i kill and raid plenty of matched.rank ships, some even better than laughable. GL's implementation of PvP is still better than most fb.based games. would i like to see more interesting interactions ? sure. but as you have indicated, the deck-based damage cap is not the only element that would need to be addressed, so focusing on it in isolation without addressing the other deficiencies would be totally unfair.

personally, i would like to see features like automatically guarding planets under attack, active defense of bases, more contested planets, event-based match-ranked npc's that can be guarded for benefits, a regular PvP battle arena / tourney, etc., but those all would presumably require major coding efforts.

I am sorry to state the following, but I think you are already speaking against yourself in your own above statement. By multiraiding and/or multihacking some even better than laughable players you just point out, why for majority the PvP element of GL is not interesting. Of course, for you the current setup is beneficial and while you did not achieve your goals, you will most probably oppose any changes, which can delay or make harder to achieve them, but hey, do you know, that this game needs to be good enough and interesting not only to you & few dozens of players?
Imagine greater - if 50% of players from DAU would take PvP seriously, because they would have a chance by more fair rules and balanced rules implemented...

and hell no to this: "automatically guarding planets under attack""
also there is no benefit to implement PvP battle arena, if the current PvP rules/formulas will stay in place - those on top (by abusing the current PvP formulars), will rule and the rest can only ingore it as they can not influence the outcome as such.

Online? Didn't think so. GL's PvP may be better than most FB games, but really... That's not saying much. But I do agree with you that the damage cap is not the only part that needs addressed. Dan needs to fix the whole enchilada. Which would need to be done before implementing any kind of arena, war system, contested planets, etc.

Well think about it this way. When the current damage formulas were implemented, power was mostly dependent on what modules one had installed - there were no bases to give us tens of thousands of bonus artifact points per day, so crews weren't as big a part in the power balance. Now they are, so they need to be considered.

Or maybe better yet.. Remove the entire decks from the damage equation instead calculate min/max & current hit by something along the lines of:

Attack - Defense = Max Damage per hit
Max Damage / 2 = Min Damage per hit

Damage Per hit = RNG between Min & Max Damage

Oh and just to clarify:
[list=]Attack = the Aggressors Attack (including buffs)
Defense = Defenders Defense (including buffs)

Maybe add in a modifier for rank difference...?

did you even try to put any real numbers into this proposed formula ?

let's use Negron's base attack of 525k from viewtopic.php?f=7&t=41305&start=17

pulling a defense figure out of the hat of 200k.

your max/min damage from your formulas would be 325k to 163k. so basically every ship in the game would be less than 10 hits to kill.

and if you don't like decks in there, why even bother with rank difference ? bigger = always better = BORING !

quoting Robert from viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4458&start=2:

"This was implemented ... to help stop bullying and encourage low deck/high crew builds instead of everyone following the same exact build of decks decks decks decks."

history is not on your side on this one ...

Yes, that's correct.. and that's how it SHOULD be.. if you worked that hard to get 525k attack.. well.. as it stands now that means nothing, he attacks someone with 1k decks he does 500 damage, sure he caps everything but might as well have 100k or less attack.

Think of it this way... His attack is basically the ray from the Death star, it hits a ship, it explodes.. period..

As for the Rank difference... was just a secondary thought.. it could have been a negative adjustment or positive.. /shrugs

I don't know and don't care who "Robert" is, the current system is horribly flawed, period. When someone lesser rank than you with 10k Defense can only take 500 damage from a person having 50-60k attack.. Something is WRONG, Horribly, Horribly Wrong..

And as for the argument, that takes into account the ships ability to dodge.. well Defense is made up of "Dampeners" (lessens the damage taken) and "Thrusters" (ships ability to maneuver, aka. DODGE)...

actually, you are again mixing up different facts per your purpose and maybe do not understand the concept of suggested formula as well, so let me comment:

1) you took in your response the above values of base attack not PvP attack strength (these can differ by 5% but can be much more...)

2) but let's use the above values as equal to PvP attack but then also let's consider the other stats of the mentioned beast player Negron. How many ships after so long trend of energy builds has the PvP attack to do 163K+ dmg in single hit to shoot Negron or similar ship (hull+shield > 1M) in approx 10 hits? (This questions totally ignores the following point, it is just rhetoric question per value from senatorhung's post)

3) Or did you ignore by purpose, that just in a post bellow the post to which link you pasted, it was reported that Negron had 300K+ def, which per suggested formula from Chage would require from any attackers PvP attack >300K+ ? Not far from double of PVP attack value in your post?

Aggressors Attack - Defenders Defense = Max Damage per hit while Max Damage / 2 = Min Damage per hit

Negron's defense and fictional opponent's attack considering Negron's hull+shield to disable him:
300K+ def minus 310K+ attack = approx 10K max dmg while min dmg per formula is half = 5K ... per RNG one hit would be from 5000 dmg to 10000 dmg then.
If we take, that each hit is lucky by RNG and is equal to 10K, considering 1M+ hull&shields will ask 100+ hits = 500+ energy for single disable if Negron is all time offline.
IF RNG unlucky = all hits of 5000 damage we are speaking about 200+ hits and thus 1000+ energy to disable Negron in case he is offline all time.
Again, in both lucky and unlucky scenario, the attacking players have to have min 310K PvP attack

The suggested formula therefore also address the almost immortal beast ships at top ranks not only SSB ships.

4) since when a player post from 02/2011 (last post from Rober is from 02/2012) is a proof or genuine argument in 07/2014 debate since when further balancing was done by Dan? Was this forum nick Robert an alter to Dan or any of former/current Mods? Anyone with authority close or on level of GM? I doubt.

it is stated on GL wiki you first provided link to:



5) eventually, if you are willing to consider only the requirement/needs of top ranks, does it mean, you do not care about the outcome for all bellow? even if they just joined the game?

Wow flux... Ok let me start to adress the issues in this post and with that formular.

First off lets take emps, using your negron example of a player with 310k attack vs 300k defence while yess then can only do 5-10k damage per shot a single emp increases this 4 fold, a spam of 20 increases this to a minimum of roughly 140k damage minimum per shot. even a unholy behemoth ship with roughly 10 million health would require at maximum under 100 shots to kill.

Lets now consider my ship, yes I am this self centered. I have been playing the game for over 2 years now and since roughly rank 100 I have been focusing purely on a ssb strategy. Juding from your joining of the forum flux you have been playing this game about as long as me. roughly 1.5 years of my gameplay have been devoted to ssb, and I know that there are hundreds more out there in the same possition. If the damage cap formular were to be changed to remove the advantage I have had in my restraint with decks I would probably quit, as would a lot of other ssb players. Thats exactly what the game needs isnt it, vast exodus of players

Lets also look at another part of the negron post...

So whilest negron, a pretty obvious lsb, was hitting star base justintime, a base bellonging to a top 10 legion and so quite obviously loaded with a ton and a half of hyperport and slitheon thermoregulators, he was able to aviod needing to repair his ship. So he, as Massive ship build, has got the benefit the ssb strives for through his artifact additions to his ship. Negron is capable of going without repairs on bases, quite obviously the much weaker npcs also, AND has the ability to fit all scan on his ship for scanning planets, the draw back of the ssb. So you guys saying that ssbs have the advantage, if you lsbs would just negron it up a bit then you'd be fine

As for pvp speeding up. I recently suggested a list of possible abilities, one of which was after a successfull hack there is a chance to trigger and effect, trebbling the opponents damage cap for a few minuets. Speeding up the pvp process vastly and giving lsbs a much greater advantage with their superiour hacking abilities. http://galaxylegion.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41142

TLDR at high ranks the advantage of the ssb decreases. pvp is the only area where the ssb excells once you can hit bases constantly without repairing even with a 4k+ damage cap. And since the drawbacks of the ssb persist for such a long time and those who went ssb early will have been dissadvataged for such a long time it doesn't realy matter.

So what your saying is, lets say for example, a rank 400 with 800 decks and lets say 5k defense should be able to hold off/fend off the attacks of a rank 1000 with, lets say, 50k + attack? absurd. 50k attack vs 5k defense.. Sorry but the rank 400 SHOULD be obliterated in two, maybe three hits. Name one other pvp game that has ranks/levels where a lower rank can stand toe to toe with a higher rank,

You do bring up a point with the EM's, and the solution to that, don't make it stack 1 EM effect per ship, so if you hit it with one, you would get a message "that ship is already affected by that ability".

ship size should NOT matter and if it is applied at all should make the Smaller ship more vulnerable to the attacks of the larger ship. The mechanic as it is now, is a backwards, horribly broken mechanic.

Just to check this out, i picked 2 random ships on my bt and probed their stats.

aggressors attack - 28665 (rank 643)(not that the rank matters)
defenders defense - 23303 (rank 583)

by this formula, the damage that can be done to the defending ship is between 2681 and 5362 per shot....What?? I said What?? These are ridiculous numbers.

if defending ship has say 50k hull (random #) then it would take the attacker between 10 shots (50 energy) and 19 shots (95 energy to disable (not counting shields, i never count shields cause of torps.)
But screw it, lets put some shields in there. after all this is a standard bt hit, no need for torps lol.

if the defender has 50k hull and say 30k shields then it would take the attacker between 15 shots (75 energy) and 30 shots (150 energy) to disable. That is a low amount of energy imo. This is the amount of e it takes me to kill ships that are extremely weak compared to mine. even the weakest ships i find on my bt, im not doing near 2681 to 5362 dmg per shot. If I were it would take significantly less energy than that for me to disable them.

now lets put the same attacker against a ship significantly weaker than the previous.(Again I will choose a weaker ship from my bt as the defender)
aggressors attack - 28665 (rank 643)
defenders defense - 11861 (rank 572) (this is not an ssb ship, just weak)

Now the damage that can be done to the defending ship is between 8402 and 16804....wtf? I say...wtf??
if the defender has the same 50k hull and 30k shields then it would take between 5 shots (25 energy) and 10 shots (50 energy) to disable..

is this really what you want?

now, what if we flip flop the att/def of the aggressor and defender in my 1st example.
aggressors attack - 23303
defenders defense - 28665

now the damage the defending ship can take per shot is -2681 to -5362 .... or lets just say 0 since we cant go into negative numbers..

Again, do we really want this?.
Hell no!

Of course... It puts a MUCH stronger emphasis on attack and defense and takes all of it off of "decks", which is how it should be. A weak ship will have little defense while a strong ship will have a lot of defense..

Of course larger ships will 'most likely' have a stronger defense due to more defense modules installed than a smaller ship

And the numbers are not 'set in stone', would it make you feel better if it was:

Max Damage = (attack - defense)/2
Min Damage = (attack - defense)/4

?

Either way, limiting the number of decks on a ship should NOT reduce the damage you take, if anything it should increase it.

Regardless this is an offer of another possible solution to the entire broken damage cap mechanic that is currently in place.. I do still like the OP's suggestion as well and still give it a +1 (getting back on topic)

I've honestly lost all patience with you lsbs complaining about the fact that you have made a decision for gameplay that isn't paying off in every single aspect.


But here goes anyway...
Weapons in galaxy legion are almost all energy based. These weapons from null rays up at the realy least do not fire pulses but like the quasi chaos cannons fire radiation that causes rifts in the hulls of the space craft. These weapons therefore are limited by the area of target they are able to hit because the interspacial distances mean that a single null ray could quite easily bathe an entire enemy ship in its radiation.
Lets even take this one step further and go for tactical officers each firing their own bullet powered weapons. there comes a point where even with the bullets missing and vaporised by the defences on the other ship the entire surface of the enemy ship is being hit with bullets. how can they possible cause more damage than that? Quite clearly they cant.

Now lets move on to hull platings. If you have a large ship then you have to spread your hull over a much larger area making it a lot thiner. Therefore it is extremely easy for these bullets to cause substantial damage to the hull of your ship becuase it takes a relativly low number of shots to break through this eggshell like hull.
If however you have a small ship then the same volume of hull results in vastly thicker platings for your ship due to the fact that you have less area to spread the same amount of hull over. This gives much stronger hull platings for the smaller ship and therefore means that it can last longer under the barrage of gunfire and radiation. For the size of the ship to be discounted when it comes to how thick the hulls are is absurd because it implies that 1 durtanium brackets enhancement can magicaly expand to a greater volume on a large ship than a small ship.

Once again lets move on, this time to scale and the ship crew limits. Lets look at our ships. Our ships are quite capable of laying seige to collosal dyson planet and breaking through its entire space being devoted to defences. Dyson Spheres are objects that are built around celestial bodys that provide a immense source of power. Fusion reactions being the only real viable choice. Therefore we can say that a dyson sphere is roughly the size of a fusion capable star. So our ship is able to invade a planet the size of a star. Quite clearly 1 deck in galaxy legion isn't equal to a 500m by 200m space. Its equal to at the very least logicaly sevaral miles by several miles, and since this ship would have to be high as well to avoid being thin as a bit of paper a single deck would be several miles high, so 1 deck is equal to probably a million decks+ in terms of a cruise liner. Seing how an cruise liner, to use a random example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Indepen ... f_the_Seas is able to travel with more than 300 people per deck in terms of the way we would think of it a single deck on galaxy legion would accomidate at the very least 300 million crewmembers, roughly 6 billion crew on a tiny scout at full capacity. Whilest its quite true that crew is also unlikely to be to scale I think its relatively safe to say that with the elios migration threatening only billions of people despite being a significant proportion of the galaxy affected even our highest crewed ship would struggle to break the 1 billion actual crew mark.

TLDR, the arguement of logic which often fuels the idea that these threats hold validity is wrong

Ok, first... I'm more of a MSB at my rank than LSB (as most ships ive encountered at the same rank run 1k-2k or more decks than I do)... and I have lost all patience with the SSB's thinking that their tiny/small mid ranked ship should be able to hold off a single or multiple higher ranked larger ships when assaulted. Please tell me how its fair to someone who worked hard to push their attack up to 50, 75, 100k + unbuffed attack should be forced to hit someone 500 ranks less than them for 750 damage a hit because they have fewer decks..

So lets go through a couple of your examples you talk about the blast radius of weapons, so a blast goes through the ship, tears through the hull, if its a strong enough blast or enough radiation it melts the hull entirely, destroying the ship (attack power), so yes one blast from one of these weapons could cover your entire small ship and destroy it instantly. You then go on to talk about things being negated by the Defense of the ship.. Oh wait, look there is a STAT called DEFENSE, how convenient. So now we have the attack power of the ships weapons/tactical officers (attack) versus the ships defenses (dampeners and thrusters/helmsmen) ooh, look there's that stat DEFENSE again. So, basically you've made my point.. So basically attackers big bad weapon (large attack rating) covers your ship in radiation causing enough damage with 1 hit to destroy your hull, ok. you've made my point...

Moving on.. .. please.. tell me how thin is the hull on the Death Star? oh yes, its so thin that your X-Wing or Millennium Falcon or even your Star Destroyer sized ship can just tear through it so easily.. because its A LOT THINNER.. right? oh that's right, a Star Destroyer crashed into the Death Star.. I think it scratched its hull.... /sarcasm off... Next...

So lets talk about population... so I attack and invade a planet with a semi standard population of what, 120, 200? is that actual hundreds, is that 1k population per 100, 1k people for each 1 population? or is it a world with a small colony on it with few people that I just invaded? is it 1billion per 100, 1 billion per 1, so a population of 100 would actually be 100 billion, or is it simply a population of 120? please, tell me the conversion rate? without that conversion rate then the argument that 1 decks = a million decks is null and void..


So lets even step back from all that and go a separate direction... New players start the game, they start ranking up, they are enjoying themselves, they start up the research tree. Oh wow look at those defense modules, and i researched more, LOGIC would have them installing every defense and attack module they could, Thinking Wow! i can push my defense up this high, that will protect me... only to later find out how wrong they were, and now they are dealing with reset ssb slow rankers who sit and farm those lower ranks driving them away... Think that doesn't happen.. I know for a fact that it does... so please tell me how your coveted, horribly flawed, broken deck based damage cap system helps the game

DamCap = (Decks + Rank)/2 + (Hull * .5%) and MaxTotalCrew = Rank * 150 and Raid/HackLoot = Current * 5


Welcome back real PvP.

No because these superdense matirials are so dense that they cannot be penetrated by this radiation in the same way that lead gives great sheilding from radiation these much denser matirials prevent the radiation from ohking the ship because it takes a prolonged period of time for the hull to be broken all the way through to the point it could be considered dissabledThe first Death Star is depicted in various sources of having a crew of 265,675, as well as 52,276 gunners, 607,360 troops, 30,984 stormtroopers, 42,782 ship support staff, and 180,216 pilots and support crew Its hangars contain assault shuttles, blastboats, Strike cruisers, land vehicles, support ships, and 7,293 TIE fighters.It is also protected by 10,000 turbolaser batteries, 2,600 ion cannons, and at least 768 tractor beam projectors. From wikipedia so exact figures may be in doubt but you get the picture. The death stars hull was never going to be its focus, more the fact that it was supposed it could competely annihilate any threat before it could do any real damage. Regardless using filmograpy for references is probaly not a good idea Hence the idea that a crew limit per deck is due to the logical size restraints is null and void. Due to the fact that I have an actual figure from the game gives more creedance to the viewpoint that ships crews are less than hundereds of millions than that they are more than
Considering dan is updating the starting player expirence he could quite easily add a ballenced arguement between the two and allow new players joining to know there is another potential option. That is much, much more helpfull to the game than removing a large proportion of players from even bothering to continue.

terrible idea. nuff said

It's good that the game doesn't offer us a stat that tells us how much HULL we have, you know basically tells us how dense/thick/heavy it is, how much damage our ship can take... Oh wait...

There may be an easier solution than re-writing the code, while more of a band-aid than a fix to the broken system that currently exits, how about this. Add In a new line of cannons (researched or npc drop) that functions the same as a T-Plasma Gemini Cannon except for when you Attack (not when your attacked), and depending upon the level / type of cannon the % damage done increases. maybe at first start at 2%, next set 4%, 6%, 8%, 10% etc. up to a max of maybe 20%, depending on how many tiers you want to take it.

And how many New players have you met that got excited about "oh look at all these cool modules i can install, but if i dont want to get killed all the time, i should not OoOoO and Ahhhh over them because I wont install them".. Ever play an MMO? Lets raid Boss X or Y to get this killer loot, but If I don't equip it I will get stronger... really? Thats going to draw in new players, make new people want to stay.. eh

I think things could be helped by adding a new feature which virtually every other combat game has.

Agility vs. Accuracy

Let every shot have a chance to miss. It would just take some planning to get a fair formula and determine where the stats are derived from.