PPB Rebalance Poll

[Phoenix-D]

"If anything we should be leaving the PPB's alone and talking about making the MB's a little stronger. Although early on the MB's do have an advantage. It's jsut that the PPB catch up fair;y quickly. So perhaps they are jsut more of an early game weapon."

If they're just an early game weapon.. why bother? The PPB is more effective and costs the same, plus skips shields.

Doesn't factor into any of the *other* weapons (torps, WMG/ripper/incin, grav hellbore) either..and I think they'd end up on the wrong end of the scale.

EDIT:
"I do however think that level 6 phased shields need to be at least as strong as level 5 non phased shields."

Level 5 phased: 375 points
Level 5 normal: 300

Doesn't go to 6.

Phoenix-D

[ May 30, 2002, 03:47: Message edited by: Phoenix-D ]

[Phoenix-D]

Running some of my own tests in the simulator, same ship configs. 18 APB, 12 PPB. Strategy: default optimal weapons range.

APB: 0 won
PPB: 9 won (lost 7, 0, 1, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2)
Ties: 1 (APB: 13L PPB 8L)

that's with the APBs as player 1.

With APBs as player 2:
APB: 1 won (lost 4)
PPB: 9 won (lost 1, 4, 2, 4, 2, 1, 5, 3, 3

overall: APB wins 1, PPB wins 18, 1 tie.

this may be a case of the simulator being jacked, I'll try and run some real-world tests tommarow.

Phoenix-D

[Andrés]

I think I found the solution to our problem!

Original Problem:
PPB seems to be unbalanced, being very cheap to research and comparable or superior to the strongest weapons, such as APBs that at their highest level cost almost 6 times PPBs at their highest level.

Opposite positions in the discussion were.
a- it is one of the few late game weapons left. Don't touch it. If any change needs to be made, just increase the research cost.
b- weapon must be weakened. And it must be reduced to a "support" weapon role. Reducing damage, increasing size or reload rate are just different ways to achieve the same result.

To solve the question if PPBs should be a main weapon or only a support weapon, I went back to SE3, and found that PPBs were a MAIN weapon in SE3.

IMHO this entire problem was originated when weapons were converted from SE3.
In SE3, weapons (or any other component BTW) couldn't have different tonnage. Weapons could only be balanced by changing their damage and reload time.
A good balance was achieved and you had a good palette of different interesting weapons.
When weapons were copied from SE3 into SE4, they were assigned different tonnage values, while damage and range were simply scaled up in the same way for all weapons.
That's when SE3 balance was lost, damage rating of "heavy" weapons was lowered while that of "light" weapons was increased.

Proposal for a quick "balance mod": make tonnage of all weapons equal, say 30 or 40 kt.
Suddenly many "forgotten" weapons such as Torpedoes, Wave-Motion, Graviton Hellbores, Incinerator Beams are back among the highest damage weapons, and there is not a weapon far above the rest.
I think we can have SE3 balance back this way, and remove the unbalance I intuitively noticed since the first time I played SE4, but I didn't actually recognize until now.

You should be a little more careful with some weapons that were not in SE3, since some can grow too weak or too strong.
But there are A LOT of different late game options.

If you want I can show you some numbers to help you see my point. Or I can make and post this "SE3 balance" mod.

I admit that I initially though position B was right, and I voted to decrease PPB's power.
Now, after this observation I'm changing my vote to other.

My conclusion is that TONNAGE of ALL weapons, not just PPB needs to be revised.
Or if you want to keep current tonnage, compensate by changing damage.

If any change has to be made ONLY to PPBs, I'd agree that it should only be increasing its research cost to make it more fair to pay the same research points to get a similar weapon.
Tenryu's idea, increasing research cost by adding more techs levels and intermediate steps, instead of just increasing the initial cost sounds very interesting.

[ May 30, 2002, 04:44: Message edited by: Andr&eacutes Lescano ]

[Master Belisarius]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Master B, I have no doubt you could make short work of anybody using APB and you using PPB. However, I also have no doubt you could make short work of them with you using APB and them using PPB. You are on a different level than most of us here as far as skill as a player.

I only expected that Ashkan believed that the PPB doesn't need to be fixed! Maybe I could have a chance to defeat him!
Honestly, the "challenge" was more a joke than other thing... but Rollo have accepted it and we're playing now!

Originally posted by geoschmo:

I also respect your opinion in a great many issues, but on this one I must respectfully disagree. I had come to the conclusion that PPB was a bit cheap to research, and thus imbalanced, but Rollo's comments got me to reconsider.

Ok. No problem George, I understand.
But what argument changed your mind, because Rollo was wrong comparing APB VI with PPB VI...

About your experiment with Meson BLasters, looks interesting. I'm not against to try to find a work around, ok?
I'm against to play my PBW games (and solo games), using 95% of the time the same weapon...
And the sad thing, is that most of the trained players does the same than me... It mean games where all the people research PPB and Armors IV fast, Sensors and ECM, and not very often research Shields (only to avoid Boarding ships, and after the next patches, Ionic Dispersers).

Maybe the people is not very creative, could be. But I think that the people know that the facts, have demonstrated that is worthless spend research points in weapons that probably will have not time to use... because for the time to reach APB XII, your empire should be a dead meat from a long time ago... The problem is that most the games are with small/medium galaxies, and you usually start with a human neighbor...

PPB is the "über-weapon", not matter if it's something more expensive.
I don't support an special way to "fix" the PPB (although I have voted for change the cost to research it), but think that MUST be fixed, because the only drawback is some more cost in minerals, that will not keep me out to continue using it as main weapon in my games.

Somebody could say: "But if you're tired to use PPB, then use something else!" And maybe I'll start to use other weapons, only for enjoy... but the problem is that mostly I enjoy win!

[Thei R'vek]

Geo, it took you THAT long to figure out that PPBs are the best weapon for short-term games? Everybody who ever played a game against any one of the old greats from the Ladder or the BC before the advent of SE4 knows that one!

Fortunately, a good portion of good SE3 strategy carries over to SE4 strategy, we wouldn't want any of you pitiful SE3 players being able to hide forever would we?

[raynor]

Here are the tests I ran:

LC with 4 large APB VI and 2 Shield 5 costs 5200
LC with 4 large PPB V and 2 Shield 5 costs 7100

I compared seven APB to five PPB ships in the simulator.

The five PPB ships ALWAYS won against the seven APB ships.

I ran another simulator run using Shield 3's. This gave me ship costs of 4700 and 6700. So, I tested six APB ships costing 28,200 total to 4 PPB ships costs 26,800 total. In this test, the six APB ships won 1 out of 10 times.

Take a look at the damage potential of the ships:

The large APB VI's are doing 80..50 (6) damage compared to 120..100 (6) for the large PPB V.

If we say that you can build 18 APB ships to 12 PPB ships, that is a 3 to 2 cost ratio.

APB VI 3 * 80..50 => 240..140
PPB V 2 * 120..100 => 240..200

So, the APB and PPB are doing the same damage at point blank but the PPB has better damage at max range of six. This makes the weapons look fairly well balanced, right? The APB does less damage but is cheaper to build. They seem pretty well balanced, right?

But did I forget something? Oh yeah, the PPB skips shields.

With shield I's or maybe even shield II's, I guess the larger number of APB ships might defeat the smaller number of PPB ships. But by the time you reach shield III's, the PPB ships have an overwhelming advantage.

[rextorres]

Once PPBs come into the picture no one going up against the PPBs is going to have shields - they would be using armor - I know that's what I would do. So these tests lack a little realism.

Certain weapons are great for different strategic situations.

In a very small universe such as Universe Cup where a game Lasts 50 turns or less the DUC would be all that is needed. Anyone who goes after PPBs will get beat because the 100,000 points they used to start researching PPBs will be used for sensors, armor, or ecm be their opponent.

In any game Lasting over 90 turns anyone who sticks with PPBs again will get beat by long range APB Xs or better.

The point that people seem to keep making is that PPBs are so powerful there is no point in developing other main weapons - I disagree. If you go with PPBs and you don't knock out your opponent then you run the risk of having a VERY less effective weapon in the later game. In fact the Long Range APBs are so much better that the extra research is probably justified.

PPBs are great for a middle length game. The challenge IMO is to figure out if your in one.

Instead of going back and forth on the PPBs - How about this. I've always wanted to use a missile only race, but wouldn't dare in PBW. I think the missile system needs more tweaking than the PPBs.