangels, and 2 carriers, 8 archangels, 10 dreadnoughts in Nova. We'd probably all like to see the latter kind of fleet win, variety is nice in EFS. It's hard to balance something like that into the game with the EFS combat system. I would love to see a more flexible combat system in the remake.

I was not aware that psy comes before space attacks in space so I programmed Phoenix-remake space attack order to be RS, DS, CS, psych ... but this ordering could easily be moved to a INI-file so modders can do what they want.

Back when I was trying to make my own unit mod based off of EFS 1.4, but with balanced combat, I was using the map editor to test a wide range of 1 vs 1, 5 vs 5, 10 vs 10, 20 vs 20, and also mixed half stack units, to try to tweak the results to something that seemed reasonable. What I was really trying to do was make frigates/destroyers dominate fighters/bombers, but fighters/bombers very effective against cruisers/dreadnoughts, while cruisers/dreadnoughts stomped on frigates/destroyers. Something similar with ground units too, and I was sticking with the direct and close combat vanilla EFS differences to help accomplish that. It was coming along pretty well, actually. I can't get the map editor to work anymore unfortunately.

For the AI to cope with arbitrary unit stats, some sort of statistical testing rig for determining the relative power of units has been planned ... I reckon that sort of thing could be useful for modders to test the balance of their mods (semi)automatically.

Also I have some serious gripes about the maintenance/firebird economy gameplay too, which I'll leave for postgame observations.

I was thinking for the remake the in game pay rate settings would optionally affect only the positive unit costs ... this way the effect of income generating units would be static and players could tune their pay rate more freely. Maybe additional INI-file set fixed pay rate for income generating units so that gross income effect could be easily adjusted.

I'm also somewhat skeptical of whether relics are registering while on defense in EFS as a whole, even if they show up for the attacker. I definitely want to perform some tests on this. If it turns out that's true, I would think relics need a big nerf. I don't know how they balance into this mod, but in Nova they're stupidly overpowered, especially given the generally higher magnitude of values Nova has.

The combat relics are much more of a force multiplier than the other relics ... if you double the production of a single city that does not make for a dangerous city that can smash other cities around the galaxy, but if you increase a critical combat value of all units in a stack by 50%/+8 ... maybe 25%/+4 would be better ... in the remake the other option might be to have multiple instances of each relic, like "The left eye of the prophet", "The right eye of the prophet" ...

(Shameless plug) The Phoenix graphics have gone forward recently (not by myself but by an obviously capable new contributor): static ocean shores, rivers and soft tile edges are implemented. Only gradient fonts and a number of dynamic effects are now missing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)