I'll tell you what a titan's purpose should be: It should be both a combination of a carrier role and heavily-armed support ship for a fleet. They should be slow and expensive-to-build as hell, but at the same time their guns and shields should scale so that a fleet of smaller ships with a total combined mass count lower than the titan should be able to at least do a considerable amount of damage. Unfortunately, they can't, because of the way shields and weapons scale. Titans currently function on their own as solo ships, requiring no backup, as they carry all the firepower and defenses they need on themselves (rather, an overkill on both), which is what I think should be fixed. They should have to actually RELY on other ships, rather than being doomsday machines. They should have to require an actual crew of actual players to operate, due to their size. They should (in the future) be vulnerable to boarding, as their slow speed would allow them to be boarded by other people.
And hence, here I reveal my triumph card, lads.
My god, you are so snide and condescending. Cut the crap, would you?
Dodging is a vital part of this game, as outmaneuvering an opponent has always been.
No it's not? Dodging has never been an aspect of the majority of Starmade combat, which is big ships vs other big ships. Most of the time, ship-to-ship combat has been two ships flying through space like a rail shooter game, with one ship going backwards at full speed, and the other ship chasing it, both firing at each other like mad. Outmaneuvering an opponent doesn't yield any advantage except avoiding weapons fire, and it's only a small part of winning in small ship-vs-small ship combat. The way weapons work now, with cannons just spraying all around their targets, means its pretty tough to simply avoid enemy fire except to not fight at all, or to simply go all sonic-the-hedgehog style in a tiny fighter.
Also, in your little experiment, did you end up killing all the 12 frigs? That is an important value.
That was not the purpose of my experiment, the purpose was to show how ridiculously long it takes for a titan's shields to be drained by other ships. It was to show how much of an overkill shields currently are for titans. And because it proves how overpowered shields are, how much more does that say for that the small ships would need to be able to survive long enough (if the ship was armed) and for those small ships to still have enough of a ship left to drop the titans shields before they themselves were destroyed? Also, those 12 ships each weighs over 4,000 mass, and my ship with those added blocks weighed a total of 40,024.1 mass. 4,000 times 12 is almost 50,000 which means they well had enough strength in blocks there (and they do have very big weapons arrays and turrets on the ships too) to have taken down my titan, if these "calculations" you spoke of actually held up in the real game.
And hence, here I reveal my triumph card, lads.
Also, they are NPC's. In order to implement dodging, movement needs to be sorted out, and to sort out movement, mass, and thrust, need to be accurately represented in the game. We don't have those things yet. Not even close to it.
For the hundredth time, frigates and capital ships are not and never will be dodging freaking bullets! Why is this so hard for you to understand?
So all your precious "battle" experience is actually worth next to nothing. EVERYTIME the game faces a mayor change like this, the process is to compare to previous state. In previous state, you could make regen so high you would never kill a ship.
This is NOT TRUE! At all! Before this update, shields still had crap regen in combat, and AMCs scaled so that capital ship turrets of roughly 25 meters around could actually really fight and almost kill titans, sometimes! The only issue was the titans also had exponentially more powerful and bigger AMC turrets that could easily wipe out the other ship.
But shields ain't a problem now, not until Schema finishes movement mechanics, tweaks them and makes em feel right. Then we move into combat things like shields.
You obviously don't play the game! You couldn't possibly have a realistic view on what is actually important when you aren't even having to deal with the problems yourself! Those of us who actually REALLY play the game know that titans scale badly with shields and are too OP! We know that shields need DRASTIC mechanic changes, and they should have them NOW. There is no reason to wait, at all. We know there is a problem. What kind of backwards logic is this to let massive gameplay problems sit and fester and boil and make combat unpleasant in the game while we divert our efforts to other things that aren't causing problems anywhere near as big as shields are?
We are definitely moving forward. Battles are lacking so much right now, from proper handling and camera mechanics for ships to actual finished movement features.
Those features are nowhere near as important as the basic functions of ship shields.
I know you can't dodge shit now, and it ain't your fault. Just think of the whole pie, instead of just the slice you want. Becasue yes, blindspots should matter. Because his ship moving WAY slower than yours DOES matter.
Oh my gosh, AGAIN, capital ships should never be able to dodge bullets, only fighters should. That's simply outrageous. We've already gone through this. Please, quit bringing it up.
To your credit though, blind spots
may play in a bit if you have a small frigate and a large titan, with the frigate both maneuverable and fast enough to hide right next to the ship. But really, the majority of titans do not have blind spots, because turrets have very low limitations as to the direction they can fire in! It's only around a 50% aiming area restriction, with them only unable to aim in the mostly-lower regions below themselves and a tiny hole of area above themselves.
And please, don't dumb down stuff we don't need, nobody talked about the features you are suggesting(Air pressure? C'mon, you can do better than that).
On the contrary, I'm not dumbing down anything! You're overcomplicating things! And we're not here to talk about the thruster features you are suggesting as a solution to a completely separate problem!
We have several more pressing problems. The ability of a ship to move and maneuver in space needs to be tweaked properly, for combat to even begin working properly.
Again, you keep bringing up unrelated features that don't solve the problem at hand! You think thrusters are more important right now than shields? Fine, you're entitled to believing that, but I can say from firsthand experience that shields are what need to be fixed right now. You want thrusters fixed? Fine, I do too, but shields should come first, and for all the obvious reasons I have already explained in this thread. Changing thrusters will not solve the shield issue, so stop bringing it up.
You can't solve the whole puzzle until you have all the parts of it. And that is really very important. I urge you to do so.
You're making this issue seem a lot more complicated than it really is. The solution is simple, and it's a few number changes in the code for shield scaling calculations. We don't need to solve a freaking jigsaw puzzle to figure out that shields don't work and it's because of the current game equations for how they are capped.
