Buff small ships

[ne3zy]

I feel like small ships needs a big buff, I think we could fix the problem by buffing the AM cannons reload parameter or just by giving them a new weapon with maximum scale, something like 8 blocks which fires very quickly and is balanced all around, except for the accuracy.

 

[LiamHaith]

If they did implement cannons that had a set size (I presume you mean the cannon is a set size as a ship 8 blocks is far too small to do anything other than scavenge in my opinion, at least) you could potentially see a whole influx of players building frigates with hundreds of these tiny little cannons, especially if they did respectable damage and were more compact than current AM cannons.

Which also leads me to my idea that buffing AM Cannons is only making the smaller ships at a bigger disadvantage, simply because you can get a MUCH bigger cannon on a much bigger ship, it\'s hard to balance without putting factors like Rate of Fire/Reload/Accuracy using ship size/blocks used in the entire ship as a modifier for aforementioned stats.

 

[ne3zy]

well you can make it 8 blocks maximum on the ship for example

 

[D-Car]

I saw somebody posting in here somewhere about an idea where increasing the size of a chunk of weapon blocks would grant an ever-decreasing bonus for every additional block in the weapon. It\'s not a terrible idea, and could be tested for balance limitations.

The net difference is that big ships would start having loads of guns everywhere instead of a few crazy-powerful main weapons. Big ships are always going to overwhelm small ones, best to just learn to use your agility and be a small ship.

 

[ne3zy]

I\'m ok with that, being not able to defeat a 100.000 mass ship with your little 100 mass fighter is pretty normal, however I still think they need a buff because their weapons are not adapted to their playstyle, AM cannons shoot so slowly for fighters, even if you tweak the reload time (and if you do you\'ll have 0 dmg).

 

[Archer6621]

I kinda have to agree, it\'s pretty silly to see those huge battleships with enourmous guns having a very high fire-rate, while the little fighters have pretty slow cannons.

Maybe the damage per shot could slightly affect the fire-rate in a negative way? This way battleships would require much longer cannons to get the same fire-rate as smaller fighters would have, and then the general fire-rate could be improved to compensate for this.

I think fighters should absolutely not be able to defeat larger craft all on their own, but they should become a real threat in larger groups (think of 5-7 small fighters).

 

[shadowcrusnik]

Small ships have a fair advantage against big ships in that they have very good handling, even with the whole max speed thing, so that you can just go behind the ship to shoot at it, right?



Wrong. The AM canon is far too weak in small numbers to even be able to scratch a ship. Although this makes perfect sense, small ship cant hit big ship. In small ship against small ship fights, however, the ship that sacrificed less shielding for a bigger gun will win simply because their gun is easier to hit with, can penetrate their shield faster, and will overall be the \"good offense\" to their best defense. Thus allowing for two ships of equal mass to have an unfair fight.

I very much agree with a decreasing bonus when more and more cannons are put to together so that just having one big gun on a small ship rather than a bunch of small ones would be less effective.

As for big ships this would promote people to build big ships like they usually are, does the enterprise have one giant phaser? No, it has a shit ton of slightly less powerful, smaller, more compact ones.

If this was implemented along with the capability for different flight mode \"views\", and weapon direction effects, (sideways AMs can shoot forwards...), you could have massive carriers and such broadsiding each other rather than having a laser vision staredown.

 

[KuramaFox]

One way of buffing smaller ships would be in the suggestion topic I made for adding engine parts, and the item tiers (I made one topic to avoid clutter). Long story short, we effectively already have two tiers for hull pieces, and the general idea could be applied in other areas as well.



Once ease of money making is dealt with, two players with the same amount of money could choose between making a larger \"T1\" vessel, or splurging on advanced components and using them in a small vessel instead. Obviously, a REDICULOUSLY rich person could just make a T3 dreadnought and own everything, but it would allow people who aren\'t so overly wealthy to pick and choose more for which sizes they want their ships to be without limiting their options as much.

 

[D-Car]

In the end, no matter how you scale damage per shot and reload time, it\'ll always break down to DPS. The thing to overcome is, of course, shield regeneration per second and small ships are simply expected to not have the raw output of large ships.

Nerfing large ships\' ability to take all the damage would just get people to stop building large ships as well, and the really pretty ones would sit in dock being unused. I\'m fairly certain if you attack a large ship with an equal mass of small ships, that the large ship would go down every time. It might take a few of the small ones with it, though.

I think the problem you\'re presenting isn\'t so much a ship size problem so much as a problem of manpower. If you could get 20 buddies to go after a couple guys in big ships, then you wouldn\'t be complaining at all.

 

[Archer6621]

I agree with this, would love to see some epic battles that involve large amounts of fighters vs one big ship, and see how it would turn out