Lower weight - all workshop and current HWS CS ships are obsolete because you can build a ship twice the size with same good maneuverability. More broken builds yet again.
Change in EWS - combat steel ships work better, all builds still work as they were expected to. Same result, no drawbacks.
I don’t believe it’ll fix the core issue of xeno ships being basically the only way to fight in pvp on HWS. A ship twice its size with similar resistances is still going to beat the currently very small and weak combat steel ships.
I think it’l fix the way CS ship will deal with xeno ships in small-medium fight environment. As long as you have enough time to snipe enemy turrets, you can win the engagement. From my experience, if CS was made comparable to CS in terms of surivability, a 10 000 blocks (upper limit for CS only) CS ship can deal with ~25 000 blocks(upper limit for Xeno) xeno ship. My main ship is ~10 k xeno blocks, and it does quite well in both 1v1s and teamfights.
For something over the top like big faction wars with 10s of ships where you get shot all the time, usually from multiple oppponents, you will need xeno for that extra protection. But at that point you are supposed to have means to get that xeno.
My vision of perfect balance is for a well built CS ship to be able to survive 10-15 minutes of constant fire from 1 opponent. This could be achieved by making CS and xeno have same resistances, except maybe for plasma or artillery weakness to justify hard xeno farm. I think the proposed change of modifier for rockets from x10 to x5 won’t solve the issue and will be glad to help with testing of the updated config.
Even though CS is the most obvious issue, hardened steel and normal steel will need the same treatment for the same issues CS has (all of them get one shotted by most explosive weapons, so no reason to use hardened steel over carbon, for example). That’s the reason most of the pvp ships I’ve seen on EU are carbon/xeno mix.
What size class are the ships you guys using at present? Combat steel and Xeno are both fine at size class 5, are you guys fighting with class 7?
Im fighting in a full Xeno Class 5, sitting at 35k blocks. Have yet to lose it as well 
That seems about right for what I can makeas well. Combat steel is 30K if under CPU but still not tiny.
Combat Steel does have a certain edge on Xeno. Without saying too much there is at least one value outside of HP/EWS/CPU to consider.
The issue lies in EWS.
As of right now, the multipliers are way too high, imo. You can easily lower TTK on both materials by changing multipliers around.
Also, look at Rocket launchers. There’s no reason what-so-ever to ever run flak at the moment, Rockets are Effective+ on both shields and armors, where flak instantly looses any worth by being ineffective against shields. I’d wager than a flak turret TTK on a turret is only slightly faster than a homing rocket, when you factor in movement (Flak’s only ‘bonus’ is against turrets/devices)
There should be a trade-off with rockets and flak. If flak is going to be ineffective (sic. NOT effective++) against armor, it should at least pound down a shield.
If rockets are going to carve up CSteel like butter, they should do shit-tier damage to shields.
Not that I disagree that EWS could have some changes made for a more dynamic armor/weapon system (Preferably at season start), but a point in Flaks favor I believe they are hitscan (Am I wrong about that?)
Really? In all the examples I have seen it’s maxed out at about 15k with reasonable turning… Love to be proven wrong on this one, could you send a screenie of a combat steel cv’s p menu?
uhhh…?
No, flaks are not hitscan. Hitscan is where a projectile always hits its intended target. On HWS flaks are homing, like rockets. Otherwise they behave just as a projectile (like plasma) does. At least as far as I have been able to tell.
I don’t think any of the turrets are hitscan atm, only mounted lasers (& railguns?)
After some study on CV combat, I have concluded that xeno is still OP.
Combat steel ships (even when equally sized to their xeno counterparts) still lose by a significant margin due to base resistance advantage from xeno.
This isn’t even going into weird blast mechanics from the plastic block category, and the fact that it weighs 1/4th less then combat steel. The only “disadvantage” it has is it’s 1500 hitpoints, but it’s purely academic since resistances more then compensate.
Combat steel atm really doesn’t offer any advantage outside of being a good weight block to shift the center of mass. This is really acdemic as eleon’s “Great Thruster Mechanic Reeework
” scales poorly with weight and dimensions.
In addition, due to xeno being POI only, it’s rarity means that only the major powers on NA are capable of fielding a large amount of them without difficulty. Even then it’s a uphill battle for factions who also need to farm resources like everyone else to get established.
At this point it’s xeno vs rp vs raw resources… Which might a small faction prioritize? Not getting ganked and utterly ruined in pvp is hard enough if you are new, but now you have a block that you need to spend tons of time on to get in order to realistically compete.
I am against locking an objectively superior block type behind a 2-3 day grind per ship. Veterans inherently have the advantage here; and this is causing that gap to widen by a significant margin.
Again, I’d love to be proven wrong. Please start posting evidence/bp/spreadsheets. From all the testing I have done I can’t see any reason to use combat steel over xeno.
Ah that’s too bad about flak, might have to reconsider my turret choices. I’m not saying that CS and Xeno are equal blocks, but I do use some amount of CS on my ship, and it’s because it does do something better. Personally I would like to see another xeno tier block, and a better reason to use a mix of materials.
Flak is an awful lot cheaper in terms of CPU than missiles (less than cannons even) so is an option you can put on lower tier CVs easily. So it has a purpose in the game, even it not a choice for end game pvp CVs
Zackey, not sure what you consider reasonable turning, and combat steel is definitely worse than Xeno but 30k blocks, 20k of which are CS, 100100 CPU:
Lets be real here. Xeno is end game blocks, shouldn’t they be some what op from the rest?? I don’t disagree from tweaking ews. Secondly, the biggest thing here… I’m buying xeno from pve players in mass since season 7. So my question is… how come pve/new guys have a hard time with xeno?? Yet they my biggest suppliers… 
I agree that Xeno is also good for the economy, particularly for PVE players as generally it is harder overall to make money this season (which, I believe is intended) so having that method is a good one. While some long term players may have hundreds of thousands of blocks in their OCD, many more do not so there is an economy for new players that is relatively easy to get into (as opposed to commodity trading which takes a lot of knowledge/exploration to get into). For this reason Xeno should be the better block, the issue is by what margin but, overall, a CV made of Xeno should be better as it is far far more expensive than CS. And, of course, not everyone wants to pvp but they still want to upgrade their OCD or bank in which case the Xeno economy allows this.
Making combat steel a bit better would, however, remove some of the barrier of entry to pvp for some pilots and small alliances but only to a small extent as a lot of people have more issues with finding a pvp BP if they do not know how to make one themselves. While there are some generally functional ones on the workshop, there are a lot of outdated ones and many more that claim to be pvp that are not.
A buff is, I think, fine but Xeno should remain top dog by a clear margin.
I’m all for xeno being top block, it does force a new market that can benefit PvP and PvE players with a new dynamic of supply and demand. For the PvE crowd they have a new reason to go core and multitool the hell out of POIs that have large amounts of xeno and sell on the market for the PvP players. The PvP crowd either has to sink a lot of money back to the PvE players via the market, or sink a lot of time back in PvE to acquire more xeno to build or repair their borokhen CVs. You can’t directly mine your way out of it, there is no OAM for it. It may even give more incentives for the PvE crowd to get their OCD high enough they may venture into PvP for higher stakes POIs with greater risk/reward and not worry as much about a potential unfriendly encounter.
I agree. I also think that CS should be much closer to Xeno because you can use much less of it because of weight. I thought a lot of recent changes were to reduce the size of blueprints, yet we just take out RCS and are back to having everything too large. HWS then compensates by amping weapon damage to speed up fights. I would love to see the CPU system made even more strict. Or just triple the weight of hull blocks so they don’t move like squirrels while made out of 100 meters of solid armor.
Followed by Leave it as is with 15 votes.
Such a huge counter vote is the killer for any change so we leave it as is until the next season.
My intention was exactly what some mentioned here. Giving PvE guys the chance to make money by trading it with PvP guys.
The thing is: the universe is not fully explored by many yet to recognize that I implemented some big Xeno goodies around…
And since some keep this a secret, with Alpha 12 I can implement real Quest Giver with real Dialogues, creating immersive Storys around such objectives.
Nevertheless EWS and the CPU changes are not “synced” yet.
For the next season I will rebalance some things, taking this Poll into account and more.
Thanks for the feedback!
