Boarding vs Destroying?

General discussion about the game.
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Twinge
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Twinge » Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:26 am

Elhazzared wrote:BL2 has one drawback... Very long charge time to fire.


...Are you thinking of the BL3? BL3 is a mediocre weapon that requires 4 power to shoot 5 lasers with a 0% fire chance on a 19s cooldown, and should be purchased rarely. BL2 is the 2nd best weapon in the game and has a 2 power requirement to shoot 3 lasers with a 10% fire chance on a 12s cooldown, and should be purchased in almost all situations.
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Elhazzared
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Elhazzared » Thu Feb 27, 2014 12:22 pm

Ah yeah, for a moment I was thinking about the BL3, my mistake... Still I do prefer the teleporter earlier on than the BL2.
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby zeek » Thu Feb 27, 2014 6:24 pm

Elhazzared wrote:however it still true that the teleporter problem derives only from the extra income.

I disagree. Everything else being equal if they take away the higher rewards from boarding I'm still getting a teleporter and boarding ships like crazy. It's just the easiest, cheapest, lowest risk way of dealing with enemies.
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Elhazzared » Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:06 pm

Teleporting is both good and bad. Most times it isn't bad but some ships are more problematic to take outwith teleport than with weapons. So all weapons and yes, teleporting is a weapon have vaying degrees of success, teleporting is also as good as how many you can send over and how good the crew is (example, if you have mantis or not).

So I don't see the teloporting as being too good, I can be better or worse, just like there are better and worse weapons. The problem is the too good rewards forces players into mostly using teleporting for those rewards where if the rewards were the same players would care less about teleporting and about taking the ship intact. This would make the diverstity the game has come into play more.
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karadoc
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby karadoc » Fri Feb 28, 2014 11:54 pm

One of the things that bugs me about the reward bonus for boarding is this:
If I decide to play the game with an explicit intention of getting the most powerful end-game weapons possible, boarding is still is the most effective way to achieve this goal because the resources bonus from boarding will give me more scrap to buy weapons than I would have had otherwise.

So even when I'm just trying to get the ability to destroy enemy ships as effectively as possible, the most effective strategy to achieve that goal is to use teleporters to capture ships without destroying them...
Kenshkrix
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Kenshkrix » Sat Mar 01, 2014 9:52 am

@Thread in general:
I'm not a big fan of all paths being equal, that just isn't how things work out in the real world.

If you take a ship intact, it's entirely reasonable to expect that you can acquire more valuable things faster than if you blew it up. It's almost always better to subvert something than destroy it, and that's how I think it should be.
Risk+Effort=Reward is a pretty straightforward system, and it should be harder to take a ship intact than blow it up, depending of course on what you've spent scrap on and how the RNG has blessed (or cursed) you.

If it's currently too easy to board ships then my preferred solution would be to make this particular scenario less viable.
You shouldn't be able to just board/ion+bio every single non-AI ship in the game with impunity, you should have to make a judgement call for whether or not it's worthwhile to do so, the new race and subsystems will help out with this.

@karadoc:
As a player of strategy games, I'd like to say that acquiring and managing resources shouldn't be perfectly in line with slaughtering everything in your path indiscriminately, my main issue with boarding is that every enemy ship has the same vulnerabilities to boarding, recognizing and exploiting vulnerabilities would be a nice change, boarding is far too predictable as is.
karadoc
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby karadoc » Sat Mar 01, 2014 11:23 am

oh, thanks for that insight. I'm sure you can tell that I haven't played a strategy game before.
Elhazzared
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Elhazzared » Sat Mar 01, 2014 5:54 pm

Kenshkrix - First and formost. Do not bring real world logic into a game. Real world logic is ALWAYS second to game balance.

Having boaring become a lot more difficult with a lot of cases where you have to pounder whether or not it's worth boarding means that ships which have been specificly designed for boarding, especially the mantis B cruiser, will become obsulete since they don't really have anything special except that boarding capacity!

What is it better then? Having to redesign a bunch of ships just so that boarding fits your vision of what boarding should be (that is if it isn't all ships because you're talking about a total revamp of the boarding system and all enemy ships and so on) or go the more reasoable way which is making any way of killing enemies be worth exactly the same and by that token make all ways of killing enemies viable so players will play with more options rather than just going. This is the best way to go because I stand much more to gain?

Now don't get me wrong, I do belive that risk/reward should be something to take into account, however if you mess up with boarding to create the risk/reward system, you'll just have to revamp the whole system, what ships tend to appear more, how exactly is boarding harder, this also means revamp all NPC and playable ships. It's just too much to ask for, especially when you consider the game is already a finished and polished product. Asking for a very simple and small balance patch is much more reasonable.
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby 5thHorseman » Sat Mar 01, 2014 6:53 pm

Elhazzared wrote:Kenshkrix - First and formost. Do not bring real world logic into a game. Real world logic is ALWAYS second to game balance.


While this is technically true, getting both is ALWAYS second to just balancing the game without considering real-world logistics at all.

Elhazzared wrote:Having boaring become a lot more difficult with a lot of cases where you have to pounder whether or not it's worth boarding means that ships which have been specificly designed for boarding, especially the mantis B cruiser, will become obsulete since they don't really have anything special except that boarding capacity!


You would have to redesign the mantis B in any case. It takes advantage of the fact that boarding is more profitable by making other encounters worth nothing.
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Elhazzared
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Re: Boarding vs Destroying?

Postby Elhazzared » Sat Mar 01, 2014 7:19 pm

The mantis B is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything would need rebalancing, from NPC ships, the crew it carries, the layouts, reactions, ect. To all playable ships in order for the new balanced boarding system.

Also while we are mainly going over boaring, the thing is. It isn't just boarding, it's killing the crew. Bombs, firebeams etc. Any form of killing the crew is just plain better, the boarding is just the simplests and most effective but still.

It's just not reasonable to ask for a total revamp of the system. Asking for rewards to be adjusted so that gameplay will become more varied once again is the best and most simple solution.
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