My take on a new AMC system

[ante185]

Would there be anyway to work in over penetartion? I mean if I shot a ship with a needle gun, that would be pretty good at penetrating, so if i hit a point on the opposeing ship that is so weak that my needle cannon does 2-3 (several) times more damage then it is requierd to blast that bit to kingdom come, it would just go through the ship? Like if you were shoot the trunk of a car from the side with a high caliber rifle the bullet would go straigth throuth and not do THAT much damage if ya know what i mean?

And sorry for my badly formated post, i am stil learning :P

 

[Kaelum]

The thing is, that isn\'t really OVER penetration. For something like a missile going right through, it would be, but it wouldn\'t be bad in any way for antimatter cannons. A giant one block output cannon wouldn\'t really be used for block damage OTHER than shooting a line of destruction through the entire ship. I have no problem with your idea, but it might be better used for something that has a reason not to just damage more blocks and go all the way through. Seriously, what use is it for it NOT to go all the way?

By the way, have you played the game yet? I am sure it might help you understand how weapons currently work and improve your knowledge of the subject by a lot.

 

[Kaelum]

You realize they are not gonna stay still and let you dig a perfect hole. One movement and guess what? That hole is out of reach now. Also even though I do not like how cores are so weak, they will be the final objective. Eventually, it is all about the crew. And who WOULDN\'T try and kill the guy flying the ship? You can spare you bullets to his ship and just shoot the guy in the face. I think they should have a shit load more health based on the mass of the ship.

 

[ante185]

I haven\'t played that little, what did you mean when you said that?

But your right, overpen (With OP\'s system that is freaking awesome) would be that the AMC \"bolt\" would still have some damage left after going through the whole ship meaning that the full effect of the bolt was not used and a weapon wants to use as much of its power inside the enemy, like hollowpoint bullets do, and what full metal jackets don\'t do.

 

[ne3zy]

Penetration must be added.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

That is already in the OP.

 

[ardiel]

Yes this is exactly overpenetration.

However some people just want to hit the core because if you can blow that up, then damaging the ship itself doesn\'t matter anymore. This is the idea behind \'drilling\'.

The problem is, how do you prefer to reach the core? Personally I\'d like to get there by ripping a big hole so that if it doesn\'t get there or misses, there\'s a high chance of another shot going in the hole already made. This is why I use a tandem missile setup as well where one missile opens a crater for a second missile to fly into a fraction of a second later so that instead of making one wide round hole, it makes a wide deep hole because the second missile can be slightly more destructive as it\'s inside the ship instead of detonating on the surface.

 

[Kaelum]

I see your point, but then overpenetration would just be completely based on where the player aims. I do like the idea of a fragmentation round, but penetrating missiles have that in the bag. Right now all you have to do is aim where the bulk systems and core is.

 

[Kaelum]

Eventually I think I am just gonna make a mod for this if schema continues his abandonment of the community. How does he even get the info for the updates? Anyway, when this is added one way or another, I am gonna make a massive railgun spam array that\'s only purpose it to pierce through entire sections of the ship and instantly cripple entire areas with a checkerboard of doom.

 

[ante185]

yes OPen would totaly depend on where you hit, and i was thinking that it would be more of a penalty for the shooter, to decrease the power of needle guns that would have crazy penetration and be albe to shoot through 100 regular hulls and still one shot cores, as penetration main purpus (in game) would be, apart from getting through armour, to make the projectile be able to hit what the armour is protecting.

Earlyer in this thread someone was talking about armour and penetration would be a \'bluff\' damage that would decrease with the same amount that the block the projectile passes through, so if i have a AMC bolt that have 125 in Pen and 125 damage and it hit a 2 block wide (head on) wall then if the 1st blocks health is = or less then Pen the bolt will continue,

The 1st blocks has 125 health and no armour meaning that it would take minimal damage (How much is debateble)

the second block will then recive the damage that is left in the projectile

 

[Izikiel]

I\'ve been looking at various suggestions, and while some would be incredibly simple, this one would not be. However, this would be a permanent fix compared to the others. I mean, seriously, compare an artillary shell with a rifle round. The bullet would go through maybe a wall, depending on the caliber, while the shell could pierce the whole building (and go through any that are next to it) and perhaps explode depending on the ammunition. The most obvious difference? The size of the gun. So why would a gun with thousands of blocks only take out one block of the enemy ship?

So, like I said, this idea is the most well-thought out and comprehensive fix to the current mechanics, despite the fact that it is a couple of months old. Good job.

 

[MarkAskar]

I\'m in love with Captain Fortius\'s suggestions for AMC and armor bonus reworks. I\'m actually surprised that neither Schema nor Omni have posted here yet, most threads with ideas of this caliber at least get a visit from one of them which hopefully means the other will hear about it.

I\'ve been away from the game for two and a half months so I can\'t comment on the direction Schema\'s been taking things (except that I love the structure tab) but I sincerely hope this gets added. It\'s the most thought out and well designed idea I\'ve seen on the issue. I just built a nice 900m long ship but unfortunately AMCs are worthless right now so it\'s rather harmless, and my many angled hulls do nothing to help protect my ship.

Additionally this seems like one of the best things Schema could implement in the grand scheme (sorry!) of things. Not only would it instantly bring variety, complexity, and depth to ship construction and ship-to-ship combat, but it would be a lasting fix. The way I see it, no work would ever need be done on AMCs or armor again, aside from perhaps tweaking some of the baseline numeric values for balance reasons. The armor fix works well with all weapons I can think of as well. Missiles would share the same exact interaction with armor that AMCs would, but missiles would have that reaction many times in many different directions to represent an explosion. Proposed railguns would behave similarly to AMCs when they interact with armor, likely just with (far) better armor piercing.

 

[ante185]

I really hope eithe Schema or Omni sees this, OP have really been thinking about this which is quite obiuse as the idea is bullet proof!

 

[Dolmashin]

Strongly agree with main post, bolt penetration, spread, and scaling should really be implemented. Tired of drilling pin-holes. Not certain about weapon stabilizers, probably be exploited to achive that minigun sniper. Also dislike how the current large cannons have such a high ROF.

 

[ante185]

there should be some stat penalty for having stabilizers, like every stat BUT Acc could be decreased?

 

[Dr_Freeman99]

I don\'t think I could have said this as eloquently as you have, and I agree 98%



+1 and all that shiznit.

However, I\'d like to make some add-ons to make this even more realistic. (for a game that\'s about making space ships and asploding planets)



1. Sheilds should be able to be cstomizable (i.e. Shpheres around a ship vs. the personal shielding we currently have. That way allied fighters and turrets can be protected via the main shield generators.

1a. Sheilds should also have to be placed in \'generator\' style areas, rather than be able to just fill every square inch of unused hullspace with shielding and make an impenetrable object. Also, hull should have more of an armor value, so that shields are not a must. That way the smaller fighters can still be plausibly used.

2. Turrets should share their damned power with the ship, rather than having to stuff them with power generators. Makes it a damned hassle otherwise.

3. Missiles should also have different sizes compared to the exit \'barrel.\' for instance, on one of the ships I had built, I had two nuke-level SBB Missile launchers that could take out over half of a shop (Big mistake by the way, had twenty or so of the merchant ships after me. They even stole my levathin schematic and used it against me) and yet seeing such small missiles disheartened me.

3a. Missiles should also be able to be outmanuevered, or have flares to confuse them. Smaller fighters that can be taken out with one missile hit needs some defense againt the missiles. Mayhaps have it set up so that smaller ships can use the flares, while larger ones need some other defense, like a laser anti-missile weapons or something.

4. Shields should have a frequency in factions, so that your faction members can pass through, while if you are \'solo\' only you and those you give the frequency to can.

5. SOme way for a person to control a turret without goign out of the ship to reach the turret core.

6. A way to stop people from \'salvaging\' your ship when you are offline. I had a massive ship that I had worked my way up to on a server, and I left for a day, came back and was in a field of debris... my ship core had been spared, as well as half of the ship itself, but still...



But yeah, otherwise, great idea.

 

[Zyrr]

Probably the first weapon suggestion I fully agree with, good job Captain.

I do have a few things to add, however. Firstly, I do agree with your missile suggestion; fast, hull damaging and not crap. But, for the sake of balancing, perhaps this should only apply to a point?

Let me elaborate. Heat seeking and fire and forget missiles should have a cap on their stats, so as not to completely replace AMC\'s when it comes to hull. D1000\'s, on the other hand, should not be limited in their stats and can become what is essentially a tactical nuke. This is because if you let missiles lock on or track with insane damage and radius, it will replace AMC\'s and be OP.

Next, a quick thing about shotgun style AMC arrays. The problem we have been coming across in this thread is that shotgun arrays eventually become better than cannons simply because they do more DPS and, most importantly, the way they fire.

For those of you that don\'t know, shotgun AMC\'s work like so: all projectiles fire at the same block you are aiming at, if you are aiming at a block. This makes an AMC \"cone\". However, once the projectiles reach the target and destroy it, the cone inverts and AMC\'s spread out in the same angle they were fired from, doing huge amounts of internal damage.

As cool as that is, it isn\'t very balanced and pretty much ruins ships ridiculously quickly. I propose that AMC\'s do not do this, instead firing straight in the direction that you are aiming at with your mouse. It would make planetary sized shotgun arrays inefficient, and combat the shotgun > cannon mindset.

Also, because shotguns would theoretically fire quickly, it would make them very inaccurate very quickly, so you have to engage closer for the shotgun to work effectively.

Finally, and a bit off target, I\'d like a \"Designate Target\" option, somewhere. This makes all of your AI controlled turrets that can bare on said target switch from whatever the hell they are blasting at to the designated target. It also alerts faction members and allied faction members within, say, 2 sectors, that you want them to shoot at this object. The objects IFF (diamond indicator thing) becomes a flashing red diamond, as well. To prevent spam, only one can be set by a person at a time.

tl:dr - gj

 

[refirendum]

Why not add random number generation to the AOE? the shorter the length of the cannon the wider the random number generator range. this random number generator determines the angle of the amc bolt being shot out in relation to where it is aimed. so if the cannon is short, it gets fire-spread, and if it\'s long, it gets very little spread until it\'s long enough to just not get spread at all.

 

[Saria]

we make a distinction between different sorts of AMC cannons? Let me elaborate on an idea.

The more AMCs you have connected to a weapons computer, the slower the reload speed. Not the AMCs that are connected, just the amount of you have connected to a single computer. This slowdown wouldn\'t be linear, it\'d be exponential, with every additional AMC providing an exponentially less reload speed penalty than the last. For example, an AMC computer with 5000 AMCs attatched to it would no longer recieve any kind of reload speed penalty, where as the total penalty from 1-1000 would be similar to the total penalty from 1001-4999.

The benefits of a system like this are numerous. The most obvious one is the way it would make smaller craft viable. In the current system, a ship with a single mega-turret will spray minigun fire at small ships to the point where it\'s almost impossible for them to avoid, which means that having small specialized point-defense turrets is an illegitimate strategy because bigger turrets are more effective in every role.

This would also come with a benefit for large AMC batteries: AoE damage. If you have a giant, 10000 block AMC battery, it\'s going to shoot much slower than a fighter\'s AMC cannons but it would hit with explosive impact. An AMC cannon of that size could probably do damage in as big as a 10 block, unpiercing radius. The AOE wouldn\'t damage the blocks behind the target, it but it would damage the blocks around it.

It\'d also be cool if the size of the projectile scaled with the amount of AMCs, so that really big guns would fire giant AMC projectiles that would be exploding over the enemy hull. It\'d be awesome and big guns would actuall feel big.

This way people can also make really big guns for stripping enemy hull rather than the only concievable weapon in existence being AMC shotgun patterns.

It\'d create a great game balance too. Small point-defense turrets would be rapid fire, low impact weapons designed for taking out fighters, while slow, explosively devastating turbocannons would be used for taking out bigger prey.

 

[ltmauve]

It\'s not so much that shotguns are wide as the are usually long. I\'m not sure what the length an AMC needs to be to put out 400 damage per shot but I know that it is over 40. At that point it is another nerf against small spaceships. Maybe a mechanic where the more guns are on a computer the slower it adjusts aim of the weapons, or the aim gets reduced after firing shots, counted from ALL weapons on a computer