So the idea was to do a couple things. First, make it so that turrets were worthwhile. Make it so that scouting is not so easy and automatic.   Make is so that frigate spam is not so appealing. Make planets last more than two seconds against bombardment. Make is to that the difference in power between frigates and cruisers is substantial, and likewise between cruisers and capital ships. Make carriers more powerful. Make the economy less retarded. Make it so every damn battle doesn't take half an hour.


I think it worked out pretty well, though I may have made the carriers a little too powerful. Not enough to throw the game completely out of whack, though (the standard configuration).

What I did was cut all shield and hitpoints for frigates down to one fifth of normal. Then I removed all material requirements for them and I cut their support levels in half. You can actually spam more with them than before, and they have the same firepower, but having fewer hitpoints makes it so if they go into a heavy battle unassisted then they are going to get chewed up. For whatever reason in the standard game a scout frigate (the smallest ship!) has hitpoints on part with a cruiser. Now things work much more sensibly and a miriad of annoying things was taken care of by this alone. Light ships are still useful, but you can't just send in a group on its own without seeing them die horribly, which is more like how you would expect...it leads to some actual strategy. I also reduced seige frigate bombing levels so the annoying issue of the AI running past your defenses from planet to planet without engaging is no longer a problem. With fewer hitpoints, scouting out is also more dangerous now, which is good.

For the cruisers, I kept them the same, balancing the frigates and cap ships against them. The only change I made was to make them all four times as expensive. They are a lot more powerful than the frigates now, so it only makes sense. I left their support points alone - it pays to have quality over quantity because they are more durable and more effective for spending the same support points on frigates, but they require the same resources as before so it takes much more of an effort to make a decent fleet of them. Only change I made is carriers get two squadrons instead of one.

For planetary defenses, I made the range about three times as much for turrents and reduced the number of actical slots hangers take to two. Now, scouts won't run past your planets with impunity (and vice versa), which to me is a bit of  a game ruiner because you always end up having the whole map scouted out in no time. Defenses are actually useful now with these changes combined with the changes in frigate hitpoints. Weak attacks will get slaughtered, and strong attacks can be held off a while if you have a solid defense set up.

Finally, I made a few changes to cap ships. The biggest one is that I set the number of squads for carriers to five. I probably should have done three or four instead. Still, I find the big carrier battles to be a lot of fun. I might balance this out with the other capital ships by giving them better armor or something at some point. I also doubled their firepower across the board. It's nice to see them target a light frigate and blast it to pieces in a few seconds instead of the interminably slow bashing on scouts that for some bizarre reason have a third as many hitpoints as the largest ships in the fleet. I think it's just common sense that that had to be changed. I also buffed all the capital ships a bit by multiplying their heal and shield recharge rates by three.  They were just too slow before, but they're still not so fast that they can ignore ships pounding on them by any means. Since I rebalanced the economy a bit, I also upped the cost of all of them to 7500. I thought about going higher, but that seemed to be pretty blanced when I was playing - the cruisers are now around 2000 so it makes some sense. For the money each successively larger ship is more effective, but the smaller ones have a lot of firepower for their size and they don't take any resources to produce, just money. So basically each ship size class has its merits now, but it makes no sense with my new balancing to stick to one ship size. In fact if you do, you will fail for certain, now - which is how it should be.

The change I made in the economy was to have each planet provide better income. In the standard game income from planets is pretty questionable in its worth - it's highly doubtful you wil ever get more money out of them than yous pend on them. It makes way more sense to have each planet make some money for you, to give them more point in existing. In the original you can just spam out scout frigates and go straight to the enemies' capitols and destroy them pretty easily without even bothering to capture any planets, improve them, etc. Now you make more money, but things also cost more so it balaces out. It makes it so that capturing planets is actually profitable now, too, which is a plus.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with the balance, though it could still use even more, especially to make real differences between all the ships in the game.

I hope people give it a chance and enjoy it. If anyone has any feedback after playing, I'd love to hear it.


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