Big Ships are Terrible now...

[Joka10]

I must say, I don\'t have too much experience with massive ships, being too lazy to build one myself. However, I have a few very large ships which I have used in my game via .sment files, and they\'re pretty capable of wiping out my fighter. It fires an antimatter cannon at a recharge rate of 71.5 for 730 damage (basically I can just hold down the button and it fires nonstop). It also has two BB missile arrays that recharge fairly quickly and do 254 damage. It has powerful shields and a thick hull. Using it, I can take down an Isanth VI in less than 3 seconds (if I aim right :P). In my opinion (which is still somewhat nooby), it\'s a pretty good fighter.

The three large ships I have tested it on, in order from smallest to largest, are the Starcraft Minotaur Concept Battlecruiser, the UFF Ascencion, and the HMS Celestia. I was able to destroy the Minotaur once when it bugged out and stopped shooting at me, but when I actually fought it for real, it definitely won. I basically removed the outer hull, but I was still pretty far from the core. I was able to destroy the Ascencion pretty easily, but I think that ship is made out of normal hull, not hardened, and it doesn\'t have the best shields. It still did put a dent into my ship, though.

The Celestia is a massive ship, though. If you have not seen it, I recommend you check it out. It might be the biggest ship available on the Ships list on this site, or at least everything I\'ve seen that is highly rated is smaller than it. I am sure many of the people who are upset have ships far bigger than it, but it is undoubtedly of a massive size. Fighting the Celestia, I was forced to retreat. I wasn\'t killed, but all of my external cockpits were destroyed and I had no way to see any part of the ship except for the reticules around it and its turrets. My weapons were severely damaged, and if I were to have stayed around much longer, I\'m sure I would have been destroyed.

Last I saw before my cockpits went kaputt, I had barely scratched the Celestia\'s paint.

Perhaps I don\'t know what I\'m talking about, but there\'s definitely a way to build a big ship right, and whoever made the Celestia did it. It had powerful and numerous enough guns to cripple my ship, and strong enough shields and hull to prevent me from getting anywhere near the core. The person who made the Minotaur also did it right, though that is significantly smaller than the Celestia. People just have to adapt to the new system. Maybe it\'s much more expensive and time consuming to make a good, big ship, but it\'s certainly possible.

 

[Dire Badger]

I have been working at building medium capitals. 60 meters or so, and have discovered a couple of things:

There needs to be a better way to launch and recover LARGE numbers of fighters (a single bar just doesn\'t do it when you have a regular squadron of 24 fighters) (recovery can take hours, even with microships, not fun)

Having a variety of turrets is brutally effective against incoming fighters. and even half-decent shields (400 blocks or so) can keep you alive long enough for your turrets to kill them (by fighters I mean stuff less than 20 blocks long that can accelerate/rotate at close to max speed)

Top-fire turrets appear to be considerably more accurate. perhaps because their field of fire is much more restricted?

Your own launched fighters NEED a little bit of armor on their front. with it, they can kill ships. without it, they become a flying cloud of blocks, even with decent shields.

Missiles, by themselves, are useless. as part of a combined-arms approach, however, they are very good. The kind of evasive actions that work against ai-controlled direct-fire turrets will get you KILLED if there are a couple of BB\'s on your tail.

and last but certainly not least: There needs to be a way to open and close all your doors at one time

 

[Myxam]

There is not a single Science Fiction, or Science Fantasy ship bigger than 15x15x15 yard that can be crewed by a single person. Even fewer that can successfully fly solo. Yes, your Calibri Class Ships that you pilot alone and by yourself are now sitting ducks for everything medium class and down -- as they should be, fictionwise and balancewise. These large ships you are all building/flying are just that, large ships -- they unwieldy, vulnerable when alone and deadly if not.



Better get used to playing nice with your faction mates, because any faction that flies together is going to destroy you.

 

[Dire Badger]

I agree that all things being equal, a crewed ship should always be superior to an uncrewed one.

 

[Apollo848]

The game is in alpha, with new features being added and considered, and changes being made all the time. Shielding, armour, and weapons will all likely be changed multiple times in just the next few months. Schema and the others have a lot of work to do, focusing on making it 100% balanced for everyone right now would be illogical as the next update will probably unbalance it again. I personally will avoid building massive ships for now, despite the fun they are, because even though right now my current big project\'s shields,powerplants,weapons,armour, ect are efficiently done, the next update might change a key component in it\'s design, taking away hours of work, if not days. If you\'re willing to take the risk, you can\'t complain when it becomes nearly unusable. I\'ll still work on small-mid size ships, maybe even finish my capital, but I won\'t complain if they turn out useless. It\'s just something to do.

 

[kajata]

I was really bumbed when i saw that shields were nerfed, then I realized that since my capitol used interlocking turret plating I had no issue. enemy fighters have to burn threw 10k shield 4x5x5 block turrets that all auto target anything on their side.

I built my capitol with turret points that fit all around it so hitting the actual ship would be nearly impossible, still added in shields, but they never actually get hit.

So my 100 block turrets have had their shields \"buffed\" they all auto target and they act as my hull plating since a 100 block shipp will have to burn threw one of them and still attack me.

Problem is this strategy makes my ship the ugliest POS you have ever seen, but its effective. as 1 100 block ship will have to take on 50 100 block ships per side, break one and then keep pummeling that weakspot. the 100 block turrets are all replaceable as they are blueprinted.

 

[TrevJ]

Just make your capital ships modular - dock smaller shielded \'ships\' as your hull.

 

[Directfix]

So big ship are to be invincible to small ships!! I don\'t think so. The taller you are, the harder you fall.

 

[MrTargareyan]

The Yamato was a WW2 ship, it didn\'t have shields.... Which were probably designed to stop fighters taking out big ships in the first place. Given that I just built a 350 block long faction cap ship, I\'m pretty annoyed.

 

[War Dog]

Don\'t really see why people worry about a 50 mass ship taking down 1,000,000 shields. It\'ll still take ages. I personally like the change, but I don\'t build that many gigantihuge ships. If the nerf is undone, we\'ll inevitably have another batch of complainers.

It Will Never End.

The Unpleasable Fanbase.

Whines Eternally.

Next update: Shield regen nerf is undone.

Next update after that: Shield capacity gain from shield blocks drops to crap after you hit 1 million shield. Just like power gain



Dohohohohoho.

Anywho, what we really need is a way to turn on turrets faster than going to each individual AI block and turning it on.

 

[z1967]

Yes Yes Yes and

http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3vcw9c/

I also agree with the endless whining, you can obviously just salvage the big ship and build a few smaller ones. Or better yet, build better big ones.

 

[Maniox]

Big ships are utter shit because you can just slam amcs at a rate 1:100 compared to his shields and you will burn trough them within 30 seconds, its so fucking annoying that amcs scale so retardedly well and shields are so crap.

And to the idiots that thinks that small ships should have this easy of a time to kill huge capital ships, why the hell do you think that? is it because you want to defend your now incredibly broken 800 mass frigate that\'s invincible because of the speed compared with your armament?

Recently made a 100k mass ship just to be utterly dissapointed how truly useless it is when you need 10k amcs to burn trough a million shield blocks within a minute which can so easily be done with a ship that\'s 2-3k mass...

 

[MichaelSeph]

Pretty much everyone agreed with that the shield regen nerf was way too big, including that it doesn\'t regen at all while being hit, the regen is so small that it doesn\'t affect a thing if the shields are regenerating or not. Even big ship haters agreed the nerf was exagerated, but they don\'t complain about it as most of them don\'t have time or skills to make a worthy big ship, and instead, they use fighters to go around.

 

[Morhe]

\"Pretty much everyone agreed...\"
Translation: \"Three people I talked to agreed...\"

 

[Unit3746]

Well then I geuss we need to understand that big ships are going to be less usefull for a full on attack, you can still use them to ship small fighters, and if you have a good number of turrets, you can still protect your ship pretty well. Besides, when playing this game, we need to understand that no matter how nice we make our ships, there is always a possibility of dieing and losing the entire thing, or haveing it destroyed.

 

[MrFURB]

Wow, this thread got revived? Alright, guess I better restate my opinion.

The balance of large ships to small ships is tricky, because if we made larger ships just as powerful as all their components combined (No negative scaling or anything) then the game will very quickly turn into an arms race to see who can make the biggest server-crasher possible. Meanwhile the entire playstyle of bombers, fighters, protecting screens, and many more roles that smaller ships are supposed to be relegated to all become worthless and underexploited (They already are, to a point). On the other hand we can\'t make larger ships useless because it would be rather backwards to add useful blocks to a ship and have it become less useful. The best solution is to find a medium ground that gives all ships important roles both in and out of combat.



Look at fights in Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica lore as a good reference. Those people that got into the flimsy little Viper fighters or Y-wing bombers were at so much more risk than those hiding behind 2,000 ton monster ships, but they had a job to do and only they could do it.

I was and still am in favor of the shield change as it makes infinitely more sense than putting hardcaps into game mechanics like the old shield system did. Plus, big ships have a ton of tools at their disposal to deal with enemies. With turrets, new pulse cannons, new powerdrain beams, and overall superior stats, a 1 vs 1 between a frigate and a battleship will usually go in the battleship\'s favor.

 

[War Dog]

Realistically, they\'re right. A small fighter should not be able to plink capital ships to death.

So yeah, definitely give them back their shield regen, it\'s only realistic.

You know what else is realistic?

Capital ships should not be able to move as fast as small fighters.

The S.S McLargeHuge should be crawling around at 5 speed while the fighters at 50 speed flip it off just outside the range of its turrets.

And anyone trying the \"Higher Maneuverability\" speech knows it\'s garbage as capital ships lolbackdash their way to victory.

Power, Resilience, Speed.

Pick any two.

 

[Directfix]

Yes they should. That\'s why there is small fighters in scifi and the real world. Big ships have the advantage to shoot at longer distance. Small fighters are made to kill big ships and if you don\'t like it, get other ships to protect you, or put more blocks on like they go in every other movie and what the Airforce and navy do on earth.

Learn to live with it or go home.

 

[Nootau]

Allow my large ship to accurately target small ships from from maxium targeting range rather then spray and pray when the ship is too far out to render decently. Then I would me more than happy to use of pulse shock wave combined with accurate guns to murder smaller ships. Also if we are using scifi, then it takes many small ships to try and tackle a large ship so fighting 1 large ship vs 15 small ships and the smaller ships having a modest advantage is a good thing. It is is simply 1 large ship vs 3 small ships, the large ship should still hold a significant advantage.

 

[TrevJ]

Again, you can STILL make huge ships, you just need to design them in a modular fashion and dock other \"ships\" to the outside which function as ablative shield plates.



Look at the ship at 6:30 in this video to see what I am talking about as a general concept. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu-qRKpmFT4