Combat Balance via Targeting/Locks

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    Some thought: I've heard a lot of ideas to balance ship-to-ship combat, most of which involve scaling weapons, or shields - or even modifying Effect values, etc.

    But I don't think that's the issue in combat right now. Currently, missiles bring swift victory, by destroying the Core with it's wide explosive AOE. And that is largely due to targeting/locking being centered on the ship's Core.

    Solution: Center a ship's target/identifier/signature exactly in the center of a ship, regardless of where the core is placed.

    This mitigates the need to constantly rebalance weapons and shields, because you don't know where the 1-shot-to-kill block is anymore.

    Further thought: Under this method you would not know where an opposing ship's core is, and would be forced to maim/disable their systems - or get lucky and accidentally take out their core. Battles would be more realistic, and last longer. As well as having your shields depleted wouldn't always mean insta-death, just that you are losing the fight, and you might actually have time to get to the escape pods.

    Couple this with the new rail mechanics, we might actually be looking at a combat mechanic where weapon systems are integrated in the ship via turret rails - The ability to identify a ships weapon systems and disable them, instead of destroying the ship, is pretty awesome.


    I'm not sure if this has been suggested already. And this is simply my opinion. Let me know what you think!
     
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    Something I've heard thrown around is that missiles no longer lock on to the core. Currently ingame we have a mechanic that detects if the crosshair is focused on a block. We're thinking of making it so that in order to lock, you need to keep your crosshair on the target. When you gain a lock and fire, the missile is targetting the block that the crosshair was centered on when you fired.


    Of course that's just something that's been tossed around but i figure it'd be compatible with what youre saying as well.