Birth of the Federation

As it has been discussed before, ram is a very powerful and useful attack tactic. Better hull translates into survival but the relationship is not straightforward. A ship with near zero depleted hull (if it has superios hull values to begin with) is capable of ramming again and killing a ship with better hull values.... you don’t see this in vanilla as much, but in UDM hull values are enhanced and this becomes a problem when facing cardies. One cardie CC can take out two dom HC (ship closest in hull value)... it's been noted before and solution for exact ram damage is yet to be found. I am reluctant to embrace BOP solution of ram=death at this point so i propose the following...

1.increase beam damage/decrease minimal distance for torp fire for ships with weak hulls. in my many simulations between cardie/dom ships I noted that most damage is given by torps. Any race has advantage over cardies as far as the torp damage is concerned (may be kling is an exception) - but in battle it is a not relevant - cardie opponents have only only one shot at torp fire - at first turn - then cardies will come in close range - and it does not matter if you flyby or circle or charge or assault - torps won't fire. and beams are too weak to do any damage to the cardies. If we can get torps to fire at point blank distance, that could help…

2.increase hull/shield values for cruisers - to the point that they can hang on longer

3.increase range for non-cardie cruisers to long and tt speed to 2 â€" this will allow a possibility of sneaking behind and taking over sister planets â€" and would force cardie at the defensive stance.

The way it stands now, the only way to win vs cardie in UDM is:
1. play on large map â€" to give chance for dom to grow and build up fleet at least 2.5 times the size of cardie â€" but dom does not have production that is 2 times that of cardie…
2. dig in, build intel on remote out of range planets and hope cardie mess up orbital offence â€" if they make less command cruisers than you have powered up orbs, then you may survive for a while, but if you have a half dissent player, on large map 30 CC is a force â€" you need 60 dom ships to win that game…

any thoughts would be welcome…

Hmm, I must say RF, before any of that is done I would rather see the Ram=Death variant and maybe some spiced up(more beam weapons) cardassian ships.

The best solution though would be that ram works like we always expected it to work. On this basis UDM and all other Mods have been made.

As much as I sympathize with rf, my first comment after our game was how it was a shame the races r so unbalanced because of ram, I'm not convinced changing other races' ship stats just to counter the ram of card is the answer.

I think in vanilla it (ram) wasn't an issue as you could kill a ramming ship before it got to you alot of the time. But in UDM, shields are so high and weapons so low that no matter what you do, the ramming ship will reach you before you can kill it.

In a perfect world, ram should work the way it is supposed to work. Since this is not currently possible (is it?), another solution needs be had. I'm just worried that too much time will be put into countering the ram threat of card. After that will fed be able to play dom? Will rom be able to play kling?

I would say just remove the ram option until a fix can be found for it. A temporary workaround until the correct fix can be found and implemented. This would eliminate abuse of the Ramkill of 2 CC by Cardie and force the battle to be acted out naturally and the way it was intended by the mod.

Without ram, card just doesn't have the torp power to compete with dom/rom/fed.

thats why build tons of Cruisers instead of those expensive commands, or Strikes if u want... they have more torps...

would definitely switch the strategies around

Those smaller ships can't bomb a major, quite useless to make, imho.

well then I would suggest increasing the range of all Striker torpedoes to at least equivelant of their Command counterparts

change in hull values would mess up orbital attack etc - and one of the nice features of this mod is that it lets you survive longer due to better planetary protection...

i looked at ram problem before when i tried to come with strategy to let raider 2 (speed 4, massive torpedo load, weak hull) to survive vs cardie destroyer...

so i do believe without serioius detriment to the current game if we change all/or parts of the following

1. increase the tactical speed/agility of cruisers to 3 (vs 2 for cardies) - thicker hull - should translate into slower speed.. i wonder if it is possible to make speed increase fractional - i.e. 1.6 etc..

2. increase starting battle distance separation
3. increase beam damage for non-cardie ships by 50%

4. broaden torpedo firing range to allow torp discharge at close distance

5. look into more range for for cruisers

6. make strikers cheaper

just random thoughts bound to be dashed to bits by the cold reality of modding reality limits...

if only code for real ram damage could be corrected..

I said nothing about changing hull strengths..

I did state that the Strikers max torpedo range should be increased to that of the Commands so that they become more suited to planetary bombing. (at least i think thats how it works, distance factor between orbitals/ships ?)

I thought it was a combination of hull and shields whether or not a ship is destroyed by orbs.