I think the issue is more that the relative distance from a miner to a BC in the late game is always incredibly small. Normally you have to 'overextend' yourself to expand your economy in RTS games, making it an obvious vulnerable spot to strike at first. However... this is obviously not the case for a game like Cruiser Command where your base is mobile and you gain incredible movement speed boosters (in order to facilitate end game fluidity) to most small ships.Degra wrote:I'm not sure anymore whether it was the right thing to do with the wraith to reduce relative damage progression via upgrades.
It seems to me that the only way to reverse the current process is by nerfing the wraith's default values, but improving gain via upgrades.
Wraith deceleration upgrade seems like a good way to make it possible to catch miners late-game again, as it's only worth when you don't deplete your energy in the process, meaning you should have at least vessel energy 3 by then.
Just make it cost kerm, so people won't get it early game so much.
The reason that miners are harder to kill late game isn't because of stats, but because it's incredibly easy to simply turbo boost back your BC and spend only a second or two afterwards simply waltzing over to repair. The relative distance gets smaller due to speed upgrades and abilities that facilitate movement.
AKA as the game goes on, you eliminate every miner weakness in terms of movement typically. If you want to make miners more vulnerable late game, you need a method of eliminating that absolute advantage -- an upgrade that completely disables Turbo Boost until a miner docks and relaunches, tethers, something that will dampen movement for the miner.
And with this in mind, I'd like to finally get to the real point: nearly every ability in cruiser command focuses entirely upon 'making your own ships more effective.' You can count the number of abilities that impede your opponents with your hands -- tractor beam, wraith EMP, destroyer energy leech, wraith energy leech, wasp missiles and sabertooth missiles would be the ones of real note.
The reason I don't include things like infiltration is because infiltration in itself does not impede the enemy team, but rather it's the way the player uses infiltration that impedes the team. It would be like saying 'small ship collision impedes the enemy team because it lowers the enemy small ship's movement.' It's like saying 'increased damage impedes the enemy team by forcing them to expend more shields.' It does not do anything to address scaling -- it only further increases the peak at which the scales reach.
In short, Cruiser Command is a very Buff heavy game, with few Debuffs. Part of me finds this amusing because one of the biggest debuffs in the game, Destroyer's Energy Leech, is the way to break stalemates in current team battles. It's an effective 'negative energy production' aspect so long as you continue to hit. It's an ability that effective addresses the issue of energy production scaling into the late game.
I don't mean to say that we should start pumping out 'debuffs' en-mass. What I mean to say is that certain scaling issues that come with the late game can probably be more easily addressed through the addition of such debuffs rather than constantly attempting to adjust the scaling of each ship.
