Serious, Size, and Cap Problems.

from Sins Forums
I love this game but some serious cap problems are starting to crop up.

I know that this Issue is being covered in Multiple threads and would like to see some suggestions here.

An official Cap balance needs to be released.

1) Capital ships lose their value when 16 ships gets overshadowed by 2000+ other ships. Whats the point. Try it. you'll laugh at the capital ships.

2) Fighting multiple AI on large scale maps. Even 4000k ships is laughable. Who can even try that when one has multiple choke points and planetary defense is next to useless. Let me add that ANY ONE WHO THINkS PLANETARY DEFENSE IS WORTH ANYTHING hasn't been attacked by a force large than 500+ ships at once. Planetary defense needs to scale directly with SHIP CAP SIZE to even make it a viable help to defense. If Tactical support increase is out of the question. "Planetary defense ships" that cap in ratio with the rest of the game cap might work. In other words Defense ships can't leave the assigned planet or can't offensively attack. Of course that is just a suggestion

3)Capital Center. Do i even need to point out the problem here on a larger map.

That being said. This game is Awesome up to a size point.

A unique problem indeed.



11,490 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
I'm probably missing something here, but doesn't the large cap size let you build defence fleets anyway? Not all of the ship cap has to be used on roaming fleets?

I might add that I'm pretty new to the whole RTS thing (hated them before Sins, zerg rush pfft...) so I quite likely am missing something.


Personally, planetary defense seems about right to me - imagine how many gauss guns (or whatever) it would take to actually cover all angles when trying to defend a huge, huge ball in space..... can't see it being a sane/practival idea in "reality" (for want of a better word... although, it's similar to coast line defence say in WWII - not intended to completely protect all of a coast line. I'm sure there's another, better anaology....)
As has been pointed out elsewhere, any planetary defence would be most useful in harrying and delaying an attack until your defence fleet gets there.....

my two cents :)
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I've been another guy calling for a scalable increase in population cap, but the more games I play the more I realize that may not be entirely necessary. I just played a game against 3 medium AIs on the Doppleganger map... Consolidated my forces around the system's star and built up enough planetary defense structures in the surrounding grav wells to delay any invading fleet long enough for my fleet to respond. I turtled up, built up my defense forces before commissioning a new offensive fleet and the struck out to an enemy system. I jumped from system to system, making sure to fully secure one before jumping to the next one. Once secured I tried to leave fleets near each system's star in order to both act as first defense and to be available as reinforcements should another system come under attack.

I ended up with 5 sizable fleets, 4 with 4 cap ships each and about 40 support ships, and a 5th made up of the remaining 50 or so support ships as a defensive force. I was pretty much able to handle almost everything the AI threw at me...

That all being said, I'd still appreciate an option to scale up the population cap, mainly just to give us more gameplay options.
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I love this game but some serious cap problems are starting to crop up.

I know that this Issue is being covered in Multiple threads and would like to see some suggestions here.

An official Cap balance needs to be released.

1) Capital ships lose their value when 16 ships gets overshadowed by 2000+ other ships. Whats the point. Try it. you'll laugh at the capital ships.

2) Fighting multiple AI on large scale maps. Even 4000k ships is laughable. Who can even try that when one has multiple choke points and planetary defense is next to useless. Let me add that ANY ONE WHO THINkS PLANETARY DEFENSE IS WORTH ANYTHING hasn't been attacked by a force large than 500+ ships at once. Planetary defense needs to scale directly with SHIP CAP SIZE to even make it a viable help to defense. If Tactical support increase is out of the question. "Planetary defense ships" that cap in ratio with the rest of the game cap might work. In other words Defense ships can't leave the assigned planet or can't offensively attack. Of course that is just a suggestion

3)Capital Center. Do i even need to point out the problem here on a larger map.

That being said. This game is Awesome up to a size point.

A unique problem indeed.



End of quote


I was hoping we would see at least the release of the text versions of the Gameinfo folder files by this weekend so the modders (myself included) could get to work doing something about these problems for the people that disagree with the way things work currently. Any official adjustments will take quite a bit longer to get released I'm afraid.

As for part 3, you can change the allegiance penalty drop off rate in the Gameplay.constants file in the Gameinfo folder. This is about the only regular text file you can change currently.