Siege frigate balance opinion & general plea for buffs over nerfs in forthcoming patch

I honestly think that siege frigates shouldn't run more than 8 supply or so apiece. They easily outcost even heavy cruisers at this point, which is flat-out stupid. I'd be perfectly happy with one of two immediate solutions:
1) eliminate all of their anti-planet damage entirely and boost their damage, making them effective anti-heavy frigates, make basic frigates anti-medium and LRMs anti-light, creating a niche for siege frigates in clearing cruisers and planet defenses.
2) cut their anti-planet damage in half, or even less than that, in order to make them more supply-efficient. As it is, capital ships are clearly a better use of resources in every conceivable way. You could make siege frigates even less survivable than currently, but they're practically made out of paper mache and bottle rockets as it is.

Buffing planets is a bad idea. First of all they are already very strong with the upgrades AND the technologies (which all 3 factions have).

Any buff to planet survival would be a direct nerf to Capital ships.

For the most part good players focus on buildings around the planets, and not planets themselves, because sieging is already not worth it.

It's a much better idea to tweak the idea so it doesn't place weight as heavily on building siege frigates rather than anything else.

I personally think Siege frigates ought to return to 1.02 status and be effective against buildings, while LRMS receive a nerf against buildings. That way Siege frigates will actually be...Siege frigates and be an asset to assaulting planets and structures.

Tec or Vasari could have their colony caps colony skill buffed by giving cheaper bombing shelter upgrades(like 40-70-100% cheaper)

But um.. Siege frigs are horrible.

A marza is as good as 7 or 8 of them, and costs LESS than 4 of them(not factoring in cap ship crew research) and still costs less than 7 or 8 of them including cap ship research to give you a 3rd cap

So for less money and less than HALF the supply you can get a 2nd and 3rd marza for LESS than the equialent 15 siege ships! Not only that but 15 siege ships is 225 supply, 2 marza's is 100.

It's not that Marza's are too good. Siege frigs just SUCKKKKKKKK.
They sucked in 1.02 too!

I'm fine with Siege Frigates being made out of paper but the one thing they do well and they currently suck at sieging planets compared to getting the siege cap ship, they're also way too expensive. I thought they were borderline unusable in 1.02 and then this.

One posible alternative would be to nerf capital ships planetary damage. so as to force the player to bring along siege frigs after the capital have cleared the space around the planet. But that would suck.

I've played games where the AI would throw 56 siege frigs on my planet with no fleet on it. And that planet would almost be alpha-striked. But two things, first, with the TEC planet shield with its two upgrades researched, the planet would actually last long enough for my fleet to make 2 jumps to reach the planet. Secondly, a fleet of 25 frigs would make the siege frigs retreat. And one more thing, a fleet of 56 siege frigs eat up his fleet capacity, which meant a lot of unsurported capitals and undefended planets.

All things considered, I think the devs did well to make siege frigs suck this bad.

The siege frigate nerf was totally pointless. The only reason they got nerfed is noobs complaining about them when the AI used them in packs because they had nothing to defend against them. Making them completely useless in multiplayer is not the right answer to that!

Easy solution: Reduce their supply cost to 7 or 8 and just let the AI build less of them.
Noobs in singleplayer are happy and people can finally use a few of them in multiplayer.

NO. NO. NO. PLANETS ARE HARD ENOUGH TO BOMB AS IT IS. This is one reason people use LRMS so much, simply kill the buildings and ignore the planets. Then LRMS can kill actual ships afterwards.

This is not a "possible alternative" at all.

Siege frigs need their cost reverted, though supply could stay the same, survivability nerf stay, but they need 30%-50% more damage.
Even in 1.02 it was for the most part a better idea to make siege caps.

Not exactly fair to call people "noobs" for having this opinion.

Although I completely agree with your solution, pre-patch, it didn't matter what you had defending a planet when the AI sent in its siege pack.

You could be the best player around, with maxed out defenses and a full fleet just waiting for the AI's sieges, and they could still wipe the planet clean before you could kill them. NOTHING could stop it, and that's not exactly fun or good.

So, like I said, I agree with your suggestion, but lay off the elitist attitude.

It's not an elitist attitude.
And I call everybody who could not defend against AIs using siege frigs in 1.02 a noob - and rightfully so.

I played the AI in 1.02 a lot and there simply is no way a halfway good player can be beaten by siege frigs. The fact alone that the AI will retreat them as soon as a friendly fleet jumps in is enough.

Nono, siege frigs were in NO way too strong in 1.02 and in fact they _weakened_ the AI using them because that AI could not only not damange my planets (because it jumps away as soon as my fleet shows) it ALSO had all that useless supply and cash in the siege frigs and its actual fighting fleet was a joke compared to mine.

AI building lots of siege frigs is double stupid because (a) it annoys clueless noobs that forget to build ships to kill stuff and think they are playing some sim city style game and (b) it annoys people who know how to play becuase the "real" fleet of the AI seriously lacks the firepower to be any challenge.

Siege frigs were totally weak and sucks in 1.02 already because of their insane supply cost and now they are even worse.
Lower the cost and bring them to 7-8 supply to finally make them at least a little useful. As I said: If the AI overuses them just fix the AI and don't nerf siege frigs.

Just a small correction. If you were the best player around , you would have scouted the fact that the AI is making a siege fleet and you would have wiped him out.

That's why I wrote "noobs had nothing to defend against them". There ARE plenty of things to do to kill siege frings and I never intended to imply that there are not.
The only reason one has not enough units to kill any amount of siege frigs is that the guy playing doesn't know how to play the game.

That's not a bad thing. We all start as noobs and Sins as a steep learning curve.
But calling for balance changes just because you don't know the game and the counters yet ... that's just stupid and if devs listen to that kind of lazy whining then it results in a ruined game for everybody else (just look at the completely useless siege frigs now - and even in 1.02 they were useless already).

And no, I never said I'm a good player. Actually I'd say I'm kind of a medium player. I'll probably lose in multiplayer a lot but I know my way around the game and know the basic concepts / counters. And that is MORE then enough to NEVER have any problems with facing siege frigs. As I wrote before: They are total crap and only eat up fleet supply that the AI better should use for units that actually server a purpose.

Some good points regarding relative contexts i.e. Frigates to Cruisers in cost & power.

I think all ship costs and Siege Frigate statistics should be reverted back to what they were when Sins hit retail. Some tinkering does threaten to blur the difference between the ship categories.

The two distinct issues here that most folks seem to agree upon are:

PROBLEM #1: siege frigates have been nerfed to the point of complete redundancy

(thanks innociv for your comparison with marzas)

Potential Solutions:

Nreth: reduce siege frigate supply, make planets stronger
- downside : buffing planets unbalances capships vs planets
- planets are already pretty tedious to kill

Snipafist: completely change the role of siege frigates from anti-planet to anti-heavy, modify roles of other ships accordingly.
- downside : this sounds like massive work rebalancing the entire game

TarlSS : nerf lrm anti-building damage, buff siege frig anti-building damage
- downside : static defenses are no longer any use at combating siege frigs

innociv : revert siege frig costs to 1.02 levels, keep supply & survivability nerfs but significantly increase anti-planet damage
- i quite like this idea. A significant damage increase - perhaps coupled with an increased reduction in survivability & cost. Siege frigates would again be useful in leveling enemy planets after achieving orbital superiority
- making hit and run flanking attacks with siege packs against poorly defended planets would become a viable tactic, adding more depth to the game
- maybe siege frigates could be made a bit slower as well so they could be hunted down fairly easily if unsupported

PROBLEM #2: less experienced players have difficulty combating the AIs beloved siege frigate pack tactic

The two obvious ways to address this that have been pointed out already are
i) nerf siege frigates
ii) reduce the AI's love for building siege frigate packs

Clearly the former approach hasn't worked. I have a few opinions about the latter idea:

a) Patching the AI so that it makes poorer strategic & tactical decisions on Hard & Unfair modes is an awful idea. Note that I'm not implying that the AI's use of siege frigates is currently a good idea.

MegaVolt makes the excellent point that patching the AI so that it relies less on siege frigates may actually make it harder to beat, considering how useless siege frigates are / have been.

c) My suggestion - why not just patch the AI so it doesn't use "uncounterable"* tactics like siege frigate packs when in Easy & Normal mode? Less experienced players who have not yet learned how to combat these strategies can have fun in the lower difficulties, and people looking for more of a challenge in single player can play against the harder difficulty levels of AI.

Finally, playing the devil's advocate, here is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion which addresses both problems : the redundancy of siege frigates & the problem less experienced players have in combating the AIs use of them:

Since siege frigates are redundant in competitive play, why not just cut them from the game completely?

* : note sarcasm