#Big Balance feedback part 1

24 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

jade notch
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Howdy!

As a game designer myself, I understand that balancing is one of the most difficult things to do in game development. But the right balance is often more important than graphics or cool features.

But first, I want to express my great admiration for the balance of weapons and armor. The developers managed to create a system in which it is practically impossible to create an invulnerable ship that could take out everyone and everything without getting damaged. It is very good! Congratulations!

There are several critical points that I drew attention to. They ruin the entire gameplay:

First, stations are very vulnerable. The first quests to save the stations become just a fairy tale. All you have to do is do nothing. It is enough to wait until the pirates blow up the station and all the resources are yours! If until this moment the economy of the game seemed balanced to me and it made sense to farm resources, then right after the first station I realized where my eldorado was! I just simply got a million money at the 5th level of reputation. After that, any farm became meaningless.

Secondly, the railgun is a damned unbalanced thing. Before I started building ships with these weapons, when moving to a new level of reputation, I faced new opponents and I had to change my ship to fit the new realities. It was exciting and cool! But as soon as I built a railgun with a range greater than that of all possible opponents, then I became immortal. Now my whole tactic is to stay at a safe distance from the opponents and shoot them without taking damage in return.

Thirdly, mining on asteroids and crafting in factories for something other than bullets and rockets again does not make sense. This is partly due to problem number one, and partly due to the extremely low price of resources such as steel and the extremely high chance of such resources dropping into gold wire and its high price.

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I always tell my colleagues: "Criticize - offer"
So here are my suggestions for each of those points:

  1. All stations must be threat level 20. These should be fortresses that are almost impossible to destroy. Defensive platforms should also be much stronger.
  2. You need to limit the maximum range of the railgun. It should not hit further than missiles.
  3. Strengthen cannon artillery. Make it more long-range and faster-firing. Now it is a useless weapon.
  4. Significantly reduce the chance of gold wire drop.
  5. Rework the system for mining ore from asteroids. Make ore more capacious in terms of resource in factories. one piece of ore should give significant potential in item crafting.
  6. Add scrap metal. 90% of steel falls in the form of scrap metal when dismantling garbage. Add the need to process scrap metal into steel through crafting at the factory.
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P.S. If you guys need any help with balancing the game ask me and I can do it for free! Message me here or via e-mail [email protected]

ivory elm
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You can do similar things with any weapon and effective utilization. The railgun is particularly suited to it of course, but mines, HE missiles and ions would work in the exact same way of kiting opponents to death. If you employ defensive manuevers you can be directly on top of opponents and simultaneously completely safe.

Unfortunately skilled players can completely trivialize the game in any fashion, not just with the railgun. A similar issue for example is the AI's inability to deal with flanking, which will similarly completely dismantle the game

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I like a lot of the rest of your points though

mental schooner
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cool feedback

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i agree with everything

pseudo frigate
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Mining is more like alternate way to get stuff, if you cleared system completely, and still need resources to upgrade, mainly this issue appears in multiplayer, because you have to gather resources for two ships instead of one

peak pumice
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I agree that it would be really nice to have more crafting steps. Like, Ore -> preproccessor -> platemaker Or "scrap" -> Preprocessor -> platemaker ... Though this should be an optional step so you could just keep going with the current version

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Though Scrap should still be able to be used to repair the ship through some sort of "emergency converter" that's super fast but really inefficient, just so that you can repair your ship after combat.

jade notch
ivory elm
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Got what too?

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If you mean the same long range weapons, by employing shielding and PD you can tank and shoot down all weapons that might have been threats. Even a ship with 300% railguns would fall decisively to such a ship

gloomy creek
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I agree with all of your points, and especially on the resources part. It feels like normal drop rates are inflated in general, and I shouldn't get so much useable material from a ship I just nuked.

round grove
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...You get basically nothing from ships. Maybe an uranium drop or a processor. It's much easier to just mine for money.

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PD and shields basically nullify railguns.

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And adding more factories means full factory ships become even more of a massive pile of scrap than they already are.

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Hypercoils are funny. If you attack enemies to farm, they feel a little too OP. If you mine, they quickly get outclassed by pretty much everything, except for their base materials or steel, or if you're mining down an already empty system.

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You get a big pile of resources from ships, especially if you core them, but most of it is rather useless steel.

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TLDR: before you do any balance feedback, play the actual farming professions first.

gloomy creek
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I don't mine any since I found out I don't need to. I just salvage what I kill, with a ship I've hardly changed from difficulty 5 to difficulty 12. I end up with more cargo than I can carry and end up having to slap a dozen storages on my ship as well as my freighter being filled up. Got like 3 mil or so in credits with probably another 600k in mats sitting around from just the last couple days

round grove
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This is me except i mined three systems

gloomy creek
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Generally just too easy to get rich quick, and most if the combat is pretty trivial

round grove
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But, no, resources just aren't hard to get.