The great VHF comparison, a viable approach to balance?

[Ursus]

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 )

Here's the avenger model with the shield bubble and hitbox, using a SUR importer for MilkShape.



Its not the binary profile or the axis that determine how easy/hard the ship can be hit, its the overall size or the "presence" that matters, and the axis sizing is just weighting for that.

And it is different depending on if the shields are up or down.

So basic axis numbers dont really mean that much.

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.

Wraith is another ship that was designed as HF, and had to be made into VHF to be competitive.

Really, everything comes down to the fact that HF is a crap class and all the ships have to be VHF to be competitive. If HF class was good, we could take all these small ships and put them back into HF np. But we cant because its crap.

Put that shield bubble on the CTE LF/HF/VHF/Bomber and its almost the same damn bubble (some differences but very close). Ships that are one size should be matched to their appropriate class, and other instances should be deleted as redundant. We dont need LF or VHF version of Falcon HF with the same hitbox, we need Falcon HF that works.

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Discovery 24/7 Negotiating Tactics:

[Blodo]

Just to add something to the criticism on the bit simplistic way of quantising profile size:

First of all I disagree with weighting the top by half, it is still rather important for group fights where ships do not simply fly in a 2d plane against each other, but also roll and are hit from different directions. It's not that unheard of for people to get sniped by razors to death while taking a turn, simply because their ship roll is set so that the ship actually exposes its top/bottom when it turns. There are more than a few ships that do that, and it must be taken into account.

Second of all, it doesn't matter as much how many pixels a ship takes in a bounding box, the more important thing is the thickness of the model profile. So any proper sizing algorithm must take into account the thickness of the model rather than simply count the pixels. A good example for this is a ship like the Tridente or Scorpion, both of which are rather big if you take them by bounding box and amount of pixels within it... and yet can be rather hard to hit because of their many holes and slim model parts.

So I kind of take this chart with a rather big grain of salt.

Speed calcs also seem to need work. I assume that what was presented there was basically turn speed... in which case it should be instead presented in terms of angular acceleration, max. angular speed and angular distance covered in 1 second from rest, like in FLStat... except taking into account not just pitch plane like it does. In addition to that, mass (even though it's now standardised across fighter classes) should make an appearance considering you use VHFs, HFs (Karasu) and SHFs (Werewolf) in that chart - which skew the chart if it was meant to be for VHFs only.

Reason for that is that in FL you don't really turn at the same speed all the time, acceleration plays an extremely big role. That's why ships with less mass and same turning stats are able to do tricks around those ships with larger mass for example. Responsiveness (acceleration) affects adversely how well a ship can dodge.

[Yber]

Positioning is just getting yourself a sight of the enemy's ship so you can hit it easily. How you do it is at your own.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Rodnas]

Thanks Blodo for chipping in!

I think the issue of size is hard to grasp, Ursus proposes a good concept with his "presence" aka looking sideways from above, which is what one sses while hte ship turns and so on. And of course holes and other "good" shapes are quite hard to catch in numbers and ersonally i have no proper solution at hand for now. But untill i get a better way i adjusted the weighting so that the top is equal to the other sides. Still not perfect, but with your grain of salt a possible way to get a first educated guess on size and shape.

So shape is a big factor but propably the toughest one...to help with that i included the pics(sadly too big) to help with discussiong/doing that educated guess.


I am also not sure what you mean with the speed calcs....
basically, FLStat gives you calcs for the x axis and slaps some nice unit on it aswell.
What i did is calculating the same stuff, just for all 3 axis just how it was proposed by Mjolnir (click me, ia m a link!) . So the speed should be up to date and fine actually, safe the one for hte Sabre/Lich, which is the only VHF that strafes different than its colleagues

Werewolf/Karasu: There is no Karasu there...the Werewolf is a relic which can be ignored...or removed...


@Tachyon: Actually on what would you rely balancing on? on belly feelings? Games are made out of numbers and everyone relates equally to them...belly feeling is as subjective and unfair as it possibly can be....
Sure, the tables fail quite fast on the size comparisons, they don't take available guns into account(which would fill another thread) nor the ships versus which one is baanced to face off and so on...but statistics and logical structuring is quite a good foundation for discussions in my book

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Read about: The Benitez Familia and Trueno Benitez

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[Blodo]

Regarding speed calcs: what Mjolnir gave is just one part of the puzzle. Anyway I always find it better to just present the actual acceleration rather than time to reach top speed. That's obviously easy enough, you just go top speed divided by the time taken I guess. It gives a bit of a clearer picture of the actual acceleration of the ship which is what matters the most, top speed is kind of 2nd priority, especially for things like dodging or adjusting aim.

But the more important part is that you missed out strafe calculations and these regard mass and strafe force, as given by the following:

Code:

strafe acceleration = (strafe_force [shiparch.ini] - linear_drag [shiparch.ini]) / mass [engine equip.ini + shiparch.ini] (in m/s^2)

[Govedo13]

safe the one for hte Sabre/Lich, which is the only VHF that strafes different than its colleagues

Can you explain this one- XTF uses it a lot and rape me all the time, the ship just moves in some hard to predict way.
Werewolf is SHF- you can add second comparison for SHFs,it is just different class.

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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]

@Tachyon: Actually on what would you rely balancing on? on belly feelings? Games are made out of numbers and everyone relates equally to them...belly feeling is as subjective and unfair as it possibly can be....
Sure, the tables fail quite fast on the size comparisons, they don't take available guns into account(which would fill another thread) nor the ships versus which one is baanced to face off and so on...but statistics and logical structuring is quite a good foundation for discussions in my book

I didn't mean to say to rely on numbers at balancing, but to rely purely on numbers at putting ships into a ranking next to each other or rely purely on numbers, when choosing what ship I want to try next.

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[Rodnas]

@Blodo: it might be that i am superbly dense or on the wrong path ofthinking here, help me out:

The acceleration to top speed on a traight line is only influenced by force, provided by the engines, deducted by the linear drag and then diided by the ships mass.
Now all ships of the VHF class have exactly the same value here so all accelerate axactly the same way on a straigh line.

When it comes by turning acceleration, things change, but turning acceleration is what i labeled as "reaction" other than that i named it different it is all good, of course i can make a [unit] on top of the table, too.

Strafing and strafingacceleration is next. Again, all ships of the VHF class strafe and strafe accelerate identical, if wished i insert the correct number here.
The only excempt is the Sabre/lich as it has a strafe force of 21000 instead of the regular 20000.

Which leads to govedos question: I have no clue why the XTF beat you in pvp but if you think they strafe too good, here are the exact numbers:

Strafe force- linear drag = excess strafe force

Excess strafe force//mass = Strafe acceleration

Strafe speed(max) = Strafe force// linear drag

So in your case:

You, in your puny standard VHF: Have a strafe force of 20000, drag 600, mass 150, means:

Strafe acceleration= 129,33 m/s (if we need units)
Strafe top speed: 33,33 m/s

Now that evidoer in his sabre:
Strafe acceleration= 136 m/s equals +5%
Strafe top speed: 35 m/s equals +5%

I am not sure if 5% more are that significant, but i surely am no exert in ingame pvpery^^


Then again, back to Blodo: your "problem " with my calcs i i was to lazy to slap m/s and rad/s on top or am i just confused?



Editing on Tachions response: i 100% agree with you on that one! The rankings that are calculated by mixing different scores are to be looked upon with extreme caution!
First and foremost becasue they simply only reflect my honestly small knowledge and feeling of what is good or bad in freelancer, thus were chosen a bit over my thumb.
Also, picking a ship by its numbers is a bit soulless( not to mentions there are numbers that are not shown aswell). no doubt.

=> but what yu can do is just copy&paste the spreadsheet to a new one so you can play around with the formulas and stuff or do comparisons that you are interested in and so on....having as much information as possible summarized in one spot was my intention, not forcing my personal ratings on anyone

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[Prysin]

in the end, it doesnt matter which ship you use. Pilot = everything..

Take the spatial... huge-ass thing, so large that it make you wanna cry... try solo one in a medium/slow VHF... NOT FUN

dual nuke can instakill 90% of the VHF's short of the mislabeled Werewolf, which dies on the second turn.
the core can keep 8 guns firing forward for almost as long as any battle lasts. in addition to heavy shielding and the ability to mount a CAU 4 (yes iv'e done it. extremely excessive armor, but it turns it into a light-gunship)
then there is things like eagle, which is almost a cheat. If you have a steady 3%+ lag and almost noone will take down your eagle short of scoring a lucky nuke on it.

HF's isnt a terrible class, they, much like LF's, just need a proper classification and purpose...

also, bayonet > any VHF

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DHC Discord

[Savi]

I started to think that fighter guns and proper shield in a fight affects much more the balance compared to ships themselfs.
About the shield, first time we fought me with the shield that disadvantages his guns and my friend's shield that advantages my guns. He couldn't touch my hull before drying him from 60 nanobots to 0. Then we did shield exchange and fought again. To my surprise, he managed to deal like 40% damage to my ship.
Now the guns: I tried to phew in conn with a lynx that had 2 carabines and 4 musketons. Everyone was owning me hard even if I was trying to slide, over steer, etc. Then, I bought 6 grand culverins and went to conn again. The difference was enormous. And there are many many others examples in which the same ship with different guns will suck so hard.

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Last raid of Discovery 4.86

Bowex S-Convoy

LSC vs Geb