[UPDATE] Sins vs Entrenchment Changes

[Stark]

Since laughing about how fundamentally broken Sins was, I thought it'd be fun to talk about how it's changed in the most recent patch paid expansion.

First, siege frigates and planetary bombardments in general. In Sins a few bombardment ships or caps could lay waste to a planet, regardless of hitpoints, in a few minutes and kill every taxpayer in the first salvo. The AI loved them and a quick rush with sieges could decide a battle. They tried to balance this by first making bombardment ships expensive and then making them do less damage, but this just lent more impetus to the 'caps only lol' strategy.

In Entrenchment, planets take damage WAY slower from all sources, and even an unfortified 1500-hp asteroid colony will last more than a few minutes under 3-4 ship bombardment; I was able to move my entire fleet 4 full jumps (including sublight transit of each leg) before such a colony was destroyed by 3 siege ships. However, the AI now actually avoids turrets with their frigates (which boils down to 'fly a wide circle around the jump line and approach the planet from an unconventional angle) which makes it less trivial to just mob the fuck out of the avenue of approach with turrets.

Secondly, the fucking retarded and utterly broken 'armour type' and 'damage type' system. As noted in the other thread, it meant that flak guns could rip missile ships to pieces, but the giant space lasers on capital ships couldn't. The guns on scouts were actually the best dps against some types of unit. Ships had an 'armour' rating, which WAS NOT THE ARMOUR TYPE, and the effect of this number was never explained. They actually had to release a counter diagram to actually inform people how this retarded and unnecessary system worked.

In Entrenchment, while it's still present (the changelogs talk about changes to the armourtypes as before), it's FAR less noticeable. You no longer win with huge swarms of LRMs. Caps are no longer near-impotent against small ships. It's not perfect - it still takes way too long to finish some fights - but it's way less annoying and glaring.

Defences have obviously recieved the most attention. In Sins, defences were only really useful in giant quantities (unless the AI parked it's bombarment group near a turret) and there were very few upgrades available. In Entrenchment, aside from the introduction of mines and starbases, the other structures are now more useful and versatile. Because Ironclad can't balance jack shit, the TEC have the best new defence upgrades and the Lesbians have the most ridiculously unbalanced. TEC Hangars can now be upgraded to possess flak guns, the turrets can add LRM packs and lategame a giant long-range ability, and their starbases are biased towards trade and toughness. The Lesbian base is obviously a fighter spamfest, but also has a bunch of synergies with the beam turrets (beam turrets can stack shield buffs now, so a cloud of them + starbase = lololololol). The Zerg starbase fucking MOVES (although it can't jump) and is set up for direct, captial-ship style combat. Each race's mines are a bit different; the Zerg have a minelayer that builds mines for money and can be upgraded with 'gravity mines', the TEC build them from the tactical menu once researched, and the Lesbians have a new type of fighter that is deployable as mines (making their hangars even more flexible unbalanced.

However, the big ideas in Sins (ie slowness, market, pirates etc) never really worked. The game is slower than a fast RTS, but nowhere near as slow as a game like Kohan. The market is basically irrelvant and regardless of demand you'll buy for 350-500 and sell for 200-250. The pirates are WAY less annoying, but the whole bounty thing is still a bit of a nag (although they're easily turned off). The addition of specific cruisers for anti-structure work (artillery ships basically) makes cracking the pirate base pretty easy midgame.

In the sphere of enemy AI the game has seen the most dramatic improvements. The game now actually HAS AI, for instance. In one battle, I was blowing up an enemy starbase with artillery and they moved their fleet in to intercept me. I dropped a ping on the system, and my ally jumped into a nearby enemy system and started wrecking the place. The enemy fleet went over there to deal with them, letting me blow up the starbase. My ally then decided to retreat, having been heavily damaged by the enemy, and I jumped over there to assist - arriving just as my allies ships left. Expecting this to go badly (with my fleet outnumbered and out of antimatter/shields) I was surprised when my allies' fleet jumped right back in, bringing it's most spaceworthy ships and all their carriers to the party. As the battle progressed (we held the enemy fleet between our two forces), the ally actually build robotics cruisers and bought them to the system to repair my damaged capital ships and used their own capital powers to recharge my shields and disrupt the enemy fighters. Needless to say, nothing like this would EVER happen in Sins.

It's a paid-for patch, but it's only $10 and I'd recommend anyone that was disappointed in Sins should give it another go. With Bailknight's graphics mod, of course... the basic effects are still hideous.

[Darth Onasi]

My main problem with the game is that the AI still cheats on any difficulty, and can pull a super mega ultra fleet out of it's ass while I'm still constructing my second cap ship.

[White Haven]

Huh, interesting. I hadn't been following Entrenchment at all, but it sounds worth poking at.

[Tanasinn]

This actually sounds quite interesting. $10 isn't too bad, either. The heads-up is appreciated.

[Stark]

My main problem with the game is that the AI still cheats on any difficulty, and can pull a super mega ultra fleet out of it's ass while I'm still constructing my second cap ship.

Work on your early game. I can outmass the enemy on hard and I don't even focus on rushing or military early on. One you hit the 18m mark of OMG FREE MONEIZZZ it is of course impossible to be outnumbered.

[Stark]

Something else that may have been visible in the screenshots is the much less rigid fire arcs. Particularly on the lesbian ships, all weapons with LOS will fire, not just the 'facing' battery. This makes the unevenly armed ships mch more useful or visually interesting - a Kol will now actually engage half a dozen targets instead of largely being idle.

[SylasGaunt]

I noticed that when I picked it up today. It's nice watching a couple of Kol's warp in and start firing in all directions when they exit in the middle of a frigate group.

Haven't gotten to try all three sides yet but I did fight a couple of the Vasari's mobile stations as the TEC. If what Stark says about the Advent is to be believed this should be hilarious considering the TEC station can dump out 14 damn fighter squadrons if it's built that way.

[Stark]

Remember that the fighters on a lesbian base can be self-deploying mines, thus giving those bases a lot of resource-free flexibility (especially for souring retreats when combined with the starbase's natural 'jump out damage' effect).

[Hotfoot]

Remember that the fighters on a lesbian base can be self-deploying mines, thus giving those bases a lot of resource-free flexibility (especially for souring retreats when combined with the starbase's natural 'jump out damage' effect).

Resource free? They cost resources to deploy, you know.

[Stark]

I'm pretty sure building fighters costs resources, even though it's automatic. Glad you could participate in the discussion, though.

[Hotfoot]

No, I mean, deploying the minefield from the Advent fighter base costs money. When you hover over the ability to deploy, you can see the cost.

[Stark]

LOL Yeah, and building them in the first place costs money (at least it did at some point, it might just cost antimatter now), so they're not free anyway. I haven't even experimented enough to work out if number of fighters completed in squad = number of mines (which it doesn't seem to). I just think it's awesome that you own the game and can't make any commentary beyond 'omg lesbian mines cost money hurf durf'.

[Hotfoot]

What commentary do you want me to make? That's it's still ass-slow? I'll get back to you when I've done more than small map trials.

[SylasGaunt]

So I checked and an Advent starbase setup with maxed hangar space can deploy 20 damn squadrons of fighters or bombers. I stuck two of those into the sun of my home system on one game. Anything bigger than a scout ship that warped in got zerged to death in short order.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Huh, I was under the impression you could only deploy one per well... That is a little insane if not...

[Stark]

The best part about stars is that everyone moves slowly and if you're positioning it defensively (to stop someone jumping to your star or to another system) it's easy to plop it down and force anyone to drive past it really, really slowly and then take 30% damage when they leave.

Sadly the AI can't handle starbases, and they're much easier to destroy than they should be. Oh well.

[Darth Onasi]

I like plopping a base outside a wormhole, that and a small garrison can blast the ass off any invading fleet that used to use wormholes to invade my planets.
TEC bases are especially broken in non-planet wells thanks to being able to manufacture frigates and cruisers.

[White Haven]

Was playing a big 5v5 game over the weekend, enough allied AIs to generate some pretty beefy fleets, so it really got me to work on my defensive doctrine and such. Sadly the solution I finally evolved never got tested, because by them they were so beaten they couldn't muster an attack. Made all the resources I'd shoveled into frontline fortifications feel somewhat silly in hindsight.

[Darth Onasi]

Yeah front lines can shift very fast in this game, and suddenly that fortress world you had just beefed up due to constant raids becomes a backwater due to your own or other's conquests.
Still they're always nice to fall back on if your current front is compromised.

[Tanasinn]

I haven't bought Entrenchment yet but decided to play a bit with the 1.1 patch and Bailknight's mod until I did. Followed the instructions, mod showed up in the list, no problems...except that the mod doesn't seem to be changing the visual effects at all. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

[JointStrikeFighter]

Are you sure you got the entrenchment compatible version?

[Tanasinn]

I don't have Entrenchment.

[Stark]

The Entrenchment compatible version is ALSO the version you need for the latest versions of Sins. i was using that version before I bought Entrenchment, and once I got Sin-E I just moved it to the new folder.

[Nephtys]

So I checked and an Advent starbase setup with maxed hangar space can deploy 20 damn squadrons of fighters or bombers. I stuck two of those into the sun of my home system on one game. Anything bigger than a scout ship that warped in got zerged to death in short order.

A single Kol could flak them all to death in a burst or two.