After a long time of ignoring Deneb battle skirmishes I decided to try one yesterday in hope things have changed for the better.
What a disappointment.

I joined large battle in P-1. Number of units on both sides was around 1600/1600.
When I jumped in sector, 2 HACs were facing each other at 300m and playing futile light show with each others shields.
I was instantly engaged by one NPC vulture and as soon as I turned to deal with it I got another warthog and rag on me.
Fight was very annoying because as soon as I shot a vult, rag and hog would sneak behind me and spam gems, jacks/screamers, flares with agt fire.

It took me some time (a few deaths) to find the best way to deal with this ganking but as soon as I destroyed annoying spammy rag another one would appear and start spamming gems/rockets so I had to repair frequently. This went on and on.
Suffice to say my free repair option soon became a non option because HACs floated out of radar range in a matter of 5 min. (10k distance or more).
I was forced to repair at station ( 2,5 mil credits cost for roughly 4 hours of battle).
After killing around 200 NPCs and spending lots of cash on repairs I got bored out of my skull. This battle was far from over and was not going anywhere.

As a player who has good piloting and fighting skills I cant even imagine how this large battle scenario must look from a point of view of a newbie or a modestly skilled pilot.
Most of them probably think: "fuckit, this is annoying, I keep dying and spending money and getting frustrated. I am not having fun, I will trash this game and go find a better one."

On a final note:
Dynamic warfare in Deneb is a complete waste of time and resources. It is not adding anything good and exciting to the game and is instead making players frustrated and annoyed.

After killing around 200 NPCs and spending lots of cash on repairs

Did it not occur to you that perhaps the large skirmishes are not supposed to be solo-able? It would be pretty obvious to someone who has any knowledge of combat in Vendetta. The way to win border battles is to remove the shields from capships (which NPC's are not capable of doing effectively). If you're in a large skirmish with HAC's, that means you need at least 4 people. However,

...As a player who has good piloting and fighting skills...

you should have been able to figure that out on your own.

On a final note:
Of course Deneb warfare sucks right now. It isn't finished yet. Supposedly it will grow a purpose at some point, and get cleaned up mechanically. Stop mindlessly bitching about it. If you don't want to do Deneb war until it's finished, go find something else to do until then.

Yea trying to solo a large skirmish just makes you a dumbass.

When i'm solo'ing i usually do small or fighters. The cap ships in small can be defeated with a solo rag but once you get to medium and large you need a min of 2 players, more is always better.

Rude comments from intellectually challenged are just what I expected.
Thanks for not letting me down Iadron.

I will try to draw a simple picture here.

1. Purpose of battle is to defend/attack a sector in Deneb. Objective is to attack enemy HAC and defend your own.
2. Large number of units are deployed without any strategy or plan.
They are just shooting each other and ganking occasional player who enters sector.
Rags (missile spammers) do not attempt to pull an organized attack on enemy HAC, instead they go after light fighters.
3. HACs are shooting each other till the cows come home without any effect and slowly floating away to oblivion.
After 5-10 min. HACs float so far away that any attempt to locate them is doomed to fail (10-20k away from any jump in point), hence, you cannot dock and repair for free or even try to attack a HAC with a pathetic missile spam rag.

That "not solo-able" thing has bugged me for some time now. Here is why.

Before shields were implemented everything was solo-able and most enjoyable.
I enjoyed hunting and killing queens, flying solo in a vulture.
I enjoyed Deneb border skirmish, flying an IBG and finishing tridents, teradons and HACs.
Now, if I want to kill a queen or finish a border battle i have to take a spamrag tub.
Oh, yes, and I cant do it solo (most of the times), as Iadron said, it takes at least 4 spamrags "stacking" missiles to kill a shield.
Now maybe someone is having great fun shooting missiles from a rag, going to reload and doing it over and over again but I just don't see it as some good fun even if you have a great team with you.
Really, guys lets go grab spamrags and go shoot missiles at HAC/queen/whatever for an hour, great fun indeed.

If anyone is ever going to ask me (not going to happen anyway) what needs to be done about this, I would say:

- seriously reduce shield strength or remove shields completely or give us back avalons.
- introduce some tactical planning in Deneb dynamic warfare.
Waves of bomber attack groups with light fighters cover launching at enemy with clear objectives.
Scrambler fighter squads to intercept enemy bomber waves.
Allow players to partake a role in one of attack/cover/scrambler groups.
Reinforcements are a mockery now. Whenever 2-3 NPCs boom, new 2-3 jump in.
How about when facing significant losses, rest of NPCs in sector regroup and withdraw to defend a perimeter (or HAC) until real reinforcements jump in (real attack or scrambler group). Time reinforcements, not just replacing 2-3 of them the moment they go boom, set a timer (10-20 min) or an X number of NPCs destroyed before reinforcements are sent.
And for gods sake, do not position HACS at 200m from each other. This looks extremely stupid. HACs can engage each other only when there are no other options or your complete attack/bomber fleet is destroyed.

Make it intelligent and enjoyable. Nobody wants to go into a war with morons led by morons in a moronic ship with moronic missiles.

@CrazySpence
Pure curiosity. I tried it to see if there was anything new or improved since I haven't done Deneb skirmish in years.

Before shields were implemented everything was solo-able and most enjoyable. Seriously reduce shield strength . . . or give us back avalons.

Quoted for major truth.

Thanks for you post Incognito, I share some of these sentiments. It is true that we must acknowledge that border warfare is a work in progress, our comments are sample points to help the devs make there decisions in time investment.

I have noticed the drifting HAC (and other capital class ship) issue too. It does create a problem in that some of the NPC's whos directives are usually to attack the capital ships, invest their efforts on the player when they cant locate the cap-ships.

I have noticed rags to be pretty annoying lately too, I am not sure why though. I think it has something to do with my previous observation. They seemed to pay no attention to me a month ago, whereas now I feel I am spending a lot of time outrunning their missiles.

It is not fun, but maybe we can trade tactics on how to best the rags a little quicker, to make the fight more interesting. I have not had luck dodging the missiles with lateral strafes etc, only making arcing loops around the rag with my turbo, keeping the missiles on my backside (not fun, but I'll listen to better suggestions).

Regarding the NPC hogs, they were sneaking up on me a little, but if I caught them with my targetless first..I found they were pretty easy prey when I kept them at a certain range where their flares were easy to dodge, their AGT was out of range and my guass made and easy hit.

Capships, gonna have to side with some of the others on that one. Its nice to have at least a few targets in this game that you can't take down without a coordinated strike. So I vote to keep the same shield strength. It would be cool though, if their was a little more incentive for a true cappy kill, like a bomber badge or something. Maybe the badge requirement would be a number of cappy kills, where you get points for the shield strength, like 1 point for a trident, 5 points for a terradon and 20 points for Connie/HAC or something. This would promote more group fighting and tactics, which is a lot of fun. It might even promote more scenarios where both the red and blue teams have a few players in the same BS!

Thanks for starting this thread, I'm looking forward to seeing how the BS's evolve.

Cheers
~Karman

targetable shield generators plz

We're looking at two things: 1) allowing players to command subordinates during skirmishes (including NPCs), this potentially allowing single players to coordinate strikes on capships. 2) Bringing back torpedoes and the like once turret logic is changed slightly; then bombers will actually be bombers and not firing stacked swarms or whatever.

Zero-starting velocity flare-like weapons would make good 'bombs' without being totally exploitable for pvp stuff. Make em do avalon-range damage but their speed would be entirely dependent on launching ship speed.

Zero-starting velocity flare-like weapons would make good 'bombs' without being totally exploitable for pvp stuff. Make em do avalon-range damage but their speed would be entirely dependent on launching ship speed.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/21746?page=1

We'll probably do unguided absolute-velocity weapons to start with, since the trick will be finding a happy medium where the turrets have some hope of shooting them down, but also making them viable assault weapons. If we let people accelerate them with ship speed, that will prove more challenging.

At one point we had beam turrets on HACs. They were fairly effective and that zinng sound they made was awesome.
But seriously... enhancing turrets and bringing in torpedoes wont solve much unless the whole battle skirmish concept is backed up by some intelligent battle planning and organization (NPC behavior).

Clearly, it's a work in progress.

Too bad there isn't anything for guilds to fight over. It would create a lot of player made content if there was something for guilds to fight over ;).

I know that Dynamic Warfare is a work in progress, but it bares repeating from a previous discussion about Deneb:

It has been suggested that the rockets and missiles the bots have be removed from use against players. I know that when warfare was still limited to one sector and the rockets were introduced the player base for Dynamic Warfare took a swan-style nose-dive and it hasn't recovered.

Why not pull the plug on the rockets/missiles against players? The NPC Warthogs are plenty lethal with AGT to not need flares, and the Ragnoroks could be scripted to engage capital-targets only for the time being.

Well, the problem is that the capital ships are too far out of range for the Rags to see and therefore they dump all their missiles on the player. An obvious solution is to up NPC radar range, but the reason the cappies are so far out of range in the first place is because for some reason, when two of the same capital ships engage eachother, one of them ends up backpedalling while the other is flooring it straight at the other one. As for soloing large skirmishes: it is possible. I have seen a Teradon take out Connie and even HAC shields single handedly when I turbo ram them forward when they engage the capital ships. Obviously, capital ships need to get way closer when they attack eachother, and one of them seriously needs to stop backpedalling. It would also help if HACs, Tridents and Constelations would engage their targets broadside... heck, it would be really awesome, actually. Another thing I see with Border Skirmish is that the game is often oriented with two clusters of either side's capitals on opposite sides of the sector outside of eachothers' radar ranges and a fighter skirmish somewhere in the middle, with the occasional bomber or Trident plunging into their doom commuting inbetween the clusters. Quick fix: for every battle have a sector coordinate that's inbetween the Itani and Serco spawn points to be the "center" and have a 1000-2000m radius around that point that all npcs, fighters and capitals alike, would take priority on being inside before engaging a target; except the HACs and Connies: they would not have a target other than being inside 1000m of the "center" so that, hopefully, they should just be in range of bombarding the other capital ships. Another thing I would like to see is a turret weapon on HACs and Connies and such that's very high velocity, has splash damage (mostly for show) but is still contact detonation, has a much deeper collision sound than the current flare explosions sound, does a lot of damage (still not as much as yellow snowballs, but more than super gauss) has around a 3000m range, but can only target other capital ships. Just something to provide that broad-side to broad-side "bombarding" effect when HACs are idle and out of range of eachother. Oooh, and make the screen rumble for anyone docked in a HAC when one of the shots hits! (that last bit doesn't have to be implemented, but it would be pretty fun)

Extra-High-Velocity-Super-Rockets on HAC's to shoot at eachother would be awesome, Shank. I'd be more inclined to something more railgun-like, though..

HAC's need guns that can take down other capships even when shielded..

drawing on historical naval battles which would be the most logical basis for capital ship battles. If you don't know a lot about sailing ill probably loose you here but it would make great implimentation into the game. bad when old ship of lines would broadside each other the preferred position was to be windward of your target so you could angle your guns down at the exposed hull that usually sits below the water line thus sinking the ship if it where to tack.

likewise now we are in space with unlimited degrees of movement if your most powerfull firing position is your broadside and the enemies weakest point is still the "bottom" you would want to below your opponent and rotated 90 degrees. so in theory a capship fight say between two hacs should be a very slow chess game type dog fight that should not take more then 3000 meters to manuever into or out of position

so in theory a capship fight say between two hacs should be a very slow chess game type dog fight that should not take more then 3000 meters to manuever into or out of position

Ah, how I wish the capship AI were capable of such a thing...

I agree peytros, naval style engagements of fire and maneuver are what is needed here, not the strike-fast tactics employed by dog-fighters.