A. Flood Raids and Strategy:
The flood invasions that reach me have approx ~175 ships total. 15 are bombardment ships the rest uber-light frigates. The uber light frigates have no weapons and fight by a capture ability. There is no other raid strength.
The other minor raids are from infection research and have around 30 ships. 6 of them the bombardment ships.
If the flood were a human player faction, the plan would be to spam light frigates to no end and hope to get lucky capturing things. Nukes would be a nightmare. Makos the most feared foe.
B. Flood Analysis.
They are not OP imho, it is just impossible to set up defenses against them when they arrive as the defenses get captured immediately. The bombs also destroy the planet. The first planet they harass with a raid is doomed. An invasion must be dealt with by a fleets. Clustered groups of civilian structures with spread out defenses located some distance away can kill the flood, however the large number of ships could result in losses anyways. A substantial amount of power is lost fighting them as almost every weapon is overkill, Planets hit by raids are best defended by fighter squadrons and some mac cannons. Make a small island with the defensive structures, then surround it with mines. Rebuild mines often and expect that your defenses will not always win.
Against the largest raids put your weakest ships on the front line and have the heavier ones pound away from behind.
C. Balance suggestions.
The issues are:
- Too many flood ships (you need a large number of weapons, not firepower to defeat them)
- Perfect ability. If they get in range your ships are gone.
- Ability can affect everything.
- No default antifighter.
- Impossible to react to the first wave.
- More durable basic flood ships with a basic attack that can hit everything but planets. (Survive a few MAC shots. Maybe floodify some of your models and have multiple types of these with different strengths)
- Basic attack has a passive that is target specific
- 10% chance to disable caps for 10 sec as they fight off invasion. Capture if below 25% health, 1% chance to capture at full health.
- 15% chance to disable cruisers/structures for 10 sec, capture if below 40% health, 5% chance to capture at full health.
- 20% chance to disable frigates, capture if below 60% health, 10% chance to capture at full health.
- 50% chance to capture fighters.
- Attack would take roughly 3 shots to take out charon frigates. (1/3 power of thanatos mac guns)
- Captured ships would be partially healed (150 Hp), disabled for 3 sec to assert control, have temporarily lower armor and a 15hp/s regen that would transfer to a 10hp/s regen and an armor buff and a slight hp buff (no airlocks), and a constant weapon debuff (20%) as well,
- Basic attack has a passive that is target specific
- Bombardment ships are capital ships.
- 2 default capture abilites.
- 1 squadron of capture capable drones.
- The passive abilities of the basic frigates.
- Smaller Raids and Invasions
- Invasion goes to 2 levels. first three raids are roughly 30/3 ships, others are roughly 75/10 ships.
- Raids are 1 raid 10/1 to 2 raids 15/3 to 3 raids 25/5 ships. (3 levels)
- Defensive tech, a la vasari, that decrease raid size by 20%. (Flood Experience or something like that.) Alternatively it gives a debuff to flood ability percentages.
