Guardian Balancing Discussion

I dont necessarily agree that guards are the easy way to get a good income. The amount of time ive spent getting a guard empire with an income of 2-3mil per turn is way longer than the time ive spent getting a miner with an income of 120-130 mil per turn. The miner had research around 140...

With the guard i cant build to 200 mil pr everyday... I have to make the money in between. With the miner i was always spamming ships, just make money.

I havent done the math, but i have a feeling that a terran with a gordoed fert does make enough money to spam ships way higher than a guard on a regular base. (assuming food sells at 8-10 which seems to be thebcase most of the time at rt)

So to be honest i dont see how you can say guards have a stronger income path. One thing that may be a huge advantage of the guard race though is that they can benefit a lot more from making money at the market in legal and illegal ways. But its kinda wrong to balance the ships assuming this is somthing you will be doing when playing a guard.

Hmm. You are right about the basic principle ren. We need to compare what you can do with two empires with comparable land. But there are details to it, for instance what will you do with commercial terrans against food terrans? And how do you take into account that it is easier to have much land with a terran than with a collective or marauder?

Another problem by saying we need to be able to play at similar pr range with all the different races is that the quality of a guard fleet is likely to be way less than the quality og for instance a marauder or collective fleet at the same pr. In other word the 100mil pr marauder fleet may be way better than the 130mil guard fleet.

Agreed but nothing can or will be done about gordos. Raising upkeep is a horrible idea and will take the fun out of playing guard for new empires. Every time a discussion comes up about balancing guard the main answer is always the one that cant be fixed. Gordos.....

Raise upkeep: negetive
Decrease build rate: positive
Nerf K.Class: negative
Remove gordos: impossible

Yes, guard upkeep to PR is lower than for other races, but thats because they have a MUCH lower income! The ships themselves are rather expensive as I recall.

And the only thing that happens if you increase guard upkeep is that the race becomes practically unplayable at higher PR on TB servers. How many high PR guards are there on the TB servers? Very few, and they either have very old empires or lots of land.

The problem is not the guard ships, its gordos! To me it doesnt make sense to fix the gordo problem by changing ships. All the guards that can spam high PR on RT are the gordoed ones... like it doesnt make sense to use BW as an example of how OP virals are with maru ships just because he can spam shark to max PR. Everyone should try to play a guard on TB and see how long it takes to make an empire that mattes in rank control.

@ Sibi, sure as I said rough numbers. Guardian upkeep/pr is still so far above the other races, which I think poses a slight problem.

i agree attacking a guard feels like a lottery of shield mods

i would be in favor of k class having 1 99% mod (a diff dmg type for each ship) and then moderate possitive mods on the rest

I`d like to see a smaller k class with decent attack/range and have all resists be slightly positive, kinda like most destroyers. Would be a good UW ship due to range and damage output/br

I dont think we should try to balnce guards towards the very few and very patient guards that has got max infra and made 100k land with gordoes. This is a small group, and a problem that should be adressed by changing gordos.

What i like though is the idea of increasing the buildcost and guard ships by increasing mineral cost. (might also be good for mineral market long term if the mineral consumption is larger.) and i also think the upkeep culd be increased 20-30% as you suggest raist. Would make guards a race where you have to save up a bit for the uws.

I think that currently the shield mods just make it too easy for guardian. If we redesigned the K class, I would be more in mind of making them smaller ships, that pack one crazy punch but are rather fragile (imagine a strong tourm, but weaker in defense).

The other thing is raise the upkeep values or even mineral cost to each ship. Go take a look at SD`s spreadsheet he built last year that shows the upkeep ratio, you`ll notice most are at 1:1.2. Make them 1.3 or 1.4, and then scale the ships down smaller than they are by a little bit.

I agree with you that guards are meant as a force against uws. Thats what we have been told as long as i remember, and thats ok.

Though. Fighting uws by building small stacked fleets and hitting is usually not very efficient as a guard. And i dont agree with you that k.class changes this a lot. Most uw fleets are build with ships with +7 range, no retal and missile dmg ships primarely. I would much rather do this with miners, terrans or virals that are the other explorable races.

If guardians are meant as a race with ships that are outranged by virtually any other race ships, then they need signifcantly better dmg/turn and hull/turn. Because they will never get to shoot first.

I also disagree on tampering with the K.Class. As gm stated guard is meant to fight uw`s and a big part of hitting from less pr is the shield mods. If this is changed then guard needs cruisers and destroyers with long range capability to compensate and at that point its an overhaul , I strongly disagree with changing K.Class.

I still feel guard build rate could be nerfed, I understand guard has a high base pr from being tax but the prob lies with "as sibi said" gordos. Guard empires with a 4-8 mill base pr need to be able to climb fast to get away from base but I think in exchange for over gordoed explorable ,empires getting away from base with a reduced build rate is a fair exchange for the over powered income-pr ratio. This is a rt perspective only I apologize if this offends any tb guard empires but the majority of activity is on rt.

Reducing the build rate and making guard movement more comparable to the other races will encourage stacking more instead of spaming. Right now guard can 2 stack from bade to 100 mill in 2 hours using anywhere from5-15 bill depending on the empire age that being new or established. We need to redesign a few ships that will focus guard as race to being a stacking race. You will always have spamers thats a givin but if we tweeked a few ships and added no retal like with the G.Condom for example I think its a move in the right direction.

Hmm.. i used to think guards were overpowered. The only reason i started a guard at RT was to prove this point.

I am not sure the buildrates are a problem anymore. I believe the buildrates were increased realtively more on all the races ships when this was increased not so long ago. Am i right here?

I still think if there is a problem with the guardian race it is the extreme resist. 3 x k.class combined with the topaz and emmy, quartz and agate.

In the old proposal the BR is lowered quite a lot - making the ship buildrates comparable or even lower than ships like Galleon, Flysch, Lyth, Herc, angel, thresher, bullhead just to mention a few. I am afraid it would not make sense to lower the dmg/turn and hull/turn this much without compensating by increasing the range significantly and adding no retal on some of the ships.

raist you can`t consider yourself as a true point btw. Most guards don`t have crazy amounts of land. But i`d like to see some workings with the shield mods for guards/ K class mostly. However I would be worried to see if doing so would make any ship with range of 7+ just wipe guard ships on agg instead of now being only missile ships.

I agree partly with FortyThree. I`ve been a supporter for removing the K class shield mods for a while. Guards have 13 offensive ships, 3 of those have en/kin immunities, 5 have en immunities, and L class stands up to missiles (and flourite does wonders too).

Another thing I have an issue with is the Pr to upkeep ratio. Currently, you can go 10 times your income as pr. (you have 1m income, you`ll go to roughly 10m pr before negative income) As you gain more per turn, the effects of this keeps skyrocketing. If I have full goods, I can build over 100m pr before going negative per turn, and i can get to about 200m pr before i`m back at my original cash point. In my opinion that`s rather ridiculous.

My problem with guards is the op shield mods. If I know a guards fleet I can easily beat them but if I`m striking blind it`s a different matter. I`ve often hit guards with a decent 10 stack to come up against a 3 stack spam that wipes out 4 or 5 of my stacks and takes virtually no damage. Checking the battles I often see that if I`d swapped 2 or 3 stacks around I would have wiped the spam. There`s just too high an element of luck when hitting guards. I`m not sure of the best way to fix this but I feel this is the main problem with guards.

I think the current guard vs. other races setup works pretty good. All other races got a major BR boost, which seem to work as intended. Guards still has better build rates, but now its only marginally compared to caps from other races. And since guards are always vulnerable to high range ships (destroyers, cruisers) I think this is quite fair.

Sure some of the guard ships suffered from the update, but as for all races, there are some ships more useful than others.

@Ren: Your numbers are incorrect... unless the guard you talk about has max loyalty and use 4 fez stacks in his fleet... I have considerably more than 100k land and more than 200 infra and I break even around 80-90mil PR. The only problem is guards on RT who can get these high incomes using gordos, thus staying inexplorable. For getting a high income on TB you need to get A LOT of planets, for instance DM on fast or MajorDineros old guard on ultra. So from my perspective gordos are the ones to blame.

I have two real issues with guards atm, and this applies to both TB and RT.

They have pretty much the highest turn efficiency in the game atm. Guardians can 2-3 stack spam quicker than any other race, and do massive amounts of damage to multiple people with very little skill or effort. I`m reasonably okay with this though, guards have always had a crazy build rate.

The larger issue I have with guards is their upkeep efficiency. No other race comes even CLOSE to Guardians right now, not by a long shot.

By `Upkeep Efficiency` I mean how high they go with a set amount of land/infra. A terran, miner, viral etc with say 200 infra and 100k land will be able to fight at 30-40m before going negative. A guardian with the same amount of land and infra can fight up to 80-90m before going negative. (Rough numbers, but you get the idea).

The staggering gap between Guardian and the other races for the last while is completely silly, and I think that`s one issue that needs to be looked at.