General rebalance idea.

[Knjaz]

Well, I can understand your pain, and pain of everybody else's that achieved a good skill level in snubcraft.

Actually I achieved a good skill with caps... Then everyone got auto aim and now caps are stat/distance wars. No more need for aiming while maneuvering. Dumb.

Let me ask you this: Are you willing to lose zoom in order to have these other changes implemented? If no, why? Is it because it makes it to harder to fly caps now? If it does make it to hard to fly caps, would that be comparable to the current difficulty of flying snubs? If yes, then there is your balance. Make everything hard to master.

Limiting zoom to 3x-4x definitely won't be a problem, if aforementiond changes taken into account. If required for balance reasons, after aforementioned changes, might be reduced even lower.
Removing it fully? Well, increase camera turn speed then, at least (it's already pretty damn low)

The only reason for that is that you put your noobs in RM BS which is by far one of the most extreme ships on the server.

Well, tbh, I meant cruisers and carriers here. Not everybody wanted to fly a simplistic RMBS. (which isn't too simplistic, just like any other heavy cap out there). As of now, any cap or a gunboat is better choice for a newbie then a fighter. Even the Flying Coffing, a.k.a. Geb. (if it didn't get it's rear shootings 7's, in last 4 months)

Ok, let's continue.

It is newbie friendly. There are a small handful of players that can use skill in the current balance to their own advantage, those players have their ups and downs in activity, but when they are active people just get this idea that it is somehow a problem that somebody else can kill them in a fighter and it takes work to be able to kill him back. Skill should be rewarded with kills, it's one of the last things that keeps players interested. The only issue with VHF fights right now is lag, bot trading and not enough trick shots.

<Joker example>


As for fighters learning curves specifically: flying fighters is not for the lazy. If it becomes like that though, it will be just boring because fighter fights will be predetermined by the amount of fighters turning up on the field, and that takes all fun away from the fight. Freelancer capfights are already pretty well dictated by how many caps can be fielded by each side due to the way capship game mechanics work, I really don't want to turn fighters balance into more of the same.

<Connecticut Example>

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.

Bot transfer is essentially an exploit. It makes groups into a single unit which you need to drain of all regens in order to place one kill - and then they all either die consecutively in short intervals, or someone runs to base to bring reloads and we start over. It makes gun kills in group fights a rare thing, and those people who know how to instakill other fighters are the ones who win the fights for their group. This is incredibly suboptimal IMO.

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.

Projectile speed increase is not the way to go. As said above, it will dumb fights down. The only thing that fighters need is more high damage specialty weapon capability returned to them to make fights a bit more interesting (which I am working on). And removal of bot trading. Caps shouldn't trade bots either, then we can give repair ships a repair gun and balance the damn thing right, rather than the current cheese fest that it is whenever anyone fields a cruising repair ship with the 4k bots/bats that can always go to a nearest base for more reloads if he starts getting low. Seriously. I used this thing in Gamma raids, the amount of cheese you can accomplish with it is unreal.

You call it "dumbing down", I call it "making them more newbie friendly and popular". As I mentioned before, I wasn't talking about leveling a pro with a newbie. I was talking about reducing the gap by some amount, and a whole other set of ways to achieve a more balanced and thought-out gameplay, in a system. (under proposed system, fighters and bombers would have higher lethality rate, low maintenance costs, lower respawn" time, etc.)

First of all, I'd like to specifically point out, that, as we all know, damage sent/damage inflicted ratio on snubcraft is way different from any other ship class on disco. Therefore, that is the first thing to work with if someone would intend to make fighters more lethal to themselves. Today's Disco increased fighter survivability up to 2.5 times compared to vanilla freelancer, without changing their anti-fighter capabilities. (Not just gun DpS, but the actual DpS under various scenarios, taking into account it's evasive capabilities, on various skill levels).

Just giving them means of inflicting damage at a very high DpE ratio will, first of all, result in the increase of their anti-transport/gunboat/cruiser/battleship capabilities. Unless it'll be something really short ranged.


Now, remark about your proposed cap "rebalancing" and total removal of bot trading.

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.

For how long can you survive in, say, a Roc under the fire of average corsair fighter, in "full evasive" mode? (sending novas from time to time). Even noobs like me can hold on for a while. And that again brings us to the actual average % of shots that reach their destination in snubcraft vs snubcraft brawls. That % is very different between low-skilled and high skilled player. Thats what I was talking about, when I mentioned those "Maximum 20% of Pro's total firepower, after some Conn training"

P.S. Worth mentioning, that, in comparsion to Vanilla freelancer setting, current setting, especially after "Nova torpedo fix" requires fighters to actually be capable of relatively quickly dealing with a number of similiarly sized vessels, that are dishing out enormous amounts of damage and going full evasive at same time.

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?


IMHO.

[Prysin]

Blodo is pretty spot on... however, zoom/TS has ruined some ships too, as suggested by veygar. I for one, would like TS and zoom to be removed from gunboats. It was far more fun when GB was 100% skill and aim based. Alas, this wont be done.

As for cap skill - it is a MAJOR difference between pro cap pilots and pro fighter pilots. And i am not talking "difference" as in caps having 50 times the firepower and armor of a fighter, but the difference in sheer skill.

So of you may have seen a bret BS lulz around in conn, taking on legates, turtles, ossies, valors, LN Dreads, Ranseurs, Togos and other big caps known for their battleprowess, yet that darn bret BS dont loose. They fight a head on slug-fight, in which the much heavier and much much more destructive 9m core'd vessels shoulda owned the bret BS, but yet they DONT.

As for jormundgand demanding skill, i strongly disagree. It is far too forgiving as it is to demand SERIOUS skill. You need some basic skills to efficiently aim that FW gun on the move, but the arcs, agility, shape and size makes it more of a tactic-dependent vessel, then a skill dependent one.
LN Dread however is more skill oriented, because even with proper tactics, the firepower and arcs arent great enough to take out a RM BS before it can cruise up to you.

Oh and to all of you LN players out there, tired of cloaking turtles - get LABC. Firepower of a light BS, speed and agility enough to run away. and it has a CD

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DHC Discord

[Timbuktu]

Ok how about gun projectimle speed is increased by a percentage, like 10%, and not by a fixed value like +100 speed. Or by a percentage of the square like

newspeed=oldspeed + factor*oldspeed^2

Or using another exponent than 2. That shouldnt make the 2k+ guns too overpowered over the fast ones.

The main problem I see is with the superagility of some ships. 3 ships shooting 1 dodgy ship fo 2 hours, and the guy just refuses to leave system and leave people alone because he got ego issues.

Rather immature "vets" trying to "teach" "noobs" that "you cant kill me Im to awesome you must submit to what I want."

Its simply too easy to survive in fighters, expecially when your enemies are also in fighters.

[Blodo]

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.

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.

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...

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...

[Yber]

If you want to kill a fighter without a transfer, use a mini razor. If you want to kill a battleship the same way, use 4 HMs.

Period.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Ichiru]

Ship prices need to go 50% up as well

No, just no. It already costs around 20 million to set up a decent VHF. 50% price increase is gonna make it even more expensive so we'll have even less players.

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Acolyte of NoMe

[Sava]

To the OP:

At some point i shared the idea that stronger guns and/or weaker hulls and shields could be better.
I thought about it's benefits:
-more realistic
-less base hugging and shieldrunning (I don't say both are bad, just sometimes they're used in an abusive way)
-would make convoys fun - if escorts could get the raiders before they destroy the transport, the transport itself would be invulnurable as long as its escorts are alive - way better than today's "scouts", sending instant interstellar messages to their employers.

BUT, on the other hand, we spend alot of time just flyin' around, looking for some interaction. If a snub fight take just a couple of minutes, or even less (like in vanilla Freelancer) we would seriously lack PvP. It is dealt with on PvP servers, where there's no 4 hour (or 2 hour, or 1 hour) non-engagement rule, you can just undock and jump back to the battle. But here we do role play, and i see no way how can we adapt to short fights without loosing much of PvP expirience.

I think it was the mod designer's idea to make PvP last longer to compensate the afterdeath non-engagement rule.

[Ironwatsas]

I am still of the opinion that just removing armors in general will improve matters. Even without any other changes (with the possible exception of turret steer for Gunboats).

It means the guns we have wont' need a massive rebalance unless we decide to do something special to make Light Fighters more useful. Possibly increasing hull damage on most guns, thus making dodging and shields the "main" protection for ships instead of armors.

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ANOTHER IDEA: For capships, I've had an interesting thought; instead of nerfing Turret Steer, why not simply remove the thrusters on Gunboats and Cruisers, and add a replacement device which, when active, causes them to turn and strafe much faster for a short period of time. Including for Battleships.

Granted, the versions on Gunboats and Cruisers would be far more efficient/faster then Battleships, but a battleship dodge just might make manuver warfare between caps more interesting.

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All that begins must end.

[Veygaar]

ANOTHER IDEA: For capships, I've had an interesting thought; instead of nerfing Turret Steer, why not simply remove the thrusters on Gunboats and Cruisers, and add a replacement device which, when active, causes them to turn and strafe much faster for a short period of time. Including for Battleships.

Turret Steer isn't the problem, zoom is.

Try Turret Steering with out any zoom and you'll find you'll need a TON more of practice to be efficient in it.

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Veygaar for Admin Moderator 2013!!!

[Yber]

To the OP:

At some point i shared the idea that stronger guns and/or weaker hulls and shields could be better.
I thought about it's benefits:
-more realistic
-less base hugging and shieldrunning (I don't say both are bad, just sometimes they're used in an abusive way)
-would make convoys fun - if escorts could get the raiders before they destroy the transport, the transport itself would be invulnurable as long as its escorts are alive - way better than today's "scouts", sending instant interstellar messages to their employers.

BUT, on the other hand, we spend alot of time just flyin' around, looking for some interaction. If a snub fight take just a couple of minutes, or even less (like in vanilla Freelancer) we would seriously lack PvP. It is dealt with on PvP servers, where there's no 4 hour (or 2 hour, or 1 hour) non-engagement rule, you can just undock and jump back to the battle. But here we do role play, and i see no way how can we adapt to short fights without loosing much of PvP expirience.

I think it was the mod designer's idea to make PvP last longer to compensate the afterdeath non-engagement rule.

You're so damn right. SO KEEP IT HOW IT IS.

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inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.