split the AMC into two types

[Krazykat]

So I see a lot of topics about possible changes to weapons, and I have a few ideas so here are my 2 cents:



I suggest that we remove the AMC, and replace it with 2 new weapon blocks/types

weapon 1) Pounders. These are slow firing, medium speed weapons that do an AOE impact and are very destructive to hull, however to be effective there needs to be a lot of them linked up. Have them scale so more blocks lead to more damage and AOE, but slower reload like a true artillery gun. To balance they do a reduced damage to shields plus a slow moving round

weapon 2) PEC'ers. Particulate Energy Cannon. Essentially made to be used on the small scale. They have a very high ROF, a fast moving bullet, and improved damage towards shields. These would do a reduced damaged to hull and be fairly innaccurate for balance. This weapon is made for small fighters and support vessels to help the big guys bring down other titans. ROF drastically scales down with # of blocks but damage and accuracy slowly scale up.

That's my thought. Just having these two weapons alone would greatly diversify combat and just allow players to have more options. If it is necessary keep the AMC as a sort of middle ground to make sure that fighters could still damage hulls and capitals to have something else besides pounders

 

[Archer6621]

In my opinion, it\'s a bit silly that huge flagships have huge cannons that fire like mini-guns. I\'d rather imagine some kind of big slow-firing cannon on them.

 

[Krazykat]

exactly my point. in every frickin scifi big ships get giant but slow cannons, and capitals can counter with PEC\'er turrets anyway if fighters are trouble. also PEC\'ers used against fighters would be better because there is assumingly less layered hull on them

 

[Nootau]

I would love to have these slow firing heavy damage guns on my stealth birds. The burst damage plus a rapid cloaking ability would be very fun to toy with.

 

[Krazykat]

make it so the are extremely slower firing pounders on small scale. So true bombers could exist.

 

[Morhe]

I think an interesting route to go would be to remove the \"rate of fire\" percentage in the AMC\'s power balance settings, leaving only \"Damage,\" \"Range,\" and \"Speed.\" Then, add a separate slider for fire rate that allows you to directly chose the amount of time between each shot, and multiply the damage an individual shot does by the number of seconds chosen. So, if you wanted to, you could set the refire time to 10.0 seconds and get 10 times the normal damage for each shot, or set it to 0.25 seconds and get a rapid-fire cannon that does one-quarter damage per hit.

There would likely need to be a limit to the maximum refire time to prevent small ships from setting their cannons to 24 hours in order to one-shot shields on large ships and then switch to missiles. Perhaps have the maximum refire time scale to the number of linked cannons, so that you need a large cannon to get a very slow, heavy-hitting AMC.

 

[Krazykat]

But, I also wanted to seperate weapons meant for shields and for hull. This would enhance the roles that vessels play and force more organized combat and teamwork for faction battles and the like. Simply removing then adding the same feature wouldn\'t differentiate as much as something new entirely

 

[Morhe]

If you want a slow-firing hull-damage splash weapon, that already exists; the missile batteries are already made for that role.

 

[Krazykat]

ok, here is a suggestion for that:



remove the dumb fire missiles entirely. They serve little purpose and can\'t hit anything that can move

heat seekers kinda stupid, but make them ignore docked turrets and ships, only enemy/neutral ships targeted

Tracking needs to be improved. Make them a bit smarter with the ability to predict basic movements

For all missile types: increase AOE dramatically while also reducing the damage they do individually to each block. Have them move faster too so to have an anti-fighter use.

This would then have a place for pounder weapons, they take out small chunks of ships but possibly can penetrate deep into the hull and possibly expose modules. Missiles would be used in unison with smaller weapons to chip away at layers and deal with small vessels.

 

[CodatheSpaceFox]

I like the thought of different weapons. Only been playing for about 24 hours and I\'ve already spotted a lot of imballance between weapons. Especially the rockets. Just as well, we should have a solid fire weapon like the scavenger laser, meant to drill shields but do little damage to hulls. I suppose the power drain weapon could do that... never tried. Still, the weaponry in this game is definitely still Alpha.

Speed up the missles, add some diversity to cannons, and maybe make some literal modules for solid built missles. like using the bombs as warheads for handling massive vessils and bases.

Dunno, mostly talking out of my ass here, but StarMade still is an awesome game for just joining, now I just have to put together $3 somehow.

 

[2hu]

Saying that missiles would be used to \"chip away\" at hulls is bullshit. In your system pounders would outclass missiles such that no one would want to use missiles over pounders as far as hull-breaking goes. That anyone would use it for protecting against fighters is questionable too; if PECs are anything like current AMCs, then having several turrets of them will be enough to bring down fighters. You even mentioned earlier that part of the PEC\'s role would be in destroying less-armored targets like fighters. No one would want to invest in missile batteries, except maybe because missiles look nice.

Also, with PECs being inaccurate, battles between smaller craft might take a long time as they don\'t have the advantage of having several turrets. Maybe PECs could lose accuracy with greater size?

 

[Valck]

I\'d prefer to see the existing game mechanics changed in a way that the smaller the cannon, the higher the rate of fire, and the bigger, the slower, while damage per second continuously increases with size; maybe even a small area effect for really large guns, or related to calibre (determined by the block\'s front face and the orthogonal dimensions of the cannon array). IMO that would automatically result in small fighter guns and AA turrets, and large main battery barbettes and spinal linear accelerator type cannons.

The same should be done to missiles: fast small rockets, and large, lumbering torpedoes and planet destroyers.

 

[me2005]

Why not allow the AMC to scale to different sized bolts in exchange for ROF? Base it all on the number of cannons you have and bam-pow, your suggestion basically works. What I\'d like is to be able to choose to have an AM-Beam instead of the cannon. Set it so it does the same DPS as the cannons, and is really just a different fire method/graphical thing.

Missiles speed should probably be higher too; missiles should just about always be faster than ships. But that\'ll come when balancing comes.

All weapons should be scalable though; having a giant weapon block fire out of one corner really fast isn\'t as cool as having a giant bolt/beam/missile.

 

[roorz]

A better way to differentiate the guns would be to remove dumb fire missiles and replace them with HI-EX pulse rounds that can both heavy hit against shields and chip away at hulls with the average blast radius on a untuned round being about 3 by 3 block hole but the true heavy hitters would still be missiles

anti matter = fast rate of fire and lower damage with small blast radius

HI-EX pulse = slow rate of fire and higher damage with medium blast radius

missile = rate of fire twice as long as HI-EX and highest damage with large blast radius

 

[Zovc]

so you want to make those big motherships i am fond of to not be able to use those epicly powerful guns? to be truthful those ships have big guns because they have big amounts of space. You make a fighter and your consequence is lack of space. Do not complain, just build your own mothership to counter them. FIREFIGHT!

 

[roorz]

No I\'m just suggesting a method that would make engaging with the enemy more interesting