Stargate Nova

I've been toying with the ships for a little while trying to get a good balance based on what i see in the show. At the moment things are really true to the show i think but is does mean that when you are playing a fighter you have viruatly no chance... a luck shot from three or four death gliders will take down a f302 easy... as seen in the show, this means that given the same category... fighter, frigate, cruiser or destroyer, your battles are going to be quick, reasonable, long, really long... unless your a single destroyer taking on multi enemy destroyers.

eg: DSC304 with Asgard upgrades vs 4 Ori Warships.

My question is should i stay true to the tv show with this balancing where a DSC304 can take on several Hataks really easily or knock out a hiveship using Asgard upgrades as if it were a dart or should i add new technologies to enable the hive ships and hataks to defend against the new DSC304 upgrades.

My basic instinct would be to to have the three most powerful ships be the Aroura, Daedelus and Ori Warship but when it comes to game play as opposed to tv this could make things very easy for the player who has the money to get the right upgrades... also should the ships themselves be really expensive which is my gut instinct to help extand the time it takes a non cheating player to go from a F302 up to a Daedelus.

What do you guys think?

This post has been edited by Lostpinky : 03 December 2007 - 10:21 PM

I've never seen the Stargate series so I can't comment on the particulars, but here's my 2˘:

Stick to the Stargate universe's balance. It just makes things feel incoherent. Say, to put it into terms that I would understand, you hopped into a Star Trek: NG plug and you and your trusty Sovereign-Class were taking down fleets of Borg Cubes. It's just wrong on some fundamental level.

Here's what I'd do to compensate for that. I presume from your outline that the player will usually not be at a numbers disadvantage significant enough to counteract the player's government's technological superiority (again, just basing that on what you wrote; I could be understanding this incorrectly). So, to keep true to the feel of the SG universe, instead of making the player's ships worse than they are in the show or putting in way more enemies, don't give the player access to top-of-the-line ships. Sure, our EV sensibilities dictate that by the end of the storyline, the player should have access to the most powerful ships/weapons available, but who says that needs to be so? Assuming the plug is going to have the player in a military officer role rather than the freelance starship pilot (if that is indeed the case), you could just get assigned to a particular ship and that's that. Maybe get bumped up a time or two, but never reaching the apex of the respective government's potential.

Anathema semi-spoiler here:

I actually played around with this idea in Anathema. By the end of Chapter 2,

Spoiler

the largest ship the player has access too is the Scimitar Cruiser

, a relatively light ship. Think Fed version of the Abomination (albeit much better all around). This added a huge deal of challenge to the missions and a sense of urgency that can't be accomplished

Spoiler

when you're flying around in a Titan or Raven

. Something to think about, at least.

Thats a good 2 cents worth there...

(i've added pictures for a sense of what i'm talking about)

In the stargate universe Earth was always out gunned and out classed but still managed to win due to it being a four man team vs a bulky enemy, they were more like SFs than GI Joes. When it came to Earth getting ships our fighters have proven superior to almost all fighers other than the Ori which we have not seen yet.

When Oniel was piloting the F302 he managed to take down at least 8 Gliders without refueling before making his way inside the Anubis Hatak's shields...

Moving up the scales a bit the Daedelus has Superior tech (Asgard mostly) to a standard Goa'uld Hatak and could easily take one down one on one but is usually confronted by at least three.

And in the final episode of SG1 managed to take down 3 Ori ships (the second most powerful race) before being in the point of destruction.

If going with your idea i would not allow the player to have the upgrades, though it it set 20 years in the future, by which time it would be expected that some of the technology would be available.

I like the idea of the player not being able to get the most powerful ships in the game so having the player fly around in an Aroura class battleship Ori warship or Atlantis Class Cityship, but if i was the player i think i would feel a bit cheated if there was no way i could get the really cool ships.

I think i should stay true to the show but maybe go with the idea of seeing really powerful ships that you can't play with, floating around like a fan designed Earth ship more powerful than the Daedelus, while still allowing the player to play with the ones that are seen in the show.

The Asgard upgrades were on the Odyssey , not the Daedalus. And it wasn't just the Asgard weapons which allowed it to destroy the Orii warships-----it was the Asgard weapons in conjunction with a ZPM. Even if they did get Asgard weapons installed, without a ZPM Daedalus and Apollo wouldn't be nearly as powerful. (They can still beam nukes around though.)

Keep that in mind. There's no need to make any Earth ship super-powerful even with Asgard weapons, unless it has a (non-buyable, probably mission-based) ZPM upgrade.

This post has been edited by Lindley : 05 December 2007 - 09:05 AM

@lostpinky, on Dec 5 2007, 12:48 AM, said in Balance:

When Oniel was piloting the F302 he managed to take down at least 8 Gliders without refueling before making his way inside the Anubis Hatak's shields...

I assume you are referring to season 7's "Fallen" here. If you go back and re-watch the episode, you'll notice that O'Neill actually only destroys the first two gliders he encounters. He then had to evade the rest so he would still have missiles left to destroy Anubis' weapon. I don't think an F-302 has a significant advantage over a glider, especially once it's missiles have been expended.

I generally like trying to take out really big things in really small things...

My opinion: stick to the show. It makes a lot of sense for really big things to be able to easily destroy really small things. When you have ships of truly huge scale, they are just going to be very powerful. I personally think also that anything to make the game more challenging is fun: even when your ship is simply not powerful enough to survive a fight with some other type of ship, there is a definite sense of urgency added to running away and surviving, or running the blockade, or whatever.

For instance: it is very difficult in EVO to take out the Dreadnaught with a UE Fighter, even though the UE fighter is an excellent ship: in order to get in range with blaze cannons, which work the best, you have to be in their firing range and the neutron blasts can barbeque you. Phase cannons have longer range, but it takes so long to damage the Dreadnaught's armor with phase cannons that the number of possibilities for making a mistake are increased. Neutron cannons are so large that they're hard to fit onto your ship, and the Dreadnaught has more of them anyway.

If you would like to make the game such that the player cannot simply be a god when he/she has the best ship, just make all of the enemy ships some percentage faster and have some new upgrades. This is easy to do with the skill modifier in the govt resource, and you can obviously play with the dude and ship resources to make some changes as well.

@lostpinky, on Dec 5 2007, 05:48 AM, said in Balance:

I like the idea of the player not being able to get the most powerful ships in the game so having the player fly around in an Aroura class battleship Ori warship or Atlantis Class Cityship, but if i was the player i think i would feel a bit cheated if there was no way i could get the really cool ships.

That's true, but perhaps you could make them available only 1) after the player has finished the plot or 2) near the end of the storyline, and then just find some reason to pit the player against an insane number of enemies.

I know it was the Odessey but the DSC304s are all Daedelus Class which for the purpose of the sentence is what I meant.

Fallen is what i was refering to, I will have tho rewatch again I thought he took out more than 2.

Good point about the ZPM on the Odessey, however the Asgard core had its own power supply and it is not stated if the weapons are powered by the zpm or the Asgard core so that one is a bit speculative. It is stated that the core has its own power supply as too not impose on the ships ZPM and the time dialation tech used up the asgard core first before it started using the zpm.

@lostpinky, on Dec 7 2007, 02:21 PM, said in Balance:

I know it was the Odessey but the DSC304s are all Daedelus Class which for the purpose of the sentence is what I meant.

I can see why they might be, but I don't ever recall hearing them called that. Typically they're just "battlecruisers" or "304s".

Quote

Good point about the ZPM on the Odessey, however the Asgard core had its own power supply and it is not stated if the weapons are powered by the zpm or the Asgard core so that one is a bit speculative. It is stated that the core has its own power supply as too not impose on the ships ZPM and the time dialation tech used up the asgard core first before it started using the zpm.

It seems to me that if Asgard weapons could do that much against an Orii battleship without a ZPM, even the dinky vessel the Asgard sent at the end of season 9 would have done something more than it did. And Earth would have been badgering their little grey butts for help a lot more than they did.

I don't really know anything about SG1, but the way to balance the game in EVx is to write the missions and then play through them, and tweak them until they are just achievable using what the player is likely to have at that point in the game. Then play through them again, and again, and again, and keep tweaking.

In the original EV, this meant that the player had to do some trading, get some points, and upgrade to better ships before he (or she) could complete different levels of missions.

Game balance (despite what a lot of people seem to think) isn't about creating a universe in which the capabilities of the ships balance each other out. It's about writing missions where the player has to play hard to progress, and which get more difficult as the game goes on. An unbalanced game is one where the missions are so hard that players get frustrated and give up, or where they are so easy that the player gets bored.

So, ultimately, you should be able to stick rigourously to SG1, and balance the game by the way you write the missions.

Thanks Martin, good advice.

@Lindley, Generally speaking the name of the first ship of that class is the class name... ref Star Trek: Interprid Class USS Voyager, the ship was the USS Intrepid, or USS Enterprise - D was Galaxy Class the first being the USS Galaxy.

gateworld.net forums are full of references to daedelus class and so are scifi-meshes.com and they are usually called DSCs or DSC304 for Deep Space Carriers.