New version of my VASARI mod is up

and who is your source?

blair? blair says he will make the marginally stronger and marginally more expensive, which will not make them any more powerful, neither of which is significant, neither of which I would classify as much of a change.

you lose!

I have faith in Blair, just look at the amazing job he and the IC crew did on game speed! <3

Normal speed is fun now and FAST speed is AMAZING

blair promised you no miracles, thank god because that could ruin the game.

It was the ai of course, but this still has merit.

I killed four capital ships with a marauder and seven(four left when I was done too) skirmishers. Two dunov's, a sova, and a kol.

It's amazing what you can do when the big guys don't get to fire till their escorts are dead, and then only get to shoot at you till you want to leave, at which point you blast out of there faster than their frigates can move, your entire fleet easily retreating. Killed the poor bastards planet twice while doing it, and built a secondary fleet while keeping the ai thinned out to just a few frigates the entire time. Vasari can run away from anything, and they can chase down anything too. Some of you(multianna for instance) really need to think outside of the box a little. These guys are the kings of mobility, even before phase gates. I'm still pretty sure I'd lose to myself, no shield regen abilities in the bunch, and only the carrier can actively repair other ships on the move to real effect. They are not freebees though, they are godlike tactical strikes that can get in, get out, get back in, get out again, rinse, repeat... Phase gates are game over, they don't become balanced with them, they go from a little weak to god almighty accidentally stepping on a bug.

And ignore the frigging pirates already and look at the maps a little. Both ai sides are getting creamed by them, the TEC are just getting creamed a little less. They've seriously cut back on the defensive structures, so they get floored whenever there isn't a capital ship close enough to defend. The pirate fleets are almost always larger than the ai fleets are. Going squishy by pirates because there isn't a single turret, repair platform or hanger in the entire galaxy does not make a side weak.

guess you were right about their intentions schod.

something slightly different though. everyone has said that phase gates are very powerful and they are, they effectively tilt the balance of the game. thats maybe a bit too much influence for one tech. maybe, while bringing it down in tech level, you could also reduce its effectiveness, say by making phase travels a bit longer. then you still have the effect, but its not quite that strong and the difference between having them and not having them is not so horribly marked. also, to compensate, add a tech to nullify that nerf ( one already exists at lvl 12 or something. just another at lvl 9 say to bring it up to what it can do now in vanilla mode.)

another idea: is there a tech to speed up normal phase travel for vasari ( or in gravity for that instance)? that way you could have the mobility bonus even a bit earlier, again making the race at least a bit less dependent on that one technology. maybe they're even superfast as is, need to play'em more, psychoak reported something along those lines. just an idea.

I like those ideas, they fit well with the Vasari and would make them a little more balanced early on

I dont know about in grav well speed bonuses, but the civ 5/7 phasegate idea sounds good to me.

Vasari armor upgrades decrease the effect of gravity(translation, speed and acceleration increase), the marauder has a gravity reducing ability for nearby units. With a marauder, you can get anything in and out of enemy territory, even the colony capship. The armor upgrades by themselves aren't super effective, but even just the first two gives you an edge at a 3 weapons lab req.

As far as I can see you are one person out of at least 10. 10% is not a good marketing figure.

I'm saying you guys pooped out and threw a temper tantrum when it wasnt exactly like you wanted, 90% of the general populace isnt like that.

I was actually fine.



Yes, your evidently high level of social knowledge and charisma totally allows you to know that.

What most people want is the protoss approach to power: strength in individual units, capable of taking down multiple opponents. What Schod and I are seeing in the Vasari is power in mobility and (for lack of a better way to phrase it) "interference". Vasarin power doesn't come from their ability to take down several enemy ships while going toe-to-toe, it comes from the ability to move their forces between points quicker (mobility) and screw around with the enemy (phase out, the cruisers, other things). Also a little bit of intelligence there too -- in the military "I know what your doing" sense.

The Advent could go another direction, though I'm not creative enough to think of another dynamic. Perhaps the Advent could focus a lot more on screwing around with the enemies ability to fight -- like their "take over an enemy frigate" ability would suggest. Sowing confusion by randomizing enemy IFFs for a few seconds might be fun... cutting communications to a star system (effectively, for as long as your running the "embargo" style ability that planets fleet logistics is reduced by 30/60/90%... )



The devs haven't confirmed anything about major that I've seen (though I'm still digging through the backlog...) A minor rebalance towards strength in individuals, yes. The kind of radical ones you guys want? No.

So the devs need to figure out how to make it a lot clearer that the Vasarin advantage lies in mobility.

I think they tried to by the fact that they nearly doubled the amount of area they have given for sub light movement around planets. To a Vasari player this could me the ability to completly ignore any heavily fortefied planet.

I can see it now, lvl 15 mil, competing empires spontaneously lose sight and control of fleets in a random gravity well every 2 minutes
  

Oh nasty, NASTY! Too OP, but nasty!

I don't know.. I've played several MP games now, and once a Vasari player gets past the initial hurdle of a slow starting economy/limited fleet points, they can actually become protoss-like. Because they start with 30% more base shield/hull (I believe that's the number Blair gave), some hp/shield upgrades give a bigger return than TEC ships allowing them to last quite a bit longer than their TEC counterparts. In that regard, it's much like the Protoss.. it's not that they did overwhelming damage, it's that they could stay alive longer to dish it out, which is more or less how the Vasari are around the mid-game. And towards the end, they can steamroll pretty efficiently really without worrying too much about mobility.

Part of the problem is (and I know Yarlen addressed it) is that a lot of the techs that give them the mobility they're supposed to have are pretty high up in the tech tree, and for most of the small/mid-sized games, they really can't take advantage of these strengths. This goes for cruisers too, it's fairly rare to see the 7-9 lab cruisers in wide usage in the smaller games.

It might actually suit the Vasari a bit better to thin their numbers a little more (70 fleet points is 10 Skirmishers to 14 Cobalts, and with tech 2 research the cobalts would be slaughtered by the skirmishers) and increase their firepower while decreasing the survivability. Combined with granting them their mobility techs a little earlier I think this will make them more of a hit-and-run and get-in-get-out-fast to accomplish your objective race than they are now. Basically, they will have even fewer numbers and die faster, so you would need to do your thing fast before you get overwhelmed. Since most ships can't target multiples, this would mean even though they have superior firepower they could be easily overwhelmed by TEC numbers, so you really would not be able to go toe to toe with a TEC fleet without a massive fleet of your own (which would cost much more in resources and fleet points than the TEC).

I got it that you two saw mobility as their main strengh and one decent look at their tech tree told me the same. I'm not so sure though why the one excludes the other.

a very good idea imo came from annatar in that he said increase in firepower rather than survivabilty would make individual ships more powerful while still supporting the mobility thing. and of course any increase in ships stats has to be compensated by a cost increase. in any case, the more I think of it, the more I'm actually good with them, provided we do see some of that rebalancing blair promised. so far, the uniqueness comes into play just too late.

ah, and another idea, since Schod liked the others: since the vasari are good at phase gates, give them a stargate. high lvl tech, upgrade to phasegates, lets you travel to any other stargate, so its works just like its primitive cousins, exept over stars. so no need to go via stars, send your reinforcements directly. a bit overpowered probably, but worth thinking about.

OPedness

yeah, but they must collapse one of their Terran planets into a black hole to get it

That would be a SuperGate

But then that would let you shove fleets to other star systems Since we don't have different galaxies here..

Either that, or make it really expensive in terms of tactical points -- a 20 point "monster" isn't something your likely to build just anywhere.

Wait, I thought the supergate was kind of a joke, not a serious suggestion

well, it wasnt all that unserious (i.e. I didnt make a joke here), but it will need a lot work to make it not OP. if you have it take so many tac slots that you can barely build anything else there, it becomes a risky thing and a bit harder to defend.

btw does anyone know what happens to a vasari fleet when its gate is destroyed while in transit? would be funny if the complete fleet were destroyed, would make the tech not so ridiculously strong.

But it's still not going to make it into release, since it'd be a brand new thing and they said they don't have time for it, so

Well, when the destination gate is destroyed nothing happens -- they finish jumping as per the usual.