is guard still uber awsome?

These changes are awesome, keep them (:

Lyth is a very effective ship at killing cirtain things.Also remember that these are preliminary changes and after it is done we will possibly look into other ship rebalancing to make the boosted BRs work more smoothly.

Just to confirm: BUILD RATES ARE ON TRIAL AND NOTHING IS PERMINANT. Read that 5 times then take a deep breath, and give us viable, useful feedback, not things like `I liked it how it used to be cos it was good` or `I don`t like the change cos I can`t get used to it`. You have to learn to adapt, it`s a good life skill to have, learn it here too and you will go far.

Sibi, being unexplorable is a tactical choice. You only do it if your skilled or your fed/faction holds the ranks enough to make getting easy borders well...easy. If this BR change makes the ranks more dynamic with more colonies/clusters floating around, it can only be a good thing to disrupt the status quo no?

Yes it will suck to not be able to recover from a bad hit you made to get borders as guard, but then again it`s been like that for collective for YEARS. As I have seen it Guard has been an easy race pretty much from the start, not a hard race. The only real `hard` part about a guard empire is getting your 2nd C2 explored (assuming you go for that) and getting loyalty on your colonies. Once you get that Guard is VERY easy, even fighting due to careful attack mode pretty much guarantees 1 colony won, unless you really messed up.


Now with this BR change the meta game is going to totally change. Empires will rise, empires will fall. Some will adapt better than others and take advantage of the fact, others will crumble. Whilst that is not the reason for the BR boost, having a more dynamic set of ranks on all servers will be a nice change for the underdogs and those that like to take advantage of new opportunities.

well i`ve heard most people prefer guards for digging.

anytime you do anything to benefit terrans miners or Maru you inadvertently buff virals which is are contributing factors as to why pyth`s br wasn`t increased to much and why lyth saw no love sadly.

lol SD

"Most people also Agree that Guardian is the best race to dig for artifacts with."

I dont know who "most people" are, but they have clearly never played terran/miner.

I think the current buildrate increase is very interesting, im just glad im not unexplorable, which many TB guards are, becuase that will really be a pain to play with these updates unless you control ranks. The problem for guards is that they lack high range ships so they cant really attack on aggressive unless they hit a spam or get lucky. This update is clearly a needed nerf for guards, but on the other hand its a huge buff for virals due to thier cheap maru ships, high range V class and good economy which I dont think is needed.

AGREES with Ashylarry, great way to get rid of PT. XD @ Accord.

I think a week long paid account for new accounts would be a GREAT idea.

Letting guards get to 2500 loyalty + loyalty for missions would completely do away with planet trading, right? Except for the people too lazy to explore 25k C.2s.

Apollo, i have played collective, a few times actually and i am not knocking them, i plan to go collective on a server after i UW =p

guardians suck at digging SD.

I`ve done actual # tests. Terrans have the best dig rates and guards lag behind most of the other races.

there`s little the staff can actually do about new players...i would love to see 1000+ people online in GC. hopefully with the facebook thing stephen has going on we will get a few new players... but we need as balanced of a game as we can to hold on to these new players more so the stater/free races need to be appealing and competitive enough to hold onto these players.

i personally believe that stephen Should issue a week long paid account for all new accounts on GC to give them a taste, and for those who are quick enough to restart as a paid race. i think this would help lure players into staying.

Guards have lots of good qualities still.

Their Econ is low because they don`t need it, Econ sole purpose is to build and maintain fleets.. Guards still have very cheap Upkeep and they don`t need to buy food.

Most people also Agree that Guardian is the best race to dig for artifacts with, on Rt that usually means gordos. Thats why established Guards on RT usually make 4-5 mil a turn with ease.

On TB that artifact advantage is usually used as STC which gives them a slight turn advantage.

Guardians were ok Back before any updates, Guards were competitive even though they had 4 different ships, all others were just smaller or larger cookie cut outs of those types, not to mention all these ships hard horrible shields. That`s why their build rates were so high

Then we went through and redesigned many of the guardian ships, giving them better weapons and much much better shields and provided a greater diversity in their weapon types and shields. This gave them more tactical options and their ships better survivability. all this was done without increasing their cost or upkeep.

Then D and G class were taken from viral at the time meaning no more cheap missile boat (Angel) to help deal with guardians. Viral were the dominate race at the time... this further increased Guardian supremacy. not only that the upkeep on Marauder capitals were increased. making Pyth spams much more costly. Which also reduced the effectiveness Angels for Marauders since their upkeep also increased.

Around the same time Maraudian also decided to reduce the Br of non Guard Capital ships.. Lyth was dropped from 3 to 2, Herc from 2 to 1 Angel from 3-2 pyth from 3 to 2 and nirvana from 3 to 2 and lictor from 2 to 1

this also gave Guardians a boost in their effectiveness

One of the effects of this BR increase is to help even up the ever widening gap that has been made between every other race and guardian.

As for Guards Downside, Knowing that Guardians can`t UW, and that they never will so if you are a Guardian then you already decided UWing was a big deal to you.

Their ships are still decent they can still build fast, with this update they have plenty of ships that build over 70k a turn, any ship that builds under that is generally considered a better quality ship such as Tourm, their most overpowered ship now builds at nearly 40k a turn and that is their slowest racial ship.

Part of this test period is to see the effect on guard ships. If its found that Guards have completely and utterly lost their lethality and have become as effective at as miners were at fighting in 2004 then yes we do indeed have a problem that will be rectified.

in my personal opinion people have become so accustomed to seeing guards having such high build rates with these effective ships that they believe this is and always was supposed to be the norm for guardians. To me Guardians have become a race where it doesn`t take much thought or require much skill to play (not saying anyone lacks skill) as a current guard all you need to do is Spam hit build spam hit build because it doesn`t matter if you win or lose with a guardian your losses in terms of turns and time are usually very small compared to the other races you hit. Hopefully this will help put a bit more thought and effort into playing the guardian race making it bit more of a "hard" race.

Edited by ShatterdDreams on 2011-10-02

Stacking SHOULD, be considered with all these BR.

I think guardians with the new built rate can be considered a nerfed though its for the greater good of the other races and thus other players.

also since everyone has a 90-100k spamming ship it will reduce the probability of guardian spamming since the other race`s ship should beat the quartz

=) so i think its worth letting this built rate change go through, though i am not sure whether people will start restarting to virals, but for the current situation i believe i answers people`s demands =)

guards still strong, and marus cant explore, but we canz haz plunder :3

Guards can use fez much easier now, which is ofc a big advantage. If the buildrate increase is going to stay the guard ships should be reworked a bit, as it seems some of the ships have been left alone due to the fact that raisin BR from 1 to 2 would be too much and it has to be straight numbers. Emmy building at 70k, garnet at 80k a turn compared to topaz at 50k seems a bit strange.

But this change is ofc a huge advantage for all other races than guard which might help balancing. But this again severely favors the big/rich empires imo as they can build to very high PR much easier now.