SkyRaider#3584 posted (#post-224390) said:

Brother Belial#4215 posted (#post-224389) said:

Move to the corvette and flak will out DPS them 9 times out of 10.

Well, Dreadnought ships arent exactly nimble. Vettes can easily be on your other side by the time youve made a quarter turn. Ive tried to get in range before but doesnt always work.

Sometimes thats just how the game is supposed to work, though. It always gets to me just a bit when people will complain about corvettes being overpowered, and then you find out later that the person who was complaining about them plays the heavy artillery cruiser the classes are supposed to overlap eachother, in a sort of rock-paper-scissors-esq gameplay style- corvette > artillery > dreadnought > destroyer > corvette. Each ship plays differently, and learning all of them can help with each ship individually (ie, learning how to play corvette can really help you play artillery). Knowing your enemy is a valuable asset if it really starts to be an issue, you just might have to rig your ship for an anti-corvette build and slowly wean yourself off of it over time

Rock paper scissors style balancing only produces good balance if every player has equal initiative. That isn't the case though. A corvette can very easily avoid fights it would lose and pick fights it will win, while an artillery cruiser has a hard time disengaging from fights it can't win, as well as not being able to force opponents to stay exposed to its long range firepower for long.

So, while the signs in rock paper scissors may be balanced, if one person got to see the other's hand before they pick their sign it would still be an unfair game. That's the situation you have in class based games that balance around this idea frequently. Classes that are particularly fast, or have some kind of stealth capability are generally able to avoid fights with the classes they lose against while forcing fights against classes they win against, making them overpowered despite being part of an intransitive relationship.

You can observe that in games like World of Warcraft in open PvP. Rogues kill mages, mages kill fighters, fighters kill rogues, but the fighter can't find the rogue, and a mage can't avoid the rogue so a smart rogue still always wins.

That's why artillery ships can drop mines. Tac's can drop mines. Leave them when corvettes come from and you win. This is why you have builds and counter modules.

Aetrion#4710 posted (#post-224664) said:

Rock paper scissors style balancing only produces good balance if every player has equal initiative. That isn't the case though. A corvette can very easily avoid fights it would lose and pick fights it will win, while an artillery cruiser has a hard time disengaging from fights it can't win, as well as not being able to force opponents to stay exposed to its long range firepower for long.

So, while the signs in rock paper scissors may be balanced, if one person got to see the other's hand before they pick their sign it would still be an unfair game. That's the situation you have in class based games that balance around this idea frequently. Classes that are particularly fast, or have some kind of stealth capability are generally able to avoid fights with the classes they lose against while forcing fights against classes they win against, making them overpowered despite being part of an intransitive relationship.

You can observe that in games like World of Warcraft in open PvP. Rogues kill mages, mages kill fighters, fighters kill rogues, but the fighter can't find the rogue, and a mage can't avoid the rogue so a smart rogue still always wins.

Good point. But if the mage is also a good player for example, he can win against the rogue despite it beeing it's hard counter.

I play artillery cruisers with mines only and it seems to work out quite well. In veteran fleet lots of corvette players dont seem to see the mines in time in a combat situation.