New reactor mechanics with bombers/drones and fleets

[Mork2]

Hi,

This post assumes that I've read the proposed changes to power and that this doesn't change. According to what I viewed every weapon essentially has its own capacitor build in and takes charge from the reactor in the priority that is set. In theory if missiles or docked is set to the lowest power priority on both the carrier/station and your one shot weapons are set to the lowest priority on the bomber/drone you could make some real bombers. You don't need to actually charge your weapons with your own on board power.

So in theory I create a bomber with a large missile/pulse/explosive and beam/pulse/ion weapons. I don't need to have enough power to charge them. And you can fire them once. Have beams and missiles set as lowest power priority. Some backup cannons that charge normally. The one shot weapons only really get charged up when your docked to the station or carrier with excess power. Undock fly off fire your ion beam at target, fire the missiles. Massive alpha damage. Some backup cannons if you almost kill it. Then return to carrier/station to recharge....

You could even have the weapons as pods that can be ejected. Docked fixed weapons on, set the bobby AI target to selected and turn the bobby AIs off. When you want to attack use a inner remote connected via wireless to activate the bobby AIs on the pods after you have selected the target. You can have another inner remote to eject the pods making them decoys while you run. Though you might not use effects on them so there more expendable.

Not only that but your built in reactor with chambers can be setup for stealth for when you undock from the carrier/station. Since you don't need a big reactor to power your one shot weapons it shouldn't be to relatively hard to stealth.

Then add the whole fleet carrier commands and you can fly around in a carrier and order strikes in remotely carrying high alpha damage attacks and fleet AIs can now apparently use stealth....

Just some dangerous ideas for small ship pilots /drone commanders to consider....

 

[Zoolimar]

You still need enough reactors on your bomber for weapons not to lose charge. So how good alpha attacks would be depends on how high is the needed percentage of energy to keep them operational. And if you are going to mod your reactor heavily to stealth/jamming it will probably take a lot of it's power making it that much bigger - especially if you have an oversized weapon sticking out of your ship.

 

[Dire Venom]

Definitely sounds interesting.
Weapon systems will have a 'maintenance' cost to keep them active, so the drones will need to beable to provide enough power to beable to fire them/keep the weapon loaded.

That then begs the question, is there any innate advantage to having the missiles launched from bombers as apposed to from self contained pods on the ship itself? Is there any way to control what your drones fire at and when they fire? Otherwise they might easily waste their shot. Another thing to consider is impact. A whole bunch of missiles hitting the same area will do far more damage than a bunch hitting all over the ship (e.g fired from multiple angles by drones)

I would certiantly like this to be a viable form of combat, however it seems more changes are needed to make it effective and worthwhile, especially better drone control and targeting controlled by the player.
Another thing to note is engagement ranges. Ideally you would want to launch bombers outside their engagement range, have them fly in, drop then return while the carrier remains safe. However such an attack takes time, and they could easily charge their warp drive in that time and warp into the sector with your carrier completely negating your drones.

 

[Mork2]

Yeah I forgot about the maintenance charge required. No idea what that might be so that could effect it heavily.

The stealth mechanic from the video I've seen doesn't use actual power but the add on chambers and the options you can select with them. While the chamber block count scales with the reactor size for the option (tech points) available the reactor size doesn't have to be large for a stealth ship that doesn't use a lot of power. Unfortunately it does require a maintenance charge and depending on how big that percentage is will limit the size of weapons useable.

 

[Dire Venom]

Yeah I forgot about the maintenance charge required. No idea what that might be so that could effect it heavily.

The stealth mechanic from the video I've seen doesn't use actual power but the add on chambers and the options you can select with them. While the chamber block count scales with the reactor size for the option (tech points) available the reactor size doesn't have to be large for a stealth ship that doesn't use a lot of power. Unfortunately it does require a maintenance charge and depending on how big that percentage is will limit the size of weapons useable.

Ah thats brilliant! Having a stealth carrier with heavily armed drones stuck on :3 As long as the drones are of sufficient size to keep the weapon charged I don't see why this wouldn't work.
My only gripe is getting the drones to actually target the right ship imo. I can't wait for an "Unleash the drones!" update.
I could see it as having a carrier modual or even chamber you can place/build/use on ships, with the carrier then being able to interface directly with the drones through it.
Being able to pilot ships remotely would be amazing as well :3

 

[Cluwne]

There's a mind-boggling flipside though - one could sneak up with a cloaked Death Star and fire it's massive Missile+Pulse+Overdrive torpedo at whatever it is you need to utterly obliterate.

 

[Dire Venom]

There's a mind-boggling flipside though - one could sneak up with a cloaked Death Star and fire it's massive Missile+Pulse+Overdrive torpedo at whatever it is you need to utterly obliterate.

Im curious to see how the chambers play out. Personally, I would have tied cloaking to the design and construction of the ship but who knows what they've got figured out. I do also hope that alpha strike doesn't become the only way :/

 

[Madman198237]

When the update rolls out I'm using the build tools to build a 1km sphere and fitting it to turn fast without moving.

I'll just jump my Death Star from place to place and obliterate people by point the superweapon at them. Or, you know, just park in their ship and let lag do my work for me.

 

[Loadout]

The original point of drones was two fold;

- mass expendable units
- high enough collective dps to wear down capitals massive shields

That said I don't see myself using the special reactor abilities on drones. It was stated in the video that they will be expensive, then again everything is "expensive" and we all know how that really goes. If however said blocks truly are cost-prohibitive, then it would be unwise to use them on 40+ ships you intend to have neutered to a husk in the coming battle. It would be fiscally irresponsible, although much of the game already is given the horrid state it is in.

If I had to use them though I would probably avoid stealth, it would be seem there are already better options out there for drones. If your drones are there to provide a screening effect stealth is counter productive. Something that either boosts mobility(strafe speed in particular) or dps(lower charge cost to maintain weapons anyone?) would be a vastly better option. It all depends on how you want to use said drone and how to get the most out of that.

DPS is always greater than alpha damage. In every game out there for some weird inexplicable reason even the best alpha damage I can think of has horrible consequences that ultimately lead to it's demise. Targeting was mentioned as one possible consequence. What happens when our bomber drones suddenly decide a passing pirate Isanth needs to die when they are supposed to be aiming at Deus Ex Machina on the other side of the sector!?

At this point theory crafting is a moot point however, as we don't have any list of planned options that will be available or the trees that span off of them. In the dev video there were about 5 kinds of blocks. Mobility, stealth, recon, and two others they didn't appear to use, at least one of which will likely be weapons based and also equally likely to have some sort of power upgrade for weapons. Without the exact mechanics made apparent all we do is speculate and hope they add something worth the 7 or so months they have spent on this single update.

I really would like to see a healthy update that makes drones and ships in general more useful, I just find it hard to have faith after 7 months of nothing and then a video that seems like it would have taken any other studio on the planet maybe 3 weeks to come up with.

 

[Nosajimiki]

A whole bunch of missiles hitting the same area will do far more damage than a bunch hitting all over the ship (e.g fired from multiple angles by drones)

This is a bit of a misconception. In the case of firing small numbers of smallish missiles at a stationary target with no AMS, this is true, but if you are planning to pound a big ship with dozens of nukes: firing from multiple angles will make shooting your missiles down or evading them much harder. Also, when multiple missiles explosions stack up without enough time between them, explosions will center on "dead" blocks before they have had time to despawn which means you can typically do more damage by stripping the outer skin off an entire ship's surface than you can by concentrating them on one spot.

 

[Madman198237]

I also point out that you're going to activate MORE PDS turrets by firing from all angles compared to overwhelming the PDS turrets on one hemisphere of the vessel.

 

[kulbolen]

I also point out that you're going to activate MORE PDS turrets by firing from all angles compared to overwhelming the PDS turrets on one hemisphere of the vessel.

while without context id agree with this, id point out that it depends on the targets design. lots of pvp ships are designed to maximize coverage on most angles with most pd most of the time, or at the pilots discretion.

 

[Madman198237]

I always build my ships so that there is PD everywhere, with relatively little regard to maximizing overlap in firing angles. Maybe that's not the most efficient, but it's certainly the easiest, and probably more common (More PD = better, as a general rule, until you reach laggy territory, anyway)