The Brotherhood Guide to Fleet Bonuses

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[Hal]

According to Raven's explanation, those numbers are your Modifiers as described in my guide.

Personaly, I like games that don't give you the numbers, that way it's always speculation, and trial and error for the players instead of spreadsheet science.

Anyway, can someone help me further here (thanks already to all that have taken the time to reply to me so far).

My fleet has the following numbers. What do these actually mean:

74 Escort ships provide 25.22 pts. for stealth and 25.87 pts. for engines of Ships of the Line and Capital ships
75 Ships of the Line provide 22.08 pts. for beam damage and 68.11 pts. for missile damage of Escort ships and Capital ships
 
45 Destroyers provide 65.73 pts. for sensors of Cruisers and Battlecruisers/Carriers
30 Cruisers provide 23.67 pts. for beam damage and 73.00 pts. for missile damage of Destroyers and Battlecruisers/Carriers

[tommuis]

my advice for 99% of the players is: dont worry to much about the "finer" details of the battlecode, getting a  basic eco going + descent ships build and working together with your allies whilst being active determines 95 % of your outcome, the impact of the more complex formulas is often overestimated and is more intended to keep it interesting once you level up.

[Gonad The Barbarian]

my advice for 99% of the players is: dont worry to much about the "finer" details of the battlecode, getting a  basic eco going + descent ships build and working together with your allies whilst being active determines 95 % of your outcome, the impact of the more complex formulas is often overestimated and is more intended to keep it interesting once you level up.

Ditto.........It doesn't mean anything to have the perfect fleet composition, if you don't have the economy to build a larger, more powerful fleet than your opponent.  Fleet bonuses can give you an edge when you're matched against another fleet of similar size and power.  It will not help if your econ is far weaker than your opponent as he'll still steam roll your butt.

[Solar Flare]

Its true that the economy is the larger factor, as is the activity required to increase your economic base by conquering enemy planets. If you are a new player trying to get better there is little point becoming too focussed on things like bonuses.

However they can increase your fleets performance dramatically for little invetment and are well worth looking into, even for moderate players in my opinion (not to mention the extra depth making battles far more engaging and fun).

The amount of Silver Star (and up) players that haven't the first idea about bonuses is quite surprising.

[CE]

The amount of Silver Star (and up) players that haven't the first idea about bonuses is quite surprising.

that's pretty normal when you have such a small playerbase as we have now.
Greywhores can win gals even without building a decent CAP 

[Solar Flare]

True enough, but when the player base grows and just being able to build econ wont cut it anymore, those same players might take the next step up and learn how to design nice fleets.

[CE]

True enough, but when the player base grows and just being able to build econ wont cut it anymore, those same players might take the next step up and learn how to design nice fleets.

I sure hope so
I'm getting tired of designing my fleet and those of my allies over and over again, even some so-called vets don't know how to build decents ships

[Solar Flare]

The problem being that the majority of players are here just as a little fun, so dont want to spend hours reading the various strat guides about how to build a ship.

The only way to get round that is to have all the info on the page to guide them through it as they go and good example ships set up.

I mean, if you just signed up and were playing casually, how would you know that speed 10 ships were really slow? How would you know what a good level of sensors was? How would you even know bonuses existed?

If it wasnt for people teaching their allies how to play there would be hardly any good ships in a galaxy at all!

If we can successfully make it so that it is easier to absorb the basics intuitively then the higher end of the gameplay spectrum *should* be open to more players

[CE]

i've learned the basics by reading alot... and with alot i mean all!
Ofc, when you start your first gal as a zeeb, it's not needed to read all about gorgs and oms...

I think there are enough ways to learn the basics, but maybe we need to organise those ways better. But on the other hand, i still think newbs should show initiative to learn the game. If not, i'll kick them out right away.

[Walker boh]

i learned reading the stuff on mike jens site and ravens battle basics.. also kodells ships bonuses guides.. still have those bookmarked and refer to them from time to time..personally i always try to build my fleet with the bonuses for damage and sensors in  mind..

[Solar Flare]

I did the same, but if you want the player base to be very large we have to cater for the casual player - the kind of people who dont read a manual when they buy a game

How did this thread end up on this? 

[tommuis]

i agree with solar flare statement that a bunch of guides in 1 central location is a good thing, for new players, clarification.

About the bonuses, the amount of o/p you need to invest in a fleet makes it so that only late game large alliances can take advantage of it. For outcome of the gals they have little impact. Also a fleet with for example only(same o/p rest equal) sotl will beat a diverse fleet of escort/sotl/caps just by setting orders against the weakest part of the enemy fleet and shooting them down first while the dmg they absorb will be mostly spread out over the sotl fleet(although i recommend heavy hull PT with min req sensors for dmg absorbers) This has been demonstrate many times and was demonstrated from the early in conception of the bonus by lestat and me, the main reason imo when disusing with raven was bring in some flavour in the the designs and moving away from the same max. efficiency design time after time. A overhaul of the stealth .vs. sensors was needed to make this better ( partially to neutralize the counter strategy i suggested) but was never accomplished since the whole cfs/raven blabla that erupted then, leading to the project never being finished.

[Solar Flare]

Its not too hard to mix SotL and Caps to give mutual bonuses, so at least some of the bonuses are easy to get for the medium sized alliances, but I see what you mean, theres no way a medium sized alliance could make full use of them all.

If the bonuses were redesigned around flat bonuses from each ship, rather than all contributing to a modifying value then they would just serve as force multipliers, rather than being able to magically spring up a value to the cap value with 10 caps for example - it would favour truely mixed fleets, rather than most effective design + weird ships designed purely to give bonuses to the main ship

Im not sure if Stealth needs completely redesigning. If Sensors simply gave less value for each subsequent sensor slot then it would be just as easy to get mid range sensors, but progressivly harder to get 100 and beyond. This would not only serve to make it tougher to hit evasive escorts (or SotL/Caps with the bonus from them) but it would also make it harder to target your chosen class ... so cover Evasives can come into play earlier in the battle than they do at the moment

[Merc42]

As a relatively new player I did go looking for things what all the bonus meant but I've been a hardcore wargamer for years (WiF by ADG, Europa etc.) so I'm used to complicated rules with errata you need to track down.  The fact that everything was not listed somewhere in the Manual was in my view just bizarre.

As for how the bonus work it's in my view rather silly to list the exact numbers that are modified in the fleet status screen and not list the percentage of that number that actually gets to the affected ships.  It's in fact what in my limited view leads players to thing oh look my 55 escorts are giving X and Y bonus when in fact they are giving close to zero.

What should be shown is the actual exact bonus being applied and players will see that number go up as they add more ships and/or more effective ships.  To just show the raw mod all by itself IMHO is a big part of the problem.  To not clearly explain what that misleading number(s) means is part of what hurts the game for a newbie.  I'm learning the game in spite of how difficult CFS has seemingly made it.   

Frankly people complain on the old forums all the time about how few active players there are when very simple information regarding the game is so difficult to find.  Not sending out an email that the game will start in 24 hours is IMHO too stupid for words.  It costs nothing and probably by itself makes a significant number of inactive players.  Not having all the information one needs to play the game readily available is in my view so short sighted it's stupid. 

I've helped write, review, edit, and create rules for games I enjoy to play.  Players will do things like this to support games they like to play.  All the company has to do is print or in this case edit an electronic rule book after approving the wording.  Sorry for the rant.  It's a good game that could easily be far more easy on new players and have a bigger base.  It's great a group of gamers wants to make it work better, thanks.

[Solar Flare]

I agree, there were some very silly moves. Which the new group will be correcting