First of all, thank you all for your replies. You have proposed good and interesting suggestions, some completely different in their nature or objective, but we have been reading with attention what you said, and the main points will be noted on a document, so we can have a rapid and clear access to them.
At the moment, I see the main concerns are about fixing the current issues, which sounds logic and necessary as we need to have a proper and solid basis to push the development foward.
I have been able to separate two main issues you pointed out within your comments and a third being more general on the current gameplay between the capital ship classes.
1) NPCs Bumping Capital Ships:
Let's get this straight: this is certainly the most annoying issue currently within caps world and it has been the case for years. I don't know anyone who enjoys being flipped by some random stupid NPCs. Perhaps the 180° turn in 2 seconds is funny in some ways, it is clearly not when it happens constantly and especially during a battle. From my own experience, it literally can change the entire outcome of it.
That's why it has to be solved, and we understand that no proper development can be done without having this fixed, once and for all.
But this task won't be easy. Several attempts have already been made, all resulting in a desperate failure. But not all possible solutions have been explored yet and some have a potential. That why we encourage you to share your ideas -they have to be reasonable of course- with us, over here or Discord (some of you already proposed some ideas here), do not hesitate to ping for this, and details will be appreciated as well.
2) The relation between caps and snubs/bombers:
That's a fact, many snubs fights have been ruined because of caps interfering with them. And we believe it is high time to have a proper separation between caps and snubs.
(11-29-2020, 06:50 PM)Mephistoles Wrote: 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.
(11-29-2020, 07:18 PM)Lythrilux Wrote: 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.
These two posts are quite interesting. It is entirely feasible to make snubs' shields virtually invincible against caps guns and it would solve the snub/caps issue quite elegantly. But like Lyth said, snubs then shouldn't be able to 'battle' the caps. For example VHF shields take 0.01x (random number) damage from cap guns and cap shields take 0.01x damage from VHF guns.
However, bombers should be excluded from that little trick if their role as anti-capital is kept unchanged. Otherwise, it would be entirely pointless to fly caps, as one bomber could destroy any capital ship alone thanks to their invulnerable shield, and therefore being lethal. Currently, two or three bombers are able to destroy any capital ship as @Boban pointed out here.
Nevertheless, these changes have the potential to allow us to live and enjoy a new world where snubs and caps can have their respective fun, without having the two classes interfering with one another.
And last but not least, everything else that has been mentionned, there are good propositions. I will personally not comment them from now, perhaps my two other collaborators can do that.