0009441: Combat Starship Energy Costs - DEV Arcen

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0009441	AI War 1 / Classic	Suggestion - Balance Tweaks		Sep 2, 2012 7:53 am	Sep 2, 2012 9:27 am

Reporter	Zane Wolfe	Assigned To
Status	new	Resolution	open
Product Version	5.076

Summary	0009441: Combat Starship Energy Costs
Description	The new jump in starship energy costs makes it very difficult to maintain a starship fleet as your main offensive fleet while trying to keep the number of captured planets fairly low. While this probably doesn't affect too many other players play styles, I tend to use starships as my primary offensive force, while keeping the fleet ships back as my defensive force. With the new jump in energy costs its a requirement that I use the 300% Econ bonus or just give up on using starships as a main force. And even then, its still a major strain using 30+ Matter Converters. At the current costs 10k per starship just getting the cap of MK1 Combat Starships of any type cost 40k. A single homeworld game, you start wit 175k positive energy balance. You can get cap in 4 starships, which only leaves you with 15k remaining which must be split between EVERYTHING else. Pretty much every cap of starships you use, you need to dedicate a Matter Converter. And at -100 m/c each, that gets prettridiculousus. And assuming you unlock Spire and Zeinith starships to use, a full cap of Combat starships of only MK1 240k worth of energy, nearly 2 full Energy Collectors worth. While before, it was fairly easy to use combined caps of both starships and fleetships, meaning that you could using one offenseence and one set defenseence. And, as I did, chose to focus mostly on starships, leaving fleetships at MKII at best, spending extra defenses, while the starships serve as your primary strike forces against the AI. (Even before the change from Power Plants to Energy Collectors, though that patch did seem to make it a bit easier) With the new costs on them, its very prohibitiveoperaterate full caps on both, without having a massive energy reserve and either the required econ bonuses for the sheer number of Mater Converters you're going to need, or a lotconqueredured planets for extra Energy Collectors. Combine this with the fact that a cap of fleetships usually is better than a cap of combat starships, and there becomes little to no reason to use the combat starships at all. While combat starships are fairly powerful, they are of limited use unless you have a full cap and using a mix of them rather than just all of one kind. With the current energy costs for them, its pretty impractical to use them unless its in a limited capacity, such as a pair of Plasma Siege to break a Forcefield protected mob or 1-2 Flagships in a blob of fleetships to buff them. You get more out of unlocking the Raider, Scout, Cloaker, or Enclave starships than you do for any of the combat ones, since a cap of the appropriate fleet ship of the same mark will do the job, most times even better than a cap of starships. Against the things you are encouraged to use starships against, AI Eyes and Ion Cannons, there is no need to use combat starships at all. Raiders can kill Guardposts quickly, destroying the Eyes, and many times get out free and clear. The Cloaker, for 1k knowledge, can let you cloak up to 200 ships, more than enough to get in a cloaked strike squad, destroying the ion cannons so you can bring in the main force to begin the assault. And that is assuming you didn't start with a nice cloaked bonus ship. Perhaps a balance can be struck between the old costs and the new ones? Standardize the cost 5k + 1k*MK lvl. So MKI combat starships would cost 6k, MKII would be 7k and MKIII would be 8k each. Still more than the average cost of a cap of fleetships, (from the patch notes on 5.074 it gives an averag cost of 20k) but not so much as to make it rather prohibitive from using caps of both fleetships and flagships while either trying not to use the econ bonuses, and/or trying to keep the number of captured worlds low.
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