It takes a moon 4 minutes to get to 30 population...4 minutes...if your HW has a moon next to it (which is virtually every time) then you can easily have a 30+ pop moon by the time your enemy would be in range....that is easily enough damage to kill any TEC/Advent corvettes outright...

Now to be fair, most TEC/Advent players are using LF spam...if you have anything better than a moon next to your HW and you colonize it quickly, you are looking at 70 population in about 10 minutes....that is enough damage to wipe LF or LRF fleets....

Certainly this isn't viable in all frontline positions...but it is not uncommon for frontliners to be 4 jumps or so away with high militia planets between them...when that occurs (and it occurs often enough), it is not difficult to get 7 civ labs and a tier 7 tech....these situations also inevitably mean that the wail whore has immediate access to planets with more population than a moon...

FYI, 7 harmony labs + wail + culture tech + culture center is about the same cost as 2 mil labs, repair bay tech, a frigate factory, a fleet upgrade, and ~30 disciples (which we all know players can afford in the first 10-15 minutes or so)....

Is this still the SOASE forums or has it turned into Gamer's Anonymous where we just bitch about things instead of trying to fix them because our own modding isn't perfect?  I'll throw my 3 cents into the ring and hope people start doing the same.  We paid 100% to StarClad for Rebellion, but they've only given us 75% of the game.  We want to use the factions fully instead of having to ban or limit factions, abilities, etc... because of lack of patching.  If StarClad won't move towards balancing out the material, community needs to.

Wail, split damage to 15 damage vs shields only and 5 vs hull only.  Shields gonna drop, but ship not gonna pop.

MAW, 210 second cooldown and requires L6/L8 Titan -seems like it should kick some ass, but not all the available ass.

Doesn't Beam Blast get people all pissed off too since it can generate between 2000 and 2500 damage to an infinite number of enemies in the column?  Shit, people might ban that in MP too...

How about 16/24 targets instead of an infinite number affected and eaten?  Reduce the percentageOfCost from 50% and 100% (silly) to 35%/55%.  Still does a nifty number against the enemy, but doesn't decimate them completely... firepower will do the rest ffs.

Jumping Starbases... Ai doesn't phase jump their starbases, but players love it -DEVS MADE PLAYERS TO DO IT... just did it poorly... Give VR two starbases.  1 is immobile and 1 can move (and phase jump in late game).  I've done this in my little mod and it's not half bad to have a phase jumping starbase (with capital armor so more can fight it) that won't face rape a titan or starbase to pieces.  Yes, link to my mod is easier than linking all the files to the second starbase type.  

get ideas going and then have some of the people who were the uber community reps during beta work something out and get StarClad to work things out.

I am sorry, but that is not a good idea imho:

First of all 5 hull damage is still enough to stop most corvette rushes cold so in early game there would be litte change. In late game however Wail becomes more or less useless as the by then more durable ships can easily shrug it off.

An ability only capable of damaging enemy ships..... is of very little worth. Especially if if is costly to use and cannot be triggered again for a long time. You see... a fleet hit by an only damaging wail could be on the brink of destruction.... it wont help you much... he will simple retreat and wait 5 minutes until passive regneration has restored the health of all his ships back to reasonable levels. That is not worth a planet.

It would also affect factions differently:

TEC: Minor dent in the armor.... TEC shields are not impressive to begin with.

Advent: Disproportinally impacted as Advent have a lot more health in shields than in hull.

Vasari: Second best armor ratings..... good shields too..... like TEC a good sized dent in the armor and weakened shields.

so you gonna bitch about it or put out ideas to solve issue?  you don't like 15/5 damage split, so what in your opinion would fix it... better... where are the core MP players and their opinions?

I thought I remember a thread on how to make these ruined abilities better but now I can't find it, is it real that there is no thread for it?!?!?!?!?!?!? Or I was too lazy to search for many month old threads and only checked that have been commented in 2013.

Now I remember there is one, What should be in the next balance patch, that is for general balance discussion, and there are many ideas on almost everything that is currently wrong, that's why here isn't many comments about how to make things better I think.

So... no MP competitive mod and no sign of Stardock really digging in a fixing things... why bother then.  

later.

Well, since virtually none of the MP guys know (or care to know) how to mod....yeah, it ain't gonna happen....

So far Stardock has supported this game quite good.....

The problem for any "competive" mod is also that is is rather difficult to find people agreeing about what should be changed.

Sure, there are a few things like Desperation or the unnerfed version of the jumping Orky..... where everyone more or less agreed, but most remaining things are not widely agreed upon and if, people argue about how to balance it more properly.

Stardock is still supporting this game so modding is a bit pointless.  Once they say they're done and the last version has been played long enough to recognize imbalances that remain then it will be a worthwhile endeavor.

That's a very bold statement. It's a very nice way to absolutely ignore mods that enhance and add to the base game, such as E4X, in a way Stardock never will, and the various total conversions out there.

I really hope they don't make a bunch of new races.  To keep up quality we'd have to wait periods of years, and by then, graphics, gameplay, etc. will be continually upgraded by other developers and this game will be irrelevant. If they sacrifice quality there is no point in playing something terribly balanced, I won't even touch it.  If I wanted terrible balance and therefore gameplay with contrived ill thought lore for the sake of more variety I would download mods.

 

I think they're doing fine with upgrading the depth of the game/interface/game modes while keeping it balanced tbh

2009 Juan... you called it... give up, play mods.  

Really all it takes is some skilled multiplayers to coordinate with modders, where the modders listen to the feedback from the skilled players, and the skilled players test and provide useful feedback.  I know I would be interested to perform such a service in my free time, modders hit me up via pm if you are interested for some guidance. 

I agree with the previous poster(s), we need to make a competitive balance mod for this game, as the developers have decided to not balance the game.

I do think there are definite fixes for all 3 of these abilities that could "tune" them into useful but balanced abilities.  SD went too far with SttC imo, it used to be the autowin strat for VL and now no one uses it because the devs took ALL the suggestions to nerf it and applied them when only 1 or 2 changes to its use would have greatly curtailed abuse of the ability.

So, since its monday and I haven't yet committed to real work yet let me throw my 2 cents onto this dead horse.  These ideas are probably far from original.

SD Mobilization:  I think making it require an upgrade slot (maybe level 2 of phase stabilization, costing the higher 2700/400/225 upgrade cost).  This would definitely make the SB less threatening with only 6 weapons/hull slots to get.  Also, I think the debuffs should stay, and possibly be permenant debuffs on a SB that has jumped, which would reflect the incredible stress a jump would put on such a massive structure.

Maw: Increased cooldown, and also I think a ships' mass should give it a chance to evade being eaten.  Smaller ships (frigates) are a high chance (70-80%) of being consumed while larger ships (carriers, cruisers) have a smaller chance (40-50%).  This would keep even a perfectly timed and positioned maw from being a game ender but would still make it a dangerous ability to account for.

Wail:  To be honest I've only seen it used a few times in MP before it was banned but I think if the damage was tuned so only the 2 highest population planet types (ice and terran I think) would be capable of killing cruisers or carriers if they are maxed out, this would be a much less scary ability, since most late game fleets are almost exclusively made of up larger ships.  Also, possibly make corvettes immune to it (although this might actually nerf it into the realm of SttC and make it a niche ability that is not used in MP, which is not the intent).