Racial Merits and Analysis

[TJ]

We tend to chat a lot about which race has the coolest stuff, so I thought I'd open a topic on it.

One thing I was wrong about was the TEC's strike craft; I felt like they were pretty good, but running some numbers on it, I take it back.  TEC strikecraft kind of suck.

Sorry if my chart's a little weird; I didn't have the patience to format it as a proper BB-code table.  But basically, it shows that the strike craft are more equal than I thought, but that the Tec's fighters are not the best at anything and generally the either the worst or just barely better than the worst where it counts the most.  The Vasari squadrons' stats make up for the lack of craft much better than I'd thought, too.  And while it looks at first like they have the fewest hit points (9 ships with 40 hull = 360 hp for Advent, 6*60=360 for TEC, and 4*85=340 for Vasari), when you factor in the beefy armor on the Vasari craft, it turns out they take mroe of a beating than the other two.

The raw numbers are available online, but I think taking a moment to do some analysis like this might really show what those numbers mean in a fight. 



                                Advent  Tec     Vasari
Fighters Ships                   9       6       4
         Hull                    40      60      85
         Armor                   1       1       3
         Armor damage mitigation 5.00%   5.00%   15.00%
         Effective Hull/Ship     42      63      97.75
         Total HP                378     378     391
         Repair Rate             0.15    0.25    0.4
         Repair/Sec/Squadron     1.35    1.5     1.6
         Damage/Ship             1.3     1.6     2.6
         Damage/Squadron         11.7    9.6     10.4

Bombers  Ships                   7       5       3
         Hull                    75      100     140
         Armor                   1       2       5
         Armor damage mitigation 5.00%   10.00%  25.00%
         Effective Hull/Ship     78.75   110     175
         Total HP                551.25  550     525
         Repair Rate             0.15    0.25    0.5
         Repair/Sec/Squadron     1.05    1.25    1.5
         Damage/Ship             2.5     3.3     5.7
         Damage/Squadron         17.5    16.5    17.1



(Edit: I messed up my chart, left fighter damage stats in the bomber section.  Fixed; conclusions not altered. Also, "armor damage mitigation" isn't 100% accurate; armor's actual effect is more accurately reflected in the effective hull/ship.)

[otter]

The math is really hard, but for approximations remember that the Vasari are also negating 25% of the incoming damage while the Tec and Advent are only negating 10 and 5 percent, respectively.

[TJ]

In short, the Vasari kick a lot more ass than they appear to on first glance. ;-)

[TJ]

They have a changelog up for 1.1 available here.  Mostly little game balance tweaks and bug fixes, looks like.  Illuminators have been tweaked down a tiny bit.
Returning Armada gives more/bigger ships, but goes off less often (10 minutes); I guess to make it less of a free fleet and more of cavalry coming over the ridge.

They've fixed a lot of synchronization problems (remember Mark's alternate galaxy problem?) and have improved their firewall traversal; both good things.  They have also tweaked the AntiLight and AntiVeryLight damage to do 50% damage against big ships instead of 25%, effectively doubling their effectiveness against big ships.  Lots of other tweaks.