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Well, It's been fun, but then I went to 7. Phoenix casually caught up to my fleeing Prometheus, and took down 26000 hit points in 4 shots. You won't see me in-game until this shit is fixed.
Nor shall you see me. My ship has been downed several times too many by the high-power railgun shots of Arolte. When two shots kills, it's a bug. Go fix it.
Is this normal? The ship and equipment prices are sky high and they are uninsured when you die. If so, they should give at least 70% insurance ratong on the equipment, ships, etc.
not wanting to be mean or anything BUT GO READ THE NEWS PAGE!!!
scroll down past vendetta test 3.02 past "whats good" and read the first line of "what's not so good"
the dev's know this is unbalanced as is.. and give reasons for why they let it out this way.
thats why we are playing it.. (and for FREE w00t thanks dev's) so they can get a much better idea of what is unbalanced and get that information faster than if they did their testing in house.
/me steps off of his box and goes back to enjoying the cool free game he gets to play.
scroll down past vendetta test 3.02 past "whats good" and read the first line of "what's not so good"
the dev's know this is unbalanced as is.. and give reasons for why they let it out this way.
thats why we are playing it.. (and for FREE w00t thanks dev's) so they can get a much better idea of what is unbalanced and get that information faster than if they did their testing in house.
/me steps off of his box and goes back to enjoying the cool free game he gets to play.
A good idea is to always hit "u" right away upon entering the sector you plan on docking in. If you see a known pirate on the list, leave and sell your cargo somewhere else. 13 sectors means that there'll be a lot of potential trade routes, and the pirates can't cover all of them.
7 and 13 are pirate heavens, and until they change the stations around to allow docking from more than one side, they always will be. They also happen to be one of the most profitable trade routes in the game, but they're by no means the only profitable route in the game. If you're having trouble in the sectors with the asteroid stations, then stick to the ones with the standard-type stations that can be docked with from multiple directions. It's much harder for pirates to cover a station like that.
7 and 13 are pirate heavens, and until they change the stations around to allow docking from more than one side, they always will be. They also happen to be one of the most profitable trade routes in the game, but they're by no means the only profitable route in the game. If you're having trouble in the sectors with the asteroid stations, then stick to the ones with the standard-type stations that can be docked with from multiple directions. It's much harder for pirates to cover a station like that.
Actually, it makes sense that the more pirated routes are the most profitable ones. You get paid extra for the added danger, simply put... /me thinks of the Gefjon run in EVN...
Lately the more profitable trades have switched to 10-14 but many of the pirates seem to be trading now for some reason
-Scuba Steve 9.0
-Scuba Steve 9.0
COME BACCCCCK!!! I can't keep the peace just by my self :)
Ohh yea that weapon he used was the ultra powerful railguns. Which people like Arolte think should stay like it is. ugh
Ohh yea that weapon he used was the ultra powerful railguns. Which people like Arolte think should stay like it is. ugh
I've been pirated a few times myself since 3.2, which is diconcerting because historicaly I've either gotten away or swung around and killed the pirate. I couldn't do either. I *was* going to refrain from playing until things got balanced, but now I've decided to just lay low and trade late or on quiet routes - slowly building my warchest for when balance has returned. Stick around and help finance our glorious comeback.
Railguns are definitely more overpowered than any other ship OR weapon in the game. One shot with a quad-railgun will kill a bus. There has never been such a powerful weapon, and never for so cheap either. They should either be toned down or made several orders of magnitidude more expensive.
I withdraw my previous statements. They do need to be toned down. Not so much for the sake of killing regular "all nation" ships, but rather for the sake of giving newbies a chance and, as Whistler mentioned, four hits should NOT take out a Prometheus. The Valk's hull needs to be toned down as well.
One rail gun is balanced. No one thinks that a rail is 'too powerful' on a Centurian.
Two rail guns is balanced provided that the ship is not that manueverable.
Four rail guns is balanced provided that the ship gives up both manueverability and speed.
And that you need quads to face the Valk is not justification, because the Valk is just as bad of a design issue.
The problem is fundamentally I think not with the rail gun. The problem is with the ability to group fire 4 weapons. We've never been able to do that before. The main advantage of the rail gun is it actually lets you do it without instantly running out of power. And because of the rail guns very slow cycling rate, it would take a rather insane ammount of energy expenditure to 'fix' the problem.I don't think any of our present ships is handicapped in manueverability enough to justify being able to mount quad-anything. No ship should be mounting quads with less than low manueverability, and most of them should have worse than low manueverability if they want to have the advantage of a quad.
You can't even realistically mount ion blasters as a quad. They don't work that well as a triple. The very fact that no weapon competes _working together_ is what makes the rail so fearsome, not that the rail is itself so fearsome. IF you had unlimited energy quad gravitons would be as evil or worse.
The best fix IMO is limiting which ships can mount groups of weapons. In other words dual and quad mounts should be rare. We need more types of mounts 'Small Rocket', 'Small Gun', 'Large Rocket', 'Large Gun', 'Mine', etc. This would fix not only the annoying railgun issue since few ships could mount even 2 of them, but it would also fix the single biggest problem with 3.2 and that is that combat has become one dimensional in large part because everyone is mounting only one (type) of gun. You don't see combats with opponents launching mixtures of direct fire weapons, straight fire rockets, and homing missiles at each other any more. I very much want to see these ships get more weapon slots, so that even a Centurian can go back to (at least) mounting Tacyon's and Rockets, and that a Ragnarok could be mounting duel rails, rockets, homing missiles, lightning mines and avalons if it wanted without crippling itself by choosing tactical flexibility over specialization.
The ability to specialize is every bit as advantageous as manueverability or hull points and has to be limited with the same checks and balances. Only after that problem is addressed can we even hope to ask the secondary question whether the rails speed more than makes up for its low damage output in that the other potential problem with the rail achieves a much better 'hit percentage' than any other weapon. Even if we slowed the rail down to 300 or less, people would still use them because they are the only way to realistically take advantage of all four 's' mounts on a hornet (etc.).
Two rail guns is balanced provided that the ship is not that manueverable.
Four rail guns is balanced provided that the ship gives up both manueverability and speed.
And that you need quads to face the Valk is not justification, because the Valk is just as bad of a design issue.
The problem is fundamentally I think not with the rail gun. The problem is with the ability to group fire 4 weapons. We've never been able to do that before. The main advantage of the rail gun is it actually lets you do it without instantly running out of power. And because of the rail guns very slow cycling rate, it would take a rather insane ammount of energy expenditure to 'fix' the problem.I don't think any of our present ships is handicapped in manueverability enough to justify being able to mount quad-anything. No ship should be mounting quads with less than low manueverability, and most of them should have worse than low manueverability if they want to have the advantage of a quad.
You can't even realistically mount ion blasters as a quad. They don't work that well as a triple. The very fact that no weapon competes _working together_ is what makes the rail so fearsome, not that the rail is itself so fearsome. IF you had unlimited energy quad gravitons would be as evil or worse.
The best fix IMO is limiting which ships can mount groups of weapons. In other words dual and quad mounts should be rare. We need more types of mounts 'Small Rocket', 'Small Gun', 'Large Rocket', 'Large Gun', 'Mine', etc. This would fix not only the annoying railgun issue since few ships could mount even 2 of them, but it would also fix the single biggest problem with 3.2 and that is that combat has become one dimensional in large part because everyone is mounting only one (type) of gun. You don't see combats with opponents launching mixtures of direct fire weapons, straight fire rockets, and homing missiles at each other any more. I very much want to see these ships get more weapon slots, so that even a Centurian can go back to (at least) mounting Tacyon's and Rockets, and that a Ragnarok could be mounting duel rails, rockets, homing missiles, lightning mines and avalons if it wanted without crippling itself by choosing tactical flexibility over specialization.
The ability to specialize is every bit as advantageous as manueverability or hull points and has to be limited with the same checks and balances. Only after that problem is addressed can we even hope to ask the secondary question whether the rails speed more than makes up for its low damage output in that the other potential problem with the rail achieves a much better 'hit percentage' than any other weapon. Even if we slowed the rail down to 300 or less, people would still use them because they are the only way to realistically take advantage of all four 's' mounts on a hornet (etc.).
Celebrim's post is good. We might as well socialize the ideas we have and be a helpful Beta community... my suggestions are simple and I have only two (although necessarily inter-dependent or linked in any way):
1. Railguns are traditionally a heavy weapon... after all we are dealing with depleted uranium here... they should have a high mass impact on your ship. Mount four and watch your manueverable fighter become a leg-ironed Ragnarok with a thin skin. Conversely a chain gun would be light but not able to hit too far past 800ms. Mount four and lose little speed so you can close the gap you need.
2. Mass energy consumption. Mount four and you drain your whole reserves for a good number of seconds. Mount two you drain half. Mount 1 you only drain a 1/4 per shot.
I would like to second Celebrim's suggestion on weapon category mounts. But it will be more down the road for that I imagine.
In the end it will be crucial for the final product that the different weapons/ships/configurations all have multiple powerful end products available. In a MMORPG people feel the need to personalize heavily. And to that end a bunch of configurations that are workable are going to be necessary. I know you all know this but I just wanted to make the point.
1. Railguns are traditionally a heavy weapon... after all we are dealing with depleted uranium here... they should have a high mass impact on your ship. Mount four and watch your manueverable fighter become a leg-ironed Ragnarok with a thin skin. Conversely a chain gun would be light but not able to hit too far past 800ms. Mount four and lose little speed so you can close the gap you need.
2. Mass energy consumption. Mount four and you drain your whole reserves for a good number of seconds. Mount two you drain half. Mount 1 you only drain a 1/4 per shot.
I would like to second Celebrim's suggestion on weapon category mounts. But it will be more down the road for that I imagine.
In the end it will be crucial for the final product that the different weapons/ships/configurations all have multiple powerful end products available. In a MMORPG people feel the need to personalize heavily. And to that end a bunch of configurations that are workable are going to be necessary. I know you all know this but I just wanted to make the point.
The rarity of quad- and even tri-mounts I agree with. However, two mounts should be okay, at least with things like energy weapons. It's basically like having a gun that fires twice as fast, but uses twice as much energy. You do more damage, but you can't fire as much. With the railgun, however, you have 30 shots whether you have 4 guns or 1, and it doesn't deplete your energy. THIS is where it's broken. A decent solution would be to have a pool of ammo for it, not 30 per gun. For example, you have a pool of 60 shots for it. With 1 railgun, you get 60 shots. With 2, you get 30. With 3, you get 20. With 4, you only get 15 shots before you have to run away.
Captain, what takes more energy to do, charge a capacitor and shoot the energy into 2 rails or create a fully stable projectile (stable as in won't instant blow up in flight) 10 times per second being the projectile is complete energy?
The rail gun should fire faster and go slower like, .5 seconds 100 speed, but you should be able to charge the rails, for like 2 seconds and it goes at 400, 4 seconds it goes at 800, etc, the speed should also increse the damage, remember our kinetic energy freind. Each second of chargeing drains 20 energy, this would effectively make a quad rail gun ship drain 30*.5*4= 60 energy per non charged shot, for a 800 speeder it would take 30*4*4=480 energy, very costly in the energy reserves, also if you set the rail guns to secondary fire, tap c to begin chargeing, tap c again to launch.
I use railguns, why? Energy weapons are completly out of synch with the balanced world, they drain too quickly, i'll still use rail guns when fixed for botting. listen, it's absurd a good weapon takes up 25*10=250 energy per second! That's ludicris!
The rail gun should fire faster and go slower like, .5 seconds 100 speed, but you should be able to charge the rails, for like 2 seconds and it goes at 400, 4 seconds it goes at 800, etc, the speed should also increse the damage, remember our kinetic energy freind. Each second of chargeing drains 20 energy, this would effectively make a quad rail gun ship drain 30*.5*4= 60 energy per non charged shot, for a 800 speeder it would take 30*4*4=480 energy, very costly in the energy reserves, also if you set the rail guns to secondary fire, tap c to begin chargeing, tap c again to launch.
I use railguns, why? Energy weapons are completly out of synch with the balanced world, they drain too quickly, i'll still use rail guns when fixed for botting. listen, it's absurd a good weapon takes up 25*10=250 energy per second! That's ludicris!
in terms of today's technology, it takes longer to bind packets of energy. Then again, we can't fly through space like F/A-18s today, either. For all we know, laser technology could have hit upon some little secret that makes it child's play to bind energy with minimal loss and expenditure. The point being that the bullshitting about reasons can come later. For now, balance is all-important, and other considerations take a back seat.
I think that all that needs to be done to the railguns is make them use a bit more energy. Have so that if you fire one or two linked togeather, it'll still have enough time to fully recharge before you fire again, but you can't fire more than once or twice while turboing. Have three or more deplete your energy reserves within a couple of shots regardless of whether or not you're using turbo.
That's one advantage defenders will always have: Attackers have to deplete their batteries firing their weapons. Defenders just have to hold down turbo and fly away.
Now if only they did something about that "must have full energy to warp" business. The energy it takes to go to warp should not be dependant on the size of your battery.
That's one advantage defenders will always have: Attackers have to deplete their batteries firing their weapons. Defenders just have to hold down turbo and fly away.
Now if only they did something about that "must have full energy to warp" business. The energy it takes to go to warp should not be dependant on the size of your battery.
The energy to warp should be based off of ship size. Here's some examples:
10-14m = 150e
14-18m = 200e
18-22m = 250e
Notice that this allows even people with Centaurs and light batteries to use the warpgate. Or it could be done like this:
10-14m = 40%e
14-18m = 60%e
18-22m = 80%e
22m+ = 100%e
10-14m = 150e
14-18m = 200e
18-22m = 250e
Notice that this allows even people with Centaurs and light batteries to use the warpgate. Or it could be done like this:
10-14m = 40%e
14-18m = 60%e
18-22m = 80%e
22m+ = 100%e
Pyro totally hit the nail on the head with a pooled ammo amount for rail guns. I'd prefer 48 total rounds over 60.
Yeah, I was just using 60 because it's nice and round for all of them and it was the first I thought of. 48 is better, though.