Quality of Life stuff 8.2018

[Cluwne]

This might come as a surprise, but speed is one of the ways to tank damage, in this case by avoiding it. Shocking, I know.
Like it or not, slowpoke, but it has as much right to exist as any other way, like armor, shields, stealth and PD for missiles.
You're literally saying "I can't come up with ways to counter this defense, REMOVE IT NAO!!1!".
Git gud scrub, you sounds like an angry kid that got beaten in a game, but instead of analyzing why he lost, he flips over the table.

P.S. And for god's sake work on your english Ivan, it's painful to read your post.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Every chamber should auto-charge by default. There is nothing added to the game by making people hold down a mouse button.

Not just the chambers, jump drive too. There is 0 point in making us build a chamber to not hold down mouse click except to punish spinal mounts, which are already not the meta at all.

From the OP: "Please for the love of God have F to highlight an entity and ANOTHER button to SET ATTACK for your select fire turrets."
This has been bugging me since the first time I built a turret, back in the days of docking enhancers.

Also please prioritize fixing shipyards. Shipyards are so awesome when they actually work. Them not working is a really big problem that hits at the core of the game. No, they do not consistently work right now in 0.201.138.

Acid damage on salvage beams would also fix the glaringness of them. Seriously, there is no reason for us to be building these waffle arrays, it doesn't make the game better.

 

[kikaha]

Seriously, there is no reason for us to be building these waffle arrays, it doesn't make the game better.

But so satisfying when eating a roid... Or cutting it in half with one sweep...

 

[petrenko17]

This might come as a surprise, but speed is one of the ways to tank damage, in this case by avoiding it. Shocking, I know.
Like it or not, slowpoke, but it has as much right to exist as any other way, like armor, shields, stealth and PD for missiles.
You're literally saying "I can't come up with ways to counter this defense, REMOVE IT NAO!!1!".
Git gud scrub, you sounds like an angry kid that got beaten in a game, but instead of analyzing why he lost, he flips over the table.

P.S. And for god's sake work on your english Ivan, it's painful to read your post.

I am complaining as the only design that can beat this strategy is the same one. Resulting in no actual meaning of armor cannons. Nobody will bother building different ship since current movement is in favor of this style.

You are more experienced in combat, tell me a design which beats beam thruster ship.

 

[EricBlank]

I agree with most of these suggestions, they would really improve how the game plays.

One thing that would be nice is stats displays in weapons grouping menu telling us not only the base damage per shot but also per second and also damage from effects. I.e. i want to know how much thermal damage vs kinetic damage vs normal/base damage my 33.4% kinetic effect beams actually do. And also expected damage per shot/second to unmodified shields and armor of each type vs unarmored blocks. Not sure what the equations for that are anyway, and i dont see a reason i should have to do the math myself when the program already knows all of this. It just needs to tell me.

 

[petrenko17]

Damage per second is present, effect damage is not. Also the clean up could bring some tool tip to better describe what those effecet actually do.

Other note, armor doesnt scale well. On lower size ships (for example trading guild drone of fighter) armor is wastly supperior however on bigger ships armor is severly lacking behind cannond damage. I would love to see lower hp of armor blocks but higher scaling with additional layers. Since beams ignore armor completly, which is kinda sad, their damage would have to be lowered

 

[Ithirahad]

This might come as a surprise, but speed is one of the ways to tank damage, in this case by avoiding it. Shocking, I know.
Like it or not, slowpoke, but it has as much right to exist as any other way, like armor, shields, stealth and PD for missiles.
You're literally saying "I can't come up with ways to counter this defense, REMOVE IT NAO!!1!".
Git gud scrub, you sounds like an angry kid that got beaten in a game, but instead of analyzing why he lost, he flips over the table.

P.S. And for god's sake work on your english Ivan, it's painful to read your post.

Pretty sure this 'slowpoke' came here to play a sci-fi spaceship game, not an unarmored sticks with lots of beam turrets game. Perhaps his approach to the problem is wrong, but if there were effective "ways to counter this defense" atm, I'm pretty sure all the competitive ships we hear about wouldn't more or less follow this design guideline.
[doublepost=1533698881,1533697641][/doublepost]

Every chamber should auto-charge by default. There is nothing added to the game by making people hold down a mouse button.

I second this. I don't really see anything good about NOT having auto-charge on any system that takes more than 10-15sec to charge up; it doesn't do anything except make everything feel tedious and annoying and giving you a nasty case of finger fatigue depending on mouse. The limiting factor should be power management, not hotbar switching.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Pretty sure this 'slowpoke' came here to play a sci-fi spaceship game, not an unarmored sticks with lots of beam turrets game. Perhaps his approach to the problem is wrong, but if there were effective "ways to counter this defense" atm, I'm pretty sure all the competitive ships we hear about wouldn't more or less follow this design guideline.
[doublepost=1533698881,1533697641][/doublepost]
I second this. I don't really see anything good about NOT having auto-charge on any system that takes more than 10-15sec to charge up; it doesn't do anything except make everything feel tedious and annoying and giving you a nasty case of finger fatigue depending on mouse. The limiting factor should be power management, not hotbar switching.

On fixing beam-armed stick ships:

• Rebalance weapons (beams are currently the only counter to sticks as well as countering every other kind of ship)
  • Beams should do way less damage than currently, to everything
  • Cannons should be the highest damage/energy and damage/block weapon, not beams, to make up for a chance to miss
  • Missiles should make bigger craters in hull than currently
• Add breakaway, as it would put an end to this nonsense of floating turrets and add at least some disadvantage to a stick when it's hit
• Make capital (Star Wars definition, >100m in longest dimension) ships not able to maneuver like fighters. The entire idea of the stick meta is to be not only thin, but unpredictably moving so that shots can't land. 2.5 TWR acceleration is absolutely ridiculous on a big ship, it makes it harder to hit and much more likely that something will glitch out. Basically, make thrust take a lot of energy as well as a lot of blocks, so that you need something like the Corellian Corvette (30% of the ship is engines, and it isn't exactly well-armed) to achieve even 2 TWR at capital scale.

 

[petrenko17]

Pretty sure this 'slowpoke' came here to play a sci-fi spaceship game, not an unarmored sticks with lots of beam turrets game. Perhaps his approach to the problem is wrong, but if there were effective "ways to counter this defense" atm, I'm pretty sure all the competitive ships we hear about wouldn't more or less follow this design guideline.

On fixing beam-armed stick ships:

• Rebalance weapons (beams are currently the only counter to sticks as well as countering every other kind of ship)
  • Beams should do way less damage than currently, to everything
  • Cannons should be the highest damage/energy and damage/block weapon, not beams, to make up for a chance to miss
  • Missiles should make bigger craters in hull than currently
• Add breakaway, as it would put an end to this nonsense of floating turrets and add at least some disadvantage to a stick when it's hit
• Make capital (Star Wars definition, >100m in longest dimension) ships not able to maneuver like fighters. The entire idea of the stick meta is to be not only thin, but unpredictably moving so that shots can't land. 2.5 TWR acceleration is absolutely ridiculous on a big ship, it makes it harder to hit and much more likely that something will glitch out. Basically, make thrust take a lot of energy as well as a lot of blocks, so that you need something like the Corellian Corvette (30% of the ship is engines, and it isn't exactly well-armed) to achieve even 2 TWR at capital scale.

Ivan is happy for given approval.

 

[Captain Fortius]

I don't really see anything good about NOT having auto-charge on any system that takes more than 10-15sec to charge up; it doesn't do anything except make everything feel tedious and annoying and giving you a nasty case of finger fatigue depending on mouse.

+

This.

I can't seem to recall a game where I needed to hold down a key to make my cooldowns.. y'know... cool down.

Innovation is nice and all but perhaps this is a wrong direction. Pop that scanner, or warp jump, or thruster boost, make the skill go on cooldown and slowly tick away automatically.

 

[petrenko17]

I think this mechanic is only present because how power is used when you are chanrging anything. Jump drive, at least on my builds, is connected to substantial energy spike. Your suggestion would be 100% more user friendly, but would also mean those spikes would come after use. Which in combat also is not that great. Though this mainly affect jump drive, scanner and others would be fine on autocharge and delayed spike since thouse are used during combat not at the end of it.

Would single left click to toggle charging be user friendly enough for you?

 

[Captain Fortius]

Great insight, great solution!

Power drain is an issue I forgot, toggle charging by a single click would work well.

Come to think of it, this makes perfect sense too;
When the captain gives the order to charge warp drives, he doesn't keep constantly yelling at the flight officer; CHARGE WARP DRIVES! CHARGE WARP DRIVES! ARE THEY CHARGED YET? AND NOW? HOW ABOUT NOW? Y'STILL CHARGIN? KEEP CHARGINNNNNNN!! , though after saying this, the idea of an over-excited PTSD riddled hyper-active captain is starting to sound quite entertaining.

The flight officer / pilot too probably just flicks a switch to the "charge" position, and does not spend minutes pumping the same button.
Unless he's over-excited as well. Or he has to pedal a jury-rigged bycicle dynamo.
Maybe you could get a faster charge by repeatedly clicking at the cost of increased power drain and a chance to malfunction? (that's just a low priority extra feature idea)

 

[Comr4de]

This might come as a surprise, but speed is one of the ways to tank damage, in this case by avoiding it. Shocking, I know.
Like it or not, slowpoke, but it has as much right to exist as any other way, like armor, shields, stealth and PD for missiles.
You're literally saying "I can't come up with ways to counter this defense, REMOVE IT NAO!!1!".
Git gud scrub, you sounds like an angry kid that got beaten in a game, but instead of analyzing why he lost, he flips over the table.

P.S. And for god's sake work on your english Ivan, it's painful to read your post.

I think the big difference here is that those other damage types have counters. In this current build speedy boats have no feasible counter, with tractor beams having only the range of minimum damage falloff for damage beams. It doesn't need to be removed but there needs to be some sort of counter or downside to running this shipstyle.

 

[petrenko17]

I think this mechanic is only present because how power is used when you are chanrging anything. Jump drive, at least on my builds, is connected to substantial energy spike. Your suggestion would be 100% more user friendly, but would also mean those spikes would come after use. Which in combat also is not that great. Though this mainly affect jump drive, scanner and others would be fine on autocharge and delayed spike since thouse are used during combat not at the end of it.

Would single left click to toggle charging be user friendly enough for you?

I also forgot, holding pre charged system will negativly impact combat. Charged systems should comsume some precentage of power needed to charge them or other percentage debuffs to your ship if need be. This would bring some disadvantage to precharged ready to use jumpdrives. Nonetheless testing and seting separate "debufs" to each system depending on its impact in combat is requiered.

But this is rather balance and not usefull aditions which should be in this thread. As a nice feature i would love to be able to type back in teleport command instead of coordinates, it would take the admin to location from which he had prewiosly teleported. I think this would be useful for ingame administrators as they play, they jump to distant sector to solve something and then they can jump right back where they left of playing.

 

[Captain Fortius]

Perhaps in their charged state, each system could be volatile? (explodes violently when shot)

Rupturing a charged plasma cannon, or a booster rocket, or Emperor forbid, a warp drive can lead to catastrophic damage, which at least disables the system if not the entire ship. In some cases, there's not even a "ship" remaining to speak of.

 

[Zoolimar]

I think the big difference here is that those other damage types have counters. In this current build speedy boats have no feasible counter, with tractor beams having only the range of minimum damage falloff for damage beams. It doesn't need to be removed but there needs to be some sort of counter or downside to running this shipstyle.

Lasers is what counters speed tanking as they are instant hit.

 

[jayman38]

Or he has to pedal a jury-rigged bycicle dynamo.....

Hehehe I want this in game so much. To go along with power blocks being a cage containing a hamster wheel and a tireless super-hamster.

 

[Comr4de]

Lasers is what counters speed tanking as they are instant hit.

Thats just indicative of the overpowered state of damage beam. Why bother using anything else when you can just hit a target once and have a beam stick to it? In theory damage falloff sounds great but 40% of a 100m damage beam is still 40m damage. The main issue is that speed tanks are able to control their engagement range more effectively than any other ship setup and theres no way to limit their mobility. without a way to tackle them and keep them from running away after they dump 200m worth of burst damage onto you or holding them at range to let longer ranged weapons hit, all ships start to look the same. Its why most pvp builds right bow are vertical ships with loads of turrets and maxed out tmr.

 

[Cluwne]

Seems like increased tractor beam range, maybe with a bit of falloff too, would solve this balance issue rather nicely.

 

[aceface]

a balance thread for new weapons/power in general would be nice