I would start with looking at the healing of the constructs between weakenings. That seems the clearest thing that's broken.

The rest, eh, hard to say. Having something besides another ship being able to stop bombard is a bad idea. That rather defeats the point of bombard. Bombard alone isn't going to take down a construct anyway. Aether battles are one of the few interesting aspects of nexus battles.

Which leads into something beyond the scope of this thread, that being whether or not nexus battles are adding any value to the game experience. Or whether constructs are honestly. The constructs giving free discretionary powers have pretty much single handedly destroyed any serious raiding of elemental/cosmic planes. Nexus battles have become the primary source of conflict for good or bad.

My personal feeling is that in its current incarnation, that's bad. It's structured raiding. With very little benefit for those who participate. The benefit for the offensive is if they manage to take the construct down they will get a power boost and they will eliminate the construct power from their enemies. Of course they have to actually take down the construct and that has never been an easy prospect. On the defensive side the benefit is...they don't lose something they already have. Fortunately it is not forced conflict but it's pretty much the only consistent org on org violent conflict that remains.

To be honest, it's not fun. I may be in the minority on that but I know a good portion of Celest does not find it fun either. To the point of not logging in to avoid it. It's not the primary reason I don't really play much anymore but it's definitely a reason. I realize my opinion means little and that the current course seems to be pretty well committed to. You can't please everyone all the time but I'd be curious to see how many players truly really enjoy nexus battles as they currently are. I'm not advocating getting rid of them. I think they're a great idea. I just think it needs more revamping than minor tweaks to really be an enhancement to the game.

It is scarier than a leviathan. Regardless of how big the ship is, it can only heal itself so much. There's only one empath and that hull healing balance is nothing to sneeze at. And it doesn't matter how strong the hull is, those modules aren't any stronger. And since a bombarding ship has to stay in place it's a sitting duck. Two warships should be able to take it out eventually. Any time when you can just move out of range when you're getting hurt and the other ship can't follow is advantage to you. Especially when you have another ship that can stay and keep hitting them.

In a straight up point blank shooting contest the ship with the bigger hull is always going to win all other things being equal. But that situation should happen rarely hopefully!

I've been playing around with an idea in my head of allowing some sort of battles between weakenings on nexus worlds that would temporarily disable a construct (not destroy it) for a short period of time (like 1-3 hours?). Perhaps this would give some sort of slight buff to the person who destroys it, or perhaps power to an aethership.

As an example of where my mind is wandering: Before raiding Nil (for example), you'd first go to the nexus world and disrupt the Taintaltar (disabling its power). Maybe this is done through some sort of psychic attack on the construct and/or a special type of bombardment from aetherspace. If successful, perhaps you'd gain a small increase in health/mana/ego and/or the ship's energy collector gets a big boost (if there are any).

Again, these thoughts are pure speculation and undeveloped but feel free to comment!

you're lucky you've never tried raiding Glom yet. All big raids can be stopped by a night user with choke. Oh avatar raid? choke. But back on topic, I definately agree that the aetherbattles are interesting. I sometimes would bombard and sit there just hoping for an aether battle. only been involved in a couple and they got me pumped.

And all deaths? Resurgem. Destroyed body? Soulresurgem.

Right now, I see the only real issue in the healing. It shouldn't be removed, but maybe made so that you have half the healing we have now.

Also, I like the idea of smaller skirmishes a lot, reminds me of stealth missions.

I definately like the idea of the 'disable' missions.

Eh... maybe just remove the battles themselves completely (I have to say that I agree with Catarin, they get excessively tedious much of the time). Implement your "mini-battles" that deactivate it for a time. Make it so that constructs *cannot* give positive power (at most, having them up brings them to a netloss of 0p per month). If deactivated, make it increase power loss by, say, a third of the amount each day reduces it, up to its total maximum. Examples:

A construct's powerloss decreases by 35 power every day when its total power to build is 35000 and its initial drain is 350. With this, deactivating it would reduce the total by 11 each time. If deactivated 3x a day, it nullifies the benefits from having it up. More, and it goes backwards, back to its maximum of 350. (Could modify this number to be 2 deactivations instead, say, to be easier and have more of an impact, or even 1-1).

Remove the "structured raiding" as it's called. Let it be something that can be done as a preparatory strike if desired. Give an organization something to do to hasten its reactivation, without *requiring* it (see: Guild novice times. Many ways exist to reduce it, but even if not taken, you will eventually get there).

Heck, you don't even have to scrap the code you've got. Make a colossus and all of the upgrades much, much cheaper (1/10th of the ingredients, say), scale damage appropriately, and you can still use construct battles to deactivate the things-- or bombard, if that's your desire. There's reason to defend your construct-- you don't want the benefits given from it to go away for x hours. There's reason to attack them-- remove someone's moonchilde aura, remove planar defences. There's reason to work to reactivate them-- someone raiding Nil for 2 hours after dropping your construct? Work harder to get it up faster so you can prod them to move along.

Actually, being able to restore it faster via a quest would probably lead to people feeling that they *had* to (even if they really don't) which may not be desireable.

Can strike that part.

Edit: This is, of course, tied in with your other idea for small benefits for disabling a construct. I'd guess that you'd want something larger for disabling the "big constructs" (the rezzes) to encourage them, while the disabling of smaller ones (the Planar defence ones) come with their own incentives (easier raiding) and don't need as much of one.

Okay. After fighting in the last battle, I have a few reinforcements on some suggestions:

1.) Scroll-lock really needs to go. It's completely defensive biased

2.) Stop grace abuse, plz.

As for the idea of disabling it.. Eh.. I guess? But there's the issue to resolve with healing off weakenings and scroll locks. Those are the two main issues in my opinion, and the two things that really need to be looked at. Possibly the colossus/colossi battle system as a whole.

I might also suggest that using the scroll will use up its own balance for like... a minute or 30 seconds before using it again. It's just boring and pain in the *** to see who gets to slow down first, taking up most of the weakening's time, before you know it, you just wasted the whole hour whoring scrolls to one another and without a single dent on the construct.

If damage is increased and it's oriented at disabling instead of destroying, then all a scroll-"lock" will do is just delay the inevitable if there are enough attackers. As-is, with the current setup, a scrollock does completely favour the defender because of the time limit (1 hour). Make it something like 10x damage, though, and even with a scrolllock, the construct's going to be disabled in 20 or so minutes with a decent offensive force. (Not sure how Bombard should be changed, but... eh, assuming that a colossus' costs and upgrades are reduced by 1/10th as suggested above, who cares about bombard?)

Further, we've had the discussion on Grace before. Nobody's opinions changed. I still don't believe it's abuse to use Grace as it's intended (to keep you from being farmed in your own territory). This isn't the place for that discussion to come out again, however.

A lot of this post is rambling so I apologize beforehand. As Xenthos alluded to (I think) forced conflict is not fun for players. Anything that even hints that they have to do something which is at its core a non-fun activity is enough to inspire the dreaded log-off syndrome. At the same time, players tend to feel forced to participate in anything that gives them a benefit or will give their enemy a benefit if they don't. On an organizational level anyway. Which isn't really something the admins can do anything about unless they decide to just do away with organizational conflict all together. Which would make the game very boring for a good portion of the players.

I like the idea of the "mini" battles but that is primarily because I like the idea of being able to nullify the effects of a construct.

I like Xenthos' ideas on mini-battles but disagree on the elimination of the large nexus battles. I just think they need to be tweaked some. One thought is having all the nexus worlds go into a weakened state at the same time greatly limits the possibilities of alliances and even going on the offensive at all. If your enemies are always going on the offensive against you every nexus weakening it's kind of hard for you to go on the offensive as you're leaving yourself undefended. Why not have them on a cycle? Sometimes they all might be weakened. Sometimes only one, sometimes two, etc. It would vary it up some.

What about having "weakenings" occuring more frequently but they'd be different types of weakenings. To start just two types. One the full weakening (which would be on about the same schedule as now) where you could actually set up your colossi and destroy a construct and bombard and all that good stuff. The second one being this mini-type. It would be much shorter. Like 20 minutes maybe happening every day or every other day. You would have a disrupter object that you would set up much like a colossi. Someone would be focusing this disrupter on the construct and it would take a certain amount of time of focusing to disable the construct for some period of time. Killing the operator would stop the focusing but it wouldn't immediately wipe out the damage that had been done already. It would be like 5 minutes of straight focusing during which time the focuser couldn't do anything and the defenders would in theory be attacking. If successful the construct would go dormant for a rl day or so. Or perhaps half a day. Along with the decreased power costs and gold costs as well. Or power gain if that's the case. So you'd have quick skirmishes as well as the big battles. With benefits as I'll be outlining below.

I'd like to see a system where participation in nexus weakenings garnered benefits on both an individual and an organizational level. As a participant either on the offensive or defensive you would gain a reputation with the gnomes as a fierce (or semi-fierce) aether warrior. As your reputation got higher, you could buy certain temporary artifacts from them on a personal level. For example an item that would nullify the effects of discretionary powers on you. An item that would allow you to teleport between aether bubbles. Mechanical enhancements to weapons or armour, etc. Along with your reputation cost there would be a gold cost which would be rather significant for the greater items but the lesser items would be useful too and much cheaper. Nexus battles would be the primary way of gaining reputation but aether battles would also gain it as would hunting aether beasts. Though hunting would accumulate it slower as it's not a very difficult activity beyond the gathering of the crew. More reputation for more difficult beasts. The details of how you would gain reputation during a nexus battle I'm not going to get into much but it would be things like operating a colossus/construct, focusing on a colossus/construct, killing those not of your org on the aether bubble, bombarding, and of course aether battle in general.

So there would be incentive for anyone to participate, win or lose beyond the basics of a reward for destroying the construct/keeping the construct. And in my mind, incentive is good. With it, people are willing to do all sorts of things they may generally consider tiresome on its own merits (like...bashing for example). Without it, they're not.

As I mentioned, organizations would also gain reputation with the gnomes. An organization would use its reputation to acquire things of benefit to the whole organization. Such as access to new constructs to build, upgrades to current constructs, upgrades to defenses, upgrades to their aether docks, an aether destabilizer unit that could be activated at a specific nexus world to cause it to be weakened (very expensive and it would take an hour to activate it giving the defending force some warning).

The idea for all of this is for nexus battles to move into something that people want to participate in on a regular basis rather than simply feeling obligated to.

I categorically agree with everything Catarin just said.

Shockingly, I agree with you once more, mini-me.


And it would be nice if the weakenings were..I don't know, more random. The last few have been either at like, 4, 5 am or at 13 or so pm, which is both times I am normally not logged in.
Think of the europeans!

It is impossible to make weakenings more random because they are as random as you can get (that is to say, completely). If the last couple have been at those times you don't like, then that is just.... a random occurrence.

Has anyone ever wondered how Estarra manages to fit these obscure smilies with what she's saying? It's short of spectacular.

Gah So i meant to post last night, but my net cut like it always does before I could finish typing and hit send. Anyways we had a clearly superiour force last weakening. 15+ people plus bombarding. This most definately should've destroyed the construct, I have no doubt in my mind that it should've no matter how these weakenings are set up. Next weakening is 5 days, which is 5 kegs and it'll get pretty healed up. I can't exactly remember everything I wrote before, but I think I agreed with tael, get rid of scrolls and give them a new utility. as Lysandus said, scroll locking means no damage getting done. This helps with the damage aspect we're all having trouble with. make them heal half of what sparkleberry does or something. get rid of kegs in addition. give them some other utility. could make poison slurry that people insert into opposing constructs/colossus, or something just inserted as an upgrade and given as another attack on it on it's own balance.

Oh and then I think I talked about the 'grace abuse' which is in quotes cause I don't feel it was abuse at all. You're meant to be able to get inside your construct/colossus. That's why security can teleport to that room because of the whole greaterpent ordeal and then instantly enter. Gloms are the only ones who get the advantage in stopping this because of choke which delays the instant entering if you pay attention. but that's just more of my envy of actually wanting choke. In any case, Xenthos was graced to get inside, that's fine in my opinion. The only near grace abusive things he did was grab bodies and sit in our room. But firstly, just speak on CT or some other channel. Should learn to do that anyways with all the thoughtstealers mages have now. Secondly, if he grabs bodies to get immolated who cares? we give them back anyways a bunch of the times. I supposed that time Dino just liked cutting heads off. But in all the smaller raids we've always left bodies untouched. I don't think there was anything wrong with what Xenthos did with grace.

Lastly...I agreed with Catarin's point on incentives. As a demi or titans that's when people tend to stop playing so much. or stop bashing. Incentives keep titans going to demi and demi's get the incentive not to lose demi and drop a huge way, but eventually they don't get any more incentives other than reaching for Avatar which isn't really based on bashing. i also liked the idea of not all the nexus world's weakening.

I have to say that there are a few inaccuracies here.

First off, you're not meant to kill it in one weakening. You got it down to about 1000 health from 5000, because I know how to pilot rather decently (so your huge numbers and bombards did 4900 damage to an experienced pilot, and sparkleberry healed about 900). You did 6600 damage the last weakening with a less experienced pilot there and smaller numbers. A keg heals a whopping 350 health, so 4 kegs is a whole 1400 health.

This means the next weakening is, at most, a 2400 health construct. Thus, your healing complaints are rather baseless. Healing 1400-1750 isn't the "end of the game" when you're doing 5k-7k damage, it just slows things down... which is good, when destruction is on the line.

hm thanks for your numbers and it isn't an inaccuracy. This was the second successful attack. that's why I said it should've gone down. two attacks against basically no defenders but a pilot. still should've gone down. Something is just mechanically wrong with the whole colossus/construct damage system. Which is why I said take out scrolls and all that kegs and give them healing scrolls and such.

With the numbers, actually, it is inaccurate. 2 weakenings against poor defence, or 3 against moderate, is about what's "expected" given the current numbers and postings by the admin.