Should Chain Drives Remain?

[Lecic]

But if someone drops a few inhibitor drones and escapes, no matter what you think of them, you no longer have the ability to chase after them.
If only you had spent a little more space on a robust drive you might have actually won that fight, but it seems today you were not the smart one.
Coward he may be, but you could not defeat him. All is fair....

If you jump away from combat, you have lost the fight. Retreat is defeat, or, at the very most, a draw. If someone is a big enough coward that they can run away from my inhibitors, then the likely aren't that good of a fight anyway.

 

[kiraen]

This is only true if their goal is to fight you.
If the goal of the enemy is to get from A to B and you can not stop them, you have lost.
If your goal is to destroy your enemy and you can not catch them, you have lost.

Why do so many people think this game is about PvP and PvP only?

 

[Ithirahad]

This is only true if their goal is to fight you.
If the goal of the enemy is to get from A to B and you can not stop them, you have lost.
If your goal is to destroy your enemy and you can not catch them, you have lost.

Why do so many people think this game is about PvP and PvP only?

Ironically the scenarios you're talking about have to do with PvP as well, as when more faction mechanics are put in there will probably be a lot of scenarios where people end up jump-racing to get the advantage over another player. You have a point, though; the question is more properly stated as:

"Why do so many people think that the balanced or imbalanced status of a travel mechanic is specifically derived from its viability as an escape system for direct ship vs. ship combat?"

 

[Sgtwisky]

Well Kiraen, if the attacker does not have a 2 block inhibitor to stop the player before they try to run, that would be the attackers fault. If the attacker failed to counter the escape route, then of course a loosing opponent (or an ill equipped one) will try to escape.

He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day... With a few more blocks.

 

[kiraen]

Ironically the scenarios you're talking about have to do with PvP as well, as when more faction mechanics are put in there will probably be a lot of scenarios where people end up jump-racing to get the advantage over another player. You have a point, though; the question is more properly stated as:

"Why do so many people think that the balanced or imbalanced status of a travel mechanic is specifically derived from its viability as an escape system for direct ship vs. ship combat?"

Actually, my point was that not everyone is into PvP. Any 'cowardly' actions you might perceive may meerly be someone going about there business. Combat may be completely irrelevant to some. Your goal may be combat/PvP, but it doesn't have to be for your opponent. I can not lose your game if I am not playing your game.

Call me a coward if you want, but I will avoid combat every time. It's annoying, I have better things to do then compare sizes with you.

"Damn, that leech is still attacking us. He's going to make us late for the yhole sale at Zangrex. Drop the inhibidrones and punch it, ensign. If I can't get my fix I will send a sternly worded letter to your mother!"

 

[Ithirahad]

Personally, if I want to escape I usually do it the old-fashioned way - punch in Overdrive and Ion (which all Aethi utility ships have) and run like hell. Jumping can wait.

 

[Deveyus]

I think chain drives are interesting because they require at least basic knowledge of logic to implement them. I think we should have more types of systems that are put together, because it adds something interesting to the game. There are currently pros and cons to chain drives, and I like those pros and cons.

But, if some people want an alternative system, I'll bounce an idea off you guys here. How about jump drives use a special kind of liquid energy, which can be stored in tanks? You then connect a jump drive to this and it uses a certain amount with each jump, depending on the size of the ship. A separate device would be used to convert energy to the special the liquid warp energy. This way it would allow a person to "charge" it up when it isn't in use, but would also require a person to wait if it's all used up. Perhaps a jump drive could emit a logic signal when left-clicked and display the total charge available on the icon when connected to a warp tank system. Within this system, someone may wish to build multiple tanks for redundency, in case one is damaged. They could also balance the speed of charge and the size of the tank for their ship. If someone wants a ship that can jump 10 times, then need to wait on a recharge, they can. If someone wants to build a small jumpship that charges quickly, they can do that as well. And in addition, there could be some interesting looking tanks that fill up and empty to give some animation to the whole jump drive process within the actual ship. They could also have separate energy converters which stay on all of the time to provide a trickle charge to the warp tanks, so that they refill while parked.

I think this would be a more interesting approach. What do you guys think?

Your liquid energy doesn't have an in-place counter described, it could be viable but needs such a thing first.

I don't get how chaindrives are considered OP by some players? Any small fighter can halt a titan that is using chaindrive with just activating a few blocks of inhibitors. Inhibitors work a sector away, so just fly by close enough with a fast fighter every 30 sec to completely drain every computer in the chaindrive. And then your fleet of ion-frigates show up and the titan gets annihilated.
If there is a certain faction you're after, travel a few times between their HB and spawn or their allied HB and find out what sectors the jumps usually takes you too and place some inhibitors there, and a fleet perhaps?

Sure, in the future maybe the whole travel system will need a rework, but for now I think it works fine.

If the titan didn't bring another drive sure, the point is less about them being "OP" and more about them being a fundamental breakdown and of the game mechanics.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Personally I think chain drives should be phased out in favor of an actual feature of the game that performs a similar function with far less hassle. How the devs will go about doing this, if they do, is anybody's guess.

 

[StormWing0]

Most times I run to bait some poor PVPer into a death trap. Not chickening out of a fight, just seeing who wins the Darwin Award. :P Ironically enough when I get building I spam defense stations in all sectors I'm not using for something important. So after a while the whole territory of mine is one big death trap without a fleet or a really good single ship.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Most times I run to bait some poor PVPer into a death trap. Not chickening out of a fight, just seeing who wins the Darwin Award. :p Ironically enough when I get building I spam defense stations in all sectors I'm not using for something important. So after a while the whole territory of mine is one big death trap without a fleet or a really good single ship.

ofc they could just torch them out one by one...

 

[StormWing0]

ofc they could just torch them out one by one...

AP Turrets and AP Traps inside but finding the faction block in most cases for my builds is a tad easy, just find the middle and try not to die getting to it. XD

Meantime as for chain drives the only issue I have with them is the fact that they have to exist at all. That said they are a nice bit of player ingenuity that have been made so I don't want them to go away even if we get a better option later down the road.

 

[Reilly Reese]

AP Turrets and AP Traps inside but finding the faction block in most cases for my builds is a tad easy, just find the middle and try not to die getting to it. XD

Meantime as for chain drives the only issue I have with them is the fact that they have to exist at all. That said they are a nice bit of player ingenuity that have been made so I don't want them to go away even if we get a better option later down the road.

Having old tech in a game is very nice for a sort of immersion stand point.

 

[Mortiferum]

Chain drives are fine, with server latency they are not exactly precise.

They malfunction, they will get you into a sun. They are useless in combat and only makes travel less tedious.

 

[Dragleones]

[...] They are useless in combat and only makes travel less tedious.

But isn't that exactly the point being made? The reason why they should be replaced with a proper game mechanic?

Current jump drives are really good at bringing you out of any combat situation, but are due to the low default range bad for travel.

Why does travelling has to be tedious?

And I don't mean tedious as in time consuming. Travelling has to be in some ways time consuming. (Otherwise it kills player interaction and exploration).

I mean tedious as in simply being annoying.
Using a jump drive as its intended by the game developers is literally like driving through downtown manhattan at 3pm.
I am literally holding a button (or the brakes) for 5 minutes just to cover about 5 meters before having to wait another 5 minutes.

Maybe I'm just having a terrible misconception about what jump drives should be used for.
Call it heresy.

But i wish the default jump drives were the exact opposite way. (Chain drives currently fill that gap. But since they are unlikely to stay we need an replacement)

[...] ... useless in combat and only makes travel less tedious.

I'm not sure who. Someone already proposed this in this thread. The plannd hyperdrives should be the go-to travelling method for any vessel. Jump drives would be a far better fit capital ship as some sort of "special system". Perfect to engage and escape combat.

 

[Madman198237]

Maybe jumpdrives could be used as a sort of super-capital and small-but-elite-vessel combat maneuvering system, allowing for a rapid sector change in combat to outflank enemies....or simply to move your Death Star around the battlefield, because thrusters would've been too expensive to use.

 

[Benevolent27]

Your liquid energy doesn't have an in-place counter described, it could be viable but needs such a thing first.

Hmm.. Well, I'm not proposing that jump-drive inhibitors be removed. But since a jump-drive might have larger reserves, perhaps a jump-drive inhibitor could also use the same liquid jump energy to basically do "burst" damage to the enemy's jump drive energy pool.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Just wanted to add that "teching" up to chain drives from basic starter stuff is really a lot of fun (same with some of the dock able reactor stuff), and a good game play mechanic.

Now of course the community on the forums likes to argue how to do things "most efficently" and their are pages and pages of stuff and it can be overwhelming to most players.


But the basic idea of things like the chain drives are not too complicated and actually fun to "discover", and invent on your own.

I only hope that whatever system that replaces these in the future involves processes like these (but perhaps somewhat planned from the begining) and are not just 'X amount of modules to computer' or 'make n% of ships mass to increase effectiveness'.

Those are really simple, shallow, and boring. Things like docked reactors and shield injectors and chain drives (rip instanced drives [code named X and Z drives] ;-;7 ) are really mechanically interesting and really awesome to get down into the nitty gritty of things and find out what people do to make them tick.

So yeah, please consider the opportunity to purposefully add in systems that could possibly require logic for the people who like to discover and invent technology for this game like you previously and sometimes unknowingly done, it adds way more depth than you realise, more than other games of this caliber.

I would appreciate it.

 

[AtraUnam]

I miss Z and X drives, I mean they needed to be patched but damn they were convinient.

 

[Groovrider]

Why are we always trying to kill any thing that smack of player ingenuity? There's not exactly a whole lot of devices a player can make that feel like technology. Chaindrives, docked energy stores and logic weapons (thank god no ones trying to nerf those) are the only proper "machines" that we can make in this so-called sandbox.

 

[JonasWalker]

Why are we always trying to kill any thing that smack of player ingenuity? There's not exactly a whole lot of devices a player can make that feel like technology. Chaindrives, docked energy stores and logic weapons (thank god no ones trying to nerf those) are the only proper "machines" that we can make in this so-called sandbox.

Likely due to the fact that most of the 'tech' you mentioned is nothing but bodge job fixes for broken/boring alpha mechanics. If removing those bandages is whats required to actually address the core problems that spawned them in the first place then so be it. Maybe that means officially adopting some of this 'tech', maybe it means changing mechanics so they are no longer needed or even exist. We the player base will give feedback on those changes, find ways around things that annoy us, and the cycle will continue. Such is the way of the Alpha. :D