Welcome to Vendetta Online 1.8.111

Changelog:
*** Vendetta 1.8.111
- EC-89 and free battery are now available at the conquerable
station so players cannot strand themselves there.
- Conquerable station defense turret hitpoints have been quadrupled.
- Conquerable station defense turrets now respawn after 10
minutes instead of 15 minutes.
- Conquerable station defense turrets should now try to fly back
to their position if knocked away.
- There is a 2 minute wait period between when all conquerable
station defense turrets are destroyed and the station can be
docked to in order for the station to be conquered.
- Improvements to conquerable station defense turret targeting
system.
- Trade Guild mission no longer disconnects the player when the
mission is taken.

Nice update! Fast, too.

Overkill.

I think it won't be long before people adapt their strategies and it ceases to be overkill. But things like turret HPs are easily dialed down in any case. In the meantime, you guys can continue testing and providing feedback.

I approve of the increase in health, but I'd say either to decrease it to only doubled health or dial the 10 minute respawn back up to 15 minutes. Other than that - perfect.

ShankTank: Seconded.

Huge overkill: double the HP, leave the 15 minutes as is.

Underkill: When destroyed, the turrets should explode so violently as to destroy all players within 20,000m.

lol Sounds good to me.

Better yet: Make the turrets not explode, but "disable" until the last turret gets destroyed. Then all turrets explode simultaneously with a splash radius of your choice!

Or alternatively: When disabled, they turn into Lightning-Mines ..and then explode like above when the last one is destroyed!

Last night when we conquered the stations the turrets respawned instantly and killed me and several others before the owner could distribute the keys. They were supposed to take 10 minutes?!

Or, better yet, the turrets could be huge clusters of Devlons. Or ponies. Gauss and missile spewing ponies. That explode.

Impavid: "respawn" time is based on the assumption that the station has not been conquered, then it takes 10 minutes for a "killed" turret to respawn. If the statio is conquered, the turrets are immediately reinstantiated, bringing the defenses online and allowing for immediate re-conquest by someone else. So, yes, you'll probably want to fly away from the station for a bit, while the conquering person hands out keys.

The defenses are not overkill in my opinion. 5 of us took them out in around 40 minutes just now, and we didn't really know what we were doing. I think if I tried it again, I could do it in less time with fewer people now. Granted, there were no players defending it, but I think even with player defense, it'd be fairly easy to take it, as long as you had as many people on your side as the defenders did. I guess we'll see for sure as the week goes on and we test it more.

The missiles are way overkill. Make them have only one missile in the air at a time (per turret), and/or make then so they can be dodged. As it is, even a vult3 with a single hx will not out spin roll one of them, and even if you do manage to dodge it turns around and comes back very quickly.

I would like for it to be next to imposable to solo an undefended station, but just next to imposable, not actually imposable. Something a highly experienced player could at least in theory do with determined effort. I tried hiding behind roids with plasma hx, but could never get within weapons range before those missiles got me. I would not like for a single player to be able to just overwhelm a station with stingrays, but actually have to employ some skill. I think just about any two newbs with stinger/gems rags should have a shot at simply overwhelming an undefended station.

On the other hand, I would like the station defenses to be an effective force multiplier of two or even three to one, so that if there are players actively defending the station, it would require two or three times their numbers (or skill) to overwhelm them.

Are the turrets all supposed to have the same amount of armor? They currently don't. 2 out of 8 of the turrets have about 4x the armor of the others. I think these may be the missile turrets, but I'm not sure. Is it supposed to be this way or is it a bug?

I strongly disagree with Roda. Station should not be soloable. At that point it just makes it too easy to capture in groups. I think it should take a minimum of 4 coordinated and skilled players, or 6-10 average players. And those numbers should obviously increase with more players.

I do not think stations should be soloable.

I agree they should not be soloable, but I don't think you should make the relevant numbers (HP vs respawn time) so far apart that two or three skilled pilots cannot take down an undefended station. VO simply isn't big enough to impose that sort of population requirement. I'd rather the defenses be harder to take out than require sheer numbers of noobs in rags to crush in X minutes.

The most obvious way to do this is to up the HP of the turrets, which gives defenders a better shot at killing attackers and repairing damaged turrets before they're killed off, while also making respawn time more reasonable -- 15-20 minutes, depending on how heavy the HP jump is.

I suspect that three skilled, organized pilots could conquer an undefended station as-is. But, we'll see.