(10-31-2012, 08:01 AM)Knjaz Wrote: In most of these points you specifically were adressing the outcome based on skill difference in 1x1 or low-scale engagements. But in such engagements Skill will still matter. Just, Pro fighter will win not with 90% of his b/b left (or 100% if he's extremely skilled, or using a LF, or something else), but with, say, 60-70% over the medium-low skilled one.
It's a team fight where you'll start feeling the difference, where a snubcraft won't be able to run 30k under the fire of multiple other snubs.
I still maintain that we don't need to place balance on its head if we simply get rid of the "the larger the group, the larger the bot pool" phenomenon. Weapon speeds for fighters are kind of in a pretty good position as they are now, guns have been steadily boosted with damage for the past few versions to the point where 3-4 volleys from your generic 2.00s will drain the hull of your typical AUmk8 VHF in one pass if they all connect (believe me you don't want to see the shit that will take place if it's really easy to connect them - as it would be if they had 800ms speed), meanwhile the neverending hailstorm of death from 8.33s after the dps buff is nothing to be scoffed at either. Aiming accuracy ought to be rewarded, rather than decreasing the gap.
As to caps turret steer, that's IMO fine for all including gunboats. But zoom steering... well, that's more of a contentious matter. I tried that myself to see what the big fuss was about, truth is it's almost impossible to know what you are targeting when the reticle just as readily switches to other targets in the vicinity as the one you have selected on high zoom, so that means it only really works on singular targets or targets that don't fly in a group but away from each other. But there are other things such as in high zoom don't know where you are flying or which way is up/down/left/right as the camera flies all over the place, you can't turret steer well due to that bug that moves your camera as well as your ship when you press horizontal arrow keys, you don't see approaching novas, you can hardly see anything unless you are in open space... where you guess positions of where others are only by the visibility of their shots and whether your autoaim is locked on to them or not, because most ships in my experience meld in the background from a distance of 4k+ (that's my assumption of optimal zoom for auto aim benefit).
I haven't seen any winning tactics with turret zoom happening lately after certain ship's arcs have been changed, so I'm not sure I am convinced it is a big issue. That said I wouldn't complain to limiting turret zoom to a closer distance, it seems logical. But that's a matter for another thread I guess. Auto aim exploit is an exploit only if it is effective.
Quote:Why calling an exploit a feature that was here since the beginning of times? It's not the bot transfer that is an exploit, it's that Disco greatly increased fighter survivability while not increasing their anti-fighter capabilities. If Bot transfer does not pose such a problem in any other ship above a Snubclass, and we all know that it does not prolongate the fight on transports, gunboats, cruisers, and caps the way it does on snubcraft - why consider it as a core of a problem when it's clearly visible that the problem is in Snubcraft department.
Bot transfer poses problems in every class. Cloaking battleships running to base to reload and bring more bots are an exploit. Fighters running away to bring more bots to their buddies are an exploit. Draining the whole group of bots by shooting one target is an exploit that makes focus fire a massively boring tactic and forces the fights to go into a series of 1v1s or spend ages isolating every target. Repair ship logic at this time is a enormous exploit that hasn't been fixed for version after version because we didn't know how (we have an idea and the means to do it now though). Just because the game devs did not foresee bot trading as a huge problem in MP does not make this a "feature", more like a bug.
Furthermore, I don't see caps as needing any big rebalance if bot trading was to be removed. *Maybe* a small percentage HP increase (5-10%) at most, and there is a pretty clear reason for that: caps were not balanced to take bot trading into account.
As to fighter lethality: ask yourself this. If fighters have guns that you just press on your target and it takes damage no matter how much he dodges, how much fun is that for you or the receiving guy? Does it not encourage huge ganks where sheer numbers prevail because suddenly dodging skill doesn't matter? What happens to skill based fighting and training which a lot of people enjoy?
My answers to the above questions in relevant order are: it's not fun either for me or the other guy, it encourages ganks and "numbers win the fight" mentality, it makes training for skill a worthless endeavour. There needs to be clear progression to give people a reason to even compete in fighters in the first place. Note that I said "compete" and not "fly". This is one of the last things that keeps people flying fighters rather than lazy battleships. I don't think I will be taking that away.
This is why I will keep on saying that fighter gun speed increase across the board is a really bad idea, and that what should actually happen is we introduce more high damage, high skill weapons in different varieties to encourage skill based shootouts rather than, to paraphrase Veygaar, stats/numbers wars.
Quote:Nova spam:
Currently, the only 3 things that can help a heavy capital ship with escort to outlive bomber swarm is a) Cloak combined with either friendly NPCs or JH/JG b) Personal jumpdrive. c) bot trading. (edit: ) d) high average skill difference between escort and nova bombers.
Currently light bombers are quite bad at dealing with heavy caps such as battleships, while heavy bombers die faster from a fighter escort swarm (3-4 or so) than a cap dies from a nova barrage. Unless there is a really big swarm of bombers playing that is (4-5 and above).
Here is why Novas will stay such high damage: caps are not balanced under the assumption that they will be scarce. It is perfectly normal to see more caps fielded than fighters in a particular fight. This is something that will never change. Factions then that do not have caps should be able to repel an all out cap assault that inevitably happens using nova spam bombers. It's a simple counter to a bad tactic, think RTS games where spamming one type of unit gets you killed. Same thing and I do not think this deserves any changes even if bot trading is removed.
At the same time... lets say you bring a balanced force to war. 1-2 BS, 3-4 fighters, maybe a gunboat... and the enemy takes 4 bombers out. This is a textbook matchup: you take your BS to kite, take out novas using your flaks while the fighters kill the bombers by spreading them. The BS uses solaris to take down shields of approaching bombers that try to use their SNs so that they receive hull damage from the fighters. Heavy bombers will go down. Light bombers will struggle to deal enough damage due to power core limitations. And if you have a gunboat and they target it first as bombers usually do = you win because gunboat sticks close to BS while they tear bombers to shreds. If they don't target the gunboat first, the gunboat tears the bombers to shreds. Result: you win. I am sorry but I really see no problems with novas as they are. All you need to do is vary your force composition. And then you will notice that actually EMP novas need a buff...
Quote:Large scale Close brawl (happens more often then long range duels):
The only way for a capship to stay alive in a close fight brawl for a little longer is a bot trading, which requires good coordination and teamwork. because average lifespan under those conditions is under 30 seconds for the first focused ship. That's another side of the medal, with fights taking extremely short time - and that makes them very teamwork and coordination heavy. Are you going to fully rebalance capital ships for that as well, with bot trade removal?
Large scale fights will always end fast due to focus fire. We will never get those right because half the participants lag out anyway before the fight concludes. We can reduce primary and cerberus dps to keep BS alive for longer during slugouts... but even bot trading doesn't help here because in the end you still drain the whole group's bots and they die in the space of 1 minute after the 10 minute slug out drains everyones bots.
Unless they bring in a rep ship for super cheese that is.
EDIT: Timbuktu correctly observed that the issue is not as much with gun speed as it is with agility of some fighters. This is something that will be looked at, though of course there are other issues as with LFs... go ahead and find the thread that proposed reducing LF speed and increasing their firepower. I wouldn't mind that particular proposal actually...
