Is it supposed to be this easy to kill an Idris? How do you balance this when you don't know if it's fighting 10 players or 50 players?

Yeah, so it has been really tricky balancing this because it isn't just the number of ships, it's the type of ships as well that people bring, and it's also the way they use their ships, the tactics they use, the timings they use. There's so many variables, and it comes down to how they can defend themselves as well. So we did have a really good idea of the baseline strengths of these big ships, and we feel we've kind of hit roughly in the right place for the baseline strengths, but we don't feel they're fully able to defend themselves yet. And there's lots of factors involved with that, but we are kind of working on this, and we're basically looking back at how players have attacked these big ships and we're learning weaknesses that these ships have. There's certain times when the players can outgun the turrets, and it's basically because the ship can't keep up with the movement and the turrets can't keep up, and they're able to find a hole where they can't get shot, and they can move in that, and it's really hard for those big ships to react to that. So we're looking at those weaknesses, and we're looking at how well the big ships can defend against torpedoes, because that's what does the real damage to these ships, the torpedoes. So we do see some times where these big ships can use countermeasures really effectively. That's really cool. And they can also shoot some of the big torpedoes. And it's just getting that balance right between: we want these big torpedoes that are basically small nuclear devices to do damage to these ships, but at the same time, we want the big ships to be able to defend themselves. And hitting that balance when you have as many variations possible as we have currently is really tricky, but we're going to look back at these events and we are going to improve it from both a balance side and an AI side as well.

And there is the elephant in the room, which is obviously the servers struggling right now. Because if you're talking about, should it be this easy to kill an Idris, and all you say is it only takes nine size nine torpedoes to blow it up, that seems like too little. I think, actually, no, that makes some kind of sense. As Rich is saying, the issue is that they're not shooting them out of the sky. And on our local servers, that works. It works really well. It's balanced to the point where... I mean, you bring in a whole group of Retaliators and you organize them and you will easily take down an Idris, because that's what the Retaliators are designed for. Otherwise it would be overpowered now for capital ships.

And of course, as more capital ship systems come online, there will be more opportunities for the ships to defend themselves. I know the Idrises aren't using their missiles and stuff like that, but sometimes a good defense is a better offense. So as more of their capabilities come online, it will change that experience.