[Dev Build] Weapons 2.0 impressions from testing the basic 3

[Captain Fortius]

# 2, 3, 4, I'm perfectly aware of. I felt #4 especially keenly, after building a nice logic turret with recoil animation and sequential fire, only to realize it'll always need a guy sitting in it, and will still have terrible accuracy.

#1, well, you wanna discourage checkerboards or not? Ultimately, a superlarge titan grade doomsday weapon with exponentionally scaled damage output is only truly bad news for another titan, as you've said, smaller, more numerous weapons can do a finer job of killing a smaller target.

With the projectiles scaling in thickness now, I'm happy enough to build single output weapons as is. Earlier I had to resort to checkerboarding a 2x2 cannon barrel to mimic having fatter bullets, and I tell you it was tedious to build and still quite unsatisfying to see in action; it tended to still punch a 1x1 hole...

 

[Zoolimar]

#1, well, you wanna discourage checkerboards or not? Ultimately, a superlarge titan grade doomsday weapon with exponentionally scaled damage output is only truly bad news for another titan, as you've said, smaller, more numerous weapons can do a finer job of killing a smaller target.

As outputs scale linearly you basically want to split the weapon as many times as needed.

So let's say the enemy is 2 times lighter than you? That probably means you want to split your gun in 2-3 outputs. It would be 10 times for something 10 times lighter and so on. Basically too big of a gun should over penetrate unless it is specifically designed not to do so, but than it should have a penalty against shields/armour. And too small of a gun would deal limited damage and won't penetrate armour.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

How are you going to hit a ship jumping away with missiles? I don't remember anyone trying to run normally in Starmade. Most people just jump.

So a death spiral before shields even down. By the time shields are down enemy ship already lost 30-50% of it's combat capability and as it was already losing I don't see the need for missiles. Better to add some more beams instead of them so that enemies chances to bring my shields down would be even less and I would be able to beat his shields faster.

Why? It's instant hit. As long as enemy is not hugging your hull you should be able to hit anything within range. (Well unless your ship is so shitty it could not turn). Also nothing stops you from mounting it on a turret. You'll need to do pretty nasty things to the game code so that people won't be able to put it on the turret.

*Checks combat ships* Never have seen a ship that is incapable of turning at least half of its turrets on a target, unless it is literally hugging its hull, and even then some of them could do it. Even if we take the top/bottom parts for vertical ships they could still turn around 1/3 of firepower there.

Against bigger targets with shitty speeds maybe, but only if they have much better DPS than beams or else the instant hit nature of beam would win.

Jump inhibition is kind of needed in any case, or combat gets pretty silly.

Extra beams might bring down the enemy's shields faster, but system disablement would have diminishing returns.

You'd need to turn pretty fast to track speedier ships, and there's a shield vulnerability (temp off I think) when using them. Doom beams probably aren't worth it against little corvettes.

I think cannons should have like 1.5x the DPS of beams per power, if not more.
Also, at longer ranges, beams should lose DPS, so missiles and sniper cannons can shine.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Also, if missile reload uses very little power, a single launcher on top of your beams would be more efficient for damage per power vs. just beams.

 

[Zoolimar]

Extra beams might bring down the enemy's shields faster, but system disablement would have diminishing returns.

You'd need to turn pretty fast to track speedier ships, and there's a shield vulnerability (temp off I think) when using them. Doom beams probably aren't worth it against little corvettes.

That ignores the fact that before that you need to get past the beam alpha strike at max range. And nothing stops you from placing the beam on a turret. Or maybe, say, 6 turrets for best coverage.

I think cannons should have like 1.5x the DPS of beams per power, if not more.
Also, at longer ranges, beams should lose DPS, so missiles and sniper cannons can shine.

You should measure effective ranges of the weapons. For cannons it is pitifully short except for largest ships. Though leading reticle somewhat helps. For a cannon with 4 km/s projectile speed ships under 20k mass would be hard to hit beyond 2-3 km.And even at range I wouldn't hold my breath for great results.

Also, if missile reload uses very little power, a single launcher on top of your beams would be more efficient for damage per power vs. just beams.

That only works if missiles are also light and armour is shit, or if armour is stupendously good vs. beams.

In first case you could add some side-arm launchers that would be enough to deal good damage and overwhelm your target's PD system.
In second case you have no choice but to use missiles because beams become a weapon that is only good against shields.

The last time I checked even beams specifically made to beat shields still could do pretty good damage to unshielded ships.
________________________

Previously missiles had range and good damage even in pretty small quantities if you was able to trick your opponent's PD. But if turret AI will get a, supposedly in the works, target prioritization many of the tricks wouldn't work.

 

[Coyote27]

. But if turret AI will get a, supposedly in the works, target prioritization many of the tricks wouldn't work.

That's already in devbuild, actually.

 

[Zoolimar]

That's already in devbuild, actually.

Does it work properly? If yes it's cool. Combined with missile HP it would mean you no longer could just sprinkle PD turrets everywhere - you'll need some real damage on them.

 

[MacThule]

That's already in devbuild, actually.

Nice - that's a good start! I'm excited to put some PD on my test target now and get to debugging.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

volley fire has been added in 201.065. only cannon and missiles have volley fire. Beams currently do not. Apparently if you stack enough arrays volley fire can fire just as fast as cannon/cannon but with each bullet doing more damage.

Hopefully this gets balanced.

 

[CockADoodleDoo]

looks like weapon gimballing is dead. hopefully schine fixes turret tracking before release.

on top of that holy HELL weapon ranges have been nerfed through the floor.

 

[MacThule]

I'm wondering if the nerf to beam range at least was the result of some of the discussion that happened here last week about how OP beams were...

Standard beam seems to have a range cap of 2km now, rather than a sector-based range cap.

 

[MrGrey1]

I'm wondering if the nerf to beam range at least was the result of some of the discussion that happened here last week about how OP beams were...

Standard beam seems to have a range cap of 2km now, rather than a sector-based range cap.

I believe they've detached weapon range from sector size somewhat... there's a new setting in server.cfg

WEAPON_RANGE_REFERENCE = 2000.0 //Reference distance for weapon ranges. (what blockBehaviorConfig.xml weapon ranges are multiplied with (usually the sector size)). Set to 1 to interpret weapon ranges in the config in meters

 

[MacThule]

I believe they've detached weapon range from sector size somewhat... there's a new setting in server.cfg

WEAPON_RANGE_REFERENCE = 2000.0 //Reference distance for weapon ranges. (what blockBehaviorConfig.xml weapon ranges are multiplied with (usually the sector size)). Set to 1 to interpret weapon ranges in the config in meters

Good find! That should help in terms of server modability and alternative balancing. I like it.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I'm wondering if the nerf to beam range at least was the result of some of the discussion that happened here last week about how OP beams were...

Standard beam seems to have a range cap of 2km now, rather than a sector-based range cap.

2km is actually a buff for default sector sizes (previously 1600m), and they talked of moving to set ranges instead of sector-dependent ranges a while ago in a Q&A.

 

[MacThule]

2km is actually a buff for default sector sizes (previously 1600m), and they talked of moving to set ranges instead of sector-dependent ranges a while ago in a Q&A.

Good point about the small sector sizes. I missed that in the Q&A. I think it's well done so far, though we won't know for sure until it's actually in play for a while.