StarDestroyer.Net BBS

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/sin ... bs;summary
It looks like the first look at the first of the three Sins of a Solar Empire expantions, Entrenchment, have been released. I think it looks interesting anyone else have some thoughts?

Here's a thought - learn how to use English or fuck off you stupid little shit.

I've been amused by this expansion for some time, since it's basically just a whole bunch of stuff people wanted from day 1, but the devs said NO WAI GAME IS BALANCED and now they're charging for it. 'Pay to make turrets not suck and stop AI siege spam' is just fucking hilarious.

I anticipate Cov showing up to laugh like a schoolgirl about this.

Stark wrote:Here's a thought - learn how to use English or fuck off you stupid little shit.

I've been amused by this expansion for some time, since it's basically just a whole bunch of stuff people wanted from day 1, but the devs said NO WAI GAME IS BALANCED and now they're charging for it. 'Pay to make turrets not suck and stop AI siege spam' is just fucking hilarious.

I anticipate Cov showing up to laugh like a schoolgirl about this.

Ouch my first mistake I will do better next time

Jesus fucking christ.

Stark wrote:Jesus fucking christ.

He's Sarah Palin's retarded baby.

Speaking of retarded babies (as I often do) I'll finally be able to turtle in this game!

Will capital turrets be able to stop enemies casually walking through your systems or killing your taxable population? GEE I HOPE NOT THE DEVS SAID THAT WASN'T A PROBLEM LOL

Excellent, this will fix my biggest problem with the original game. True, they should have gotten this on day 1, but if a good game comes out of this I won't complain.

I shelved SoaSE in disgust because it was broken and not about to be patched. I think I'll wait for all three expansions and read up on the forums if they actually fixed the game before I throw good money after bad.

Oh Lordy, what to do when the romance been gone.

Stark wrote:I anticipate Cov showing up to laugh like a schoolgirl about this.

Well, well, well. It seems that their little internal testing mechanisms no longer are satisfactory for the rest of us. I'm not terribly suprised, and it is way past time. I think anyone could have seen this minor gap in the gameplay mechanics, but like a toddler, they've managed to wander out into traffic anyway.

A problem with Sins, notes Iron Clad, is that once you took your massive fleet on the offensive, this would allow a weaker enemy to circumvent your fleet and attack a poorly defended homeworld. It was very difficult to wage wars on multiple fronts, so the star base will allow you to move the battle lines in your favor. Should you choose to go on the offensive with a star base, you could, for example, construct it in an enemy's gravity wells. All of your enemy's resources would be devoted to destroying your star base, and you would be free to mobilize your fleet.

Know what I see in the future? A big fucking end-run around the Starbases. How hard is it to avoid these things? Do they do enough damage to kill a starship before it can leap into hyperspace again? If not then we'll get the leapfrogging bullfuckery of the original game. I have no reason, as an aggressor, to bother sieging your world if I can play "Sink the Bismark" and gut your little gem mines on my whistlestop tour of your space. What they need more than a big stationary target is a hyperspace blocker that actually does it's job. I assume, as part of the Starbase, there will at least be some kind of hyperspace suppressor that can't just be dinked out as you go.

Oh wait, Stark already covered this, dammit. Anyway, this was always the issue. Forcing an enemy into a fight was annoying, but nowhere near as annoying as the advantage of avoidance. What I see this as doing is just exacerbating the problem of defense, since these aren't purely defensive weapons--they can be deployed in a forward position. Furthermore, the big siege cannons can also be built forwards, so what seems likely is that a combination of starbase and siegecannon could be used to harass people furthermore, since a starbase will not be available until late in the game, far later than useful. When I played SoaSE my strategy was to create my first capital ship as soon as humanly possible--which was really goddamn fast--and then burn down as much of the enemy as I could. This is a remarkably good strategy, and the time you really need that Starbase is promply after the game starts, to allow you to expand and begin fighting without getting ganked. What they had better do is start you with a starbase, or give you a free one ala the Flagship. Capital craft are just too useful to be as cheap as they are, and a stationary turret that can be countered by capital craft just sounds like madness. What the fuck is the point then? Know what counters a starbase that kills 5 capital ships in a fight? A sixth capital ship. Sometimes balance means having no rock to beat the scissor. If someone spends 10 hojillion credits to make their defenses, their defenses deserve to be good. I grow tired of this needless parity! Small ships were useless before, now they are double-plus useless.

haard wrote:I shelved SoaSE in disgust because it was broken and not about to be patched. I think I'll wait for all three expansions and read up on the forums if they actually fixed the game before I throw good money after bad.

Hilariously the 1.1 patch is on it's third beta. It's been in beta for months and months, during which time they've pushed out the 'please pay for shit we denied was necessary because the game is totally balanced' 'microexpansion'.

So many people I know wanted to like this game, but it's so utterly broken.

I don't know what all the whining about defenses is, my defenses rarely ever failed. Enemy Capships? Frigate blobs usually ate them before they could get away if they tried to run...

*shrugs*

Of course, I haven't actually played it in some time...

Did you play against the AI or people? If against the AI, well, sounds like you were playing defensively. This is fine, but the way to highlight the problems with SoaSE were to play aggressively, and create vast swarms of capital craft--like fifteen or so--and just avoid the enemy frigate blobs completely. The way to get groups that large was to hit the capital tree fast and smash up the enemy as much as possible early on to delay their resourcing--and you would do that by avoiding their defenses. An enemy who spends time building defenses on their core, backfield worlds will have a defense gap near the front, or slowed expansion. Someone with active, mobile cap hordes (and supported by cheap and efficent units such as micro carriers) will be able to expand, capture more territory, set up more mines, and generally win the game.

Because of this, defenses usually were pointless. They didn't do enough damage fast enough to stop me from coming in and killing your research plants, or your trade depos or your mines, and then zoom away. If you divert resources to build ships then you're already losing the race, since I've been spending my money producing nigh unchallengable capital ship clusters and setting up big siege weapons to punish any world too close to me. When you're playing an AI, this easy. When you play a human, it's stupid easy. People can only put their mouse at one place at once, so you tie them up chasing your forces through their territory, and even if they take out the caps, the amount of money and time you make them waste is much, much more valuable in terms of the econ.

Furthermore, you're forgetting the corruptive effects of the Propaganda Towers. An aggressive, mobile enemy saves those space slots for speaker towers, which lets them dominate a wide ranging area and do a lot of cultural warfare that, along with harassment, makes it hard to control or advance territory.

Basically, whoever gets that upper hand can usually keep it, and can constantly act as a drain on the enemy economy. The key is caps early and caps often, with only using other ships as filler. Defenses can be set up, but are a secondary priority to cappies and expansion, because a broke enemy can't afford to build ships. Plus, an active, mobile foe making more money can also pay off the pirates and keep the focus on their enemies--further draining a player's ability to focus on the real tasks. Defenses, if they were more like Supreme Commander rock-solid defenses, would have made the game different. What they really need are more like D-Day defenses, where cracking a defensive strongpoint actually means something. As it is, there's no frigate force known to man that can stop my ten Dreadnaughts from flying from world to world, bombing your planetary resources, and then flying home. If I lose ONE or TWO of them, that's a bad run.

Commander 598 wrote:I don't know what all the whining about defenses is, my defenses rarely ever failed. Enemy Capships? Frigate blobs usually ate them before they could get away if they tried to run...

*shrugs*

Of course, I haven't actually played it in some time...

You'd probably be dead in five minutes in multi. Regardless, saying 'oh it never happened to me' is exactly why Ironclad sucks shit as a developer - people laid this out to them right after the game came out, and they denied it up and down because their friendly office games didn't expose them. Now they want you to pay to fix it? Fuck off and die.

All I had to say to those who have played multi (even a little bit) is 'lol maybe you can't clean their pop/mines in one pass now' and they all remembered why the game was unplayably broken. Hey Cov, guess what - the econ is still totally broken too. That's not really a problem either - I bet there's a MERCANTILE microexpansion in the offing. Remember the embargo victories in 100 seconds? lol.

OH NO PEOPLE ARE WHINING ABOUT OBVIOUS FLAWS IN AMATEURISH BROKEN GAMES

In truth, I know very little about SoaSE's econ, except that it is stupid and lame, and that my nation's main export was bullets. I always gamed the black market to an abhorrent degree, not just to pay off my pirate-bribing fetish but also to drive the price of stuff up high enough that it was too expensive for anyone else to buy. This is economically dangerous, but you need to think about it--the econ model operates somewhat hilariously like a goofy magic Stock Market:

During periods of prosperity and low combat, buy metal and crystals even if you don't need them, because money is pointless. Any spare cash should be fed to pirates as a money-sink or used to purchase gem and ore, driving up the prices artifically. Eventually you'll hit a time where things get rough--thankfully, you now have scads of metal and gems with which to buy things, and if you need money, just sell them back.

Every faction got econ bonuses, and since I shun any ship smaller than a small moon, research is basically irrelevent. Get, like, the two researches you need to get fighters. And then minmax if you can--some factions more than others can get a single effective weapon system upgraded real early--otherwise, crank up the econ research and continually upgrade your capital ship capacity. Soon you've got a stranglehold on the econ and your raiding fleets are everywhere. They can't advance into your territory because you have fucktons of defenses, and defenses ruin small ships just fine. Trading fleets are basically just overkill, and if you really get that late in the game you're just being mean and toying with them! I didn't actually know there was a "I have money-killed you!" victory condition. If there is, and I never even knew it, then this game sucks way more balls than I thought. After thoroughly bitchslapping Sword of the Stars and it's devteam around for a year, I was really hoping for a good version of the "space strategy" thing. Ah well. It's basically a discount title anyway, and in that vein, I can accept it being not so polished. Still... it's laughably unbalanced.

What the fuck are game developer qualifications, anyway? A degree from FullSail and a few flash games to prove you know how to do something completely irrelevent to actual game design? It is to laugh.

Covenant wrote:What the fuck are game developer qualifications, anyway? A degree from FullSail and a few flash games to prove you know how to do something completely irrelevent to actual game design? It is to laugh.

Somehow, the degree seems quite optional... As you would think they would cover balance theory SOMEWHERE in such a curriculum...