Over the past five days or so, me and a friend have been making ships and talking about what changes to the game would make it more enjoyable for us, Some of these are mine, some his, some both of us. My friend has already stopped playing while I continue with making ship designs for when the game is playable as something more than a glorious scale lego set, but both of us agree this isn't really a game yet, however it has everything in place or nearly so, to be a playable game with a single patch with only minor additions. Those follow below.
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1. Shields
Problem:
Shields currently are one of two things depending on how many your ship/station has. Either godmode, or worthless, there is no middle ground. This is entirely due to shield recharge, which determins if the enemies weapons can overcome your absurd rate of recharge, or not. If they can, they collapse in seconds typically, if they can't, you can fall asleep at the keyboard and wake up an hour later and still be right as rain.
Suggested Solution(s):
1. Make shields toggleable systems, a on/off switch if you will. (This can be done with either a universal key, or via the weapons tab.) When the shields are turned "on" they protect your ship, but have "ZERO" shield recharge rate. When turned "off" they no longer protect your ship, but gain shield recharge.
Now to do this you have to make two other changes, first off you need to make switching between them have a timer, 10-20 seconds I recommend. This prevents it being used effectively in combat under fire. And second you need to either vastly increase shield capacity added per block, or give shields a default 90-98% damage resistance, this way shields no longer collapse instantly.
2. The other solution, and perhaps a lot easier to code in, is to simply make shields stop recharging when shot at for 20-60 seconds, with the timer being reset with each shot. Of course this requires the same changes to shield capacity and/or shield damage resistance to make ship fights last longer than 10-20 seconds.
Both of these solutions make ship fights VASTLY more fun, with even a little interceptor being able to participate in a capital ship battle and make a small difference, where as currently the intercepter wouldn't even be noticed. And of course with the damage resistance/capacity increased immensely, fights would no longer be solely decided on who fired their overpower as hell cannons first dropping a same class ship in seconds. (Weapon balance is also covered below.)
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2. Weapon Modifications and Scaling
Problem:
Anyone thats made increasingly larger weapon banks can see the issue in the weapon's stats. For those who have not, the issue is the with each additional weapon attached together, you get a bonus to every stat of that weapon. Damage, Rate of fire, Distance, etc. Now why is this a problem? Well it becomes obvious as you make a truely large gun, instead of getting this massive antimatter gun that fires these slow powerful shots, you instead get a antimatter cannon that fires massive, fast as hell, insane distance, rounds that fire faster than the game itself can render the projectiles themselves. (With large enough guns, I actually crashed the server due to it firing something like 20,000 rounds a second "PER" gun.) And keep in mind with these guns putting a minigun rate of fire to shame, each round is doing 2,000 damage, instantly vaporizing a hole through a planet made of hardened hulls instantly. (Which are also covered below.)
Suggested Solutions:
Change the way weapons are upgraded. I suggest doing this via a upgrade point system. When you place your first antimatter cannon, you get some default stats that are horrible, but you also get a point in the weapon configuration tab, and an additional point for each weapon connected to the first one, these points are then spent to upgrade the weapon in a specific field. This way if you make a collasal cannon that does insane damage per shot by only upgrading damage, that shot will travel only 50 meters, be able to be dodged by a battlecruiser because it's so slow, and take 30 seconds per shot. So now you have to make sacrifices to get crazy damage, or rate of fire, letting you specialize weapons, want to hit fast fighters? Make a short range, fast projectile minigun, it won't do 2,000 damage a shot, but your likely to hit the target, and yet this weapon won't be good vs a enemy capital ship thats bombarding you from a range.
Oh and finnaly I suggest making a cap on rate of fire. Even with these changes, you'll be able to crash servers with it uncapped.
More to come in an hour, I need a break.
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1. Shields
Problem:
Shields currently are one of two things depending on how many your ship/station has. Either godmode, or worthless, there is no middle ground. This is entirely due to shield recharge, which determins if the enemies weapons can overcome your absurd rate of recharge, or not. If they can, they collapse in seconds typically, if they can't, you can fall asleep at the keyboard and wake up an hour later and still be right as rain.
Suggested Solution(s):
1. Make shields toggleable systems, a on/off switch if you will. (This can be done with either a universal key, or via the weapons tab.) When the shields are turned "on" they protect your ship, but have "ZERO" shield recharge rate. When turned "off" they no longer protect your ship, but gain shield recharge.
Now to do this you have to make two other changes, first off you need to make switching between them have a timer, 10-20 seconds I recommend. This prevents it being used effectively in combat under fire. And second you need to either vastly increase shield capacity added per block, or give shields a default 90-98% damage resistance, this way shields no longer collapse instantly.
2. The other solution, and perhaps a lot easier to code in, is to simply make shields stop recharging when shot at for 20-60 seconds, with the timer being reset with each shot. Of course this requires the same changes to shield capacity and/or shield damage resistance to make ship fights last longer than 10-20 seconds.
Both of these solutions make ship fights VASTLY more fun, with even a little interceptor being able to participate in a capital ship battle and make a small difference, where as currently the intercepter wouldn't even be noticed. And of course with the damage resistance/capacity increased immensely, fights would no longer be solely decided on who fired their overpower as hell cannons first dropping a same class ship in seconds. (Weapon balance is also covered below.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Weapon Modifications and Scaling
Problem:
Anyone thats made increasingly larger weapon banks can see the issue in the weapon's stats. For those who have not, the issue is the with each additional weapon attached together, you get a bonus to every stat of that weapon. Damage, Rate of fire, Distance, etc. Now why is this a problem? Well it becomes obvious as you make a truely large gun, instead of getting this massive antimatter gun that fires these slow powerful shots, you instead get a antimatter cannon that fires massive, fast as hell, insane distance, rounds that fire faster than the game itself can render the projectiles themselves. (With large enough guns, I actually crashed the server due to it firing something like 20,000 rounds a second "PER" gun.) And keep in mind with these guns putting a minigun rate of fire to shame, each round is doing 2,000 damage, instantly vaporizing a hole through a planet made of hardened hulls instantly. (Which are also covered below.)
Suggested Solutions:
Change the way weapons are upgraded. I suggest doing this via a upgrade point system. When you place your first antimatter cannon, you get some default stats that are horrible, but you also get a point in the weapon configuration tab, and an additional point for each weapon connected to the first one, these points are then spent to upgrade the weapon in a specific field. This way if you make a collasal cannon that does insane damage per shot by only upgrading damage, that shot will travel only 50 meters, be able to be dodged by a battlecruiser because it's so slow, and take 30 seconds per shot. So now you have to make sacrifices to get crazy damage, or rate of fire, letting you specialize weapons, want to hit fast fighters? Make a short range, fast projectile minigun, it won't do 2,000 damage a shot, but your likely to hit the target, and yet this weapon won't be good vs a enemy capital ship thats bombarding you from a range.
Oh and finnaly I suggest making a cap on rate of fire. Even with these changes, you'll be able to crash servers with it uncapped.
More to come in an hour, I need a break.
