Norfleet

Reply to Player elimination is flawed. in Sins Multiplayer Sins Forums

[quote]Good point. Of course, defending against a Novalith is very easy.[/quote]Wait, what? Defending against a Novalith was easy? I thought there *WAS* no defense against a Novalith. You can't shoot down or intercept the projectile, and there's no structure anyone can build which specifically counters it. The TEC Planetary Shield only reduces the pain, and that's only available for TEC. There *IS* no defense against the Novalith other than to destroy it, and if you're able to casually blitz and

Reply to Bounty: does it matter to you? in Sins Multiplayer Sins Forums

Bounty has basically zero influence on who I decide to attack. While manipulating pirate attacks with it has use, the actual bounty itself is rarely worth the hassle. For one, the amount of bounty paid per ship killed appears to be an absolute sum rather than tied to any kind of proportionality, as I eliminated an AI player that had some 122K bounty placed on him, and yet did not receive all the bounty despite having annihilated him utterly! I've seen, at most, maybe $250 placed on a given ship,

Reply to DARN @!%#@!&*^ SPACE PONY in Strategy Sins Forums

I think the Space Ponies are simply a useless planet special. I found it once, but I can't recall anything interesting happened.

Reply to Destra Crusader Aura? in Strategy Sins Forums

I think it might get vaguely more interesting with Malice, IF the damage doesn't just get negated due to round-off, and IF it interacts with Malice. 1.5 damage dealt to 30 ships could mean everyone takes 12.75 DPS (1.5 + (1.5 * 0.25 * 30), which is not great, but not quite so pathetic, but it's possible that this damage is too small and gets ignored due to roundoff. It also requires that Ruthlessness damage is reflected by Malice and not rounded off into harmlessness, though. Anyone want to see

Reply to Home planet has 25% allegience, bug? in Technical Sins Forums

Did you ever BUILD any culture? It's possible that the planet you chose has been null-culture for a long time, so when you built your homeworld there, max allegiance went up, but your planet was still null-culture.

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]If the role of shield mitigation is to reduce the effect of focus firing, the fact that a numerically inferior force usually cannot focus-fire its way to victory seems to bear that out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't focus fire much more tactically effective in other RTSs?)[/quote] Question: What effect does a lack of shield mitigation have? How many Cobalts, 8F vs. 9S, are left if shield mitigation is ignored?

Reply to Retreat and game balance in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]I do like the fact that the engine will let computer commanded forces elect to run to fight another day.[/quote] "Let"? What is this "let" you speak of? I've never seen the AI do anything *BUT* run away.

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]8v8 Cobalts: FG wins.* 8v9 Cobalts, where the superior force is spread-firing: the larger force (SG) wins, with about 4 ships surviving.Does this hold with other group sizes / ship types?It seems that while focus firing conveys an advantage in equivalent-number scenarios, it doesn't give you enough of an advantage to win if you're outnumbered.[/quote] This isn't a convincing argument in favor of spread, though: How many of the 9 Cobalts would survive if they had focussed rather than s

Reply to Carriers worth the cost ? in Strategy Sins Forums

I don't think sides-rear doing more damage necessarily makes sense against some ships: Many TEC ships fight with broadsides rather than head-on. In fact, I think only Kols fight head-on, every other ship I've seen seems to turn broadside when attacking. Several Vasari ships fight better at an oblique, and the Advent carriers also seem to do better broadside or oblique also.

Reply to Superweapons in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]"Nerf carriers!" "Nerf anti-strikecraft frigates!" "Nerf LRM!" "Nerf Dark Armada!"PleaseNerf siege frigates.Nerf flaks.Nerf carriers.Nerf LRMs.Nerf superweapons.Nerf Novalith.Nerf Returning Armada.Nerf Phase Stabilizers.And PJIs had apparently been nerfed throughout the beta to the point that people are calling anti-nerf.[/quote] Given the huge list of things which must be nerfed for everyone, it seems like maybe the game is just high-impact. Stuff dies. Easily and often. Get used to

Reply to Fleet Cap & Tax Rate On Huge Maps Needs Fix in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]As someone said earlier, with these huge maps, the "small" empires can easily have 20+ planets, meaning they can easily have a powerful enough economy to reach the 2000 point limit. Upping the limit simply give them more ships, and does not balance things out. The only way for that to work is to either up the limit to a point where their economy cannot reach the max points, at which point you have an ungodly number of ships floating around, or make the ships cost more and take longer to

Reply to Balance Issue: Pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[quote]The system is still imbalanced, because the loser of a bid war that goes to 3000 in the early game gains ZERO benefit from the 2750 he has bid, while getting ALL of the penalty.[/quote] Untrue. The player he bid that money on STILL has that bounty on him, even if the pirates do not attack him. That bounty remains until collected, so the next bidding round, that player ALREADY has $2750 or so on his head. Worth considering also is that if you kill all of the pirate bases in yo

Reply to Advent "deliverance angine" near worthless? in Strategy Sins Forums

Deliverance is like the more ecologically friendly version of Novalith. Since the projectiles aren't really "fast", it can take quite a while for them to finally get there, but once they do, like with the Novalith, it's an unending hail which will eventually destroy every enemy colony there with relatively little effort from you. It is, however, a very SLOW process, not at all fast. Allegiance loss is only 0.05/s, so a 100% allegiance colony would take a good 20 minutes to die from this, assumin

Reply to Superweapons in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]and since the cannon can only target planets in its own star system, you immediately have an inherent limitation.[/quote] This is a not-trueity. Although the blurb seems to strongly IMPLY that this is true, as of 1.02, the Novalith Cannon is NOT limited to its own system. Although shots may take a good half hour to arrive, you CAN fire it at other systems, after which that planet will be uninhabitable for 30 minutes as it gets wiped out and subsequent shots continue to slam into it. I

Reply to Quick question for the unity in Strategy Sins Forums

Malice 25% is brutal against pirates, because as pirates have no shields and therefore no mitigation, if you malice the lot of them and kill 4 pirates, they practically all die. Not sure if there's a maximum percentile that Malice can damage something to, but with pirates, they fry like popcorn with pretty explosions everywhere.

Reply to Fleet Cap & Tax Rate On Huge Maps Needs Fix in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]Go play on truly huge maps then come back to this thread and talk when you have experience with it.Anything over 30 is retarded? It's great that you think so, but nobody really cares. I've played games with 8 players on one solar system and about 50-60 planets, the game is perfectly fine (except for the massive corruption).[/quote] How huge is "Truly Huge"? I mean, I'm a shameless huge map lover, but how big do you WANT? In any case, fleet cap size is fundamentally irrelevant

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

The primary irritance of shield mitigation is the fact that it entirely benefits the side that spends all of its time FLEEING CRAVENLY. How many times have you wished that your fighters would quite dancing around and just follow and shoot in a straight on berserk attack? How many times would you have been willing to order your ships to simply ram the enemy, accepting horrible damage just to KILL THEM DEAD DEAD DEAD? Shield mitigation, is, of course, partly to blame for this, as the more

Reply to research achievements in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

You know, all the achievements are actually in a text file and you can just unlock them by editing the file. Some of them are pretty ridiculous and contrived to the point where you'd only ever get them naturally by intentionally rigging the game so you can do something so utterly absurd.

Reply to Losing battles with overwhelming odds in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

Who was the enemy? A human player or an AI? I simply can't see an AI doing that kind of damage to you with the fleet you describe, particularly as Advent. What kind of caps did you have? 5 Advent caps is likely a force the AI should find to be nigh-insurmountable, and it would typically run in terror rather than fight you.

Reply to Vasari Phase stabilizers(gates) reduce trade income in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]This means that you can, in theory at least, disrupt enemy trade by continually destroying their trade ships.[/quote] Well, in THEORY this could happen. In practice, it seems unlikely. Trade ships primarily travel between planets of the owning empire, and do not typically make extended detours into random territory where someone can safely be shooting down. In practice, it is far easier and more plausible to disrupt enemy trade by blowing up their planets. Any force that is large enou

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]As a bit of a side issue, am I right in thinking that the way shield mitigation works favours slow firing, heavy hit weapons over faster firing lighter weapons?[/quote] Yes. Looking at it at the extremes, a weapon that fires and hits for tiny damage every time will continuously follow the mitigation a curve: A weapon that kills a ship in a single hit won't suffer from ANY shield mitigation increase because the target will be dead in a single hit at the base value. However, th

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]You'll get better returns using appropriate types against appropriate enemies because their effective dps will be so much better. So the best way will be to have all your units of a particular type focus fire on the enemy unit they are most effective against.[/quote] Not disputing that targetting appropriate armor types DOES make a difference. However, this does nothing to change the fact that focus fire is still the way to go here. [quote]It does change - don't forget i

Reply to Keeping Planets in Strategy Sins Forums

I just bomb the crap out of the local pirate base. Problem solved.

Reply to Jarrasul Evacuator->Nano-Dissassembler in Strategy Sins Forums

I'm not sure how you even get into this situation. My experience is that capital ships, and even frigate and most cruisers, move far too slowly to actually *GET* into a fight, and will most likely entirely lose fleet cohesion trying, and get eaten alive by bombers. 30 bombers will destroy a capital ship in like two passes, so all of my fights have involved two fleets at stand-off range duking it out with strike craft. Anything else, and you won't even be able to CATCH the enemy force.

Reply to Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire? in Strategy Sins Forums

Shield mitigation does nothing to decrease the value of focus-fire. Why? Because it doesn't really matter whether a ship is hit by 30 shots fired by one weapon, or 1 shot fired by 30 weapons. The mitigation increase is the same, so the curve of damage a ship takes as you whail on it is the same. It doesn't matter whether I cause 30 damage from one ship, or 30 damage from 30 ships. Shield mitigation will ramp up at exactly the same rate, because it's not triggered by number of attacking ships, bu