Can anyone explain the Balance to me?

[Hanzou]

posted on June 18th, 2007, 9:36 am

Last edited by Hanzou on June 18th, 2007, 9:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

I played Fo 3.0PR for quite some time now with my brother and we have come to the conclusion that this game is not balanced at all.

The smaller Ships (any Race) always are MUCH more cost effective to build over the Big ships (including special abilities). If you only build 2 yards and pump the hell out of them, anyone building bigger ships, or even a bigger shipyard or research facility, will be vastly outnumbered and loose (not so much because you can raid the Starbase early, but you can cut the opponent of of all but the 2 starting moons).

We did in fact run several tests to see how the ships fight against their equal ressources spam of low cost units and the result was devastating, they didnt even kill half (in bigger group battles not even 30%). This is not even taking the extra cost for a Big Shipyard and its building time and the long building time of the bigger ships into account. Microing the bigger ships out of combat to repair didnt work at all as well in bigger battles (they just die to fast).

I dont want to talk bad about the game, its TRULLY awsome. I just want to hear some oppinions on this matter as i think FO is living for Multiplayer battles. Right now, the only think you can do is spam low cost units until you have won. I am speaking from several years of Multiplayer RTS experience here and i dont think i am all that wrong on the issue.

I like the Avatar System (like in CnC:Generals) and the overall gameplay a lot (esp. the Graphics, thats  incredible comapred to the origin). Imho FO should take the path of games like Warhammer: Dawn of War and others in terms of unit development: Soft counter System. Well, even softer than that, but along those lines. 

My Brother decided to stop playing with me (damn) until the Balance is better, so i tried to find some stats for the units to alter myself, but i didnt find them yet. If anyone could tell me if there is a easy way to alter Unit Stats, like a .txt or .cfg something (where you just set Shield 80 to Shield 100 and so on) I could fine tune the unit Balance to my needs. Anyone knows if something like that exists?

posted on June 18th, 2007, 10:33 am

your talking about the odf editing? you need only notepad/wordpad to do this. It will take a while to get the sort of results your looking for, but could be well worth it.

bare in mind that once you edit the odfs you will no longer be able to play multiplayer with anyone who does not have the EXACT same changes made, (probably safer to copy/paste the odfs to the other install).

posted on June 18th, 2007, 10:46 am

You are so right on that issue...and welcome on the board

changeing stats is very easy but time intensive. I once tried to change some of the special weapons power so they would get much more relevant in FO.
Go into the odfs --> weapons ---> common/special ----> open with editor 

rest is self explainig...just change the stats and save it. launch the game, try it out and see what happens


Here's the perfect place for your concern:

//www.fleetops.net/index.php?optio ... pic=3215.0

posted on June 18th, 2007, 11:31 am

In order to change the ballance yourself you'll need to edit some of the ODF files in the ODF units folder and that should solve a lot of your problems, IMO it isn't too hard to acomplish, especially if you want the balance to be better.

posted on June 18th, 2007, 1:53 pm

topics merged

posted on June 20th, 2007, 8:00 am

hi

Just look what Blizzard do (Starcraft II) Zerg against Protos
http://eu.starcraft2.com/features/proto ... ab=phoenix

bigger ships need a spezial weapon against smaller, maybe a multiple quantentorpedo shot.
rdy all 3 min or so

btw. im still waiting for the widescreen support 

cya Sentor

posted on June 21st, 2007, 7:15 am

We are currently taking a closer look to the balancing tables and already did some changes to make larger units more attractive.

posted on June 21st, 2007, 6:48 pm

There is always making the tougher ships a degree tougher than they are. I know that is what DOW did to ensure vehicles/tanks/larger units were able to take on several units at once was make the degree of toughness a factor of ten. Had the same weapons but were much much harder to blow up. There is also looking at making the researchable stuff more attractive to the player. And if all else fails like you said drop the building times between them.

posted on June 21st, 2007, 9:04 pm

I don't think balancing is that easy

posted on June 21st, 2007, 11:49 pm

What about giving the larger ships multitarget weapons or something?

posted on June 24th, 2007, 7:30 am

The basic weaponry wont change. we are quite pleased with the "character" of the vessels at the moment. larger ships will get cheaper, a little tougher or something in between depending on the ship

posted on June 25th, 2007, 3:50 am

I take it that we have built some nice matrices for this?