Lex, they are anti cap weapons. Ie, the things we pilots equip to TAKE DOWN capital ships, not give it to them. Anyway, lower the blast radius to 1,000 and it might be useful. Otherwise at the moment, capships are just too friggin fast and random for the torpedos to hit much of anything.

Oh and shield recharge rates are waaay too high. I mean... waaaay... at least on the Queens.

Why are you guys talking about Dev Avalons? Normal ones have a 500m blast radius I believe.

And the Queen's recharge is too high, but only by a bit. I can still solo em (barely).

Incarnate, what roguelazer was saying is that after the shields completely dissapeared last night, it only took 3 minutes for them to come back online, not 30.

They disapeared kind of strangely though. We did a bombing run, barely hurt it, left to reload, came back, and then we noticed that there was no shields. It might of been that we were just not paying attention closely enough, or there was some sort of bug. But the shields definitely came back after only a few minutes, no where near 30.

A question that just popped into my mind while considering a different topic: What happens when a shielded ship is hit with a Repair Gun? Does the shield get repaired, does the shot "fizzle", or does it pass through the shield to repair the hull of the ship?

I also wonder if there is any consideration or plan for how shields affect weapons fired from the capship, and whether it affects access to the docking bay.

I realize these are relatively minor details, but fleshing out these interactions could lend new strategy and variety to how these ships function.

Does it matter if the sf can catch them... even though i doubt that they can't catch a bogged down centaur, moth, rag, prom, hog or wraith...

since seeing that the avalon is a big nuke, it wouldn't surprise me to see it weigh as much as 3 agts or even more...

EDIT: besides I see no problem with the no repercussions with corvus, it is for once a pirate fraction. Why would they care if one of their contenders would get his ass toasted by some rocket.

Hey everyone, a couple responses:

1) The avalons that were in the game recently were the result of a deliverator bug, which has since been fixed. We cleaned out the database to make sure none were floating around. I will be making changes to how Avalons work before putting them back in the game. As I mentioned before, they will have a fairly large/hittable collision hull (and so, destructable by energy weapons and the like) and I would like the turrets to prefer them. They will also:

a) Be very massive. Your heavy will handle like crap carrying one, you will need escorts.

b) Be very slow, there may be merit to making them "homing" type weapons.. I don't like that from the guidance standpoint, but it does make it easier to cap their absolute speed, so they're less affected by the launching speed of the ship.

c) Having some sort of sector wide avalon-launch warning is probably a good idea.

d) I don't know what I'll do about station nuking, but that's clearly something that needs to be addressed before avalons are available. If b) works out, and the stations have turrets, it might be less of a problem (the turrets taking out some incoming, but that still wouldn't work for people willing to suicide and firing at short distances). But otherwise I might just prevent avalons from "arming" in station sectors, except under certain circumstances.. or some other stupid temporary hack (which I'd rather avoid, but, the problem has to be addressed).

2) At present, the repair guns should directly repair the ship's hull without impacting the shield, and I see no reason to change that for the time being. I don't want it to be impossible to repair a damaged ship with the shields up, and I also don't want it to be impossible to drop a ship's shields without playing whack-a-mole trying to kill all the repair beams. That might be interesting for certain Hive cases, but for PvP and normal cap ships, I think it would probably be irritating. Taking down shields should be tough enough on its own. But anyway, we'll see, maybe somewhere down the line we'll create a "shield-enhancing beam" or some such.

3) The queens will probably have their regen rate tweaked, I mentioned that I thought that would be needed in my initial post. I'm also going to add turrets to Queens.. I've been meaning to for ages, just haven't had a chance. That will make them more.. interesting.

4) Docking into a capship with shields should be possible and completely unaffected. The idea being, if you're able to dock with the capship anyway, they "let you through" or some such.

5) I have no idea why the Lev shields dropped so quickly, or came back so quickly. If you guys are able to reproduce the problem, please post about it and any peculiar conditions that might be relevant.

When we came back and the shields were down, almost all of the bots had vanished, too. They respawned around the same time the shields came back up. Not that it matters- once we got practiced enough, we found that 6 of us in Rags could take down the shields in one attack run. :-)

Which is fine for the Levi. But others need smaller vlaue say...

1/2 for a Queen
2/3 for a Teradon
1/2 for a Trident
Full for a HAC ( Or at least 3/4)
2/3 for a COnstellation, due to it's size

Could we get some kind of turret weapon to equip to bombers (Like the moth heavy has)? Having a fighter wing to protect a bomber is a great start, but without any kind of point defense, the bomber is dead anyway, because unless the fighters are extremely fast and lucky, they can almost never hold off the bots when the go after a bomber.

moldy: All those ships have greatly reduced total shield strengths, compared to the Levi. The HAC is in the same ballpark, I think, but the Trident shield strength, for instance, is only 80,000 (compared to 250,000 on the lev). They do still all use the 15k/s recharge rate, and I totally agree with dropping that for the Queen. But I'm not sure if I agree with dropping that for all other capships. The point is to avoid an easy soloing scenario. Dropping the recharge rate any will make soloing possible, at least for lighter caps like the Trident.. and I'm not sure that I agree with that.

Anyway, totally open to continued suggestions on shield tweaks. We'll need to adjust all of this over the next couple of weeks, I imagine.

tumble: Hmm. That's possible. I'll think about it.

Incarnate, I feel like the shields should recharge much slower and you should increase their strength to compensate. That would still prevent them from being solo-able. Even if the shields took say 30 or 40 seconds to fully recharge, a lone ship still wouldn't be able to take it down if the shield strength was a bit higher than it is now. It'd have to go to reload if it was using missles or it'd have to take a break if it was using energy. Either way, the shields would have plenty of time to fully recover. Just set the shield strength higher than the maximum damage per load of a fully-loaded rag and set the recharge equal to the maximum sustained output of an energy weapon with a FC battery.

I don't know, 5 or even 10 seconds to fully recharge a shield just seems too fast.

Indeed. I'd rather see some progress, then lose it, rather than blink and see the whole bar filled. It's very frustrating.

Were BP and BS fixed with this patch by any chance?

aren't both of those borked at the moment?

I don't know, they have been for a week or so. But my sub expired yesterday and I was planning on waiting to resubscribe till BP and BS were working again. Hence my asking.

upper case, your snark was a boojum.

EDIT: Sheesh... second page already? That was in reference to upper case's post on the first page about going poof (vanishing swiftly and silently away) when hit by an Avalon.

And in reply to Lexicon's post about Corvus's faction standing bug? WHAT? If you are referring to no standing loss at Corvus stations for killing Corvus admired/liked... PLEASE DO NOT FIX THAT... it's not a bug, it's a feature (for serious this time). We need station sectors that we can fight in without penalty. (cept the temp-kos for violating the NFZ) It's fun, leave it the way it is.

EDIT: As far as making station camping/nuking/mining more difficult or impossible... Incarnate already addressed that. But again... PLEASE LEAVE CORVUS THE UNCARING, UNETHICAL BASTARDS THEY SHOULD BE.

FatStrat / Moldy: Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I agree, it's annoying to shoot the ship and see no effect whatsoever. The key will be finding some balance point that's higher than full-Rag energy loadout recharge rates, but below that of rocket usage. Otherwise, it'll become another boring factor of "just shoot the ship for long enough".

I should note that all 6 of us who took it down yesterday were using rags with 3 sunflares and 2 untargeted chaos swarms, doing 108400 damage per ship per reload. Hitting the levi with all of it at the same time was just enough to take down it's shields.