thanks, however see my comments in color above.
NB: I suggested a formula, it is free to adjust, but please if you change the spirit...

I'll re-write it a bit, so it easyer to read you changed the formula by rewriting.

(Attack-defense) * ((Maximum of Decks/2 or Rank/2 )/ crew) * RNG = final dmg [/quote]


NO, I didnt change a thing Flux, Lean some basic math skills
a / ( b / c) = a * ( c / b)

a / (1/2) = 2a
a * (2/1) = 2a

re-writing it into (Attack-defense) * ((Maximum of Decks/2 or Rank/2 )/ crew) * RNG
just makes it more easy to analyze presisly what each part of the formular does

+1.. i agree 100% and have made similar points in other threads.

I make this suggestion to address the issue of SSBs at low ranks who are preventing new-comers from enjoying themselves, not to address the issue of PvP stagnation at higher ranks (I recognise that Sun said it was off topic. Which it is. I'd appreciate you guys wanting to talk about that making your own thread). Adding better red badge rewards (which I am all for, by the way) does nothing to tackle the problem I'm concerned with and the entire reasoning I have for changing the damage cap.

I've graphed the data, representative of a player with 1000 attack against some rank 100 with 1000 defense with their decks scaled from 20 to 1000, both using my proposed damage cap and the current damage cap. Just in case anybody wasn't exactly sure of the effect this change would have.



Yes, this change affects nobody but the SSBs but SSBs are a problem. Especially at the lowest ranks. This alleviates the problem without completely gimping SSBs; it's still a valid strategy and it doesn't make you suddenly "easy" to kill just no longer impossible. Personally, by the numbers I gave, I would probably still pass on a ship where my average damage was in the 200s but maybe it'll look like a challenge to a noob now instead of an impossible feat.

So, SenatorHung and Umbongo, this isn't going to make your efforts redundant or not worth it anymore, it's just going to make things a little more reasonable perhaps. Especially at the low ranks, which is the whole point of this thread.

By your logic, the attack of MSBs should be reduced by 20% because they can install more weapon modules

No, that's not my logic at all. MSBs don't ruin the experience of the newcomers to the game, thus there is nothing to fix. Where'd you get 20% from anyway? At low ranks, a lot of the time weapons contribute like 90%+ of your attack. At high ranks they contribute less than 10% of your attack.

that looks reasonable for a rank 100, and if it ONLY applied to those below rank 100, that would be fine. but try the same thing at ranks 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000. it won't look so reasonable.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. I'll make a similar graph for someone with 30,000 attack hitting someone with 30,000 defense (Though these numbers don't matter too much if they're equal) to see what the damage cap is there. Keep in mind that you very rarely actually hit someone's damage cap.

all you are realy doing with this is changing the optimal Deck size for SSB ships

old optimal size
Decks/2 = (Rank+19)/2
Decks = Rank+19 to take max effect of dammage cap

new formular
Decks/2 = Rank+19
Decks = (2* Rank) + 38


so if we look at a rank 400 ship,

the old optimal size was 419 decks (400 + 19)
and your sugested optimal size is 838 decks ((2*400) + 38)

good or bad ?, hard to tell
all SSB ships realy need to do is increase theire deck count +100% and install defence/weapons to increase theire stats
but they will still be SSB, but theire dammage cap wil also increase +100% from one day to the other, if this gets inplimented

I'm not a SSB build, but still think an increase in dammage cap like that will frack up a lot of work SSB players put into building theire ships,

so if you want to level the playing field, I still think Decreasing the dammage cap on large/huge ships would work better
if you at the same time combine it with critical hits that ignore dammage cap and do 1 to 2% of enemy hull (not including shields) in dammage, to help with the 500 to 1000 max dammage pr hit cap, vs 500K+ hull problem you run into with SSB ships at high rank.

I think the idea to simply use Rank rather than Rank/2 provides a disincentive to rank and play but at the opposite end of the spectrum.

For example, a Rank 2000 who has carefully constructed their ship would have to carefully consider whether ranking up could actually be making them relatively weaker.
Regardless of whether the damage cap is being reached, it is the multiplier by which the calculations are carried out, so damage per shot for some who are neither SSBs nor Slow rankers would increase considerably.

To ease pressure on young players against low rank/slow rank SSBs, my suggestion would be to add in a time played (or time played since reset where that is applicable) variable to the damage cap instead.

Something like:
Damage Cap = (Rank+19)/2 or Decks/2 or Days Played/2, whichever is higher.

• Wouldn't disadvantage many (if any) current high rank long-term players
• Would only affect a few mid rank slow rank SSBs slightly, with only a modest increase to damage cap (rather than doubling their damage taken per hit)
• Would make it considerably harder to freeze rank forever at low rank and farm noobs

not sure, Days Played/2 is a good cap Deigobene
problem is, if a player go inactive for some time, due work, vacation or no time to play
a cap like that one would only make the game harder for him when/if he starts up again

but it does hurt the sharks, that stick around at level 100 to 200 for months, if not years and does nothing but kill enemyships to gather badges, so it not all bad



if you are actualy playing the game, Days Played/2 hardly matters



and both my Rank and Deck caps are a higher then what a cap based on decks would give me

Ah bummer, yeah, hadn't considered long term inactives who might return :/
Was working solely off trying to minimise impact for long term active players while providing disincentive for the low level sharkies and trying not to completely nerf the active slow rank SSBs like Senator that do heaps of stuff.
Ideally would only count days you'd collected a daily reward or base pull, but that would be much more problematic I guess.

I agrey, but not sure Dan actualy tracks those 2 stats

Wrong. I addressed this issue and shown that SSBs will still have a hugely superior damage cap to everybody else, but the problem will be alleviated a little now.

actualy no you didnt....
you used a base of 30K attack vs 28K defence and a cap of 600 /1200/ 2000
but those numbers are wrong

most SSB ships use theire dammage cap as defence, and rarely bother instaling mutch defence
so what I'm looking at when I hit SSB ships is easily 2 to 5 * more attack on ship then they have defence

= I hit 60% to 80% of the cap most of the time, and still only get 300 to 1000 dammage pr hit


if you sudently increase theire optimal decsize by a factor 2, you give them space to instal more defence on ship
so presisly where the dammage actauly ends up after after this is hard to calcylate, as that depends on what they actualy put on those extra decks

at rank
200, you are looking at 219 extra space you can fill with ship modules
500, you are looking at 519 extra space you can fill with ship modules
1000, you are looking at 1019 extra space you can fill with ship modules

Trans-Entropy Drive - Mark III = size 102, Defense +820
Exergonic Inverter - Mark III = size 94 Defense +626

so if you sudently get 1000 decks you need to fill, you can easily increase your defence
(4 * 802) + (4 * 626) = 5784 extra defence

a bit more when you include
Velox Thruster Effect : Defense +5% (3 Active)
Cerulean Displacement Drive Effect : Playerdefense +4%
Merged DataNode Effect : Defense +4%
Auto-Evasion Node Effect : Defense_adaptation +3%
Trinity-Core Drive Effect : Defense_adaptation +8% (2 Active)
Cuniculus, Lepus Adjutant Effect : Defense +5%

5784 * 1.05^3 * 1.04 * 1.04 * 1.03 * 1.08^2 * 1.05 = 9135 extra defence from those 8 systems if you have those bonuses

for some SSB ships I hit, that a 33% increase in defence you need to factor in as well

but even with the extra defence, I'll proberly still end up hitting 60 to 80% of theire New dammage cap
= more or less a 100% increase in the dammage I do against them


but it not the dammage increase or extra decks they need to instal I see as a problem, it the time they spendt having only 300 to 600 decks, moving modules around depending on what they wanted to do at the time
increasing theire optimal size overnight, more or less makes the time they spendt doing that becourse they wanted to have SSB ships a wast of time......

Here's average damage on that rank 100 by the way.


Damage cap for a rank 1200 with matched attack/defense. I included where I would fall on this line, too (Hence rank 1200). This goes up as high as a ship with 8,000 decks.


Average damage for a rank 1200 with matched attack/defense. We see the same shape as for the rank 100, just with some higher numbers. Keep in mind that the average damage for a matched fight against my ship is still almost double the SUGGESTED cap for SSBs and I'm not even a LSB.



There is still a clear, large advantage here for SSBs if my proposed damage cap were to be introduced. It's just not quite as ridiculous as it currently is where it is practically impossible for a newcomer to the game to take on any one of the many SSBs lurking down at that rank

Fair point, but at the low ranks we're talking about newcomers going up against people who have ridiculous stats, for the rank, which includes defense because of their AP income (Android Helmsmen); so much so, in fact, that their defense probably ends up being much higher than the attack of anybody trying to fight them. At high ranks, defense modules become increasingly negligible in their contributions towards your defense anyway. Certainly a valid point for mid ranks and I will consider a rebuttal and do the numbers, but my concern for this thread is the lowest ranks of the game.

I think Darkmar is correct on a couple of major points. While i think some of the ssb benefit is way over the top, my main concern is still the suckage for the LSB. Nerfing damage to colossal galaxy destroyers by PT boats or from anyone really, more incentives adding modules, playing different styles and is somewhat more realistic in approach. Also any oversimplifed adjust to ssb cap seems like bait and switch for how they have built over time.

Prolly there should be a nip at both ends of the spectrum. Less silly damage to large ships purely becuase they are large, and more damage to no deck ships. Maybe just not as much as suggested in the OP. To me, the only means to ultimately accomodate a normalization has to involve how much things max based on either rank , decks, and/or time played. How you roll that wad together is a sticky wicket.

Also defense , to me, plays almost zero role in damage taken for many ssb. They have focused on attack and we all know adding decks for defense only hurts ships now. That won't change by raising ssb cap. They could use every added deck and my ship would still cap them. The difference is now i'd enjoy half the time to do so. And I'm only an average strength ship..really strong ships would drool.

It's really not that much of a change though. A factor of two, when they are taking an average of like 1/5 of the damage of other ships. 1/5 * 2 is still 2/5 the damage of other ships.

No doubt. And people like me would highly benefit from that change happening. But I'm playing devil's advocate. Totally agree with you that the benefit is too high for ssb. Also totally believe the ssb format has completely dominated all lower ranks and is killing game growth by bottlenecking ships at low ranks who dont help their legions outside of providing a warm body and a 'fixer' for base defense.

Maybe do what you suggest, but make defense more powerful in the calculations. You have the stat background, could you model out your change in tandem with perhaps a few shift points of how much defense might help in average damage taken? I think if ships could equivocate the ssb efffect through defense increase, that might be useful across all ranks. It would also make for a more clever ship build by making helmsmen more of a commodity. Right now the ssb need only add to to's-- they pretty much assume they WILL be capped by anyone worth being worried about...so they ignore defense. They also can ignore cloak, shields, and weapons.

Also, borrowing from other threads, scan and cloak should play a much more importrant role in damage. Cloak should help a LOT more on damage reduction and scan should give better odds of crits ...AND allow for say 150% of cap on crit hits. All of these in combination would make things a lot more fun --at least in my mind.