A lot has been said about GA matchmaking, but I want to focus on one aspect of it that often gets overlooked: Ships. I have put my observations in some thread on the general topic, but now, given the time to think and cool down, I decided that it warrants a thread of its own.
So, my premise is this: Because of how the matchmaking works, having good ships puts you at a disadvantage in GA. Here's why:
One good ship has the nominal GP of roughly two good characters (50k-ish vs. 20k-ish). Add the fact that a fleet consists of 7 ships plus capital whereas a squad consists of 5 characters, and you see that one good fleet (350k - 400k GP) equals roughly three (!) good squads (100k+ GP), and the matchmaking sees no difference.And I'm not talking about just any squads, to get over 100k GP, you generally need most G12 and at least some zetas. And despite meaning so much more in the matchmaking, the banner gain from ships is similar to that from characters. You see, winning the ship part (1 territory) is pretty useless when you get massively overpowered in the remaining three. And I'm not even talking about inflating your GP with otherwise useless pilots.
So, are there ways to make it better? Sure, let me present three ideas off the top of my head:
1, Probably the best one - consider the character and ship GP separately. Instead of looking for the closest overall match, look for the closest matches in both ships and characters.
2, Weight the ship GP by some coefficient to make them commeasurate to characters. Taking character GP plus 1/3 ship GP sounds about right, but not screwing up the exact numbers might be tricky.
3, Massively inflate the banner gain from ships, but that would cause an outcry from the ship-haters.
Lastly, please don't bury this thread in the feedback section, I want people to actually see it.
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However, adding another 1-2 capital ships as well as a few new ships would be a better solution. If we could use two fleets for defense, the fleet's importance in GA might grow.
The second is a bit squishy, as even the character GP formula has deficiencies, I'm not sure there's an optimal correlation between fleet and character GP calculation.
The third one is easy to exploit. If the opponent has 1-2 teams that you don't have the counter for, they can completely stop you from getting to their ship section, while for them it's enough to target the upper two slices of your territory for a guaranteed win (provided they save two strong teams and a fleet for offense).
As I said, the first one might solve some problems. Sometimes you can win by having two stronger fleets than the opponent (especially if you have HMF for defense and they don't), but in most cases having the same total GP with 200-300k difference between each player's character and ship GP leads to one of them (usually the one with more ships and fewer toons) to be at a disadvantage.
There are at least 5 threads made about this exact topic making these exact points every time we have a GA
Discord: Iona Starbound#5299
Fleet isn't really suited for GA or TW for that matter. There's just not enough (capital)ships to make it interresting. It's mostly irrelevant for the outcome, or it's the key determining factor if you or your opponent can't beat the falcon. I guess it comes down to banners in some matches, which kinda validates fleet as a part of GA, but other than that it's pretty meh imo.
2 zones would make it more interresting for sure, but with only 4 fleets it would kinda suck aswell.
What would the gp threshold be for the introduction of a second fleet slot in defense ? The difference between 1 and 2 fleet in defense is insane, plus you’ll automatically have only one shot at winning on offense. I would also add that if you put both on the same territory it would barely change anything.
I do think that ga is not treating fleet fairly. I hate ships, i was never interested in those. After month of basically ignoring it I started to have fun with it and take top 5 everyday, a week later falcon came out and ruined everything (i got it 5* but my rebels ships are garbage). So back to ignoring it.
To give some information : my gp is 1.48m chars and 950k ships, and i’m’yet to lose a round in ga. In most of those wins i was able to full clear my opponents (meaning fleet too). So i don’t think that solution 3 would do anything. You certainly wouldn’t hear any outcry from me because i wouldn’t care. All i’d need to do is keep my whole fleet for offense and put garbage ships on defense and simply trade. Not talking about protecting fleet territory with squads because if you can’t beat even a single squad of your opponent you don’t deserve to win anyway.
Solution 2 i don’t like at all because it would mean people would be matched with different total gp. In that case i would have 1.8m virtual gp, someone with 1.3m char and 1.5m fleet would be the same, we could be matched together even though that person has 400k more gp than me.
All in all i agree with Randomsithlord, the best way to make ships both more relevant and enjoyable in ga would be to add at least 2 capital ships and some other ships. To me it’s better than solution 1 because ga should not be about mirror, choice should matter and having more fleet and less characters (to a point) should be a valid choice. In my opinion any other solution would be a band-aid and wouldn’t fix the real problem.
Is there currently a GP threshold anywhere in GA? I don't remember. Don't think we need a threshold. Current player distribution warrants the case where both sides clear the opponent (on ships) and none do. In my case I have all 4 of the caps well built with enough fleet to go along with them. And contrary to squads, none of the GA templates provide any chance of depth.
If weighing ship GP by f.ex. a third only (suggestion 2), then having a lot of fluff GP from ships will be a far smaller disadvantage than having a lot of fluff GP from characters. Is that really the intention? I used to level all my ships to level 85 as soon as possible - strong ships as well as the weak once, which I would probably never use. Why should the disadvantage from this be greatly reduced now? (I wouldn't mind - but it wouldn't really be fair).
Your first suggestion, however, could be interesting.
Yes, the number of defense teams is determined by GP.
It should already work this way.
GA-GP = (#squad_fields/#all_fields)*squad_GP + (1/#all_fields)*ship_GP
Yeah, that could do the trick, basically a more complex version of my second suggestion. Or substitute the nuber of fields by the number of maximum obtainable banners, so the GP per banner is the same no matter what. But matching people with different overall GP would probably lead to a lot of complaints...
Another way would be to change the way GP itself is calculated to bring ships more in line with characters.
I mean min toon/team gp to put on zones.