fixed for you
it's time to recognize, that only few old foxes are still around and each month they are less and less and really not many of them use the exploit of current damage formula not allowing critical hits (or similar).
I obviously agree with Shadeslayer, Malevolentia, Golgotha, Chade, DarkMar, Rambojr, yankee, PigsOnHigh ...
and there are dozens of threads where others players complain about existing damage cap formula.


But again, also obvious same nicks will advocate this damage cap formula again and again till others don't give up, stop to care, get bored, play less and less and eventually stop playing... How long is this issue here?
And how many other issues originally accepted as good solution were already altered/"nerfed" by GM?

THE GAME IS DYING OFF AND ONLY THING YOU CARE ABOUT IS YOUR CURRENT SHIP BUILD? THAT IS SHOWING ONLY THAT YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO ADAPT?!
And actually, speaking about lost work if several years being SSB is simple BULLS***, cause you can anytime add decks using the unused ship-bots that (almost) everyone is only hoarding up... and achive the new optimal value of decks as needed.

I prefer either solution like posted by DarkMar (extra 5 dmg per each attack module installed) or per comments from Golgothat and partially PigsOnHigh ( formula based mainly on attack, defense, cloak and scan - scan and cloak is only from modules thus require plenty of decks).
Not changing formula what should not be called exploit, is logically not possible. If a big ship with 60+weapon modules would have extra 300 dmg per hit, that would be 300+ dmg cap of SSB when attacked.
If it would be dmg cap value multiplied by scan vs cloak, again we would move above the current SSB dmg cap.

Reasonable people w SSB would not leave GL, they would only do some math, add few ship-bots to achieve new optional ship size. However the difference between tiny ships and colossal destroyers would be more realistic than now. Also the description of scan and cloak would not be misleading

Already gave my opinion regarding a solution that might get people out from under their halcs (over-cap crits and better, repeatable PVP rewards).

Regarding the LSB/SSB thing: anybody who wants to fly a big freakin' beast of a ship is essentially punished for it by the fact that attack/defense/shield/hull/energy modules become redundant (and sometimes expensive) filler over time as you add crew. This is obviously a big issue, even if only an aesthetic one, because it forces everybody who wants to be truly "elite" into a certain mold. So at the very least, it makes ship customization supa boring. Basic success is already determined almost entirely by Artifact Production, now with a bit of Mining on the side; it would be great for the game if there were more than one ideal option for ship design. I am not holding out any hope we will ever actually see such options, but it's great to dream about.

yes, pongo suggested some lsb stuff long ago that would at least intrigue some people and/or give reasons to use them.

I cannot tell you how much I PERSONALLY would love cloak to play a real role in things...but in fairness it should do something more. So should scan. Scan limitation is the bane of the ssb for swapping and daily ship use. Let scan do something more than help find cloaked planets.

Hull is a joke too. Where the eff i am bolting on all these brackets. Is my ship a big trash heap of galactic duct tupe and pressboard? Hey look, we found some more iron, lets attach that chain link fence to the left wing. (max mad in space)

How bout a hull detioriorating bomb? Plant it on hull of enemy ship. Hull drops 10% an hour for 5 hours..cannot be removed...make it a craftable item or repeatable mission one with some expense. Let's people plant the doom then come back to ninja a ship.

How bout a radiation bomb that prevents shield restoration for 5 minutes? Kaboom!! Better kvt fast lil johnny.

Heck why not put caps on arti usage with cooldown? Each arti used takes up x amount of timer. You pass the cap, you cant use crap. MAke tm's and repair nanos and everything apply to this.

Make Repair Nano's work over time instead of instant, something like it repairs 10% of your max hull every 20 seconds (or every 10 seconds). Same with shield restorers..

I really think we just need a new tier of research mods, each giving % boosts to current stats, with defense dropping damage taken up to 50% and attack mods adding up to 50%, keep them the same size as the current maxed mods. Researched guns and defense are a joke. Even with my meager ap/hr and rank point spending, it's hard to justify adding mods that boost attack by 1/4 and dramatically increasing the size of my ship, or adding decks for defense when I know there are players that hit me that will hit near the new cap anyway.

I dont see it that way Pongoloid, I knew perfektly well what I was doing when I increased my deck count to 7000
and I would want to have my ship any other way...
I can more or less pick my own fights, and if I dont want to fight a SSB ship I can simply bump if of scanner and move on to other tagrets that cost less time and energy to kill...
and by the time I reach rank 7000, even my ship will eventualy be SSB, just like every other ship at that rank will be, as theire is bacikly nothing left to install

but at the same time, it not hard to see what is slowly happening to the game....
old players restart as SSB builds or simply quit, and New players doest stand a chance against restarted players that know how to build SSB ships and play the game.

Critical hit formula:

Ignores damage cap, deals damage equivalent to... What? Rank? 2*Rank? 5*Rank? That's 10,000 damage to a rank 2,000 player.

500 damage to a rank 100 player? I've got very little data in this region, unfortunately, so I don't know what's quite right but based on my very few data points it seems to be about 3000 hull for a rank 100 player.

We can discuss damage later.

Critical hit chance = MIN [ (SCAN / 20*CLOAK)*100% , 10% ]

For equal scan vs cloak this gives us a 5% chance of performing a critical hit. For anybody with at least twice as much scan as there is cloak, there is a 10% critical hit chance. You would never be able to exceed a 10% critical hit chance.

Half as much scan as someone has cloak? 2.5% chance of a critical hit.

A quarter? 1.25% chance of a critical hit.

Looking at Koolaid with his whopping 21311 cloak, I would be looking at, using my usual scan stat;

(7864/(20*21311))*100% = 1.85% chance of a critical hit, or 1 in 54 hits being a critical hit.

How does this sound?

With regards to the damage dealt... Well, against a rank 2000 player 10,000 damage isn't a huge amount but I'm not really concerned with the higher ranks to be perfectly honest. Against myself, 6000 damage to me is less than 1/20th of my hull and shields.

2500 damage to a rank 500? That's a pretty decent chunk. Out of 20,000 hull+shield that's 1/8th.

50 damage to a rank 10? That's... That's pretty huge. That's like 1/5th of their hull.

I actually quite like this idea so far.

Maybe it could be a flat out % of total hull+shields though, the same as Gemini Cannons and Gammacron traps? It needs to be reasonably high though, in my opinion. Not 50%, but maybe 10-20%.

I have a solution for ALL of this bickering. Just haven't had time to type it all up. I can even hear all the "Darth you're friggin crazy!" posts already. Maybe I can get it done tonight while I'm watching RAW and doing laundry...

just check, still this text show up, when once move cursor over ship scan/cloak:
"Increase the chance your ship will critically strike in combat" (Scan)
"Reduce the change for a critical strike in combat" (Cloak)

- what we ask for, should be already in place.. for long time.. another proof, that something is wrooong.


100% true



I would rather like to see also 0 chance of critical hit. Critical hit should be available only once the attackers scan is higher the targets cloak. In opposite case I would see no prob to have missed/dodged attack. Something new in PvP for GL but common elsewhere.
In theory, we could have SSB ship with only cloak on to help them hide
so I would go for something like critical hit is whichever higher of:
A) cap 5% of target's hull+shields or (min 20 hits, could be moved to min 50 hits = 2% cap)
B) dmg * [1+(targets decks * RNG value)/(scan- cloak)] ... I leave this for any correction needed.
My aim is to keep on mind small ship is small target (might fast partially/fully dodge with luck/RNG)
Locked target (scan>cloak) should usually do critical hit with extra dmg (max double dmg hit).
Obviously if scan = cloak, normal hit.
Scan<cloak you shoot blind... ["Your weapons almost hit the target"]

Then we could have PvP incentive like module(s) decreasing/increasing the % cap of target's hull and/or the chance of critical hit.

"dmg" to be calculated separately
RNG between 1-10 (or different, per need to balance)



Anyhow, it should be tested in separate battle tab, indeed. So we could test for a whiel if needed some alternation in formula as well.

Your percentage chances actually mirror exactly what my suggestion for this was, all those moons ago. Its probably a bias from Dungeons and Dragons and other d20 games where a natural 20 is a critical, but it works!

it IS going to be a lot harder to find the correct damage for crits though - currently with no shields and no defenses i take 400+ hits to kill. A 5% total hull damage critical therefor would hit for about the equivalence of 20 hits on me.
If we assume that they have a 10% crit chance ( I KNOW percentage chance doesnt work like this, but lets keep it simple) every 10 hits is the equivalent of 30, so i go down in 130 attacks instead of 400 against someone with double my cloak in scan. As you can see, even a modest 5% hull damage does massive, massive, differences to someones durability. I also suggest it only counts hull, not shield, and that critical hits bypass shields and hit hull directly. Otherwise, it is suboptimal to have shields on your ship, as they cause you to take MORE damage, not less. It also allows team kills to be more effective vs defends, as their hull and shields can go down simultaneously via crits.

This is ONE datapoint. Probably consider it the "high level" version.

The main issue I see is that it is possibly too strong at high levels, and too weak at low levels. Possibly I would suggest a critical hit does ((3xAttackersRank) + (3% Defenderhull))

This gives a base damage number for level 100's to actually be able to kill those small ships who do not yet have much hull, while letting big ships drop high level hull players fast. And yeah, 3% was a number chosen without testing, consider it an idea not a hard suggestion.

Yes to 10% max critical, simply because otherwise bombing someones cloak to 0 means 100% crit rates fast

Another bandaid would be to make T-Plasma Gemini Cannon's work on attack, not just defense. Make it a mission, or find a npc to start a mission chain to enable it.

While I can understand the thinking that led to this, keep in mind the primary issue we are wanting to solve is the SSB feeding frenzy at low levels - Gemini cannons are as attack % are a high level only ability - not to mention it would be ridiculously overpowered

That being said, I would really like some other people to work with DarkMar's idea. It would work at low levels as well, because a damage cap of 100 would seriously be affected by a larger ship shooting with 5+ guns using his idea. If we had scan and cloak crits as well, that gives a third effective combat option - lots of guns, small ship, or lots of scan. (though that is more rank 100+, given the research and energy needs)

I'm not sure anyone but Dan really knows whether or not Crit hits are already calculated according to scan/cloak.
I have heard people say that increased scan improves their rate of crit hits and I have no reason to doubt their claims.

If we assume the damage per shot equation on the wiki is basically right (which on my testing seems pretty close), perhaps the highlighted area already incoporates scan/cloak in the calculation, rather than a simple Random number from 0.6 to 1.666:

Damage per shot = tanh( attack*(random(0.6 to 1.666)) / (defense * 5) ) * damagecap

If this is the case, maybe any number above a certain point could simply trigger a crit hit function.
Then it could be as simple and scalable as adding another modifier to the damagecap portion of the equation, so that a normal non-crit hit was 1*damage cap, while a crit hit could be 2 or even 3 times the cap.

More like every ship starts out like a Tardis from Doctor Who. Capable of holding infinite crew regardless of size. But, for some strange reason, the decision was only made to limit equipment, not crew, so there are no Death Stars out there. So the biggest problem should be the line for the toilets. On SSBs this problem should be greatly amplified, so most of their crew should actually be unavailable for attack or defense at any particular time. So maybe their crew "effectiveness" should be reduced as their crew increases and their deck size remains static....

Also weird is the idea that the number of crew affects the attack or defense of a starship. You get X decks, pile them with a fixed amount of weapons and defensive equipment with fixed capabilities, but somehow the attack and defense go up forever as crew size does but with no more guns or defense mods. Wouldn't mind seeing an analogy on how that would happen in the normal sci-fi universe. Maybe there's one posted in another thread somewhere that I haven't come across, but can't read everything....

Regarding crits and evaluation for what its worth, my working cloak is 21311 and scan 12066.. same at time of my data collection.



Ok, so in my empirical data collected, out of ten hits applied to each ship, and same received----i tend to find 1-3 hits fairly higher than average per ship.

For example on damage I dealt to Sen hung, 7 or the ten hits were ranging from 190-270, 3 of the hits were well into the mid 400's. Suggesting either crit hit or very upper end RNG or both. When i compared the acutal damage dealt versus the ave though these were only 1.4 to 1.5 times the average...seemingly high end 'normal' hits.

By contrast, against golgotha i had 2 very outlying values for hits dealt. They registered at 1.7 and 2.01 x the average...which seems indicative of actual crit values. Also those 2 hits were both double or more than the other 8 hits (which were all clustered around the same value of 217).

OF the ten ships i sampled.. 10 hits dealt to each...so 100 hits (nice round #). Four of those came in at better than 1.65x average damage versus the ship in question. Interestingly 2 of the four were on golgotha and 2 on alarona. If theory holds, they have much less cloak than some others.

On the receiving side..meaning what i took from other ships...i had ZERO results come in over 1.45 and only a few come in even close to that.

While this is far less than convincing, it is interesting. I should be the toughest ship in the galaxy to crit, if basis is cloak on receiving party.

or should we simply say (SCAN / CLOAK) * 5% (with a max of 10%) to make it easy
would work for me as the chance


but unless you make the dammage something like 1% of enemy ships hull, it realy wont make mutch difrence

3* normal dammage would basickly "only" give you 2 extra hits on a critical,
if we presume 10% chance and say 3* normal dammage crits on a ship it would take 600 hits to kill,
you would basickly get 12 hits every time you hit the ship 10 times, that would reduce the 600 hits to around 500 hits

sure that would help with the limited dammage cap vs unlimited hull problem, but just not enougth

lol, yeah I was serious, but DarkMar rightly pointed out the problems with hiatus which I had completely overlooked originally and which I quickly put my hand up for

Even so, as Mal pointed out, the idea was for the vast majority to be unaffected while targeting the problem of low rank slow rank ships preying on unsuspecting noobs.
Given one of the problems people wanted to address was long term low rank players bullying up the kiddies pool, I thought Days Played/2 was a reasonable way to target them.
The suggestion really wasn't aimed at nerfing anyone except the targeted problem area, like a failsafe.

Golgotha, for instance, is a relatively leisurely ranker but at 2050 decks or so would be at Day 2050 before the Days Played/2 variable played any part at all in his damage cap.
One of the most famous of all high rank MSBs/Moving towards SSB could happily take a couple of months off and come back to exactly the same damage cap.
Anyone with more decks than that would have significantly longer, even taking into account a year or two away from the game doing nothing.

Admittedly, someone like Senatorhung would experience a modest increase in damage cap from current 499 to 627.
I suspect that would make little difference, even to one of the most famous of purposeful rankers.
As a mindful and clever player he would undoubtedly offset that wisely.

At the targeted end of the spectrum, a Rank 250 SSB that had played for 1000 days would have a damage cap of 500 rather than 134.5.
Their drastic advantage over new players would be eliminated, and they would simply rank up or add decks.
Either way, it would offer a little more protection for the new blood that is so important to GL's future.

Regarding hiatus/military service/pc downtime/internet connections/alien abductions etc etc, I do understand the concern but I think the vast majority of players just wouldn't be affected.
A whole year off is, at the very most, an increase of 182.5 and that would only ever occur if they were a strict SSB regarding Rank, Decks and Days Played when they went on hiatus for a year.

I suspect there would be very few ships where either their rank or their decks did not play the defining role, rather than their Days Played and time away.

My worry with making the critical hit *too* awesome is that they could end up making life too easy for attackers when targeting the less accomplished ships, rather than being used to take down a 600-hit target.

Your data agrees with my own personal observations, from looooong ago. Crit does exist, and it works exactly like you say. I still have charts from attack runs on noticifer and mento where i recorded a hundred hits with and without cloak, to see the difference.... Shame they are on a laptop that doesnt function properly.

My cloak is currently a tiny 3k. I give you full and complete permission to run tests on my ship at any time - i certainly do not care if i get killed for science. Send me a PM if you need me to add or remove cloak/scan, I can do it.

The issue of course, is that while these crits exist, they just do not do enough to deal with the fact that even doing max damage to a damage cap, just means you hit a damage cap. Most of the people who kill me bomb my defence to 0 anyway, and lets them hit it as well