Yet another improve Ion Cannon

    • Fleet, Defense and Combats

    • Yet another improve Ion Cannon

      Hi guys.
      I think Ion cannon has a lot of potential and designed some improvements, the ideal would be apply them all, but some of them could be useful. Let´s start:

      1. Upgrade Ion cannon shield according to crystal cost so they become tiny mini domes, reason: small dome cost 10000 crystal and have 2000 base shield, thast 1 point every 5 crsytal, large dome cost 50000 crystal and have 10000 bas shield 1 point every 5 crystal, but ion cannon cost 6000 crystal and have 500 base shield thats 1 point every 12 crystal, so make it like domes 1 shield/5 crystal so raise the ion cannon base shield to 1200

      2. Ion cannon description says: destroy electronic systems and disables shields of the ship, but thats only words, they do nothing, so the obvious its making the description true, but as is every ion cannon shot could disable any shield maybe could be very overpowered, make it depends on ion technology, 1% chance of disable the shields of the ships to 0 for every point in ion tech, so if your ion tech is 15 every hit of the ion cannon has a 15% chance to permanentlly put the shield to 0, and negate the regeneration over rounds, so the hull is vulnerable If this suggestion could be bit OP to balance it maybe you could add some deuterium cost to building ion cannon.

      3. Make ion cannon like domes and no ships, RIPs included, have rapid fire against them, so they can break rapid fire in large numbers, make them like plasma cannons, no rapid fire against ion cannon, and to balance add some deuterium cost.

    • You have to be a bit more specific about why these are the improvements you want to see.

      To point 1: Why do you think the Ion cannon should be handled differently than other def? E.g. plasmas have 1 base shield per 167 crystal, gauß 1 base shield per 75 crystal,... So why do you think necessarily ion cannons need to adapt to domes, and all other def not? That sounds odd to me, also because ion cannons definitively *not* are shield weapons.

      Point 2: There are many things missing for that idea, e.g. how this would sum up for e.g. 1000 ion cannons. You need to provide some more info about the math that is included, but nevertheless I don't think this will ever get accepted, as this would mean a major rehaul of the def-system.

      Point 3: Only bombers and RIPs have rapid fire against them, so I don't see any advantages for that change, especially because this would nerf the bombers which basically already are pretty much useless (except for some very special usecases). There is definitely missing a decent argumentation for this.

    • Hi, i´ll try to be more specific, first of all, the 3 points are independent from each other, Gf can implement only 1, the 3 of them or none of them.

      The point is nobody makes ion cannons because their ratio cost/efectiveness is the worst of all defenses.

      1. Because i wanted to balance it, ion cannon dmg is very low, they dont do what their description sais they do, so lets make them minishields. so a barrier of ions can absorb the dmg from the swarms of LF and maybe HF, usually you get attacked by RIPs or some heavy ship with swarms of million lf, this way we can counter swarms.

      2. Each ion cannon percentage is individual, if you have 10000 ions every one of them shoot at its target, and for each shot, the percentage is calculated, you have 12% chances to destroy shield, the ion cannon n1 shots to a BS, and fails so it doesnt disable shield, ion n2 shots vs lf and disables it, the point is as the game system is now, if they attack you with thousand of RIPs you need a breakpoint of plasmas to make them lose some starts, if you are attacked by 1200 rips and you have 30000 plasmas you dont destroy any single rip, can you believe, there are a critical point and you cant destroy 1 of them, this way , with enough ions and luck you can disable rips shields so defenses can damage them and they are not so OP.

      3. The idea is same as 1 or 2, convert the useless ion in a defense against RIPs either disabling their huge shields, either breaking their rapid fire against all, if you want to make people build and use bombers, remove the rapid fire from rips and keep it on bombers, so a fleet of rips atacking a defense with thousand ions must atacck with bombers. Bombers are useless because their high deut consumption and why are you using a ship to break defenses that can be destroyed by those defenses when you can use some rips and dont lose a single one, maybe the key is make the bomber more effective against defenses and the rip a little less.

    • I see your point. The main problem of this types of changes is that as the ships and defenses are always the same (1 new ship - battlecruiser - in 10 years more or less), it's hard to keep everything balanced. If Ion Cannon gets an update, sure it will change the mechanics, what's fine, but at the same time will make other defenses a little bit useless and other maybe too expensive in comparison with the new Ion.

      I do not say your change is bad, I actually agree with you even that I do not use defenses at all for my way of playing. My point is, that is it's not like a MOBA or MMORPG where there are tons of patches with new changes that make each ship or defense better. So it would be better to see all the changes that may apply and do them all at once. For example, the bomber is slow and useless... it's much better to use RIPS which consume less, they are super slow that's right, but you do not get losses and they do hit really hard.

    • if you are goihng to apply those changes to ion cannon, maybe you could add some deut cost to build like 2k M 6K C and something between 4k amd 10k D it depends if you implement 1 or the 3 changes.

      Another way to do is like the speed of the recycler, tie the power of the ion cannon to different techs, like:

      1. when your shield tech reach to 20 base shields of ion cannon will be upgraded to 1200
      2. When your ion tech reach to 15, all your ions have a 15% chance tied to ion tech of permanently disable the target shield for the rest of the battle
      3. When your hyperspace tect reach to 12 your ions bend the space around them so they are more hard to target so every ship loses rapid fire against them

    • In my opinion, the only thing which needs to be done about Ion Cannons is the reduction of build cost.

      Just make it 5K Crystal instead of 6K, or maybe even lower it to 4K.

      This would be a fair adjustment, and an easy one to implement, compared to tweaking the stats.

      Just lower the Crystal cost and be done with it.

      Clearly Ion Cannons is an enduring problem/discussion and needs to be finally addressed and resolved!

    • Exactly.

      The only change it needs is the cost. This is supposed to be a mid/low-tier defense unit. A shield of 500 is already one of the best in the game. What more do you want?

      But yes, since it's supposed to "mirror" the HL, it shouldn't cost so much crystal. 5k or even 4k would be ideal or make it less crystal and a bit more metal but still costing more crystal.

    • What if the damage it does go beyond the enemy ships's barriers? (like it's description says that neutralize the barrier)


      In this way it cost too much instead other defences but it may have a role if you choiced to build up more of them. At the same time the bomber may be get choice for their speed to attack a player that have many of them, cause maybe the RIPs can be bursted if you think that they do damage without counting barriers. In fact at the same cost you can have more bomber than RIP, so more fake/ships and the damage done by ion cannons may be spread on more targets.

      What do you think about it?