After providing a preview of our fighter changes in Patch When? #2, we'll now be taking a dive into one of our two capital ship balance reworks: the gunboat rework.
A lot of the groundwork for this rework was laid over a year ago and briefly tested by a small group of playtesters, and halfway through the patch cycle of Fire & Fortune we realized wrapping it up and including it in the patch would very nicely round things out.
An overview
It's been many years since gunboats received any fundamental changes. Sure, they've had some small number tweaks to individual gunboats' statistics, a remodel here and there and -- at some point -- a variety of extra shields to choose from. But fundamentally, little has changed. Their loadout variety is minimal, with "prims + pulses" being by far the most common and most versatile loadout. In addition, most small-scale fights between gunboats are decided on undock, with the heavier gunboats almost always beating lighter gunboats.
Other than being small and -- prior to the cruiser rework -- survivable, gunboats have always struggled to really find their place. Many players view them as dedicated anti-fighter platforms, but rock-paper-scissors balance has never appealed to us, so that's not an identity we looked to further reinforce. Instead, we looked back to vanilla gunboats, which all featured over-sized and powerful forward guns.
Now, every gunboat in the game has (at least) one forward gun. This forward gun is easily the most powerful weapon available to the class, but has a very limited firing arc, requiring players to aim their entire ship to effectively use them. Of course, this significantly changes the way the ships are played, encouraging aggressive positioning over kiting tactics. Lighter gunboats will now even want to brawl heavier ones, using their smaller profile and generally greater agility to their advantage.
This may all seem a little familiar: it's not too different from the goals we set for the last cruiser rework. That also means we've had time to learn from our mistakes. Where cruisers often find themselves in a gridlock fighting to be behind one another, gunboats have a trick up their sleeve: mines. Mines make one-dimensional close-range brawling extremely dangerous and suboptimal. In addition, they give gunboats another way to defend themselves against over-eager cruisers and bombers pursuing them.
Last but not least, we've done a full balance pass over all gunboats and their turrets. Turret counts are more standardized, allowing us to make primaries punch harder, making lower turret count gunboats perform much better. Gunboats have all received a QA pass, a forward gun slot has been added if needed and size outliers have been rescaled. Afterwards, we did a full ship stat balance pass: Gunboat Stats
Forward guns
Gunboat forward guns are a little different from the traditional forward guns you're used to. Instead of using "force ori", a setting that forces guns to always fire directly in front of where their barrel is facing -- regardless of whether or not they can realistically reach where the player is currently aiming -- they have a very small firing arc of approximately 15 to 20 degrees (depending on the individual gunboat). This means that they can be comfortably used in turret view without firing the majority of your shots into empty space, wasting precious weapons energy.
While gunboat forward guns do very respectable damage, their main strength is a combination of velocity and efficiency. This makes them excel at pursuing ships at medium range, while preventing them from rendering primary and heavy turrets useless at close range, where getting good time on target can be difficult with an arc-limited gun. While mastering effective forward gun use is an essential component of gunboat PvP, it's far from the only skill required to excel.
Let's have a look at the forward gun archetypes available:
Streamer Gunboat Forward Gun
Left: the Streamer; right: the (new) Liberty gunboat forward gun -- effects by @Kauket & @Tenshi respectively.
The open-use hullbuster forward gun. It offers a healthy balance of damage output, velocity, fire rate and efficiency. As the infocard reads: "A tachyon emitter of thoroughly unremarkable design quality and potency." This weapon is best paired with pulse weapons on your heavy slots, allowing you to deshield your enemies efficiently to then open up with the Streamer. Most faction forward guns are variants of the Streamer.
Gunboat Storm Cannon
The Gunboat Storm Cannon.
A downscaled version of the cruiser Storm Cannon, this forward gun deals heavy damage to ship hulls and shields alike. While slightly faster than the Streamer, the Storm Cannon fires less frequently, resulting in lower damage output. Its increased versatility also comes at a minor efficiency cost. This forward gun can be paired with virtually every configuration of heavy turrets thanks to its heavy shield damage.
Annihilator Rocket Launcher
The Annihilator Rocket Launcher.
An upscaled bomber Hellfire Rocket Pod, the repurposed Annihilator performs much like its smaller cousin. It deals the largest amount of damage per second of all forward guns thanks to its high fire rate while also featuring the highest velocity available. Of course, this high power level is offset by a generous helping of dispersion, making the weapon's accuracy drastically fall off with range. As with the Streamer, this weapon is best paired with pulses or anti-shield missile launchers.
The Nullifier is a specialized pulse weapon, providing an incredibly potent alternative to heavy slot pulses. The Nullifier is fast, accurate and deals very large amounts of shield damage per shot. This forward gun is best paired with heavy-hitting turrets like Gunboat Impact Cannons, which we'll get into shortly.
Turrets & Shields
Primary Turrets
As mentioned before, gunboat primaries have gained a substantial amount of damage output. They have, however, also lost a significant amount of velocity. Generally, weapon velocities slowly scale up as the ship they're mounted on gets bigger, to offset the inherent inaccurate and extra travel time required to reach the back end of a large capital ship from a turret mounted on its front. Gunboats were the exception to this rule, having extremely fast turrets that did very little damage for being mounted on a ship that large. This made hit-rates in gunboat versus gunboat PvP extremely high, while limiting the damage output we could give gunboat turrets as they would quickly become very oppressive. As an example, here are the stats of the pre- and post-patch Corsair Gunboat Turret:
Solaris turrets have, of course, also been adjusted. Similarly to cruiser Solaris turrets, we've added some dispersion while increasing their damage output even further than regular turrets' damage output, while reducing their velocity to 920 m/s. This gives them an interesting 'hitting profile' where they are even more dangerous close up but lose accuracy against smaller targets further out. In addition, better overall stats allow a Solaris-equipped gunboat to take on all kinds of threats and not just snubcraft.
Heavy Turrets
Pulses are currently the be-all-end-all of gunboat heavy turrets. In Fire & Fortune, they're just one of the viable choices. They are joined by Impact Cannons, the new name and identity of the Cerberus turret. These relatively slow-turning turrets fire similarly slow projectiles that pack an enormous punch. Razors have been adjusted to fire much more rapidly, but have lost a bit of up-front damage, as we're not very fond of instant kills against smaller ships. In addition, they now deal their full hull damage to shields as well, making them effective hybrids and an alternative deshielding weapon to Pulses. Solaris gatling turrets, of course, have been changed to fit their primary turret version, dealing even larger amounts of damage in a hail of fire.
There also might be a new gunboat codename or two out there for people to find. Or build.
Shields
In Fire & Fortune, capital ship shields are more proportional to the size of the ship they're mounted on. Gunboats' shields are no different. As with most reworked ship classes, we also have given gunboats appropriately-sized shield bubbles and new shield effects. They're now a little easier and more satisfying to shoot, especially for other gunboats and larger ships. For those who love numbers, here's the live server light gunboat shield's stats compared to the same shield in Fire & Fortune:
In addition, we've done a balance pass over medium and heavy gunboat shields, making the progression from light to heavy a little more gradual. With gunboat powerplants not varying as greatly in recharge anymore, either, your choice of shield is now more dependent on playstyle and loadout than it depends on your choice of ship.
As of the time of writing, the Ravager mine is the one and only gunboat mine. Hitting for 87,500* hull and 175,000 shield damage, this mine should never be underestimated. Unlike fighter mines, this mine is fully energy-based, and does not require any ammo. To balance things out, however, it cannot be triggered by a cruise disruptor (unless directly targeted) or gun shots, and only seeks targets in a very small (100 meter) radius -- although once locked on, it seeks with great fervor. The Ravager ensures that recklessly chasing a gunboat, no matter how small or large your ship, is a death sentence.
..But what about bombers?
We asked ourselves the same thing after fine-tuning gunboats. Bombers' damage output has risen dramatically in the last few years, making up for their massive loss of range. Gunboat handling being slightly slowed down, and the ships losing their near hit-scan weapon velocities, of course, made them more vulnerable to bombers. Stronger shields help, but against the damage output of Neutralizers, little matters. Therefore, we've also reshuffled and rebalanced bomber equipment, which we'll detail in a post soon™.
* = All damage numbers are converted to live server equivalents for easier comparisons.
Quote:As mentioned before, gunboat primaries have gained a substantial amount of damage output. They have, however, alsolost a significant amount of velocity.
i joked about you making every ship besides a fighter be unable to meaningfully interact with fighters since you hate your fighter being shot by anything but other fighters, but now it seems its no longer a joke lmao
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(09-18-2023, 12:28 PM)Saronsen Wrote:
Quote:As mentioned before, gunboat primaries have gained a substantial amount of damage output. They have, however, alsolost a significant amount of velocity.
i joked about you making every ship besides a fighter be unable to meaningfully interact with fighters since you hate your fighter being shot by anything but other fighters, but now it seems its no longer a joke lmao
You have multiple playtesters in your faction, you could simply ask any of them how gunboats and fighters / bombers currently interact.
Unless you meant one-way interaction, like a solaris gunboat bullying three fighter players for undocking in your ZoI while being unable to realistically fight back? That is in fact not something we're aiming to support.
This is probably the best rework for any shipclass I've seen so far, in my honest opinion.
(09-18-2023, 01:26 PM)Czechmate Wrote: Asco gonna be just standard GB or we keeping cool emp torpedo
Likely that torpedo is getting removed and Asco is getting a forward special gun slot instead like the rest of gunboats (good riddance, that torpedo was utterly useless). At least that's what I hope for.
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