Stealth

[Spartanius]

So is there no skill to counter stealth orbitals? With level 9 stealth orbitals and it has say, 5 at the planet and an enemy fleet of 999 monitors attacks won't they most likely or definitely fail to decloak the orbitals and if they fail they only have on try right? So what happens? Does the battle continue until the planet's health is depleted or the invading fleet is destroyed?

[Tsagoth]

The Cloaking skill is the counter to Stealth. In your example, if you have no Cloaking skill, it is very unlikely (pretty much zero) that your 999 monitors would survive. The planet would be ruined, but you would be unable to actually take it over unless you destroyed the orbitals.

[Leedot]

The other option is that a pk's planet buster skill can target any planet in the same solar system. This means that the pk can destroy the planet while remaining outside of the defensive orbitals effective range.

[Spartanius]

The Cloaking skill is the counter to Stealth. In your example, if you have no Cloaking skill, it is very unlikely (pretty much zero) that your 999 monitors would survive. The planet would be ruined, but you would be unable to actually take it over unless you destroyed the orbitals.
This doesn't make any sense with the skills unless the descriptions are way off. Cloaking, a rank 5 skill, says "Ships/Fleets are invisble to other players/AI. Togglable(sp?) active skill. Players cannot attack while cloaked and move at -50% speed. Speed penalty reduced at -10% per rank" This says nothing about detecting cloaked ships. The only other skill that talks about cloaking is the skill "stealth orbitals" which also just says "High energy hide-and-seek. +10% increase in orbitals avoiding detection"

So would sending in more ships to the battle(not the defender's) give more chances to detect cloaked ships? If not I think it doesn't make sense. IRL if you get shot at something invisible you keep trying to figure out where it is

[Cheerio]

*oops I missed... Better sit here till I die then... Should have bought more than one bullet!*

[Tsagoth]

So would sending in more ships to the battle(not the defender's) give more chances to detect cloaked ships? If not I think it doesn't make sense. IRL if you get shot at something invisible you keep trying to figure out where it is

Yes, it would. Every time the targeting changes, an attacker gets a chance. So while you're beating down his ships, every time one pops and one of your needs a new target, it gets a chance. If everything is gone except for the stealths and the planet, then you're stuck, because target selection won't run again.

If you fly a new ship in, it gets one chance and if it fails, then it will just pile on the planet as well.

[Spartanius]

There should be something that causes target selection to run again whenever there are stealth orbitals. I disagree 100% with it staying the way it is. I don't see it being acceptable, and this is currently my number 1 complaint. :confused:

[Tsagoth]

Well it can certainly be addressed, but for now I want to try and get combat working properly before I start tinkering with its mechanics again. It's got a lot worse problems at the moment than not detecting stealths.

[Spartanius]

Things that someone preparing a large Dreadnaught invasion of sector 3.2 should be aware of? Not that I have anyone in mind, but it sounds like a good question to me :)

[Leedot]

The skill descriptions do need to be updated to better explain how stealth and stealth detection works. Beyond that though I don't have an issue with the current balance of stealth orbitals in the immediate future as they're purely defensive in nature and can be countered in a variety of ways. Researching stealth tech is the most direct way but a trader can effectively disable the planet without firing a single shot by making use of smuggling to siphon off it's population and along with other trade skills to harvest resources from it without giving anything to the owner of the planet.

Lastly the only specialty that requires one player to attack another player to win is the Warlord which can circumvent the stealth orbitals altogether by using PK's.

[Cheerio]

so im going to go out on a limb here... but it feels like trade is a little overpowered right now. with our access to resources at a much faster rate compared to other players and ability to harvest effectively 12 jumps away with cargo ships... its really easy to amass a huge DN, BC fleet before other players can really defend themselves (science excluded) and fleet isn't in the game... ok so maybe combat isn't well prepared to take on a mad trader? I guess i should think this out some more and let it play out...
disregard this for now i guess - maybe im just feeling a little too powerful as trade, when the leaderboards are up and i can compare to other players it'll be nice.

[Spartanius]

Everyone gets cargoships, its freighters that are special.

[Cheerio]

yes but 500RO is extremely limiting for every other specialization - i've been able to use cargoships for almost all my routes and still spam off a very sizable conquest fleets
freighters don't really offer much benefit in my book. you're better off setting up a new colony if your looking at harvest from 24 spaces away unless you are planning on stashing all your RO on one planet

- and when you can oneshot mining colonies (with a very limited number of bc - sorry, not giving up a magic number =p )... you can resource starve everyone within a few galaxies of you if you put in enough time

[Leedot]

It's a little hard to say really. The fact that the Defense Orbital Conversions and Mine Field Drones are busted really throws the defensive balance out of wack at the moment. Not that it helps someone going pure combat early on but it's definitely a significant defensive factor to consider. The combat players do lack any early game bonuses unlike Trade and Science so that's something we may need to look into further.

[Cheerio]

i guess i just feel like combat is at the mercy of everyone unless combat comes into the game with a trade alliance... unless they go the route of cruisers + advanced shipyards and go around with a 500cruiser fleet till they can make up some RO. I guess combat would work if you try to not be noticed, make your stuff really really difficult to take and then make a lucky nab at someones RO stock, make a PK and get lucky.
I think that traders are set up to be the big bullies in the playground but if you look at the actual win conditions its pretty even (although we haven't seen fleet yet)

[Zerosignal]

With RO accumulation being broken for any planet that accumulates less than 13 RO per tick, you get nothing on these worlds.

For science on your home world, in order to get RO you need 5 points in Mining... which is pretty extreme in my opinion.

In the long run science may have some advantage when researching those 150+ hour items but you have to survive until then, by that point a capable trader should be able to lock down most of the Jovian planets in the game.

[Cheerio]

yeah - this is the kind of thing im talking about
although, if you look at win conditions, a science person would probably want to ideally lock down like 25 good planets with obscene amounts of defense until they collect enough ore to collapse a bunch of stars and ascend in one go.

same for combat, except stash ore till you have one or two planet busters and scout out peoples homeworlds.

[Tsagoth]

With RO accumulation being broken for any planet that accumulates less than 13 RO per tick, you get nothing on these worlds.

This -should- be fixed now. You'll only get the RO every hour though.

[Spartanius]

freighters don't really offer much benefit in my book50 Freighters + rank 9 smuggling + rank 9 blockade running + rank 1 money laundering and we'll see where the benefit is. I call it the Wraith strategy 0_o Stargate Atlantis anyone?!?!?! I shall Cull all your worlds RAWR

THIS ^ is why trade owns, we have ---> Options on how to take you down, we are ---> not dependent on other races to be able to do it, and we can ---> quickly switch strategies/options because of our fast build rate and quick resource generation as well as our ---> ability to build our largest ships on our most distant worlds/newest colonies(Matter Transmitters) in our empire.

Scenario 1: Trader vs Researcher - Researcher builds lots of stealth things to prepare for future wars. Trader has not yet declared war, but has researched smuggling to rank 9 for 45% culling bonus (hehe), remote harvesting to rank 9 for an additional 18% culling bonus, and money laundering to rank 1 to allow for trading with enemies/without needing to lift embargo, and has built a small fleet of 50 freighters. Freighter fleet moves in to Researcher's home world and in a period of 1 minute of loading time culls the entire planet's population. The Trader was able to setup a nearby mining colony and in less than an hour the freighters are out taking another helpless planet. When the Researcher finally declares war so the freighters will be fired on the Trader has prepared himself by researching Mercantile diplomacy giving an 88% chance of avoiding being fired at unless the researcher sees the freighters within the one minute window of loading time. It seems all of the efforts of the research empire were for folly as the WRAITH RULE SUPREME


Scenario 2: Trader vs Combat -Trader techs for max AMC, researches dreadnaughts (with skills max improvement is 520% increase in damage because of stacking bonuses which sets a normal dreadnaught up with more firepower than a super dreadnaught and just under 1/3rd the firepower of a monitor for 1/33rd the RO cost of a monitor and 1/9th the RO cost of a super dread). The trader has a potential of having the RO of building more than 3 dreads for every one dread a combat can build and in 10% less time per factory which the trader also has many more of which means the Trader has the potential of 27 dreadnaughts for every one of the combat players super dreads(smaller ships are more efficient, but take up object cap). The combat player is quickly overwhelmed by dreadnaught fleets of the trader.

Or the trader could just cull EVERYTHING RAWR WRAITH FOR THE WIN

[Cheerio]

^ this is why i allied with him. hes scary

[Spartanius]

I forgot to ask, how much population fits into a cargo space? Hopefully its not 1:1 because 50 freighters loading 5000, or actually even 7250 pop per trip with skills would take over 1,100 trips to remove 400mu pop and the pop would grow faster than it could be removed.

*forgot to mention in my previous post that cargo ships would be 3x more efficient resource wise then freighters but 150 cargoships instead of 50 freighters hurts the object cap a bit.

[Tsagoth]

There should be something that causes target selection to run again whenever there are stealth orbitals. I disagree 100% with it staying the way it is. I don't see it being acceptable, and this is currently my number 1 complaint. :confused:

I suppose if I was faced with someone having a bunch of invisible to me orbitals I might put a few ranks into whatsit and fly 50 harvs in to his planet. Stealths may be invisible but they aren't invulnerable.

[Spartanius]

exploding trade ships can damage hidden orbitals? how much damage do they do?

[zarkwizard]

exploding trade ships can damage hidden orbitals? how much damage do they do?

Someone needs to read his skills....

[Cheerio]

Someone needs to read his skills....

i also sort of glazed over this skill since it gives no idea as to how much damage they do - is it spread among every ship there or just target one ship etc.
that'd be a pretty interesting tactic - 9 ranks of it and just send 1000ship harv fleets into peoples homeworlds hahahha

[Spartanius]

Someone needs to read his skills....I knew there was a skill for exploding trade ships, the emphasis on my question was about being able to damage orbitals that were cloaked. IIRC the skill still doesn't give info about the damage able to me done.