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Forum Index » » English (General) » » OK, OK, guys: the Kluth issues...

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OK, OK, guys: the Kluth issues...

Ramius
Fleet Admiral
Agents

Joined: January 12, 2002
Posts: 894
From: Ramius

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:16

Ok, so after all this yelling at each other is over. Let's look at the major K'luth issues facing them.

"OMG, You're an ICC player! You can't comment on this!" Well to that, I say, I have been fighting K'luth virtually the entire time that 483 has been released. I think I've seen a lot of their trials and tribulations. To me, there are four major issues with K'luth, let's begin, shall we?

1. Assault disruptors and alpha strikes
Are K'luth assault disruptors fine? YES! No, just joking (hey I'm trying to keep this upbeat). The assault disruptors have issues. I run 4 ships out of my garage, a Bomber Dread, an Assault Dread, a Supply Station, and a Command Carrier. With every single dread I've taken out, not a single Kluth alpha has ever broken my armor (most of the times not even shields, with rotation). For example, in Proc the other day, I think I went up against Unknown Warrior (?) in a siphon. We sat at about 120 gu distance, just staring directly at each other firing back and forth. Im sure his ship was modded fully, as was mine. The result? He jumped away with 67% hull. And me? It never even broke my armor.

But you may say, "Hey, you shouldnt alpha against an AD head on." While its true that its very dangerous to attack an assault class dread to the fore (since we have double plated armor in front), THESE WERE BOTH ASSAULT CLASS DREADS. And the K'luth, are supposed to have more offense?

The assault disruptors either have to deal out more damage, or their power requirements need to be reduced. Next, I have never seen a stellar incinerator destroy a ship. Think about this weapon. This is a KLUTH NUKE WEAPON. Essentially it needs to be the more powerful weapon in the game. Now I like the way each core weapon has its own characteristics. But the SI needs an upgrade. Keep its splash damage radius the same, keep everything else the same, but majorly increase the direct damage it fires. I've been hit with so many SI's in my dreads I don't even blink when they hit me. A direct shot from this thing should take armor off a cruiser. With no armor, the SI should be the GG button. As it stands, its not like this.

Ok... moving on...

2. The repair issue

Frankly, I don't have a problem with K'luth workers being able to repair while cloaked. I don't really see why this was taken out. I've dealt with it for the last 3 years, and I don't consider it that big of a deal if they can repair while cloaked. Back in the day, there was a trade off where you could manually target the ship under repair anyways, because of the drone cloud.

3. The cloak issue.

Simple, the new K'luth is very dangerous. But there are two problems: One, is the eccm pinging, which should be fixed. It negates the cloak. This shouldn't be the case. Remove it. Second, beacons. I think the balance against beacons is a ship should only be able to have a certain amount of "active" beacons to be fired, just how you can't mine and bomb infinitely. Restrict the amount of beacons that can be launched at any one time. Have it so lower class ships can fire more beacons, to give them use.

4. Finally... The bombing issue

This seems to be the sorest issue for both ICC and Kluth. UGTO have been very quiet about the issue, so I would like to hear what they have to say. Anyways, lets begin.

First: bombing is still screwed up. Tael and the administration said that a single bomb cloud should not wipe a planet clean. Well they still can. All bombs still need their damage and splash radius reduced even more.

Second: the bomber dread. Verry offensive. Very dangerous. However, I believe by removing 3 bomb slots (the current has 9.), this still has the most bomb slots than any other ship (except the UGTO bomber cruiser? I don't know). I use the bomber dread AS a defensive ship, because it has so many standard mounts, I replace everything with pulse beams. This is why I love using the bomber dread. It can mount 16 pulse beams. It provides excellent defensive cover while bombing. However, it should't be able to take a planet down. Reduce it to 6 and with bombs reduced to what they should be, this should fix this, without having the need to remove the bomber dread and having it returned to a defensive ship.

Sigh, ok third: Defense base issues. I believe all other defense bases besides ICC should have a pulse beam-type weapon: a rapid fire cl that necessarily wouldnt be as efficient as the icc pulse beam, but would be enough to disrupt clouds. Only the defense bases can use this. Hell, I mean, have you seen KLuth defense bases firing? It reminds me back in the day when defense bases used standard cls and would only kill 4 bombs in the cloud. Keep the offensive nature of the defense bases. Those are perfect for kluth. My bomber dread lost 55% hull because of those things on one run. This would also stop lesser ships from cloud bombing. Restrict the number of bombs that can be launched on the lesser ships. Have it scale accordingly. A bomber scout should not be able to drop the same amount of bombs as a dread or cruiser.

Now, I disagree that all factions should get a shield generator. Shields are ICC's domain only. However, other factions need a bonus of their own. For example, Kluth planets should be able to recover quickly from an attack, since they are all organic. UGTO structures should be able to withstand more attacks, but recover at the same rate as ICC... etc.

Well, this is just a suggestion thread. Please, bring up any comments, concerns, issues of your own. Just don't degrade into whining.

Please, lets be mature.

[ This Message was edited by: Ramius {C?} on 2005-07-23 16:17 ]
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BackSlash
Marshal
Galactic Navy

Joined: March 23, 2003
Posts: 11183
From: Bristol, England

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:22

Ram, the shield issue is current with UGTO aswell. ICC shields are VERY powerfull, and for some reason, are next to uber on the smaller ships.
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Captain Sternn
Grand Admiral

Joined: March 18, 2004
Posts: 225

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:31

I agree wholeheartily...should help too coming from an ICC player at least it doesn't look like a biased rant from someone who has something to gain from it.

/me salutes Ramius
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Fattierob
Vice Admiral

Joined: April 25, 2003
Posts: 4059

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:33

I've always liked the diea that the k'luth can build cloak generators on their planets, so you don't know which buildings are on what planets if your not k'luth till you get within spitting distince of a planet (250 gu? 100 gu?)

maybe even take it one step farther and not tell what planets are under k'luth control? heh.

but otherwise, great suggestions, and a great idea to make an orderly topic that doesn't get down to flaming and ranting.
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Koda
Marshal
Fatal Squadron

Joined: August 29, 2002
Posts: 1384

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:45

Issue 1,

I personally think that yes they should be powerful, and what kept it in check was the High cost of upgrading. And that really can be applied to all players and all factions.

Issue 2,

Yes, Its a non issuse with me.

Issue 3,

Eccm pinging is interesting, but Id rather Have Cloak cost alot more power than have to toggle my eccm repeatedly. As for my view on becons, it gives people a way to combat a nearly perfect cloak. Which in my opion offers a good balance. Like ive said in many other posts in the past concerning Flux.. i dont care how uber it is.. give people a way to counter it, like a Hardend systems.. but the systems work slower.. Just give somethng that allows you to counter it.. like ecm's eccm.. Yin and Yang..

Issue 4,

Bombing and Defense bases.

bombs are being delt with. finnally. Ty Devs/Admin.

Defense bases are WAY too powerfull on Newbie, Ive recently got one of my RL friends to finnaly join and get hooked on DS, Only to go in there and see kluth defense bases and Ugto defense bases Own Newbies..

I think that this is makking new commers not like Newbie. The MV is one thing, but everytime there is something new put in the MV.. its effects in newbie are ten fold.

Such as.. invincable ICC sheilds on smaller ICC ships. Def bases that newbs are getting wasted by. Credit changes that newbs dont understand. And Newbs not ranking up becus they are loosing more than they are gaining.

My suggestion is that Newb Areas Need to be included in the MV ASAP. the more we add the more they fall behind. And that ='s fewer and fewer players. Not to mention makes me look like a dick to my friend, when i didnt even realize for a week or more that these bases were racking up more kills than ships.

-Charz
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Shigernafy
Admiral

Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 5726
From: The Land of Taxation without Representation

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:47

Quote:

Sigh, ok third: Defense base issues. I believe all other defense bases besides ICC should have a pulse beam-type weapon: a rapid fire cl that necessarily wouldnt be as efficient as the icc pulse beam, but would be enough to disrupt clouds. Only the defense bases can use this. Hell, I mean, have you seen KLuth defense bases firing? It reminds me back in the day when defense bases used standard cls and would only kill 4 bombs in the cloud. Keep the offensive nature of the defense bases. Those are perfect for kluth. My bomber dread lost 55% hull because of those things on one run. This would also stop lesser ships from cloud bombing. Restrict the number of bombs that can be launched on the lesser ships. Have it scale accordingly. A bomber scout should not be able to drop the same amount of bombs as a dread or cruiser.

I agree that Kluth bases are potentially too easy to bomb at the moment, with the slow rate of fire they have. On the other hand, they don't necessarily all need pulse-esque beams. Why not give them some other trade off - rather than having them as good at defense, make their dbase beams have twice the range, or more powerful missiles - make the "offense bases" so to speak. Some other tradeoff may work just as well. (Of course, the increased rate of death from kluth planets may frustrate and anger some people, so maybe its best to make them focus only on bombs, and not ships).

They already, however, can take down a bomber dessie from 100gu out - I had level 10 armor/shields yesterday, and with slightly delayed rotation, I was roasted before I was 100gu out. Thus, they already have the "stop lesser ships" part figured out.

Also, "a bomber scout should not be able to drop the same amount of bombs as a dread or cruiser" already holds true - they have fewer bomb bays, so they can drop fewer bombs. While the theory of having less storage space -> less ammo would make a certain bit of sense, they already are limited in their effectiveness by having fewer bays.

I think a flaw a lot of people make when making suggestions is that they focus on the view from their rank alone. Yes, you can get a bomber dread, and it IS really easy to bomb with one - but not everyone can.. and a lot of the work in the MV, especially over the last two weeks, has been by non-FA players. We don't want to lock them out of the ability to bomb anything just because the bomber dread is overpowered.
Though we don't want them to be able to flatten a planet on their own in a destroyer either. It

Quote:

Now, I disagree that all factions should get a shield generator. Shields are ICC's domain only. However, other factions need a bonus of their own. For example, Kluth planets should be able to recover quickly from an attack, since they are all organic. UGTO structures should be able to withstand more attacks, but recover at the same rate as ICC... etc.

I also disagree that they all need shields. In fact, I disagree that they all need a bonus. Why does everyone need something good on their side - why can one faction not have a relative advantage in one aspect of the game? While your suggestions make sense within the story of DarkSpace, I don't necessarily know why they are necessary. Development isn't an arms race - we don't always have to be giving each faction its own next higher better faster weapon or defense. Nor in fact do we need them all to have something to balance or counter each individual weapon or tactic. As long as they balance out macroscopically, on the whole, who cares if ICC have an advantage in planet defense?... or in shrugging on the first bomb run, anyway, via the shields.

You can argue that they are not in fact balanced in general, and that's great - but I don't think they need to be equal in every tiny respect in order to balance out in general.

But, as you said, this is just my view, and feel free to disagree and debate against me. Just keep it civil..

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Shigernafy
Admiral

Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 5726
From: The Land of Taxation without Representation

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:56

And while I've responded to half of it...

1. I'm not experienced enough to comment, but I'll take your word for it.

2. It requires them to jump out of battle to repair, more or less, which is not necessarily bad, but its worse than most humans have to endure, assuming a well-put-together team. I don't have a problem with cloaked repairing in general though. It works with the blitz mentality - jump in, strike, hop out and repair in the shadows.. then back in. It could potentially help them quite a bit when used properly though.

3. I think pinging should be fixed. I'd say its an exploit, personally, but I'm not going to enforce it as one, as its not declared as such. It needs to go, though. If the cloak is "perfect" like was planned and is claimed, pinging clearly isn't compatible with such a system. When a Kluth is cloaked, they need to be invisible, period.

Beacons.. are far too overused and useful. Again, with perfect cloak, it seems rather pointless to have a weapon that everyone can equip that will instantly negate the cloak. Sure, in theory you have to see them first - but with pinging and control-targetting, you can just spam beacons around and maybe get a hit. Or, as soon as they decloak, they are hit by beacons and are henceforth unable to cloak. Seems like far too much a neuter to me.

A limit on beacons fireable sounds reasonable, inversely proportional to the ship class size (dreads few, scouts more). Additionally, they should not STOP cloak. At the worst, I'd say they should lengthen recloak time and increase energy costs for cloak. At best, I'd say one of the two.

Though I still think jump drives should work cloaked.. that way you can get spammed by beacons, panic.. cloak (taking a few seconds because of the beacon count), and jump away to lick your wounds. And have the reload bays remove beacons - maybe with a delay of 30 seconds of repairing or something, so you can't negate them instantly with a cloaked supply in battle.
Though jump rings would still be visible...

Anyway, those are my random musings, half of which stray outside of the topic as you presented it. Sorry about that.
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* [S.W]AdmBito @55321 Sent \"I dunno; the French had a few missteps. But they're on the right track, one headbutt at a time.\"

Ramius
Fleet Admiral
Agents

Joined: January 12, 2002
Posts: 894
From: Ramius

Posted: 2005-07-23 16:57

This is very true, both Shiger and Charz. I focused too much on late game ships and tactics. I am sorry for the bias.
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Koda
Marshal
Fatal Squadron

Joined: August 29, 2002
Posts: 1384

Posted: 2005-07-23 17:07

Quote:

On 2005-07-23 16:57, Ramius {C?} wrote:
This is very true, both Shiger and Charz. I focused too much on late game ships and tactics. I am sorry for the bias.

np, Im guilty also bud.
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Shigernafy
Admiral

Joined: May 29, 2001
Posts: 5726
From: The Land of Taxation without Representation

Posted: 2005-07-23 17:23

Everyone is.. its a problem with no easy solution, unfortunately. Just pointing it out, though, so people can hopefully have that in mind when they craft their own responses.
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-Viper-
Fleet Admiral

Joined: July 26, 2001
Posts: 55
From: UK

Posted: 2005-07-23 17:56

It seems any level 10 modded dread is near invinsible unless seriously outnumbered, I cruised between 2 ICC planets in a brood and barly lost any armor.

Defences are really power vs small ships, but useless against big stuff.

[ This Message was edited by: -Viper- on 2005-07-23 17:57 ]
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Specterx
Fleet Admiral
Pitch Black

Joined: December 09, 2001
Posts: 547
From: Virginia/California

Posted: 2005-07-23 18:47

Not to gloat... but it's fascinating to see that, at least with regards to the Kluth, Faustus seems to be more or less returning them to the way they worked before the Infamous Cloak Change Patch. It seems all records of that blissful time have been erased (dev log and forum posts), but for those who weren't around, the kluth worked like this:

- Kluth ships had no armor
- The cloak was perfect (like now)
- Kluth could fire while cloaked (unlike now)
- While cloaked, ECCM usage by enemy forces increased the energy usage of the cloak and thus drained your energy. Prolonged exposure to ECCM would drain all your energy and leave you visible.

It is my belief (whether true or not) that the cloak was nerfed - and the fundamental dynamics of the game horribly distorted - because of "popular demand", i.e. the ICC and UGTO players complaining. Were the Kluth to be returned to the 1.351 state now, we wouldn't see the same problems, because the playerbase as a whole now routinely practices the very things that I and the other tooth-and-nail defenders of the orginal cloak had been telling them to practice all along.

For those who remember the MV of 2002, to see 30 players in the whole thing was nearly unheard of. Only the most well-organized fleets - GTN and PB - could ever manage to get a group together. Playing in the MV was a long, tedious and expensive affair. Everyone started in their home system when you logged in, and you had to warp to the action through a number of systems using the old, very slow jumpdrive (I think it was one-tenth the speed of the current JDs). Very few players (like, five) had the rank for stations, and perhaps a few dozen had the rank for the better dreadnoughts. The problem for Kluth was that we were too well-organized for our own good - we'd constantly encounter situations where a large, well-rounded fleet would square off against ICC or UGTO forces that came at us in a trickle, in ships ill-suited to the job, without the proper weaponry and using extremely poor tactics. Take interdictors - they're a staple of every fleet now. It was extremely rare to see an interdictor as part of human fleets in those days (the Kluth didn't even have one), but merely having one present would inevitably double the damage/casualties taken by the Kluth, and unless the latter simply had overwhelming numbers we wouldn't dare go near a dictor. I must have fought a thousand engagements where I jumped near a human fleet, spent twenty seconds focusing on and killing a single ship while never taking fire from any of the others, and then ejumped out to autorepair in safety.

To top it all off, ICC and UGTO gains each day would simply be erased during the night by Coombie, who could single-handedly - or with just a couple of others - spend countless hours recapping completely undefended systems without seeing a single human ship. This was of course incredibly discouraging and meant that GTN or Agents had to mount a huge effort to capture and hold the frontline systems - in the face of resistance from the Kluth North American players - while they appeared to revert to Kluth control almost by magic when we deployed our Australian secret weapons.

Note that, even at the time, when encountering a well-rounded human fleet that kept a close formation to maximize ECCM coverage and damage potential within a 200gu 'kill radius', the Kluth could cause some damage but would only actually win such a battle if they had more/better ships - as it should be.

So - why are things different now? Simply put, the dynamics of the MV have changed. There are far more players, such that now every faction can almost always come up with at least a decent-sized fleet. The MV has been made so much 'smaller', in terms of travel times, that you don't have a trickle of ships arriving in a system only to be destroyed piecemeal by whatever well-organized enemy fleet happens to be there. From what I've observed, if anything it is now the Kluth themselves that are lacking in numbers and tactics, whereas human capping fleets have become very numerous and extraordinarily large and deadly.

I'm not optimistic this will even be read - but if I had my way Faustus would take all the good things from 1.351 or so (essentially all the combat dynamics and ship stats) and combine them with the good things that have come since then - wormholes, shipyards, faster JD speeds, and minor corrections to obvious imbalances (like the weak old ICC missile dread and the multiple reloads/builds the ganglia could mount). From there, add more ships, weapons, and other goodies in to the structure as it existed then, rather than screwing around with all the stats and spending another two years trying to figure out what you've done. I even miss the small things that it now seems made the game so much better - like having to stop in order to make a normal jump (as opposed to an E-jump). I can't tell you how many tense moments I had, hoping that my crippled engines could slow my ship down to 0 before my jump drive got knocked out....

I suppose the next best thing would be to increase the offensive power and stealth of the Kluth - perhaps not to 1.351 levels, but pretty close to that, after taking into account their meager defensive abilities and reduced capabilities on ships like the Ganglia.

One thing that I'd definitely do away with are "device levels". Can't see the point of this other than as yet another sink for cash that's getting harder and harder to come by, and rendering comparisons between any two ships meaningless without correcting for yet another variable. I find it absolutely absurd that an engineer with high level armor can stand up to a multiminute bombardment from a dozen low-level disruptors and torpedo launchers. It certainly doesn't make the game more interesting - just more needlessly complex. If I wanted to play a mining sim with ten different stats for each device I'd go play EVE.

Anyway....

[ This Message was edited by: Specterx on 2005-07-23 19:02 ]
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MrSparkle
Marshal

Joined: August 13, 2001
Posts: 1912
From: mrsparkle

Posted: 2005-07-23 19:05

It's not that difficult to fix these issues. It just may be difficult to hear the very loud human players complain that the devices and tactics they once used to so easily hand Kluth defeat after defeat are now taken away.

Like the cheesy beacons, or the bomb damage (I know this one is being fixed).

I just fear the damage is already done. Too many people are fed up with the Kluth nerfs on the humans' behalf and have left. And don't tell me it's not on the humans' behalf. How do you explain beacons? They're there solely to make it really easy for humans to deal with Kluth.

Only a few human players see how messed up the situation is for Kluth. And for that I applaud them as they see the bigger picture, not a biased view based on their own faction.
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Ramius
Fleet Admiral
Agents

Joined: January 12, 2002
Posts: 894
From: Ramius

Posted: 2005-07-23 19:12

Please, no generalizations.
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MrSparkle
Marshal

Joined: August 13, 2001
Posts: 1912
From: mrsparkle

Posted: 2005-07-23 19:25

No generalizations?

Ok then how about this? Like Specter said, bring the old Kluth back. Remove beacons entirely and make eccm drain more cloak energy (like the cloak has to work extra hard to keep 0 sig in all that eccm). That will make the cloak foolproof but still a bit risky. Don't allow eccm to grow infinitely though. There has to be a threshold that prevents cloak from dropping really quick, or it will be worse than now (we have interdictors now unlike the old days. Quick drop of cloak without a way to recloak or jump away and you're dead. Like now with beacons which are the same as a forced uncloak)

Give them reduced armor to compensate (not zero armor) and remove the recent changes to DA to keep them extremely offensive but weak defensively.

Give at least one of their bombers more bomb slots.

Give their defense bases a better beam for PD. Replace the DA with a quick lvl 0 disruptor, and give them am torps or SI (SI are pretty weak) as their damage dealers.

Outfit stock Kluth ships with ecm instead of eccm! (why they STILL get eccm is beyond me)

Allow them to engineer and supply while cloaked. What many don't realize is those drones are visible. You will see a cloaked engineer or supply doing his job you know. Cloak won't help that.

I may think of more.

EDIT: Oh and to go with the old cloak/eccm system, make ecm that's actively countering eccm allow the cloak to run with less energy. The ecm itself would cost a bit, but the overall energy drain with both ecm and cloak running to counter 1 eccm is less than just the cloak vs eccm. Can you understand that example? I may not be clear enough. Basically, cloak would always be struggling to keep sig at 0, so ecm helps it do that when eccm is present.

[ This Message was edited by: MrSparkle on 2005-07-23 19:35 ]
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