I'm curious to know why the Sentinel is considered a worthless ship? Is it broken, or just not strong enough to make a difference in the early pre-Citadel stages where it was meant to be used? I know in earlier versions it was possible to completely circumvent the 4x combat odds for the ship, but I believe that it does properly function as a 4:1 odds ship when defending planets in its sector. Is that true?

I think the most obvious thing is that sitting in the Sential signals to everyone that you are sitting in a sector over young citadels. Not that this ship does not do it's job, but it's a dead give-a-way that you've even started citadels. Then it's just a matter of timing, making a concerted effort to find you the night before your L class goes Level 4. Easy pickin's for those who would rather invade than build.

Ok, so what if I allow the Sentinel to sit in orbit so you have to start to land before you deal with the ship? It won't be seen in sector, but if you try to land on a planet, it will say "This planet is defended by a Tholian Sentinel. You must defeat it before you can land on this planet". So basically it would be the one ship that can remain on a planet before there's a Citadel. That would make it less of a red flag.

Beyond that, if someone does find the ship, it needs to be powerful enough that there's a cost-reward balance for attacking it. It should certainly be possible to defeat the ship, but the reward should not be so high that there's no risk involved.

I also think that part of the reason the Sentinel is relatively useless is the fact that games grow so quickly and it's so easy to find a base early in the game. If the game is slowed down, the Sentinel would be restored to a place of importance for the early game, I think.

Make it so whether a player is in the Tholian or not, you have to attack/destroy it before proceeding on. To us, that's what a guardian bonus meant when we first started playing. I mean, for example and correct me if I'm wrong. I sit in an IDC (turned on) in a sector, my wife enters, she can't warp out of the sector. I can transport to another ship and she is still held by the IDC, correct? If so, then why not allow the Tholian to guard planets and regardless of being manned they have to be destroyed first.

I didnt use it when I used play because it had such a low fig capacity, and only marginally better odds than planet figs. The stock capacity is so low that you are more or less guaranteed ship destroyed if found, losing a day's turns. More figs, it would be an advantage to use it - every planet in the sector defended at 4:1 odds might be useful if it had say 50K figs or more, early on. Never checked - will two or more work?

In a stock game, I wouldn't want to be in the Sentinel - just not enough capability. Some edits have corrected the problem by adding additional firepower. It all depends on how the other ships are setup.

I think a good rule of thumb is to require two full ISSs to take out a Sentinel. Reload scripts have somewhat addressed the problem for the Sentinel, but it has to be strong enough to survive a few waves to have time to react. An IG on the stock Sentinel would be good, but that would also allow it for offensive ops to a degree.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I'm open to allowing the ship to be useful unmanned. And in that case, having multiple ships in support of a planet would be easy enough.

Planetary fighters get 2:1 odds, so Sentinel gets 2x what you'd get with a planet. Now, suppose the Sentinel could draw fighters from the planet's fighter pool?

I think it would be important to say that the Sentinel won't work when a Citadel above a certain level is present. That way it remains an early-game tool and can't be used to reinforce planets later in the game.

I'd call this "Enhanced Sentinel Rules" and make it an option. That way the current Sentinel rules could also be used when desired.

On one end you have low fig capacity and low shields.
A corp of 4 can have a full ISS with cash to spare by
the end of the first night.

Sysops can up it tho, and some edits have them.

However on the other end, in order to invade, you
have to kill them. That can result in stalemate in
edits where people have refiller scripts. So you don't
tend to see them in more serious games.

Allowing the ship to defend from the planet won't
fix either of these. You already have to blow it up
before you can land.

The tholian is not an IDC. An IDC is an IDC, the
tholian is the tholian. Some edits may combine
these functions, but not normally. Why should a
light-weight sentinel ship be able to stop a much
bigger, heavier, ISS from warping out?

If you xport out, then the ship isn't manned and
people can get away from an IDC. Allowing an
unmanned IDC to hold people is nuts, and allowing
an unmanned sentinel to protect a planet just
unbalances the defenses.

People can easily get out of a manned IDC, however,
by xporting out. If they want their ship back, torp,
xport, move it back. That macro takes 5 seconds
to write.

Allowing unmanned sentinels (and giving them full
def odds, which you'd have to do to make this work)...

That is going to result in a massive stalemate
scenerio. If I can use an unmanned sentinel, I can
build a script that xports in, lands, refills figs, and
xports out, before you have a chance to torp or kill
me. You could never get my planets, ever. There
would be no risk to using a sentinel.

Right now, there's risk to using a sentinel. It
provides some advantage (provided a balanced edit)
but offsets that advantage with the risk of getting
torped and killed. That's a fair trade-off.

Ok, so we've hit two extremes here. Most people seem to agree that the stock Sentinel is useless. The ideas we've considered here would make the Sentinel too powerful. Thankfully the proper balance is between those two extremes, and it's just a matter of finding it. We know it's there.

Sing, when you say the Sentinel would be too powerful and make the game drawish, are you keeping in mind that the special abilities of the Sentinel would only apply to planets with low-level Citadels? That won't effect end-game at all, will it? And considering that there's a strong call for early-game truce rules, one way to accomplish the same thing is to have an imbalance toward base defense early in the game. People seem to want early bases to be less vulnerable to give everyone a chance to get a strong foothold.

There are ways to get the right balance here. I'd like to find it. And when I say "balance", I'm not talking about some impossible-to-achieve universal balance that works with all edits. I'm talking about a balance within a set of rules that I will be defining as "official rules". That's the best I can do in terms of establishing any kind of balanced gameplay. But all of these rules will be optional so that your own set of rules can be implemented and balanced according to your own preferences, as always. If an enhanced Sentinel unbalances your edits, stick with the standard Sentinel.

In the Pirate edit it works too well.
Chess also has too big a Tholian.
Eden edit has a big Defender but the Scorpian can kill it if there is no refiller going.
Servers drops...Isp mess up...peeps make mistakes...this is what u must wait for in these edits.
It is not easy to fully balance an edit with Tholian ships.
When they are balanced...Hell on Earth comes close they add complexity.
In newbie games they may aid short term survivability.

But in Classic the Tholian is too small to be of any use against a ISS or Battleship.

If you find me that early on in game then I am gone otherwise I will get Torped every hour on the hour.
Its use as a DEFENDER early game is useless if torps are turned on. No one defends crappy Classic Planets early on. Much easier to start new ones.

JP,

Citadels don't matter at all. I can make a citadel
for practically nothing. If this method is used, I
can use my xport network to hop into the sentinel,
grab figs from a planet, and xport back out, and
support a dozen scattered bases anywhere in the
game w/o risk of torp or dying.

That's way too powerful. Too powerful in any edit.

How about a ship field...
"Drop defensive odds to X on V=?"

Or

"Disable guardian bonus on V=?"

Phead is right, most people do not bother to defend
their stock edit planets until they're 1 day from
going mobile.

To balance the tholian, I try to aim for a certain
number of waves from the biggest attack ship. Like 3
waves from the biggest ship, while the biggest ship
only holds 2 waves. That means you need to reload
once, or have 3 ppl attack (in the case of a reloader)
at the same time.

Another thing we could use, however, is an
"Enable photons on V=?"

So that for the first 2 or 3 days, photons could be
turned off. Combined with a more balanced sentinel
(easily done in the edit), people might actually use
them.

That all sounds reasonable. It sounds like there doesn't need to be anything drastic done with the Sentinel, but I will probably tweak it a bit so that the stock Sentinel in "official rules" mode will be somewhat different from the current stock ship. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something completely broke about the way the ship functions, since, like I said, there was a time when you could just bypass the 4:1 odds entirely.

I definitely like the idea of allowing some settings to change over time.

ISS does a 10000 wave @ 1.5, holds 50k figs.

Sentinel has 4.0 def w/ the bonus.

50000 * 1.5 = 75000. 75000/4 = 18750

I recommend bumping up the sentinel to 20k
figs. That should be reasonably balanced.

But I can pop a g-torp at any time in a sector with advanced citadels, which would then make the Sentinel effective over low level citadels. As long as the definition is a citadel under construction, too easy to do.

I don't think there need be any changes to the ship that individual's cannot already do with the Gold Editor.

Actually the ship odds should only apply when over a corp planet with a citadel. A player can use the ship for invasions by torping, xporting to the theolian, then going into the sector and popping a planet the way it currently is. Sysops currently get around this by editing any theolian ships to not carry gtorps, but it really should be a general rule that theolian odds only apply to corp planets with cits. No one in would sit in a theolian ship over a L5 or higher planet if it's a turn game if they value thier turns.