Any chance we could reconsider the points system. I've been playing around with maulers, and frankly, have not been able to come up with a viable strategy against an equal point value of smaller ship types.

The problem as I see it, is that split warheads, coupled with increasing repair costs to size, the maulers point costs, and other tactical penalties make it nigh impossible to leverage a maulers size advantage into something system winning.

I'm really not sure what to suggest however. Maybe based on the number on non-SS systems on each ship?

Or alternatively, maybe consider a 2 warhead drone instead as though 2 missiles were launched against a single target when considering points? The line of argument here being that at the moment it is to easy to negate a maulers potential advantage (swarm & repair) by splitting the warhead.

mauler + a couple repair ships... (you can get them as low as cruiser class or around and still able to repair the mauler 1 per turn)
is not to bad...

other then that, ya, I thought he was putting in a system where SS no longer counts toward system count... however you can only have so much of it, the bigger the ship, the more SS

I've done the mauler & repair ships line (I used destroyers however). Yes it works in terms of keeping the mauler alive, but just about anything else would work much better.

I'd bet on the 7 nippy frigates vs 1 mauler every time. But I'll keep trying with the maulers just the same. Perhaps I'll be inspired.

what I always figured with that setup is having the mauler almost completely drone racks, then when your not repairing, lay down a layer or 2 of low level drones. for the mauler it will be easy to have enough speed, burn and armour to blast through the low lvl minefield every shot, but incoming fire from small ships will have a harder time

1 1
2 2
3 4
4 7
5 12
6 20
7 33

for instance, the repair ships keep a constant minefield of total power 6 (whether it be single mine of 6 or 2 layer minefield of 3) around themselves at all times (replacing mines as they get shot down) so for the drone to reach the mauler and/or repair ships it would need to have 7 points of armour on it, which according to my wonderful math above, would require 33 drone points just on armour, or 11 drone racks worth of points... offhand idk how big a ship that would require but it's defenitely not gonna be a fighter, or even corvette, possibly destroyer if the entire ship is drone racks and engines. however, if the mauler has 30 drone racks (yes, it's very possible) you can have 7 point in armour to get through the minefield, and still have plenty of points left for burn, movement, and power.

the biggest limitation here however would simply be keeping the minefield up as much as possible, and finding the enemy with beholders... however from personal experience said mauler would also have enough drone racks to fling a beholder from one end of a system to another.

the plan may be a little 'out there' but the point is simple, drone for drone, yes, the mauler will lose everytime, because each fighter can shoot a drone at your mauler, for serious damage in a short amount of time. so instead you need to capitalize on the other kinds of drones that smaller ships will have trouble firing (like a wall of gravdrones)

another thing to keep in mind, is if you hit a corvette (size 20 iirc) with a power 7 EMP, both ships will take that EMP damage. however, the corvette will lose 7 out of 20 units, so almost half it's systems. for the mauler, that's 7 out of 72 total units... a whole less of an impact. and if you've ever played around an EMP blast radius, you know it's fairly easy to hit something with it.

I've tried the emp route too, but superstructure counts as an emp sink so even small ships are difficult to disable. I'd read somewhere in the rules about spawn curing emp, so I figured I may be able to build an emp flinging colossus. Didn't quite work though.

Tried the mine thing too. Problem I found with that was the multiple incoming warheads typically took out the mine field, and then I still got hit. Worked best when I launched the mine the same turn I became visible by launching the attack drone.

Oddly enough, emp has become my preferred mauler defense strat, since I can bet that every incoming warhead is split nine ways to sunday making spawn irrelevant.

I think maulers should be hard to field - in a very high planet system them a mauler +3 or 4 support vessels is very possible.

In lower planet count systems then they are not worth it.

I know that smaller ships are probably overpowered now compared with larger vessels, I'm just not sure what to do about it (yet)

I'm sure I've said it before...

large ships being easy to hit is not bad, it's the fact that there easy to take down to.

it just came to mind that at the moment there is no point requirement for shooting more then 1 warhead, except for having the extra mass, but when you do much more damage especially against large ships.
perhaps a system of adding points based on how many warheads your firing?

the other thing is what I suggested before, that large ships have a natural defense against shots from smaller ships. it doesn't even really have to be that much of a defense, really.

I just had a horrible thought.

Depending on the ship class, other unit types start to behave like superstructure: offering armour and preserving routes of control.


In order of volatility the systems are:
SuperStructure
Habitat
Hold
Mass Scoops
Factories
Swarm Gen
Drone Rack
Spindizzy
Engine


So, matching ship class to this we have:
1) Fighter, Frigate, Destroyer and cruiser only get the benefit from Super Structure
2) BattleShip gets it from SS and from Habitat
3) Dreadnaughts get it from SS, Habitat and Hold
4) Maulers get it from SS, Habitat, Hold, and mass Scoops

This swings all battles back the other way a bit, and make use of existing game mechanics.

Well?

that would help even if it doesn't fix this problem, as I'm sure we all can guess, SS loses it's useability the bigger the ship, not because more is needed for 'good' protection but the fact that you can only go up to 72 units total, and for maulers the majority of that, 66 units to be exact, is already being taken up by non SS units, leaving only a total of 6 SS total, if they do decide to use it.

so I was actually going to suggest something based on that:
since the bigger the class of ship, the less SS you can use, how about increasing the armor value of the individual SS? personally I'd like to see the amount it absorbs the same as what class ship it is (fighter =1, to mauler =7) but I know that might make it to much for bigger ships, or more specifically between destroyer and dreadnaught... but like I said, bigger ships like the mauler can't use a ton of it either like fighters and corvettes can, so idk.

I'd vote for something that allowed swarm to work as a more effective defense. If you had it so that if you applied swarm greater than the attack nano onto an affected system, then that system does not get damaged. That way your larger ship sizes become a much more credible threat.

If this was thought to be to over-powered, then scale it (to say twice the attacking nano for the same effect?).

I was wondering something along the same lines...
SS takes out 2 attack nano, but if it's only 1 attack nano, is the SS destroyed anyway?

I tried to see if it did or not but could never really tell.