ship balling

[Onikenshin]

Corey, in your reply a few months ago you said you + team was trying to make ship balling a less used tactic. I know you have the jump anywhere feature for all factions, can I know what else? Is it a surprise? Is it a future update? What can you tell me?

 Is it possible for capital ship worlds to produce the capital ships and only those? or will it be like base if you have the slots you can build whatever? I am pretty sure you can't make a building only build able on certain planets, could capital ship planets have some sort of buff to make a certain type of ship build faster? Is that possible?

 How's life?

[Corey]

know you have the jump anywhere feature for all factions,

We do not have the ability to jump anywhere for any factions. We've always thought mechanics that break the node system remove a lot of the strategy from Sins as well as invalidate any defensive setups. The Vasari's ability to jump anywhere is one of the most annoying, frustrating mechanics in the game. It also encourages more fleetballing since you don't need to divide your fleet to cover different areas, you can instantly just get anywhere with everything.

Fleetballing as an issue is something we'll have to try to fix long-term since we don't want to overdo anything or throw the balance way off. One of the things we've tried to do for fleetballing in the initial release is the fleet commanders. If you want to maximize your possible damage output, you need to build and train multiple commanders. However, since their bonuses don't stack, if you only have one fleet your total map-wide DPS goes down significantly. It, along with abilities and to some extent the system which reduces damage output as a ship gets damaged, make it more possible to either hold off or even defeat a larger force depending on how it's played. Again, this is all still pretty early; it'll become easier to address these kinds of things when there's more people playing the mod and giving more feedback.

Is it possible for capital ship worlds to produce the capital ships and only those? or will it be like base if you have the slots you can build whatever? I am pretty sure you can't make a building only build able on certain planets, could capital ship planets have some sort of buff to make a certain type of ship build faster? Is that possible?

You can't make anything only buildable on certain planets. The only thing you can do is remove any faction's ability to build capital shipyards at all and then force capturable shipyards to spawn on specific planets, but that would make scenario balance almost impossible and the slight amount of "realism" you gain isn't worth what you lose. Planets that have capital shipyards in-universe will get a bonus to their ship building speed.

[Senza]

Yeah, sounds like you are on a good track for reducing fleetballing. The key to getting gamers to not fleetball, is, as with any strategy in video games, is to make it more profitable to not fleetball than to fleetball. In vanilla sins and its subsequent expansions, fleetballing was usually incentivized. A lot of that, I think, has to do with the pace of the battles in Sins. Battles between two well rounded, well supported, well micro'd fleets can last for quite some time, and taking planets takes quite some time unless you have a massive fleet, so your best bet to do any real damage is to clump as many ships together as you can and prioritize key planets, and in battle, key ships. And of course this was only compounded in expansions which introduced ultra-heavy defensive structures in the form of starbases.

I think the devs kind of tried to reverse this with Titans, but Titans end up becoming so powerful so quickly that your best bet still ends up being to mass most of your fleet around your Titan in case you run into the enemy Titan, which your fleet might not be able to stand against depending on how many levels it has gained. (unless you're facing an advent titan anyway, in which case you just bomber spam and run away before it vaporizes your ships with a brilliant cleansing light/ converts all of them into a doom fleet against you) In EaW,  a few ships can, with proper micromanagement ( and improper micromanagement on their opponent's side), cripple a much larger force with good timing and positioning. This is certainly possible in Sins, although it's almost always just due to mass AoE spamming, which isn't something that exists in EaW.

I think that deteriorating performance as a ship is damaged could strike a nice balance between the two, since it would encourage retreating damaged ships if they are not absolutely vital. In combination with the fleet commanders,  this might be enough to encourage smaller, more independent units working to achieve the same goal, rather than one huge megaforce just steamrolling everything.