The great VHF comparison, a viable approach to balance?

[Rodnas]

This thread is intended to discuss how valuable a certain stat of a ship is in comparison to others and to show by hard, graspable facts where balance shortcomings are.

To ease the discussion i compiled a nice google.doc sheet:

Comparison sheet for VHFs

It contains the following:

• Turn speeds in X,Y,Z direction
  
• Turn accelleration in X,Y,Z
  
• Hull ratings
  
• Power core
  
• Specials(like additional/missing guns, extra CD)
  
• Size comparisons for the front,side and top. Scaled proportionally ad measured in pixels
  
• Several ratings, which are highly subjective and should be discussed!!
  

Also, in order to generate the size comparison i set up some scaled pics of all VHFs- bear with me that there is propably an error of about 1% for thecalculated values, it just comes with the method generating them.
The ships are more or less in alphabetical order, you should be able to find them by instinct if that is too messy...i might get em labeled soon™

Front:
http://imageshack.us/a/img339/3442/fronttg.jpg



Side:
http://imageshack.us/a/img99/7730/sidecopyk.jpg



Top:
http://imageshack.us/a/img803/1412/toppg.jpg
Image tags removed. Maximum image width is 700 pixels.
-Zuke




Now what to do with all this stuff??

- compare ships with each other
- figure out/discuss which stat contributes most to the overall power of a ship
- pure information and overview


I will chip in with some insights later on...

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Rodnas]

Now off to the fun facts of spaceshipdom!

Starting with the Titan eitition, of course

~ Did you know that the Titan is actually not the good jouster you always thought it is? Afterall it has the 5th biggest front profile out of 32 !

~Did you know that the Avenger, with similar hull and identical powercore outturns the Titan easily while having a more favourable profile?

~Did you know that from a Ttans regular enemies, only the Templar and the Insurgent actually turn slower?


Now.....less of the whinery that cannot be true, off to the truly fun facts

~You can fit 4 Black Dragons into a Werewolf...easily.

~ Out of the fist 5 smallest ships, only one(the Katana) is actually really agile.

~The Wraith isn't big, it's 4th smallest and has the fastest turn speed of em all(and has a good core aswell as hull)

~the Arbeiter with the same core and a teeny weeny bit more hull then the Wraith is 67% bigger than it and is at the opposingend of the agility chart?

~An Eagle is by no means big, it sit's solidly in the "smaller" average of the field....while being as agile as your average LF!

~A Odin turns substantially faster than the Black Dragon.

~While the collector is propably the worst there is, the Scraper will propably tear each and every Pirate safe an BD or Hessian apart?

~The Hellfire legion propably got quite ripped off when getting tose "100% legit" Sabre blueprints to base the Prosecutor upon?



What else did you find? Do you agree with theweighting of importance that is applied to the stats?

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Ursus]

How did you determine profile size? Most ships have hitbox bubbles that are not skin-tight. Also, most ships are encountered at a slight angle, which makes them larger than the 90-degree profile suggests. That is why I use a polygon of the extreme points, and try to determine relative "presence" instead. A good example of this is the Avenger model--it does not present much of a shape directly but it is still pretty easy to hit since even 5-degree angle is enough for the huge wings and tail to start catching bullets. Same for Titan, even though it's short, any kind of banking will expose those huuuge wings. The other end of the scale are the ships with holes in them. I'm not sure that my method is correct either.

Eagle has the same basic hull for LF/HF/VHF/Bomber. There are obvious differences between them but they have the same body and wings, with differences in things like engine size, tail fins, etc. Its impossible to balance lines like that without deleting some of their ships.

The Kusari ships should really be in the HF category, its too bad the HF category is so awful that ships have to be moved out of it for them to be competitve. Also the Kusari are smaller than some of the other HFs--compare them to the GMG HF sometime (lol).

I agree with most of your weightings, or they are close enough not to argue with anyway. However you do not seem to have enough negatives, things like the Wraith has 1 turret that only faces backwards should count for something.

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Durandal]

Now off to the fun facts of spaceshipdom!

Starting with the Titan eitition, of course

~ Did you know that the Titan is actually not the good jouster you always thought it is? Afterall it has the 5th biggest front profile out of 32 !

Offset targeting reticule.

~Did you know that the Avenger, with similar hull and identical powercore outturns the Titan easily while having a more favourable profile?

See above.

~Did you know that from a Ttans regular enemies, only the Templar and the Insurgent actually turn slower?

I am fairly certain a Templar outturns a Titan.

~You can fit 4 Black Dragons into a Werewolf...easily.

Yes, but the Werewolf is still OP vs the enemies it fights, when in the right hands.

~ Out of the fist 5 smallest ships, only one(the Katana) is actually really agile.

It got nerfed with .86

~The Wraith isn't big, it's 4th smallest and has the fastest turn speed of em all(and has a good core aswell as hull)

This is true. You just contradicted yourself above, lol.

~the Arbeiter with the same core and a teeny weeny bit more hull then the Wraith is 67% bigger than it and is at the opposingend of the agility chart?

Yep. Sucks.

~An Eagle is by no means big, it sit's solidly in the "smaller" average of the field....while being as agile as your average LF!

Dem wings.

~A Odin turns substantially faster than the Black Dragon.

I'd really have to dig through ini files to calculate the turn rates, don't trust the wiki.

~While the collector is propably the worst there is, the Scraper will propably tear each and every Pirate safe an BD or Hessian apart?

D'no the stats, cba checking.

~The Hellfire legion propably got quite ripped off when getting tose "100% legit" Sabre blueprints to base the Prosecutor upon?

The idea behind this was, if we ask for stats of an already extent ship, we won't get screwed harder than if we asked for what I'd consider balanced, which'd be 12k armor, 12k powerplant, 68 b/b and current handling.

[Govedo13]

Great work but I am not so sure about the turning because I does not know how to put in the account the back-thrust compared with the acceleration while turning,so the ship turns faster even if it have less turning on paper.
I also second that Titan is slower in Turning then Templar. Also templar have a lot better strafing abilities and a lot smaller front while the side is comparable.
Other then that you showed in good way the total lack of balance and the bunch of OP ships around.
Second more important point is the ability to dodge incoming fire compared with turning- actually really slow turning is not a problem if the ship does not get many hits due to its strafing and shape- like it is in the Insurgent case-really good example here is hessian bomber- turns like brick but dodges really nice. I guess you got what I wanted to describe- I have no idea about the algorithm behind but you could try to look at it. Also turning is not important at all in group fights because all follow the same target, dodging is more important in 1v1s and groups.
Third- Titan on paper is one of the worst VHFs but there are some pro pilots that just use it on different way and are really effective-different tactics cannot be added into the pure number&shape charts, however same tactics could be used with Manta witch is a way better ship then titan for that.
I am not so sure if you can compare the SHFs together with the VHFs because they are class of their own-wolf was vhf in 4,85 now it is shf that is brutal in 1v1s but dies really easy in group fights- it is one of the perfect balanced ships actually proving the point that guns,armors and bots mean nothing if you are not able to dodge the incoming fire, they just give you more time till you die but nothing in general.You can addon also in SHF line the RM SHF and bottlenose big Spitail- compare them separate then VHFs.
Scrapper is really fine VHF, the surveyor is OP as well but scrapper it is not better then house vhfs together with better unlawful ones, it is better then unreasonably nerfed and not used ships like RT LR-Molly-Corsair-Virage-Zoner VHFs. Scrapper dodges like boss- i just wish greyhound to dodge like that because it got 4 and half guns while scrapper have 6 better core and same size. Grey at this point cannot profit really from its a bit faster turning because the really long side that eats all hits possible.Scrapper have bigger up/down profile but it is not relevant for Freelancer PvP dynamics shape. Short pancake like shape-best shape for PvP in Freelancer. Ironically ships with such shape have even better stats then ships with bad for PvP shape. The compared size of the VHFs is also interesting, most of better ones have HF size, it would be interesting if you compare the VHF sizes with HF sizes with same 3 pictures. It is easy to say that we have 2 tiers of fighters- one for skype friends/house fighters and one for the rest- second grade fighters. Best example is to compare Nyx with Greyhound- both ship sizes are 95% the same,shape together with front/site profiles- Nyx can dodge, have proper guns and proper gun slots, it is excellent fighter on the house fighter level and Greyhound is nerfed piece of junk that turns on paper faster.
If you have time to do the same with bombers you would find funny stuff there as well - for example LR bomber is 1/3 longer, turn slower, dodges worse then IMG bomber but both have the same stats.
Kusari stuff-not fixable with this models unless you give them greyhound dodging- t.e flying straight eating all hits without much ability to strafe or give them all HF shields with eagle hulls and core.
Odin and RM VHF- I wont even start there, the funny part is that in 4.87 odin would become even smaller in front/side profile and harder to hit-you might guess witch two factions frequent the 2 main balance guys even if you does not play the mod. I mean to buff your stuff a bit that is hardly noticeable like IMG-LR bomber case is one but to buff your stuff like that is not even worth to comment.
Very important thing that you miss is guns. 90% of the 600 speed fighter guns are worse compared with the 700/750 speed ones, 100-200 DPS more cannot compensate 150 speed, you also can notice that all of the tier 1 fighters- house/skype friends somehow very conveniently have 700 or 750 speed guns. Good guns comparison table table is made by Gutzsaban- you need to check the disco wiki forum I guess it was there.
I guess that people like you and Ursus can make the balance a lot better thumbs up and major Kudos for your time and effort.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Yber]

I also second that Titan is slower in Turning then Templar.

Lol. No it's not. Templar is slower so far. That under certain turning rate you're unable to apreciatte it? Maybe, but titan IS faster than templar, because I've tried both out enough times.

Also turning is not important at all in group fights because all follow the same target, dodging is more important in 1v1s and groups.
Third- Titan on paper is one of the worst VHFs.

That all depends on your style. On a group fight, as target, I mainly turn. Call it silly, but it works.

Lol. Titan is quite fine on paper. Being slower doesn't mean that you can't face the opponent anytime. Just make that hull/shield loss worthy enough.

Scrapper is really fine VHF, the surveyor is OP as well but scrapper it is not better then house vhfs together with better unlawful ones, it is better then unreasonably nerfed and not used ships like RT LR-Molly-Corsair-Virage-Zoner VHFs. Scrapper dodges like boss- i just wish greyhound to dodge like that because it got 4 and half guns while scrapper have 6 better core and same size. Grey at this point cannot profit really from its a bit faster turning because the really long side that eats all hits possible.Scrapper have bigger up/down profile but it is not relevant for Freelancer PvP dynamics shape.

Let's go by parts, lol.

1- Lolno. Easiest thing to snac/ MR/ hit in the world.
2- High response and dodging aren't the same, lol.
3- Greyhound DOES dodge better than scrapper, so far.
4- You've just done jackpot. LOL. Ever heard about positioning? Overall in group fights, I'd rather pick up a greyhound than a scrapper.

Edit: Rodnas, you didn't take into account how sharp the model is. As Ursus said, you're just focusing in the whole mass without taking into account the angles and sharpness. I'd put the titan as example, but I'll pick the guardian. On a group fight, for me, it's easier to hit, because it got a plain part in the top. However the avenger, while supposed to be bigger, is harder to hit for me, due to the angles with the wing on the top. Same thing with titan's front, odin, chimmie, blossom, lhotse (or something like that) and templar, for example.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Govedo13]

Well it might depend on the style- I just favor more response then more turning-this is the main reason why our statements defer so much. If you take players 1 2 and 3- 1 can win vs 2 all the time while 2 can win all the time vs 3, it does not mean that 3 wont dominate vs 1.
For me more response means less hits at my hull, it is more easy for casual players to use response to strafe then turning to avoid dmg, turning requires a lot more skill and training, and still the slower turning ships can turn earlier and use the response to get upper hand in fight. Believe me or not 3-4 years back I was a lot better in PvP- with the time and age people lose their abilities slowly,turning really fast requires a lot more then strafing right.
Also Scrapper gives more surface to hit on top and bit on side then Grey, I guess if we add Nyx and compare it with both it would be better at all points.
About Templar- just slide while turning then Titan cannot keep up, so from my PoV Templar can outturn Titan even if it turns slower because there is no need of full sharp 360 turn to hit the titan on the passing. If both ships just joist and turn and joist and turn the Titan would win but who is Idiot enough to straight joist Titan? On the other side Titan is a bit harder to hit in group fights for me then Templar but only if he does not turn exposing its wings to avoid fire but boxstafe while thrusting. It is really complicated because there are too many factors that change the odds. About Titan you quoted me without reading the rest of my post- the ship have its advantages but they are really really hard to master compared with other ships that are more nub friendly- I would start with fast turning then causal player, better aim then casual player, no spaying and better feel how to handle the ship overall. In order to have success in Titan compared with lets say Odin or Nyx or Wright the user should train 10 times more- same as greyhound. I have seen people doing wonders even in 4.85 greyounds but the same people with eagle or sabre or any normal not special ship would preform better-take RM vhf for example- it turns the same,dodges better it is smaller, have 0,5 gun more, more core more bots- would you preform better with grey?
If we speak of balance we should take the causal player vs casual player as reference not the people that are pro PvPers. Here is also the point of the gun speed- people with really good aim can profit from 600 speed guns bit higher DPS, the rest of casual players are really in disadvantage compared to 700 and 750 speed guns. I guess you start to catch my point-there are stuff that are not skill based- they must be not perfect equal but at least comparable.This is not the case with balance now. There is nothing bad in having different and special ships that are hard to master like Titan and Werewolf but it means that there should be nub friendly alternatives-Greyhound being more like Nyx and Centi being VHF like Eagle. Also all mega nerfed vhfs could be resized to "normal" house/skypefriends ships,giving them normal stuff,together with nerfing the OP stuff. Werewolf is really good example for fixed useless ship-with the sammaels and pulse cannon the ship suits its role perfect, it is also perfect balanced.
What you mean about positioning? You mean go up or down from the main brawl back-thrusting/boxing trying to hit the target when you are not targeted?
What about if the targeted ship continue to dodge/move and does not turn like in 80% of the cases?

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Rodnas]

So, let's tackle this chronologically^^
@Ursus:
What idid for the size measurements is the following: I used milkshape to arrange four ships neatly next to each other and aligned perfectly on their axis. As the ships are importet properly sized you might get an error while having different zoom levels and such. Therefore one of the four ships always was a Manta(purely random) to have an internal standard in each file as i was unable to draw boxes of a certain, guaranteed same size in milkshape for a better standard .
Then i did screenshots, which i opened with photoshop. I blackened everything that was nt neon green so i can see errors or whatnot and get clearer shapes. The next thing was to check the pixel count of each of the Mantas in each file(10 in total) to see if i imported everything on the same scale(which worked perfectly).
After this was done i basically arranged all ships, each on its own layer, selected all "black" or "grey" pixels( the grey ones cause the 1% error i gave myself) and well....had photoshop count them.
So basically if you want to compare other ships with thesizes i produced you hae to calculate the "manta-factor" in or it will get very messy, very fast.
=> if there is an error in my method please help me out checking it !!!

As for the "presence" you mentioned- this would basically make a 5th row in my table for aditional comparison, right? I chose the XYZ axis for ease of accessibility and reproducability, but of course "presence" would be another worthy factor in the overall judgement! So if you have the time you could check what angles you used to look at the ships when seeking for presence? If it is always the same angle it should be doable reasonable fast ( you can help of ycourse )

On the missing gun of the wraith: my error, i had the impression t fres forward, which it doesn't-error corrected, i listed those under the "special" collum giving + or - 3 depending if good or bad,so the wraith gets 3 points more or only having 5 frontal pewsticks - if you find more info or data missing please let me know so ican account it

On the weightings: sadly i am still not sure what kind of turn acceleration is "good" or "bad", it is the toughest stat. Normally you would say it is the sluggishness or whatnot, then again if you have a high turn speed and a high reaction your ship might be too nervous to fly so you would prefer a medium or low score (black dragon for example). This is ot consistent at all as many small and fast ships have a very good score here, too.....so it might be a subjective factor and not only a pure statistical one, i still miss input from someone with a higher engine understanding here^^

@Durandal:
On the jousting stuff: I am not sure byhow far that target rectingule is offset- but in jousts you generally shoot forwards and you don't really need it -that- much folloing it while dodging strafing and sliding is a pain afterall( but this is quite subjective of course)
So sizes are more raspable than a supposed bug to me, especially because i can't get the exact offset value

On all turning speeds and accelerations: they were calculated using the shiparch.ini and the approved method of Mjolnir -click me to folow the link- so as long as you don't find a calculation error you can be quite sure those are exact values, used in the .86 mod not sme funny data generated by FLStat.

On the Katana-Wraith issue: i am sorry i didn't express myself correctly- here is the more correct statement: The Wraith has the fastest turning speed in the VHF class and a very good turn acceleration while being 4th in the unmodified surface size, 5th if you put in a weighting that makes the"top" side less important.
The thing is 4th means that there are alot ships, namely all of kusari(exactly 5 ships with almost identical size scores) are smaller than you, one of them the Katana.
The problem here isthat Kusari ships are more or less ou of league sizewise- a wraith, while smallest of the "normal" ships pure surface wise
is a whopping 34% bigger than let's say a black dragon.
Now of those teeny weeny kusarian ships, most of them are good-medium when it gets to turn speed but most slack behind in their turn acceleration. Only the Katana has this neat package of being really small and overall -really-agile.

I hope i could clear it up a bit, please scream loud if you find more proud nails or incnsistencies


@Govedo:
Concerning turning: this one is hard to grasp statistically- but generally i would assume that as long as you EK only your turn speed counts.As soon as you start using strafe things change(as strafing is different for every ship). If you use reverse thrust you willl have to account the acceleration/deceleration speeds. But putting all of them together to create something like a "perfect turn score" seems awfully tough.

The acceleration and strafe stuff is easily available with the shiparch.ini - though taking the "mass" of each ship is easier, as ships of the same class all have identic thrusters and engines as far as i know- i might include it for completeness sake, thanks for pointing it out!

Now when it comes to which ship is "best" it is tough of course...you mentioned several proper examples for this, andi am afraid the table i presented is not the way to find "the best ship", but it is a good starter if you know what you are looking for!
If you are looking for a good jouster, of course you look for a ship with small front and side profiles, taking armor in, just to stay safe( so theLynx and the Avenger might be your best buddies)
If you look for a quick dogfighter, only agility and maybe side profile will count and you will end up with the Wraith, Eagle and Touketsu.

If you look for a generally good ship you can always take those that are good everywhere, of course which will lead you to Wraith, Katana,Avenger, Eagle, Touketsu and the Guardian - where everything but the hull (for the eagle and the touketsu) is above average or best of its class

Now when it comes to the concept of balance it is propably the oughtest and most thankless thing in deving-- what i would love to see is an insight on ow it is done here to understand and follow the reasoning that is made, as personally i don't actually believe in his conspirancy stuff- i believe in oversights due to being not involved with certain factions/ships , lack of time and many many other stuffthatneeds to be done.

What i would love to see is soething like a point buy system applied to balance where every ship might have like 100 points available, spendable on each stat, like you know itfrom rpg games. Now of course not all abilities are equal and the higher the rank you buy the more it should cost, too.
So speed and agility would be the most expensive, if you want to create a fast ship you will be stuck with few guns, tiny hull, tiny core. If you want a tough ship you might get a fat hull and many guns, but youwill turn like a brick and so on.
A system like this would make balancing very transparent and logic for everyone to follow- but at first you need to know how valuable each ability of a ship is of course...



PS: i will get down to that Bottlenose, just for ridiculessness

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

---Not available for any disco stuff these days(and for an extended period of time to come, too ---

[Govedo13]

I tried all of the VHFs except blossom and 4.86 arbeiter.
I am certainly not looking for best ship-there is no best ship because different people fly differently- Yber would feel better in eagle or wraith for example while I would feel better in templar or nyx, I just hope that this info would lead to proper balance for all ships.
About the balance- it is mixture of both- oversights and not fitting models as size/gunslots-there is no way to proper balance scylla for example without changing the gunslots/model- their standard is now different- no guns should shoot inside the ship and on the other hand you have RM bomber that also have bad model but it is damn easy to balance- it is kept OP medium bomber even if it could be perfect light bomber with 5 min time to change it. Scylla issue apllies to 90% of the caps-with the turret steering/gun split and bad speed/slot position of the cap secondary guns most of caps cannot hit shit,however some are perfect. I cannot believe that somehow all of faction ships that include devs in the faction are perfect or OP or somehow all of their factions have 700 or 750 speed guns.
Also:
http://postimage.org/image/yaydkyl1j/
http://postimage.org/image/9oppnq5x1/
bottlenose is good SHF

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Tachyon]

Personally I wouldn't ever rely on stats and rankings of ships.

Especially not on these. Why ? Because stuff here is flawed, some pointed it out already.

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