On 2010-07-26 22:36, NaNoBuM wrote:


I totally disagree with this. You know how hard it is to kill a scout?!? Guns? You mean torpedos? Or SIs? SI’s don’t hit dreads 50% of the time at +300, don’t even get me started on the rest! Let me know when we have cannons to speak of... ohh wait, ganglia has 4! (how many of those have you actually SEEN?)

On 2010-07-27 02:41, Julian Delphiki wrote:

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On 2010-07-27 02:23, NoBoDx wrote: hm interesting fact: a luth-dread take about 20-30 sec to fully uncloak, and to be able to fire near a well build planet (without any ships running ECCM) and ~20-30 sec to cloak again

Still, small kluth ships have no problem around a well built planet. Get 4 trannies, go in, uncloak next to the planet(you may get one volley on you, if that), drop inf, cloak and leave. Needs some deterrent to require a little more skill to capture a planet.



[ This Message was edited by: Julian Delphiki on 2010-07-27 04:34 ]

On 2009-10-21 08:15, Mr Black wrote:
Although this does sound like a good idea, it pushes the defensive edge too far in favor of the human factions; unfairly impacting the effectiveness of K'Luth tactics and strategy. This is an example of a sound theory, however it is unworkable given the current game environment and context.

Faction balance is a very subtle equation. Even altering the build rate of one structure can have a butterfly effect impacting the rest of the game, and completely throwing off the distribution of power between Factions that we wish to achieve.

On 2010-07-25 22:53, Kenny_Naboo wrote:

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On 2010-07-25 22:45, BackSlash wrote: Kenny, K'luth are currently very powerful and have a huge advantage at this sort of cluster/planet warfare, and is one of the reasons why K'luth hold such a big % of Sagittarius. Ever since cloak was changed to this new system way back when, myself and Tael saw the need for something like this to stop tranny rushing. However, since DarkSpace has evolved around the system, we see it's become much more of an issue. There has always been thoughts of a 500 gu or so radius around enemy planets in which K'luth cloak is negated, and planets can shoot at them. We apply the same thought process in this instance to other factions - if you're within 500 gu of a planet, then you're either trying to capture it, or trying to kill someone. For that, there should be some sort of advantage fo the faction holding the cluster... For ICC and UGTO, that advantage is the planetary defence shooting at the enemy. For K'luth, there is none - and there needs to be one. The 500 gu area around the planet would go some way to rectifying this. Bear in mind this is 500 gu from the center, not from the surface, so the actual distance from the planet is 400 gu (or less in some cases). This is not a nerf, more of bringing K'luth in line with other factions in this aspect of fighting. A note worth mentioning is that this has only been spoken about losely in private staff channels, and hasn't even remotely been discussed heavily (as we have other projects we're working on currently, and the work timeline is quite busy). It will be discussed at some point, and there will be a tweak to the mechanics in which K'luth engage around planets, as they currently are immune to the advantage the defending faction is supposed to have when holding a planet or cluster. - Jack [ This Message was edited by: BackSlash on 2010-07-25 22:46 ]

Hiya Jack,

A cloak auto-negate would only make ICC and UGTO sit around planets instead of coming out into open space and fighting us. Already, we have to take the fight to them most of the time.

As per my previous post. I think you can go with what Cory suggested and introduce a new planetary structure that autopings every 15 secs or so. It's a variant of the sensor base that switches itself on and off.

Every ping will reveal any cloaked vessels within the radius, and the rest of the sensor bases and plats will raise the sigs.



[ This Message was edited by: Kenny_Naboo on 2010-07-25 22:56 ]

On 2010-07-27 19:11, Shath wrote:
+1 its rare that we fight icc/ugto sumwhere other than their own planets or at gates so they can just keep pumpin out ships

On 2010-07-26 06:08, Gejaheline wrote:
What follows is a short essay on why K'luth ships are horrible. I'm not implying that K'luth ships are god-killing superweapons, since otherwise everyone would just play K'luth, but it should hopefully provide an insight into why the K'luth faction is the hardest to keep balanced with the other two sides.

K'luth are, in short, horrible to balance. Additionally, their tactics massively favour the use of dreadnaughts.

Why? Because they have cloak, basically. It allows them to use their favoured tactics at virtually any time, and any place. Let's have a look at their strengths and weaknesses, first. I'll probably miss some out, but hopefully I'll cover the biggest ones.

K'luth strengths:

Cloak. This is essentially perfect invisibility, vulnerable only to flying too fast and pinging, which requires lightning reflexes since the diamond only appears for fractions of a second. It also provides immunity to long-range missile and fighter attacks.

Auto hull repair and speedy armour regeneration. This negates the need for supply ships.

Lots and lots and lots of killy, never-miss beam weapons, along with all of the short-range, max-damage variants of various weapon types. They have the highest-damage core weapon, and the highest-damage torpedoes. Pressing spacebar on a K'luth ship generally results in epic amounts of damage on whatever's sitting in front of you. I think there are perhaps two non-k'luth warships that can kill scouts and destroyers in a single attack, and they're both assault deadnaughts. K'luth dreadnaughts can be reasonably expected to deal hull damage during a single pass, if not outright killing the target.

AMJD. They will ALWAYS be able to jump before you can.

Weaknesses:

Weak armour. They've not got the best in protective technologies.

Hugely aggressive weapon layouts. K'luth ships will typically have lots of front-only guns, although their dreads are something of an exception there. They still won't have as many rear-facing guns as other faction's dreads. Unless you're using a krill, in which case you have rear-facing core weapons, if memory serves. But then, all factions have exceptions to something.

Horrible energy management. Their huge arrays of death-dealing weaponry tend to consume rather a lot of power, as does their cloak. This also reduces their effective damage over time in comparison to other ships.

Short range. All of their guns are either beams, which are inherently short-ranged (although not as short as other factions' beams due to no falloff), or optimised for close combat in some way, typically trading range and velocity for more damage.


Now, most of these strengths and weaknesses seem fairly reasonable on paper. K'luth are a hard-hitting, no-defence faction that can give out lots of damage but not take it.

The problem, in a word: Cloak.

The cloaking device, as it is, is supremely powerful in that it negates a lot of K'luth's disadvantages whilst allowing them to maximise their advantages:

On the defensive, cloak allows you to easily disengage. Unless you have a gigantic fleet pinging you constantly you can probably live long enough to repair yourself or get to a safe distance and jump away. Once you've jumped, you can cloak to prevent anyone from following you. If nobody knows you're around, only the most paranoid of players will ping you and therefore notice you, and that's if they're lucky enough to be in range of you.

On the offensive, in combat, cloak allows you to make maxmum use of your optimum tactics. K'uth ships are best when facing the enemy at close range, from behind where they can't shoot you. Cloak makes it pretty easy to get into this position, and if you're not in position, then there is no need to uncloak. YOU get to choose engagement range, and YOU get to shoot first, typically crippling the hapless target. Once you've fired once or twice, recloak and reposition. This counters most of the k'luth's weaknesses.

Low relative damage over time is negated because your DPS is massively front-loaded: You deal all of your damage at the start of the engagement, and by keeping engagement times short, you reduce the opportunity for enemy ships (who deal a more-or-less constant amount of damage over time) to cause an equivalent amount of damage. This allows you to deal way more damage to the enemy ships than they do to you, particularly since they'll probably have to use rear or side weapons. This also allows you to kill smaller ships far more easily, since they will typically die in the first volley rather than be able to evade enough fire to make an escape.
This one is probably the main kicker, in my opinion, particularly since prestige gain is based on damage inflicted.

The very limited firing arcs are also rendered irrelevant, since you will always be facing your target. Otherwise, you wouldn't have engaged. Same thing for the short range focus. Additionally, you don't need to absorb enemy long-range fire because they won't be able to target you.

Weak armour is negated by the fact that you can cloak in order to avoid return fire. In addition, cloaking gives your repair systems time to work, so you can be at 100% for your next run, while your target will still be damaged. Unless they have a supply ship, but of course that can be killed first.

And, of course, this all heavily favours k'luth dreadnaughts. They don't have to worry about speed or manouevering, since they can just hide until the perfect moment. They don't need to worry about missing small targets, because they have perfectly accurate beam weapons. They have the most guns, which is what matters, and they have the armour to survive their relatively slow cloak times.

Oh, and it's really easy to capture planets, too.


All of this tends to make fighting k'luth fairly dull for the other teams, since if k'luth aren't killing you horribly, they're invisible. Which doesn't make for much in the way of rewarding combat or prestige gain, which is further aggravated by the knowledge that they're making oodles of prestige every time they hit the spacebar, and you know that if you try and use a scout you'll just get killed in one shot by a giant red thing materialising next to you.

Of course, if you took cloak away from K'luth, everyone would have a field day killing them, since they can't survive sustained combat.


tl;dr: K'luth are really hard to keep both balanced and interesting because any tweaking will cause them to kill everyone really easily or cause them die a horrible horrible death, neither of which are fun, and it's really hard to find a middle ground.

Postscript: About a billion people are going to counter the above with "Ah, but it takes mad leet skillz to play K'luth properly, therefore we are superior."

Let me counter with this hypothetical question: If someone turned up with a ship that was totally invincible and killed anything in one shot from any distance, but which required some kind of ludicrously complex control mechanism/keyboard combination/ in order to operate, which if more likely? Would you:

1: Defeat them with your even madder, leeter skills, in spite of their invulnerability?
2: Shrug, say "fair enough" and die in the knowledge that you were bested by someone even more skillful than you?
3: Complain bitterly and demand that this blatantly broken game object be removed?

Or, to put it another way: Is it acceptable to allow players to use unfair tactics as long as they're sufficiently skillful to use them?

The problem with the skill argument here is that you can't counter "skillful" use of k'luth ships with "skillful" use of UGTO ships.
The way to counter a cloaked k'luth ship is, basically, lots of ECCM, which requires no more skill than getting a mob of sensor scouts. Except that you'd need something like 16 scouts to have an even battle with a dreadnaught.

End rant. I shall donate 800 credits to the UGTOSPCG (UGTO Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Gaifen) if nobody manages to completely miss the point of the above essay and instead flames me. Otherwise I'll feel smug and spend it on an extra AI dreadnaught.

On 2010-07-27 19:26, Talien wrote:

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On 2010-07-27 19:11, Shath wrote: +1 its rare that we fight icc/ugto sumwhere other than their own planets or at gates so they can just keep pumpin out ships

Probably because even if people WANT to go fight Kluth, we can't find them because they're lurking around somewhere cloaked. They usually show up when ICC and UGTO are fighting anyway.

On 2010-07-26 10:00, Marius Falix wrote:
Well yeah ....no "skill" as its claimed to be is lets face it... hitting V and being able to lose the enemy firing on ya... which face it is bloody easy when they cant see you. -_-

perhaps when a ship gets within 50-100 gu of cloaked ship, it sig shows... ya know the red targetting diamond.

what do luth have to complain about that? we are gettting CLOSER!
(im ICC close = bad)

i mean luth cloak, atleast give us a way for a ship to take on its alien counterpart in an engagement.

coz unless you accidently jump the poor sod you aint gonna know till he shoots u in the arse, and when ya do, kluth will probably keep firing and possibly wipe you out.

but if thees someway you were blessed with survival and manage to turn that slagged ship around and manage to get close to the guy, i do believe itd be fair TO LET THE POOR GUY SHOOT BACK!.

this is just a theoretical one vs one here.

since luth hunt in packs i think it wouldnt make that much of a difference if ya get this implemented.
just means they cant go overkill and be hugging ur ass before they all uncloak.

and yes this will make luth require skill as you would have to "dance" with ur opponent, (best firing range for luth dread =250?) youd have to keep em close enough to fire effectively yet keep em out of range so they dont see ya.

= would actually require some semblence of skill


as for planets i think the suggested plans are good, maybe no that effective but hopefully enough.

Thoughts? srsly Luth dont start spouting... bad things about how u are skillfull -_-

using team work is not skill its just smart, and ur team NEED to use it in a major engagement... so the team actually does pay attention and work together.

and if skill = dodging while invis u can just stfu.

On 2010-07-26 10:28, Starcommand of ICC *XO* wrote:
That particular cluster has been bombed, rebuilt, and bombed over and over. Not to mention has been saboed more then once too. If the Myco cluster was built with at least 4 sensor bases on it (like it normally dose) luth don't dare get in close to Michelle at all.

If lock was back to what it SHOULD be, clusters would be perfect fortresses again, good at both anti UGTO and anti Kluth (since planets support one another). But alas planet auto unlock now making it real easy for lesser players to hop on to an alt and sabo it up. However thats a different story for a different topic.




Geje put it perfectly. Cloak is the key word here, something the I myself for years has been saying is the prime example of why Kluth are so powerful. Yet I get shot down every time as being QQ this or fanboi that because of my position as ICC. Now the arguments of the entire ICC faction have been said NOT by us, but by a mod.


It has been suggested over and over, for something that just flat out defeats cloak. Beacons COULD be one option, allowing them to be swappable with guns again, like the old days. Thus giving every ship the ability to attempt to counter cloak. Another one would be a replacement for the interdictor device, a blue looking dico that decloaks ships in a 1k radius. Others have been Torpedo's that do this, or buildings on planets. Take your pick, the player base has come up with some very good BALANCED ideas on how to fix the Kluth issue.


Sensor bases already auto ping, but only every 30 seconds (the cooldown) and it doesn't stack with more bases. I have noticed this because I was fighting 2 luthies alone in a cluster in Proc. Noticed that something, that wasn't me, pinged. Allowing me to see where the 1 luth station and siphon were for a second, and allowing me to focus on an area to launch missiles into, and focus my own pings (was in a HC). Unless it was the sensor platforms near me, something pinged.