AMC Damage Rework (Fix shield and hull problem)

[Hochmeister]

While it\'d be nice if there was an easier way to fix ships other than buying a new one, it\'s unrealistic to expect a large ship to win a battle against a comparable opponant without a scratch. And yes, shields are way too easy to take down. However, unlike what you said, real life naval battles did end with both sides trashing each other. Just look at the battle of Jutland, or Dogger Bank, or the Bismark. Except for cases where poor ammo storage or armor design caused explosions (i.e. British battlecruisers), capital ships took and gave massive poundings before being sunk. Naval engagements typically ended with even the victor needing months of drydock. Of course, airpower and rockets changed all that, with the side who struck first winning from WWII onward.

 

[Nikicon]

Ok i have read this and i think this is the plan of attack for this:

Low number of Antimater cannons = Low damage HIGH rate of fire, short ranged, high speed,

Larger number of AMC\'s = HIGER damage, lowered rate of fire Incressed range, slower projection speed.

MASSIVE number of AMC\'S = MEGA HIGH DAMAGE, SLOWEST rate of fire, Longest range, SLOWEST projection speed.

There fore if you want dps, a large amount of smaller AMC arrays would be needed, but if you have a massive capital ship you\'ll have to decide on its role, Anti-capital or lare amont of smaller arrays for rapid fire. This will also make turrets more important as instead of low rate of fire pew pew pokes, turrets will become fast fire pokes that with time can eat though shields with thre dps over alpha damage that the larger arrays will have.



I made a 2500 mass ship in single player and took it into a freids server and kicked there but. It was fitted with two MASSIVE arrays with 0 rate of fire, speed, range, and maxed damage, and 6 smaller arreys with 30% rate of fire, 40% range, 10% damage and 20% speed. I was able to use the smaller arrays and thye out dps the larger arrays that i had. So i used the smaller arrays to kill the shields and changed over to the larger one to punch hole in the hull of his battlecruiser. I was also fighting a ship that was somewhere in the mass of 100000, and he also had many large turreted weapons on board were I had none.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

I think that the Projectile Speed should be something that increases with the amount of AMC\'s on board.



Think about it: you have more power in the system, the anti-matter can therefore be accelerated quicker and to a higher top speed. Projectiles of large cannons should be quicker if anything than those of low-powered smaller cannons.



Take this as an example:

An average 9mm bullet travels at 681 MPH.

Compare this to a Barret M82 sniper rifle bullet, travelling at 1908 MPH. That\'s over twice the speed of sound.

Then, you can compare that to an Armor Piercing tank shell, travelling at 3892 MPH. That\'s over 5 times the speed of sound.



My point is that high-powered systems shoot with more force and their projectiles fly faster.



Very fast, high powered projectiles would shoot at a very slow rate. The power of the projectile itself should increase slower than it\'s speed. This would ensure that insanely large AMC arrays would not grow overpowered but would also be more accurate and have a higher chance of hitting their targets, at the cost of a very slow reload.



What\'s the use of a slow but powerful projectile? If you start slowing it down, it will get to the point where I can move my titan quicker than shoot with it. What\'s the point?

 

[Dragleones]

The AMC

Well if u are still referring to my wall of text my suggestion was to create 3 different weapons instead of the AMC with a different scaling.

The reason for this is simple. A fighter needs for dogfights high reload, low distance together with enough damage to pierce shields of fighters and make some damage to them. If the reload would go down with building more pulselaser on a fighter its effective would massivly decrease. It would be senseless to make big arrays.
With the pulselaser being a seperate weapon instead fighters can use as big arrays as they want as long as they have enough maneuverability to stay in range. This would provide more freedom as there can\'t be a cookie-cutter build for pulselasers which provide the best stats for dogfights with this since more Pulselaser would always be dmg wise the best choice.

The AMC (the medium strength cannon referring to my earlier comment) could also be on big ships still a good choice to build in big arrays and would stick to its medium fire rate. Due to higher scaling of the heavy laser canon you have to think for yourself if you either want more damage (building heavy laser canon arrays) or want higher fire rate so its easier to hit smaller ships (building arrays of AMC). This would provide more freedom as well.

Shot speed

While it might be realistic to give big arrays of heavy canons a fast shot speed (not reloading) and give small guns low shot speed its terrible balancing wise. Small arrays (if you use the scaling method) or pulselaser (if you use the 3 different weapons method) need a high speed to actually hit something in dogfights where you can dodge really easy. Heavy laser cannons or big arrays would be devastating to fighters anyways if they hit them so they have a rather low shot speed since their task should be to attack big targets which are easy to hit.
The best protection for fighters is their maneuverability while big ships have their shields.

 

[Stormclouf3]

Don\'t turn AMCs into a build your own missile, just make the projectile speed increase very very slowly instead. GROOV3ST3R totally makes this point:


What\'s the use of a slow but powerful projectile? If you start slowing it down, it will get to the point where I can move my titan quicker than shoot with it. What\'s the point?


Also, find some other way to fix AMCs--think out side the box and find some resolutions that don\'t directly have to do with the AMC:

1. Currently they are like machinegun-snipers, so kill their accuracy. Not enough?
2. Introduce a little bit of FFISSICCS and make AMC\'s propel the ship in the opposite way it is firing (this will make it harder to move while shooting). Need more?
3. Like what Terramort said earlier about hulls, make them like secondary shields that have lots of health but no regeneration:

Have Reinforced Hull spread 90% of incoming damage to all connected Reinforced Hulls and 1 layer of regular hull, so you can actually build layers of armor that doesn\'t lose individual blocks, but actually acts like a real bulkhead, absorbing a fair amount of damage before failing.


Don\'t say bigger is better in response to me; this rule will be true even with the backwards slope idea. Before this issue can be fixed, the bigger is better rule has to be fixed.

 

[Stormclouf3]

I agree with you--we need different types of weapons , not just a complex one that changes depending on the amount of modules. As in most games, the simplicity rule applies. The less wiki this sandbox game needs, the better.

 

[WatcherCCG]

The easiest fix, judging by everyone\'s comments, would be to make rate-of-fire inversely proportional to the damage and number of blocks in any given AMC battery. This way, fighters have weak, but insanely fast shots, and capital ships have powerful, but slow shots.

 

[gashnal]

I designed a Shotgun turret for my latest ship the Achillies accuratly modeled from the BC-304 from Stargate SG1, the turret is as you would expect from the classification \"shotgun\" 150 nonlinked AMC\'s in a grid patern, the gun is ment to be a short range Point defence gun, the changes your talking about would make that gun so over powered. which is why single block AMC\'s have such a slow fire rate to begin with, yes they will not do anything to a faction block but with armor being as it is that gun will do 1800 damage per shot to sheilds, and 900 per shot to hardened armor, and it fits in an unmodified turret dock making it usable by any size ship. just making single block AMC\'s faster fireing only gives the biggest ships a new and more powerfull (although shorter ranged) gun.

 

[Dragleones]

It would be even easier to implement different AMC type weapons with different stats and scaling.

Making the firing rate going down while the damage goes up would propably result in a cooki-cutter for highest damage output and makes firing rate barely controlable. Fighters couldn\'t use big arrays since their firing rate would turn way to low.

Weapons should only scale upwards not downwards.

 

[Terramort]

Of course you could have big arrays that fire more slowly. Have you even played any sort of space flying game, ever? For example, the space combat in Star Wars BattleFront: 2 (which, in my opinion, is near what space combat should be. The only difference being larger capship interiors, and the ability to actually pilot the capship/frigates): The Interceptor clss fighters have incredibly fast-fireing lasers that will cut up another fighter, but just can\'t do enough damage to hurt armored Landing Shuttles or Frigates. Bombers, on the other hand, have a terrible firerate, but a single shot was capable of bringing down an Inerceptor, and two would bring down a Dogfighter. Even though it was harder to place, it had it\'s situations where it was more effective.

Besides, you can always trade distance/velocity/damage in order to get a faster fire rate. I think turrets should have tracking speed added, so they recieve a penalty for every point of mass they have, along with severely nerfing the turn rate/accel all ships + 100 mass (and make it worse as the ships gets larger - don\'t me wrong, I LOOOOOVE big ships, and that\'s why I want them to behave realistically. It should take literal minutes to turn around or reach top speed in a capship.) This will put all dogfighting advantages to the fighters, as they will have more accurate shots.

Of course, you\'ll probably never end up with a balance where a fighter can fly in and attack a capship and win. No, as long as shields exist in the game, it just won\'t happen. Once the enemy shields are down (maybe add EMP pulses, or you lured them near your big outpost guns, or they are under fire from your flagship, or whatever), fighters should become important assets in targetting specific areas of enemy big ships and shut down critical systems (there should be much stricter requirements on power/connecting things. Please observe: MineCraft mod - IndustrialCraft2) with well placed missile shots.

Realistically, there is no room in the StarMade universe for fighters, except to server as AI controlled distractions. Frigates have every single advantage in the game - fastest turning, enough power to run max-dps guns, big enough size to house numerous turrets, small enough size for jamming, and can usually accelerate to top speed within a few seconds, denying every single advantage that a fighter is supposed to have by being more manuvurable.

 

[Dragleones]

About the weapon:

As you said SWBF2 is a good example for a good space combat. Fighters like you mentioned had a high reload speed to take out other fighters/bombers/transports etc in space combat while bombers didn\'t really had much chances in dogfights because the fire rate was very low and even if it could oneshot a fighter u simply couldn\'t hit him most of the time. The capacity of bombers lays in taking out bigger targets.

My criticism was that you are limited in for example having a fighter with big arrays that still fire fast if the fire rate would go down by making bigger arrays. If a fighter weapon (look at the pulselaser i mentioned above) would be implemented by its own (scaling logharitmic to a low range cap and a high reload cap while the damage goes up linear) it would be useful to still go for big arrays as they provide more damage. Ofcourse capitals and or frigates could also go for massive arrangements of pulselaser but since their range cap is rather low bigger ships just can\'t use them effectivly since they can\'t maneuver fast enough to stick to a fighter or bomber.

Some other setups on fighter sized ships wouldn\'t be possible at all. For example they couldn\'t build a weapon with more range and damage but lesser dogfighting capacity (fire rate/projectil speed) (similar to the bomber weapon in SWBF2). Binding the fire rate to the size of the arrangement would simply limit the possibilitys. We need more weapons with different qualitys instead.

About fighter/capital balance:

Fighters (i mean small ships with fast firing) aren\'t designed to be any good at taking out caships and mustn\'t be good at this (imo) since they are already strong at taking down similar sized ships as other fighters and bombers. They shouldn\'t get any other strength (their fast firing arrays mustn\'t be good at fighting frigates/etc.)

So how is there room in the actual game for fighters?
Well... if bombers would get weapons that makes them useful there would be. We need some shield piercing weapons that does a good amount of damage (scales linear) has a decent splash radius and is safe against abuse (scaling logharitmic to a low range/speed cap). Called torpedos.

Shields on the bigger classes could be buffed again so they can\'t be destroyed by frigates for example. Capships with low maneuverability and heavy weaponary would wreck up those frigates but would be defenseless against bombers once their point defense turrets are down so they need to be protected by fighters. At the same time your own bombers needs to be protected by fighters against enemy fighters and by frigates against enemy corvettes and so on.

This would open up endless possibilitys for weapon setups and roles like:
-fighter-bombers with capabilitys to dogfight and decent capabilitys against capships
-heavy bombers with low maneuverability but strong weaponary
-suicide-corvettes with torpedos which can do a shitload of damage but can be disabled easily by heavy weapons from a capship
...and many more

This is in my opinion the way the space combat should go in this game. With every shipclass having their own important role.

 

[Stormclouf3]

Realistically, there is no room in the StarMade universe for fighters, except to server as AI controlled distractions. Frigates have every single advantage in the game - fastest turning, enough power to run max-dps guns, big enough size to house numerous turrets, small enough size for jamming, and can usually accelerate to top speed within a few seconds, denying every single advantage that a fighter is supposed to have by being more manuvurable.


I completly agree--but that is because the fighter class mass is labeled too low. What I don\'t understand is why people even labeled the fighter class--it is like a pistol, whereas Frigates are machineguns. Fighters are completly insignificant because of their size, so why bother creating one, let alone making a class and role for one? Imo, the fighter class shouldn\'t exist. Why are people so attached to it? I like the idea of a small ass ship, but that is frigates roll. In the world of Bigger is better, Fighters are just too small.

 

[Terramort]

I\'m not suggesting getting rid of the sliders. You could still build a larger array on a fighter, then sacrafice projectile speed or range to increase fire rate. I also think large arrays shouldn\'t be penalized too much, but instead if you have multiple AMC blocks in paralles for the output, each addition AMC blocks should double damage, halve firerate, more than double power consumption, but have a slight radius effect with damage (so you\'d get more than double for sacraficing firerate, just not all the target block).

I agree with everything else said, especially nerfing turn rate+acceleration on larger ships.

 

[Terramort]

Because they are the only ships that turn fast right now, and let you zip \'n zoom through the stars, as well as providing additional DPS without making your main ship a bigger target. The two big problems: seriously tone down big ship turn speed+accel, then reverse AMC firerate curve. This will give fighters the manuvurability advantages they deserve.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

- Projectile speed is dependednt on the power of the system. Bigger arrays will always shoot faster projectiles than smaller systems. However, smaller systems can be adjusted and their projectiles sped up by sacrificing power of the projectile

- Range should be tied with projectile speed - faster projectiles fly further out. That\'s kind of an inherent property of all firearms and weapons of any kind really. As such, it should increase and decrease proportionally to projectile speed.

More speed = more range

- Power of each shot should be determined by the amount of arrays. However, more powerful cannons should take proportionally longer to reload - due to recharging the cannons to a higher capacity than smaller arrays do.

- As such, the Rate of Fire or Reload should be merged with the Damage value that each shot does.

More power = longer reload



There should NOT be any way to circumvent the above system. As such, there should not be a way to sacrifice Range and Speed to gain more Power and quicker Reload.

Reload/Damage and Range/Speed values should be merged, leaving only 2 adjustable properties on a weapon.

Thus lowering projectile speed and therefore it\'s range , would free up charge for more powerful shots but would ALWAYS result in a lower rate of fire.



I\'m not sure what should happen if an array is rebalanced to shoot very slow and powerful projectiles - if you have 10% in range/speed, should you have a lesser Reload penalty?



On the side:

We do NOT need different tiers and levels of AMC\'s and other weapons for large and small ships.

What IS a fighter? What IS a frigate? What classifies as a Battle Cruiser?

I can make 10 different ships that will be hard to classify based on their hull, mass, power, speed and maneuverability. The point is that in StarMade, ship classification is purely superficial. You can make a ship any size from 1 block to 5.000.000 blocks and ANYTHING in between. At some point, the border between each ship class gets blurred.

Also, think about the technology of modern day weaponry - tanks use cannons while battleships... also use cannons. The same kind of cannons, working exactly the same as the ones on tanks, but bigger.

For that matter, miniguns are also cannons, just smaller. All firearms are essentially cannons. The only real difference between them is their size. And just like that, in StarMade, the only difference between Fighter-class AMC\'s and Battle Cruiser AMC\'s is the size of the array. They aren\'t different tech, just different scale.

 

[Terramort]

I disagree. There is no reason to remove one of the sliders. In real life, there are 3 major aspects to a weapon: fire speed, weight of the bullets (dmg), and reload speed. If you have a weapon that fires fast, it is usually light, without much damage (AK-47). If the weapon has a very significant damage profile, it usually fires slow (.45). If you want a weapon that does both massive damage AND an extreme rate of fire, you end up with a huge, heavy weapon with terrible tracking speed, massive power (ammo) requirements, and is terribly inaccurate.

As for all your questions about what exactly is a fighter - well, I don\'t have any cut-and-dried sheet about the mass of a fighter or whatever. When I say a fighter, I mean a ship small enough to avoid most turret fire, has good acceleration to help with dogfights, and usually prefers weapons over armor/shielding. I don\'t mean Fighters, as in, one of the 3 classifications of assault craft (Interceptor, Dogfighter, and Bomber), but just small attack craft in general.

 

[Kusibu]

\"Also there shouldn\'t be any extra hull destroying power from AMCs, destroying hull should be what missiles are good at.\"

I think this guy may have hit on something. Perhaps AMCs would be good at destroying interior ship modules but NOT hulls? E.G. damage reduction against normal and hardened hulls.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

Terramort, you are partially right.

You can have guns with high rate of fire but their damage isn\'t that great. The biggest fast-firing thing I can think of is a gatling gun. But even when mounted on an attack helicopter and equipped with armor piercing rounds able to shred tanks, it wouldn\'t be of ANY use against a battleship.

That\'s my point. Never mind accuracy, when you have a big projectile, it will take a while to reload it. You CANNOT have a fast-firing cannon that does a lot of damage.

That\'s why I think reload and damage values of an AMC should be tied together. You won\'t see 122mm shells flying out a cannon at a rate of 500 per miute - and if you did, it would have to be a pretty massive cannon which would waste a lot of power and do a lot less damage than it should.

AK\'s are pretty powerful but I won\'t go into that.



Also, there are more than 3 major aspects to a weapon: what about muzzle velocity and effective range? These 2 are pretty much tied together anyway. It\'s obvious that weapons firing fast aren\'t accurate, but they will still have the same range.



From your post, it seems you disagreed with me and then contradicted yourself. You confirmed that a gun cannot do everything and shouldn\'t be able to.

Nobody would have to remove sliders if the curves for each one were actually balanced.

 

[Terramort]

I think I merely misread your earlier post. We are pretty much agreeing, I think, that AMC cannons should not get better at everything as they get bigger.

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

It was a relatively long post and text tends to melt together. I\'m glad that we are on the same page now

AMC need to be rebalanced this way, with some correlation between the stats just like a real cannon would be limited by.