Capital Ships Rebalance Discussion

[Val]

Hello community. As the title says, this thread will be the place to discuss the Capital Ships Rebalance. A kind of new wind started to blow over to the Cap Balance Team recently, with the arrival of new members, eager to discuss, act and eventually apply the changes needed to the capital ship gameplay.

We find it important to consult the community members in order to ask them what is their opinion regarding the current capital ship gameplay and how to improve it. Because here is the thing, we aren't doing all this for some people able to edit ini or the very PvPwhores who've been cursed by the knowledge of the Esoteric Circle of Capital Ships Prostitutes (credits to @Thunderer for this name), but for the community itself, so everyone can have fun playing caps, once more.

Feel free to propose your suggestions below, discussing the remarks of the others, anything worth to be mentionned. If you wish to insult someone in general, the Dev Team, or me, please, don't write them here, keep them for conn, so at least they can be useful. And it will be my pleasure to argue with you in a storm of blindfired-chainfired shots with a discreet scent of desync!

If you don't wish to post here for some reasons, you are free to ping me on Discord, or the other members of the Caps Balance Trinity, aka @"bakugandenis2013" and @TheShooter36.

Thank you, and don't forget to close your eyes when you fire on caps. Only way to properly use the power of blindfire, and all its secrets!

[Mephistoles]

Remove all solaris turrets from the game outright without further delay. Take the plunge and do it now. They are griefing tools.

Change all cap guns above gunboat to do 1% damage to fighter and bomber shields, thus creating a dynamic where a snub can safely dive a cap while it has shields up, but is vulnerable with shields down, making it imperative a cap ship have support from smaller ships to be able to reliably fight them off. This also reduces the impact of snubs hugging a friendly capship while still maintaining the effectiveness of this strategy to at least an extent.

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Sigma & GMG Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/d4j3W4v

[Shiki]

Remove all solaris turrets from the game outright without further delay. Take the plunge and do it now. They are griefing tools.

Change all cap guns above gunboat to do 1% damage to fighter and bomber shields, thus creating a dynamic where a snub can safely dive a cap while it has shields up, but is vulnerable with shields down, making it imperative a cap ship have support from smaller ships to be able to reliably fight them off. This also reduces the impact of snubs hugging a friendly capship while still maintaining the effectiveness of this strategy to at least an extent.

+1

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[Greylock]

Capital ship gameplay can never be decent until NPC patrols are removed. It's an issue when you spend an hour trying to fight someone but neither person does anything because every time they kill the npc patrols, 342034723097846 more ships spawn and do literally nothing other than flip you over and screw with your aim. If NPC patrols are removed, only then can we properly balance anything.

Or give cruiser primaries faster refire/give them secondary turrets to murder those darn snubs.

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[Hubjump]

Fleet fights are decided by numbers too often but that in its self appears to be a community issue with players having an argument about skill gaps justifying ganking when it hasn't been agreed upon.
Artillery meta is absolutely boring and unfun. BC's strike a nice balance of powercore maintenance and mobility being able to disengage and engage when ever is fit choosing either sustained fire or a full burst of damage using their nicely scaled secondaries. I'd enjoy moving more toward that kind of capital ship pvp.

come away from artillery meta and have things closer range, faster refire and lower damage to bring down the desync bugs effects on pvp to a minimum making fights seem more fair rather than taking massive amounts of damage you obviously dodged.

Upscale cruisers and adjust their DPS accordingly, would be a case by case since of course not all cruisers are in good spots as is.
Perhaps unpopular for me to say but cruisers currently, in this game of consistency with both your hit rate and performance as a pilot, are the best class of ship in the game in terms of survivability being able to comfortably dodge at around and even under 1k where even blindfire isn't a guaranteed win unless you're equipped with mortars to snipe with and are exceptionally good at it. Like a well skilled snap pilot per say.

Perhaps increase the impulse speed or add a thruster which increases speed by 10-15ms and experiment with that for larger ships to make it more dynamic such as having different thruster speeds for dreadnoughts than medium and light battleships.
Adjust the power cost of weapons to try and make them closer to BC's combat in terms of attack choice.

Break the strafe speed standardization for the love of god! Turn rate and strafe speed are the most important stats for a ships mobility and thus survivability. A bismarck should strafe faster than a tokugawa to compensate for its larger profile. Adding more health for the most part means it'll die all the same, just with more shots.

[Hubjump]

Change all cap guns above gunboat to do 1% damage to fighter and bomber shields, thus creating a dynamic where a snub can safely dive a cap while it has shields up, but is vulnerable with shields down, making it imperative a cap ship have support from smaller ships to be able to reliably fight them off. This also reduces the impact of snubs hugging a friendly capship while still maintaining the effectiveness of this strategy to at least an extent.

A capital ship will usually never get the support it needs. This would in my eyes make capital ships suicide as dodging fire and torping caps is easy enough as it is. This would require a rework to how bombers attack caps to make it viable and I can't think of a way.

I for one want bombers to kill us faster because oh my lord it takes for ages for these little gnats to do ANYTHING. It's infuriating to die so SLOWLY let alone dying at all. But I can't think of anyway to make this viable concerning the price difference of bombers and capital ships.

[PhoenixClaw]

Remove all solaris turrets from the game outright without further delay. Take the plunge and do it now. They are griefing tools.

Change all cap guns above gunboat to do 1% damage to fighter and bomber shields, thus creating a dynamic where a snub can safely dive a cap while it has shields up, but is vulnerable with shields down, making it imperative a cap ship have support from smaller ships to be able to reliably fight them off. This also reduces the impact of snubs hugging a friendly capship while still maintaining the effectiveness of this strategy to at least an extent.

Really like that Idea. +1 to that.

[Lythrilux]

Remove all solaris turrets from the game outright without further delay. Take the plunge and do it now. They are griefing tools.

Change all cap guns above gunboat to do 1% damage to fighter and bomber shields, thus creating a dynamic where a snub can safely dive a cap while it has shields up, but is vulnerable with shields down, making it imperative a cap ship have support from smaller ships to be able to reliably fight them off. This also reduces the impact of snubs hugging a friendly capship while still maintaining the effectiveness of this strategy to at least an extent.

I would rather snubs and caps are unable to touch each other outright.

When flying a fighter, it is very irritating having a good group fight going only for some drooling idiot to come along wanting easy kills in their cap disrupting the fun of all participants involved.

At the same time, it is also very irritating to have a either a Cap 1v1 or a big fight of lots of caps, only for several snubs to come along and be generally annoying and skew the balance, also doing things such as going to restock as they have an unparalleled running away ability and are theoretically invincible if they play as safe as possible.

Freelancer wasn't designed to accommodate Capital ships on the scale we have them now. I don't think that means they should be removed from the game or anything (I enjoy my Makos and my Tokus). But it seems quite clear to me that it is very hard to balance these ships in a way where they can interact with each other and still make things fun for people on both sides of the ship preference. If it's necessary - say they can't be balanced to be a suitable bridge between these class types - I'd say the place/importance of Bombers and Gunboats in Discovery may need to be reconsidered as well.

Going back to the topic at hand, I genuinely believe the state of Battlecruisers right now is incredibly boring after their rework. Flying a BCR is just a snoozefest. I preferred them much more before when they were a true hybrid between Battleships and Cruisers. I also think Gunboat shields and Gunboat heavies were a mistake, adding FORCED DIVERSITY to a class that left a handful of boats in a great position and many others just utterly terrible and completely non-viable. Light cruisers, although not necessarily bad, are a bit useless and often worse than mediums - especially for factions that have access to BCRs. The balance between Light and Heavy battleships is whack in 1v1s, not fun for Heavies and Lights are forced to play an extremely safe playstyle if they want to win.

Finally, revert the price of Hurricanes. They're absolutely ridiculous right now. It was a kneejerk change to missions outcry.

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[Hokan]

Nova, Lex and myself came up with some ideas awhile ago.
I think Lex has the document, bully him for it!

In general, it was a overhaul of all caps. Some of the general points were:

- Thrusters are removed from them all. Impulse speed increase on some
- Turn/Strafe speed reduced
- Guns velocity was increased, refire and turn rate reduced
- Dreadnoughts specialize at Long-range anti-cap, something like 8 heavy turrets and loses its prims.
- Destroyers become a close-range anti-cap with shotgun like weaponry
- Gunboats maintain their role as a screening ship for Caps, they protect larger caps from snubs. But they're easier to hit, removing their invulnerability by excessive dodging.
- Battlecruisers are turned into Assault cruisers. Good forward arcs and forward firepower, but are venerable to flanks and being chased.

I think there was more, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Firewolfy]

I agree with what hubjump almost completly, most caps not going to have support and as for a inRP reason, its ridiculous to think that giant cannons cannot damage small ships. to be honest im not sure how in a big way that caps need to be rebalanced since im so new, though one thing ive noticed is that their shield seem to be a bit weak compared to their hull. although if this is made more to be a "temporary blanket" rather than something to last for a while, then i understand