Therion is a great ship for quite some time. It can take down a few ships bigger than it's size and Phantom is the first one that will give it a lot of trouble (phantom is that ship you're talking about by the way, it's a really good ship like most single hull ones). I still have one Therion left of the three I had initially but now after 900 rating it is pretty much obsolete as it just cant bring down ships twice it's size even with lucky warps. My other ships include one Spectre, one Phantom and one Crusader bought with Celestium since I don't meet the level req yet. I'm probably going to get a Baron (lvl 37 req) to replace the Therion as soon as I gather up enough credits (5,25 mill takes a while). Agreed mostly about the higher level weapons. However Arcfusion Array and Fusion turret are both pretty good. Especially Arcfusion Array... to be honest it's too good. Insane range (100) and enough damage to destroy 3x3 armor blocks when they are getting repaired by repairbay is too much for laser that completely surpasses shields in the first place. To be honest I don't think lasers are generally that overpowered with higher level ships that can afford to put armor pretty much everywhere on the sides too but the reason every good ship build uses lasers is that shields are too powerful. The problem with ballistics+missiles builds is that it takes a lot of time to get through shields and even once you do every once in a while the shields will soak your missile barrage because of the regeneration. If shields just had some higher delay before they start regenerating the ballistic+missile builds would be much more viable and better balanced compared to lasers.
Ah yes, it was the Phantom cheers Dsdnv! I was too in awe to remember the name. That battle I got my butt handed to me badly! Will dine out on Therion for a couple more levels, then will look to upgrade and be a bit more experimental by using more of the weapons I've got. Looking forward to Capital Cannon at level 50 - long way to go!!! Looking forward to hearing from EO regarding the mystery exploding ships!
No stealth nerfs on the repair bay. Could be that you're facing enemies who are using some of the more powerful lasers (Arcfusion Array). The graphics for the lasers in battle are still the same as with the lower level lasers, something we'd like to look at further down the road. Indeed, this player had managed to hack the game. The leak is patched, his account banned, and his progression removed. In some while his ships will completely disappear from the server database as well. The higher level weapons do have one clear advantage; you don't lose raw damage output as easily from stray shots. The smaller weapons get destroyed easier. I don't know if the balance is good enough yet, though. The original philosophy was to not make any weapon obsolete in late game. I'll study the bigger gun performance more and make balance changes as necessary. And in regards to some other balance discussion here, I agree lasers are far too strong at this point. This has a lot to do with shields being very strong. The next balance update will likely raise shield energy costs, increase the time before regeneration begins, and slightly lower laser range. I'll experiment with what seems to work best, but my intention is to have the meta far more diverse. Originally ballistic weapons were designed to be the "safe" choice; they don't cost a lot of energy, and their damage is good against any defence. However with the dominance of shields it seems lasers have become the safest choice regardless, even when they were designed to be the "specialty" weapon, good only for burning through unarmored, highly shielded ships. I'll make the required tweaks ASAP and hope to give you a more flexible meta. Best, Ribatzki
Really glad I found this thread. There are answers to a lot of questions my friends and I have been asking about the game. One thing I am curious about is whether or not there is a maximum number of hangar bays. Knowing if there is a limit would help me to decide how many ships to maintain. Really enjoying the game in general. Keep up the good work!
Hey there, and welcome to the thread! I'm glad you've found the stuff useful we've been scribbling here. Feel free to ask anything about the game in general, I'll do my best to answer every question to the best of my ability. As for the ship docks, you can have a maximum of 10 ships. However, the price for each bay goes up as gameplay balance issues demands. The more ships the longer sessions / more powerful progression you can have. Great to hear you're enjoying Starside! Best, Ribatzki
Hi again. Glad to hear you're looking into shields as a way of balancing the over abundance of lasers in current meta as I think that's the correct way to go. Now when I've reached the top ranks and am getting faced with carrier class ships on regular basis I think my earlier assesment that ships with supports are underperforming has turned the other way around as the supports are big enough in size to hold decent armoring and also repair bays. This causes a bit of frustration since the ship targeting seems to work in a way that your ships weapons always shoot at enemy main ship if it's in range and only if the ship is too far it might target enemy supports. When enemy supports have repairbays they pretty much cant be brought down unless focused with a lot of firepower which almost never happens now. Now your ship might burst a little damage on the support but before you can actually destroy anything it will switch targets back to the enemy's main ship and let the support heal back to full with repairbay. Having a ton of 360 degree turrets in your ship doesnt really help as their targeting seems to favor enemy main ship as well. To lesser extent the same frustration is caused by support shields if your ship was using ballistics/missiles: Your ship shoots the support enough to bring the shields down and then just switches targets and lets it recharge. Therefore I think you need to look a bit into how the ship AI chooses it's targets. Already damaged ships or ships whose shields are down should always be a priority target. Some kind of targeting modules that change ships targeting AI might be cool way of implementing this too if that's possible from programming viewpoint.
Good point about support ships. I got matched up against a Baron yesterday and the support ships really played a big part in my demise. I thought the Myrmidon swarms were bad enough! A re-programming of AI target priority would be good. Or if that's too complicated.... ...maybe that could be the first / only interaction point in game - you get to tap on the ship you want to target. Gives you a bit more feel of being the ship captain!!! Might be a nightmare with the aforementioned Myrmidon if facing another Myrmidon, or whatever support ships are part of the higher level classes. If tapping a ship is too complicated itself, maybe just a button on screen to toggle main or support targeting as a priority. If multiple supports, it just takes the closest one.
Myrmidon isn't that much of a problem as the supports it has are taken out in couple of laser hits so any ship with a few 360 laser turrets stands a chance. However cruiser class ships supports are so tough that usually they are left alive at the end of the battle no matter which side wins. Baron is definetely a tough one but it gets a lot worse later. I've faced like a dozen Captain ships who have a Javelin as support and also some build has two Morning Stars (or maybe even three, got destroyed so fast I don't even remember). I just wonder what the Super Carriers (Level 47-50 ships) have as support EDIT: I don't think tapping to select target will happen as it would most likely require them to rebuild a lot of the existing code for how battles are handled. Subtle changes to ship targeting AI should be easier to implement and maybe sometime in the future add more control to players. Also I think Ribatzki said earlier that they tested battles that had more interaction but it felt clumsy and not as fun as it sounds so they went with completely automated battles instead.
I've got a few things I was hoping you could clarify for me. Damage calculations Explosions Missiles Missiles damage are displayed as 1x#. What exactly does this mean? Additionally, what does the explosion radius indicate? I would assume that, for example, the Impact Missile would have a larger explosion radius than the Rocket Launcher, but all missiles either show a radius of 1.2 or none at all. Reactors Reactors have an explosion damage and radius. Taking the Medium Reactor as an example (50 dmg, 2 radius) does that mean that everything within 2 squares of it takes 50 damage when it explodes? Splash I've noticed that (at least) lasers have splash damage. Given the following configuration (- = nothing, A = armor, W = weapon), if my laser is hitting the armor in row 2 position 1, both the armor in row 1 position 2 and the weapon in row 2 position 2 will also take damage. Is that calculated as a certain percentage of the damage being dealt? And is the splash radius always the same? -AAA- AWWWA AWWWA Damage over time Lasers have a beam duration. Taking the Laser Beam as an example (25 damage, 1.5 duration), will the resulting damage be 25 damage over the period of 1.5 seconds, or 25 damage per second (37.5 total)? Since the Fusion Ray's damage increases over time, how does that calculation pan out? It's listed as 45 damage and 3 duration. Does it start at 45 and grow from there, or start lower and grow to 45? If the latter is true, how long does it take to get to 45 (or much of the 3 duration will be at 45 damage)? Friends list functionality I've connected my game to Facebook and have a friend playing this game but they don't appear in the list. Instead it still just displays "Connect". Is this a known issue, or is there something we're missing? Achievements bug I somehow never received the achievement for entering the Iron League (I'm now in the Platinum League). I've noticed that certain achievements seem to only pop upon relaunching the game, so I'm wondering if I played straight through the Iron League during my first sit-down with the game. Just wanted to mention it in case it was worth addressing Ships Destroyed stat How is this count determined? It will actually go down at points, which seems to be.. well, not what I would expect! I hope these aren't too technical or ridiculous of questions I'm really loving the game and look forward to whatever you have in store for it in the future! -Zok
I have been thinking about asking some of the same questions as the poster above for a while now. The damage numbers for different weapons seem a bit unintuitive and it's often hard to compare different weapons without trial and error. From what I've gathered the ballistic weapons simply shoot projectiles that have the damage stated in the description and weapons sustained damage per second for most ballistics can be easily calculated by (damage)*(fire rate). However for lasers it's hard to grasp how the numbers correspond to actual damage. For example Pulse Laser has damage 65 and fire rate of 5 shots per second but still it does way less damage than Arcfusion Array (105dmg, 0.4 shots/sec). I guess the differentiating factor here is the laser duration which is 0.15s for Pulse Laser and 1.5s for Arcfusion. It's just hard to grasp what the damage stat for lasers actually means as it can't be simply the damage for single laser pulse (kinda like in ballistics case). It could be that the lasers damage stat is something like "Damage per second of sustained pulse" so Pulse lasers single pulse would deal (65*0.15)=9.75 damage so the DPS would be 9.75*5=48.75. I'm guessing the defences work so Armor rating gets deducted from each hit and lasers get part of their damage reflected so actual damage done for ballistics would be (Projectile damage)-(Armor rating) and for lasers (Pulse damage)*(1-(Armor reflection)). I really don't know if armor rating gets reducted from lasers as well or do they only get affected by the reflection rating. Missiles as well are hard to compare to other weapons by simply looking at their damage stats. The damage stats seem awfully low for missiles especially since it's easy to notice that they wreck your ship pretty fast if your shields get taken down. Again this is just guessing but the 1.2 explosion radius probably means that the missile will do it's full damage to each part within 1.2 tiles of the impact point so the low damage stated in the description will get multiplied by the number of parts it actually hits. What I would really like to know is whether the "Explosion damage" carries over to your ships parts if you have placed shields so that they are too close to ships edges?
Just to call out a couple of bugs I've come across. Nothing that affects the game, just minor annoyances.... I've had the message about entering the diamond league about 10 times. The game sometimes hangs and needs a shutdown. It's not during a battle so no big issue, sometimes happens when you go back into the game. And one that's been mentioned before...not a bug really. But it's annoying when your ship design resets. Not sure what conditions means it resets and when it doesn't, hopefully gets addressed in an update.
It's a combo now. Diamond league message which now freezes the game. Just needs a simple reset, but tiny bit frustrating all the same!
That's weird... I just entered champion league and for me the message worked fine as did all the other league promotion messages before this.
I see that you are also hovering right around 850 so I think I can explain the behavior. I was curious about how far rank would go down from losses in diamond league and so I tested by running all of my weakest ships consecutively. You can lose rank down to 849 which will cause you to go back to platinum league. You will get the rank up message as you re-enter diamond. Hope this helps! Incidentally the rank up message has randomly locked the game for me since the first time I got it on my Nexus 6. I don't think it is freezing the whole game but rather the confirmation button not working.
I actually prefer losing as long as i can take a big chunk of the opponent (and credits xd) along with me. Going up to fast in rating is painful once you only get opponents you cannot beat.
Hey there! I'd be glad to answer your questions. First off I'll make a confession. The Advanced Module view is a poorly conceived contraption that should be completely remade in order to be clear and communicative. There are many variables that just don't make sense, and that's my fault as a designer. But: Missile damage represented for example as 2x something means the module fires 2 missiles at a time. The impact radius means the radius of the circle in which all modules are hit. In this formula the distance unit is the length of one module. Impact missiles used to have a larger radius, but with the damage growing exponentially, I had to tone it down. The problem with a large radius is apparent when an explosion can reach through multiple layers of armor. The same logic applies to exploding reactors, yes, where the measurement units are the same as with missiles. Lasers don't actually have splash damage. Sometimes they strike from an angle that is so conveniently between two modules that the damage disperses to both of them. When lasers (or any weapon) hit a destroyed (grey) module, the damage done is applied to one of the closest live blocks. The laser damage indication is horrid. In your example, the 25 damage is how much output the laser has per second. When it fires for 1.5 seconds, the total damage is 37.5. This becomes even more confusing with weapons like the pulse laser. With fusion weapons the damage peaks at the number indicated, but starts at a far lower value. A better iteration of theses damage indications would be to show how much damage is applied through the entire time the weapon is firing. I am unable to answer the Facebook connect -issue at this time. It could be there's a bug that prevents the game from remembering your login, and we would have to look at this at the office in better detail. Thank you for the notice. The achievements have a known issue which sometimes causes them to not be registered. We haven't been able to find the reason for this yet. This is why some league popups keep appearing again and again, and since the in-game statistics use the same method (ships destroyed, for example), the number will be inaccurate. I hope we will find the reason for this inconvenience since it creates some frustrating experiences especially later on. And no question is ridiculous, only the answer may be. Thanks for asking, and I hope this clears things up! -- On another note about support ships: sometimes they're useless, flying in there to die alone, and other times they are really valuable, sitting behind the enemy and firing all barrels all the time. This awkward behavior has actually become a staple for the gameplay balance, and can sometimes allow you to win outmatched battles and vice versa. As such I am not intending to touch the logic behind support movement. Special modules or interactions meant to target them would affect the balance in a way that I am not comfortable with. We have talked about assigning your main target manually, but it allows the active (attacking) player far more control over the result of the battle than otherwise. In some instances it would also invalidate ships with weaker supports. The strength of the larger support ships is intentional. Device CPU performance and gameplay comfort limits the size of ships I can put in the game, so the large supports are that powerful to create a meaningful difference in the highest class ships. Sometimes they may be frustrating, but there are a few ways of deliberately building against supports: - Use low range weapons (the vulcan turret, for example). Weapons target the enemy main ship if they can, otherwise they focus on the closest ship within their range. - Mines. Supports fly all around, and they are more likely to dive into a minefield than the enemy main ship. - Laser turrets. Lower class supports are too small for effective armor on the sides. With this in mind, the idea for a weapon that targets only supports has been on the table. I'm against this, however, as the module is useless once supports are gone (or if there are none to begin with). I am thinking of a different manner of module to address this, namely a "thorns" module that fires back towards whomever is causing you damage. And to all of you experiencing the frustrating freezes and forced restarts with the league popups, I apologize. Hopefully we find the achievement bug soon and get this nuisance out of your days. Best, Ribatzki
Can you buff the vulcan turret? Shouldn't it shoot 2x like its missile counterpart. It even has 2 barrels.
One additional bug I forgot to mention was that for some reason on both my Samsung Galaxy S3 and my new Samsung Galaxy Note 5, the build screens always have the warning/error messages about missing parts whether or not the ship is completely built or I click the save button (http://i.imgur.com/b4sHQlq.png). Also regarding the issue people have been having with the inability to dismiss the Diamond League message: I've found that if you wait for the XP & Credits to finish tallying at the end of a battle it will come up and you will be able to dismiss it. So if you win a battle at rank 849, wait a few seconds for your "rating" to tick up to 850 and the message should show up and be possible to click through.
