Upcoming Changes to Capital Ship Shield and Energy bank bonuses

Shield and energy bank augmod bonuses on some Capital Ships are being significantly reduced. Here is a sampling of commonly used Capital Ships so you can see the effect this will have on you.

Capital Ship Shield and Energy Bank Adjustments – April 2, 2022

Note: the % difference may be different depending on the amount of shield or energy bank augmods you have from augmenters and Items. The values in the table assume no augmod bonuses.

Due to the significant nature of the changes, we will be giving augmenter resets to every Capital Ship significantly affected by the changes. In order to receive your augmenter reset, all you have to do is open the ship while docked and use the /FreeAugReset command in the chat.

The Changes Explained

One of the main ways we give “flavor” to a ship is to assign some modest negative stats that are then counterbalanced with extra bonuses in other areas. The Kalthi Wrathful Warrior is an example of this.

If I assign a tradeoff of -20% capacity for +50% energy bank to a Light Fighter, Heavy Fighter, and Support Freighter then these ships will end up with -20% capacity, 50% energy bank.

However, if I assign that same trade off to a Capital Ship then the Capital Ship would receive -20% capacity and +200% energy bank.

Note: This also affects the Thrust augmod bonuses on a few Industrial Freighters, since they were given scaling thrust based on their tech level. 

This was not what we had in mind when coming up with the tradeoff, and these tradeoffs can stack in ways that quickly become distorting.

This all happened because of a single Excel formula that has a * instead of a +. Capital Ships that had more bank than others will still have more bank, but it won’t be as drastic. For example, instead of the Vaziayu having 2.1x more Shield augmods than the UrQa’qa Qu’ishi Qa it will have 1.26x more.

While this resulted in very “flavorful” capital ships, the magnification of the stat spread is so high compared to other ships that it makes it very hard for us to balance around. We made this change because the native bank bonuses on Capital Ships were synergizing with the bonuses from the tradeoff which led to extreme stat spreads that were further compounded by gear, skill, and consumable choices.

Timing and Next Steps

We have been discussing the best way of handling this interaction for a very long time (more than a year) before deciding to pull the trigger. We’ve wanted to address this from the moment we realized what was going on, but it didn’t seem appropriate to make changes to them due to a variety of dependencies (For example, Fighters were a significant consumer of energy for both Players and Bots). We wanted to wait until some of those dependencies were addressed before making these changes, and since we’ve already taken significant steps towards addressing them in the previous patch we are taking the opportunity to get this fixed.

Some players will choose to stick with a bank setup on the ships that have a larger shield or energy bank bonus than others. Other players may choose to move to a more regenerative based setup. We are open to both setups, and are not doing this to drive players away from bank setups. We want them to be appropriate based on the content you’re doing, with clear upsides and downsides.