Most ships with any effective pattern of guns are now ruined

[Fifthdread]

While I am sure there are people sad that their OP designs were nerfed, these design decisions need to be made for overall balance. We are arguing over AMC balance when we don\'t even know what the final game is going to look like. What if there are three different canon like weapons? What about balance then? Whatever it is now it could completely change in the future anyway. By making these changes, there is a ton of learning done and we can further improve upon balance in the future. Shotgun builds were OP and in my opinion were not intended to be used in that way. Finally AMCs are behaving in line with how I imagine them to operate. While shotgun builds were cool, they should come at a great cost. They had too much hull clearing capability before. Before the patch, you really didn\'t have to think about power as a factor. It was just \"pew pew pew\" and no cons. Now you have to weigh pros and cons of your decision to build your weapons a certain way. I agree that it makes the question related to what you intend the weapon to do. Clearing shields is definitely a good use for AMCs. That being said, hull clearing is definitely a chore as missiles travel extremely slow and can be outrun or outmaneuvered easily. The next step could be to increase missile speed as well as balance missiles to make them relevant hull clearing weapons.

 

[AHideousBeast]

Oh god, no, i\'m thankful for the nerf, the shot gun design was utterly disgusting.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

But to the people saying add more regen I say to you that I have a ship that has 540 mil power with 9.2 mil regen. My ships guns used to be able to fire constantly and now cost 120 mil per shot. As a side thought shields are now way to op. For instance if you made a ship with 20 mil shields, enough thrust to move, enough power to move and recharge shields, and a number of small self sufficient turrets. How would you kill it? As far as I can see fighters cant handle the turrets and cruisers and capitols can\'t break the shields (because of power problems or lack of damaging amc\'s)

 

[MrFURB]

As I posted earlier, the changes where a wholesale nerf to offense and buff to defense to where a good weapon system and a good shield system are now more in line with each other as far as usefulness goes and people can design a ship to be \'tanky\' without feeling bad about not having absolute maximum DPS.

Schema did the weapons nerfing in a very creative way, really. Instead of doing a boring flat damage nerf across the board he hit the power requirements of more smaller arrays and the DPS/block breaking ability of fewer larger arrays.

Yes, I agree that you can\'t have 100-200 AMC arrays on a ship now, and I agree that it could be frustrating for people to have to redesign their ships but this is alpha and things will always be changing for the better.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

I agree that amc\'s required a nerf. But wat I don\'t agree with is nerfing them to the ground. Like the example I brought up in my previous post. What could kill that ship? In its current state fights will be far to prolonged if not infinite (neither party would be able to break the shields on their opponent). Using my previous example lets say that the ship has 250000 shield recharge/sec. You would need immense power regen and base power to even come close to breaking the recharge rate let alone the 20 mil shields behind it. Now I do not know for certain the recharge with 20 mil shields, it may be higher or lower.

In essence my point is that shields now horribly outweigh amc\'s or any weapons for that matter.

Also it is more than frustrating for people who have made large and now useless ships. And refits are out of the question for a lot of large ships. I do not blame schema for this because as you state this is in alpha. I just want to point out that it is more aggravating than can be put in words and will likely drive many people away from this game. I myself find it hard to be motivated to build anymore after this as this was a rude awakening to how much can change in a games alpha state. What is the point of building impressive ships if they can be made useless overnight. This is not the games nor schema\'s fault. It is just that it was such an abrupt and warningless change. I woke up today to find my ships useless. Sorry about the semi off-topic rant I am just a bit upset right now.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

They are a mix of range and penetration(shotgun). But now they are utterly useless. As I have stated they now consume way to much power to be able viably alter my ships power to sustain fire and if I connected some of them to reduce power consumption they would never pierce good shields. As I have stated this is to heavy of a nerf. You say that this gives more thought to weapons building when in reality it makes it even more thoughtless (as weapons are now seemingly useless against decent shielding). Why put thought into weapons that will never be able to kill your target?

 

[fstratzero]

Use these
http://www.starmadewiki.com/wiki/Powerdrain_Beam

Add more powerblocks and tanks



\'nuff said.

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

As I have previosly stated that my ship now consumes an estimated 120 mil power per shot. It currently has 540 mil power with 9.2 mil regen. Not stated above is my guns fire a few time per second. Even if I double both those power numbers my ship would only sustain fire for about 10 second (if that). Also power drain beams are utterly useless because as far as I know their shields must be down and in order for the beam to take full effect it must hit power. Also you cannot fire both amc\'s and drain beams simultanously. My problem with this nerf is that is went to far. As I have now stated multiple times shields are now op. There is no reason to even put guns on your ship currently because if you have enough shields you are in essence invincible. For instance my ship had 1.8 mil dps. This would break 20 mil shield quite quickly. But the fact that it can only fire for 2 or 3 seconds means that it now cannot. Even if you double the power (which would take up much space which my ship has none of) my ship would still not break the shields. There inlies my point.

 

[MrFURB]

I think you\'re misunderstanding the scaling potential of weapons in comparison to shields. The mass you have to put into shielding in order for it to be equally powerful as weapons rises exponentially as either systems size grows. If ship \'A\' has 1,000 shields blocks and just enough power to run them and ship \'B\' has 1,000 blocks split between AMC and power, ship B\'s damage output will vastly outnumber the defense of ship A.

You must also consider that shields scale as a whole and not in groups. In order to go from 250,000 to 250,001 regen you would need to place almost a hundred (estimated) shield blocks. Adding a single AMC to any group adds much more DPS.

Most people who complain about the updates and changes are angry that their designs aren\'t balanced anymore, and not necessarily angry that the changes are \'ruining the game\' as it\'s been said for just about every single update that somehow changes the way people\'s ships operate (and probably every update in the future as well).

I\'ve had to completely redo two of my cap ship\'s guts as well as one of my sub-capitals because of this update, but I\'m not complaining because I know what the changes are and the logic behind them and I don\'t want to pause the game\'s developement just so I can enjoy my designs for a bit longer. That will happen until the game releases.

 

[MrFURB]

Have you read the specific changes to the AMC? Do you know why they are taking up so much power? It\'s because you have far too many groups of them for your power system to handle. Try changing your 640 200 block AMCs to 64 2,000 block AMCs. Finding a good balance between quantity and size is paramount to a sucessful AMC system.

 

[Zemer]

1. I know how you feel about the game being in alpha and ships losing their effeciveness almost overnight, I understand you can sometimes spend weeks building your ship. It\'s hard to see something you worked so hard on to just be gone like that. When old technologies become obsolete new ones will take their place and who knows your next ship may be better than the first and everytime you rebuild you become better at building ships. And it doesn\'t mean you can\'t keep your old design as a display piece.

2. I can\'t even think of a ship as large (and possibly ugly) as the one you described. I migh be wrong but I believe a ship that impressive might also lag servers horribly and thus could be banded from servers