For those of you like me you spend way to much time on reddit. I noticed there was no dedicated subreddit for Battlestation and took it upon myself to create one. If you'd like to help me get it up and running, or at least drop by and leave a post/comment, I'd greatly appreciate it. You can find it at reddit.com/r/battlestation_h

There is a problem with the current upgrade system: it's not intuitive. Sometimes when you purchase an upgrade (especially Burst), it actually makes your weapon *worse*. This is unfortunate, because each successive upgrade costs more money than the last.
My proposal: Make upgrades "always good".

In order to do this, you should probably minimize the amount of "penalties" (negative modifiers to weapon variables) that come with an upgrade. The biggest problems with this are the Recharge Rate penalties (adding time severely reduces damage per second, and is the leading cause for making weapons weaker after upgrade), and Accuracy penalties (sometimes the accuracy gets so low (e.g. 20%) the weapon becomes useless and the real-life damage it inflicts goes way down).

While it's possible for you to fix these problems with careful adjustments of balance, this will result in a lot of work for the developers, because they will have to look closely at all the math for each weapon and each upgrade. This micro-management will take a lot of time; probably no one will want to do this. A simpler solution is to try to get rid of penalties associated with upgrades as much as possible. It's important to remember that recharge time is directly connected to damage per second. Essentially, lower recharge time == more damage (and higher firing rate, which is also an advantage).

Another option would be to change how time upgrades work. For example, instead of modifying Rate of Fire in fixed increments (e.g. "Recharge time -0.5s"), you could modify it with percentage values (e.g. "Recharge Time -15%"). This will fix some problems associated with recharge time, and especially problems with combining it with Burst. One of the big problems with recharge time modifiers is that when you use fixed increments, you cause damage per second to increase geometrically for each step that you increase. (E.g. the Particle cannon gets +33% DPS for its first -0.5s recharge time upgrade, then +50% for the second, and finally by +100% when it reduces its recharge time from 0.1s to 0.5s). The fact that the relationship between time and DPS is non-linear and escalating gives the player a disincentive from applying any further upgrades that would affect recharge time, because they would sharply reduce the damage. It's also worth noting that the particle cannon does the most DPS by only applying the recharge time upgrade, and doing nothing else; this is counter-intuitive for the player, who would presume that the "damage upgrade" would be the upgrade that actually gives you the most damage. Changing this to a percentage might allow a flat progression in DPS so that the changes are less extreme; it might also smooth out any problems for when other upgrades add time as a penalty. For example, you could have recharge time upgrades calculate -15% time after all time penalties from other upgrades (like Burst) are calculated, which will reduce interference from those other upgrades.

I would request/recommend, at the very least, that you remove Recharge Time penalties (i.e. damage per second penalties) from the following upgrades, where they are not needed, and cause problems:
- Accuracy upgrades
- Range upgrades
- Hull/Shield Damage upgrades (e.g. Laser Cannon currently penalizes time for this)

In most situations, recharge time penalties are unnecessary. The only time where I think they make sense might be for Burst. In other situations, they cause problems with balancing, and seriously reduce the effectiveness of weapons (sometimes causing the upgrade to make the weapon worse, which is very counter-intuitive!). In general, I would recommend not relying on penalties along with upgrades to "balance" the game, because I think it causes more problems than it solves. Please only use penalty modifiers where they actually make sense.

Finally, Burst is kind of broken. I have done the calculations in a spreadsheet for many of the weapons, and have found that when you buy Burst(1), it often does not improve your ship, or is a painful trade-off (when you take accuracy into account). There are several instances where buying Burst(2) makes your weapon clearly worse, and I would say this makes Burst broken. For a player's fun, upgrades should "always be good". They should not have to do careful math to see if maybe an upgrade they want to buy is going to make the weapons worse.
Weapons where buying Burst(1) makes the DPS worse: Flak Cannon (also reduces accuracy by 20)
Weapons where buying Burst(2) makes the DPS worse, or offers no improvement despite cost: Energy Cannon, Mega Plasma Cannon, Flak Cannon
Note: The particle cannon doesn't benefit from either Burst or Accuracy upgrades because they hurt the recharge time so much that it's not worth it to add even +0.1s.

If Upgrades to Accuracy, Damage and Range upgrades didn't have recharge time (i.e. DPS) penalties associated, this would make it a lot easier to use Burst without fear, because you could compensate for the penalties by spending more money (green tech) rather than adding more recharge time. One of the problems is also that sometimes the penalty increments are larger than the upgrade increments (e.g. for the Energy Cannon, the accuracy upgrades adds +0.3s recharge time, but the recharge time upgrade only removes -0.2s; the upgrade should always be better, I think).

Anyway, that was a lot of info, but I hope I was my writing was clear enough! I hope that you can make the game more intuitive for the players who are not so good at math. I hope that you simplify the upgrade system so that an upgrade is "always good" and the player doesn't have to think mathematically, but instead just watches the battle and sees the difference (either in range, rate of fire, accuracy, etc.) but has faith that the DPS is higher because they paid for it. I think it would be best to get rid of all penalties/trade-offs, except for Burst, which requires it.

Thanks for reading! I love this game, but I hope you can balance it a bit better. If so, I will keep playing for a long time...

I have played quite a few hours on this game, and completed it on Hard both with Carriers and specifically going no Carrier Strats. I have tried lots of combinations and would like to make the following suggestions with regards to combat.

Current Problems

* Ship Maneuverability is completely irrelevant. The main guns can fire from so far off, that you rarely have to move from where you warp into. Only in the early game, when you have little firepower, do you have to worry about turning your ship to line up your weapons.

* Weapon ranges and power are not balanced. Short range weapons are completely outclassed, also because of the point above.

* The balance between Point Defence (PD) and main weapons is completely off. As I mentioned in a different post, Projectile cannons are the best PD, 4-5 of them with recharge rate boosted gives you 1200 range PD, nothing gets through.

* Shields are somewhat irrelevant. Either projectile weapons can be made so that they overwhelm the shields or as a new player you just get missiled/rocketed to death with your shields doing nothing.

* The ships you unlock are not really balanced at all, they simply get better. This is in stark contrast to FTL where the ships encourage different playstyles, but there are not really OP ships.

Changes to consider

Ships

* Maneuverability should be factored into the game, smaller ships should be faster. I would also suggest to add Evasion, not just the accuracy of the projectile hitting, but ships should have percentage based evasion where a hit can still miss. Smaller ships can then have advantages that the larger cruisers and battleships do not. Also this will allow you to mount Short Range weapons on them as they have a chance of getting in close.

* Main Turrets should also be directional or have limited arcs, meaning that maneuvering becomes meaningful.

* Ship chassis should maybe also have a load or energy value placed on them, with weapons carrying different values, so you cannot just install the most powerful weapons. It could be an energy cost, also as you improve a weapon then it's energy cost will rise, this will make you think more about your build. You can then have smaller ships with maybe high energy ratios, so that they can install a smaller amount of high powered weaponry, whereas some bigger ships might be brute force low powered weaponry.


Weapons

* PD needs to be strongly buffed, the ranges need to be increased. I would say that the minimum range for PD should be around 500.

* I would also make Strike Craft immune to large weapon fire, they cannot be targeted by main weapons and have 100% evasion against them. The only exception would be missiles. In combination PD ignores Evasion from ALL ships. Essentially Strike Craft can only be engaged by PD.

* Missiles I would change to be energy hulls and not armour hulls. This would mean that lasers should be the de-facto missile defence, with them being less effective against strike craft.

* No weapon should be Shield penetrating. This needs to be got rid of. This will serve to prevent frustration from new players, who will die from Missile overload and it also stops Shields being completely irrelevant to experienced players. Missile turrets should be either Ion based or Projectile based, however, they should not ignore shields, if a projectile based missile hits a shield, it should be absorbed.

* Weapon damage decay over range could also be worthwhile considering, if you fire at maximum range then the damage reduces. Obviously not applicable to missile weapons, but all energy and laser weapons should experience this, perhaps projectiles are also unaffected.

* The main turret balance is kind of okay on paper, except that range is king in game. Energy and projectile weapons need to swap their ranges. Missiles and Rockets having 2K range and above is okay. However, energy should fire at 1200, projectile should be around 800 with Flaks around 600. If you then accompany this with 500 PD range and better ship maneuverability, then you can have ships that are close range brawlers or long range snipers and being able to maintain your position and distance is key. (I will have to have a think through about the changes to weapons and how to balance them better. At the moment projectiles are simply too OP, Nukes come in close second when on a cruiser, Flaks are completely useless, Energy only requires 1 and Missiles/Rockets are also useless really).


There are a lot of changes here, but I think they are all worth considering.

If it is considered, then really the UI needs to be updated as well, the current controls are fine for just warping into the corner and not having to maneuver 3 ships, but if it can be changed to where actual control is required, then having a short cut icon for each ship will be essential. So click on Ship icon (static not the ship itself) and then click where you want it to go. A formation ON/OFF icon would also be useful, to save being asked each time if you want to break formation.

EDIT: The kickstarter campaign is NOW live!

CLICK here to see the Kickstarter! You don't want to miss it.

Let's do it, commanders! Let's make Extended Edition happen.

Commanders!

We have begun work on a big content update for Battlestation: Harbinger. We are going to do some major changes based on the feedback we have gotten from you, our players. We need your help.

We will launch a new Kickstarter for the new improved Harbinger next month!

This huge update will be implemented to both the mobile version and the upcoming PC version of Harbinger. We aim to publish the update in late November or early December this year for Apple and Google. We aim to publish the PC version for Steam in January or February 2016.

Some of the new planned features for this Big Content Update:

• New user interface for PC
  
• 3 new races. The Celestials, the Schillae and the Unknown Threat.
  
• 1 campaign with 4 galaxies. The races you face, and in which order, are randomized every time you play. This will give you a lot of replay value! 4th galaxy has an epic end boss battle.
  
• More and better missions.
  
• More cool turrets to choose from!
  
• New ships, especially big carrier ships.
  
• Balancing the game (Please don't be angry at us for nerfing some turrets. We try our best!)
  

• Richer environments such as: Black holes (Slowly sucking hull), Electromagnetic Storms(Disabling shields), Asteroid clusters, debris of old ships and defunct space stations.
  
• Fast forward in battles.
  
• More neutral and friendly units, like mercenaries to hire.
  
• Different kind of traps. When you click on it you are either faced with loot or enemies, or both.
  
• Something else?
  

Does anyone else use anything but bolters? I have the worst time trying to use gatlings or lasers. For one the lasers need be buffed or changed how they do damage(ie multiple tics of damage per burst). Gatlings are fun and do well against other ships chipping away at armor and health, but I rarely see a gatling even fire in the right direction of a missile/rocket. Comparatively, a broadside of bolters can knock out most inbound threats(especially with burst upgrade).

How do you unlock best ships? Im on 3rd level of hard mode and now would be a great place to have them lol