AMC Damage Rework (Fix shield and hull problem)

[DracoNB]

AMCs do too much damage.

The removal of in-combat shield regen, and the reduction in missile damage was good, now AMCs need to be reduced as well, to make combat interesting and not victory to whoever fired first.

Shields do not last long, and hardened hull might as well be painted paper with the current dps that AMCs can produce.



A 250 block array will kill hardened hull in a single shot, or 9.95 Hardened Hulls PER SECOND. With 3,980.10 dps per array, you can chew through shields as well. 20 250 block arrays will take out 1 million shields in 12.5 seconds....

edit: Adding some actual shield block numbers:

It takes 50,000 shields to get 1,094,943.70 capacity, and it takes under 14 seconds for 5,000 AMCs in arrays of 250 (20 arrays) to take those out. Once those shields are down, those 5,000 AMCs will destroy 199 Hardened Hull blocks PER SECOND.

If we lowered their damage by 90%, it would take 137 seconds (just over 2 minutes... hardly forever) to take out those same shields, and they would only be able to kill 20 blocks every second (hulls need their armour value raised as well).

A 64 block array will kill hardened hull in two shots, everything else in one (2.24 HH per second, 4.48 other).

Shields die too fast as well, with their scaling AMCs rise faster in DPS than the shield capacity does, so for larger ships their shields will only last seconds against AMCs, and their layers of hardened hull might as well not exist.

I think a reduction making AMCs do 1/10 their current damage would work well as a starting point.

Shields would get a large effective boost to their capacity (thus large capitals would last more than a few seconds when fighting another capital), and Hulls won't die as easily, it would take a 250 block array 10 shots to kill hardened hull, instead of one shot.

The other option would be to heavily reduce the recharge rate of AMCs, so powerful shots fire slower than weak ones. This would greatly reduce the DPS of large arrays and would require more rebalancing as damage per block would have to go up as blocks were linekd instead of down in the current system.

 

[Alpha_Squad]

I second your idea.

 

[Skeeve]

I know where you\'re coming from on this and I agree that AMCs are too powerful for what their role is in weaponary. But I don\'t think reducing their damage by 90% is completely the right answer. I would suggest they just make the curse of deminishing returns steeper. Maybe a combination of your idea and the steeper curve thing would be a good answer.

As for the slower shots, they already have that (link below on AMC arrays) but again I think the curve just needs to be steeper but they\'re still working on balancing and they know the game is completely unbalanced.

http://www.starmadewiki.com/wiki/Antimatter_Cannon

 

[Archer6621]

Did you even try making a huge AMC array? If you did, you would know that they absolutely don\'t become slower in large numbers, but rather become insanely fast.

The OP is talking about inverting this curve, and I fully agree with that. Make large cannons fire slowly, so the smaller arrays have some sort of purpose as well (anti-fighter turrets on capitals).

 

[DracoNB]

Currently DPS (per block) lowers as you add more cannons, but the fire rate goes UP. So damage per block is lower, but speed is faster. I\'d say that should be swapped, so 2 blocks do say, 40 damage / block (80 total) vs 2 separate (35 each, 70 total), but fire slower.

For that change though, the default fire speed should be much faster and default damage would also need to go down still as well. Power usage would also have to change as right now its 10 power per block per shot... it would have to be something like damage * blocks instead... we don\'t want small dps fast firing weapons using more power over time than weapons that do massive damage but fire slow.

 

[DracoNB]

Yep, inverted would be better in the long run, but would be a lot of changes (power usage too, as I just wrote about).

In the short term, dropping the base damage down would help a lot with the current balance until they can be reworked, or a second type of cannon added (that is slow but big damage).

 

[Skeeve]

Yep, I just read it wrong. Thanks for correcting me.

 

[Skeeve]

Sounds pretty good! :D

 

[Digi]

I agree, single blocks should start with high rate of fire, very low damage and same projectile speed, then as you go bigger the rate of fire should decrease and damage increase.

About projectile speed... I think the bigger ones should also be slower.

 

[TractGildart]

It\'s a laser, I think the speed of the shot itself is just fine, if anything that should just be constant.

I like the diminishing returns on cannons, and what everyone is saying about making larger cannons fire more slowly makes perfect sense, and is what I have been saying to my friends as well.

I don\'t know about slashing cannon damage by 90%. That would make fighter battles very, very long. I mean, you can only put so many cannons on a fighter, so even the 100 dmg/shot that I aim for right now on my designs would become a huge amount of cannons. A 20% reduction would be interesting for sure, and would be a little more user-friendly in terms of not suddenly having guns become useless. It is nice right now not having ships be invincible.

 

[Hochmeister]

While I agree that AMC\'s need to be changed, slashing their damage by 90% is not the solution as it will make combat far too tedious. An important factor that I haven\'t seen mentioned in this discussion is that no matter how high the damage, an AMC can destroy only one block per shot. While I like the idea of having larger AMC\'s fire slower, if implemented it would mean that larger AMC\'s would be less efficient against unshielded hulls. Perhaps Schema could add a penetration effect to AMC\'s; if the shot\'s damage exceeds the hull strength the shot will continue after destroying the block with reduced damage equal to the health of the hull. This combined with an inversion of the rate of fire trend would make for a good balance. Large guns would be ideal for penetrating armor, but harder to land hits with (especiall on small ships) due to the low rate of fire. Furthermore, there would be a substantial benefit to destroying large cannons on enemy ships as it would cripple your opponant\'s ability to penetrate your armor and destroy vital systems.

 

[DracoNB]

90% sounds like a lot, but as I pointed out, its not really that big of a decrease overall because they are so overpowered right now.



Also there shouldn\'t be any extra hull destroying power from AMCs, destroying hull should be what missiles are good at.



Right now in big arrays, you can take out huge amounts of shields in seconds (note my OP for details for even small arrays, but here is some additional info)



It takes 50,000 shields to get 1,094,943.70 capacity, and it takes under 14 seconds for 5,000 AMCs in arrays of 250 (20 arrays) to take those out. Once those shields are down, those 5,000 AMCs will destroy 199 Hardened Hull blocks PER SECOND. You can\'t tell me that isn\'t broken.

If we lowered their damage by 90%, it would take 137 seconds (just over 2 minutes... hardly forever) to take out those same shields, and they would only be able to kill 20 blocks every second (hulls need their armour value raised as well). This means the fight went from 14 seconds, to a few minutes. Ships would have a chance to actually fight instead of it being decided before any kind of strategy is even used. It would also even out the playing field, because right now you need at least 20x defense vs offense, and many people just choose to go for even more offense since there is no point in the defensive game.

 

[Terramort]

AMCs are actually causing two large problems at the moment - besides their way too powerful damage, they also lag the servers, as the two best methods of building them cause insane lag (either very large, very many guns, or single-block arrays that fire stupid amounts of AMCs because there are so many)

The obvious solution isn\'t a straight reduction in damage - this will only promote players to build even bigger (and thus, FASTER and MORE lagging) turret arrays to continue single-shotting Hardened Hull blocks. Instead, invert the firing rate curve when adding additional AMCs to a turret arrays. This then not only fixes the problem of too much damage, but also greatly reduces the number of calculations needed to be done per second in large battles by a VERY significant amount (also leaving room for other suggestions I\'ve seen, such as adding selectable colors for AMC shots, and the main counter was \"it\'ll cause too much lag because AMCs fire too fast\")

Then make it so AMC arrays with multiple, equal outpute (i.e. a 2x2 turret barrel vs. a 1x1 turret barrel) will cause the AMC to have 1/2 fire rate, 2x damage, and increase damage radius for each AMC output added. Then give shields some damage abosorption and armor/missiles a buff, and all of a sudden the AMC is fair weapon that has situational uses, augmenting missiles/fighters, not a mini-gun-nuke-launcher-lag-causer-server-killer-of-DOOM that they currently are.

 

[WarmasterRaptor]

I agree, some weapon balancing wouldn\'t be bad at all in Starmade. Not necessarly new ones, as we can work them by combinations to optain/mimic a weapon time.

 

[DracoNB]

Yep I agree, severly reducing their damage output is more of a stop gap for the issue since shields have already been reduced so much, plus it would make hull worthwhile without having to massivly increase its HP and armor (armour).



More = better for many things should change, there need to be some balances against things like missiles which when in huge numbers are crazy, and in small numbers worthless. Each should have a role.

 

[Jolly Roger]

So if AMCs are nerfed, what keeps me from building a bigger one with the same damage? or better yet separating all of the blocks to make a more powerful one? someone will build a bigger ship, and you will have the same dilema.

Because of diminishing returns, 400 separate antimatter canons is much more powerful than 400 networked ones in dps. How stupid would it look to have a ship with 400 separate antimatter canons? Is that what you want people to build instead? Something that fires and looks stupid so that hulls and shields are more effective when canons that look cool when fired?

How is a mob supposed to kill you?

Weak as turrets are with such little power and little accuracy already, how can they be used for anything if you nerf antimatter canons?

The lag issue is a constant with everything right now from slamming into planets to moving fast. I see this being fixed in the future anyway, so I wouldn\'t take that into account for how weapons should work.

Why not just up the shields a bit? I don\'t think this was as much of an issue before the shield nerf.

 

[Jolly Roger]

For people who say antimatter canons are too strong, I made my ship a mob and fought it with the same ship. I just did it, took me 5 minutes to kill it. My ship has 48 AMC canons doing 400 damage each. Think about how long this would take if AMCs were nerfed. Mind you your ships will still be messed up and you will still have to fix it. It would just take forever to kill one ship.



Seriously just up the shields!!! If your ship almost looks like this nobody is going to want to repair it anyway! just load a new one!! Who cares if it gets destroyed after shileds are down!

This is what I had to do to my ship to hit the core:

 

[Jolly Roger]

Here is a before picture. If AMCs are nerfed, what you are saying is, you want to repair your ship. It may not be damaged ot the point of the above picture, but if shields are down, what are you preventing with hull? Can anyone kill anyone anymore? As far as I\'m concerned, if shields are down and your ship starts taking reasonable damage, nobody is going to want to repair it. The survivability is a non issues because it takes forever to kill something like this already with the AMCs we have.

 

[DracoNB]

So if AMCs are nerfed, what keeps me from building a bigger one with the same damage? or better yet separating all of the blocks to make a more powerful one? someone will build a bigger ship, and you will have the same dilema.


If shields are made stronger, whats keeping you from building bigger / more to compensate?




Because of diminishing returns, 400 separate antimatter canons is much more powerful than 400 networked ones in dps. How stupid would it look to have a ship with 400 separate antimatter canons? Is that what you want people to build instead? Something that fires and looks stupid so that hulls and shields are more effective when canons that look cool when fired?


Same reason people don\'t do it now, because its worthless on anything other than tiny crafts. This would make people want to build larger cannons if they wanted to single shot blocks, which would result in less damage to shields, and thus shields would be stronger, or hulls would be more effective... win both ways.


How is a mob supposed to kill you?


They don\'t now anyway, but buffing shields would only make players much more powerful than them, since they have less than 10 shield blocks in their ships as is. Mobs need better ships period.




Weak as turrets are with such little power and little accuracy already, how can they be used for anything if you nerf antimatter canons?


They will still be as effective as they are before since non-turrets will be doing less damage per shot as well.


The lag issue is a constant with everything right now from slamming into planets to moving fast. I see this being fixed in the future anyway, so I wouldn\'t take that into account for how weapons should work.

Why not just up the shields a bit? I don\'t think this was as much of an issue before the shield nerf.


You want shields to be stronger instead of incoming damage lessened why? That will make players even stronger against mobs since they have little shielding as is and rely on hull for protection.

Why use hull at all on your ships if you want shields to be the only protection against damage? Just spam shields as your hull to up your capacity.

 

[Jolly Roger]

My point is, if the hull can take a lot of damage, you will be running around doing ridiculous repairs to hull, or it will take forever for anyone to die.

The benefit of having more shields is that it can repair itself all the way. If you are in a prolonged fight to the death, your hulls are going to take significant damage either way, in which case only survivability matters because nobody is going to repair that. I think survivability is plenty right now with the power of the AMCs currently.

Like i\'ve been saying, up the shields!!