The Valk is not a bugged ship. Yes, the Valk is very good, with very few disadvantages. Yes, the Prometheus has too many weaknesses compared to the Valk, but that is not the Valk's fault. How much weapons weigh should be redone. There are many possibilities, one of which is to have each race have a different high level weapons, or if not that, have those weapons weigh different amounts for different races. For example, the Serco, according to the Backstory, were pretty behind when it came to development of new technology, but they were pretty good at making the existing tech better. How about the Serco have very light missles weps and other long range weps, and the Itani versions of those weps would be much heavier. If Serco had an advantage in such technology, it might help give the Prom a better chance against a Valk, for the Prom would be more manuverable with a heavy payload. Or, how about, if each race had thier own special high power weps, the Serco would get very high powered medium-heavy turreted [hence good auto-targeting] guns? There are many possibilities. Though I admit that at this moment the Prom is not all that formidable of a ship, I think there are better solutions than the ellimination or modification of the Valk. It's time for change, let's change the right thing.

I still think the valk has too much armour for its agility.

I'm all up for Serco having improved weaponary (its what we are good at, no)?

Lets start with some useable Sunflares ie. half the weight, double the damage, increase the speed ;-)

imho if all weapons but the mk3 were halved in mass, that would be a great start.

Weapons are not bugged. They work perfectly fine. The problem is that they are boring.

Speed of sunflares is just fine, but the weight has to drop A LOT.

why can't you just put in an inherent weightlimit for the weapons before it affects the agility of the ships...

example valk : 200 kg then it gets influenced

prometheus : 3000 kg then it gets influenced

wouldn't that help the balance. Its exactly as strength in an rpg determining your carrying weight before you are going to get encumbred and your speed is going to be influenced.

PS: I just slapped on some numbers, they are by far good, but it is just to give the idea behind it.

ooh.... I like, Rene, I LIKE :D

renegade, a1k0n is doing that i think, but he's going about it in a different, more logical manner.

reference post
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7745#91077

Essentially what a1k0n is trying to do (as far as I can tell from that post) is to give each ship model a specific engine (which has model-specific thrust and spin torque values) and a specific mass value calibrated to the engine values.

This would cause weapons and outfits with arbitrarily high mass values to have a much more significant effect on ships with lower mass values, and a lesser effect on a ship with a higher one.

For example:
VALK Scenario 1
Valkyrie 3000kg
Sunflare 1200kg
Sunflare 1200kg
-----------------
Total    5400kg -- an increase of a whopping 80%!

VALK Scenario 2
Valkyrie 3000kg
NutrnIII 200kg
NutrnIII 200kg
-----------------
Total    3400kg -- an increase of only 13.33%

Prom III Scenario 1
Prom III  5500kg
Sunflare 1200kg
Sunflare 1200kg
-----------------
Total    7900kg -- an increase of 43.64%

Prom III Scenario 2
Prom III  5500kg
NeutronIII 200kg
NeutronIII 200kg
------------------
Total    5900kg -- an increase of 7.27%

Valkyrie -> Prom III Scen 1: 45.45% decrease.
Valkyrie -> Prom III Scen 2: 45.46% decrease.

no, actually its much more interesting that that celkan.

By adjusting the mass and thrust ratios, the Prom would probably have a starting mass of around 15,000 or more. However because it's engine would be beefed up to the same extent, you would notice no difference in its handling when it is empty. However, adding 2400 mass to a ship that allready masses 15,000 is not as significant an increase as adding the same 2400 mass to a ship that only masses 3000.

To accurately represent this, lets use a measurement of the mass divided by the thrust, (i'll abbreviate this T). To base our examples, we will assume that when empty, every ship has a 1 to 1 mass to thrust ratio, such that while empty, all ships have the same acceleration and dodging ability, further for the sake of argument lets say that while empty, each ship can go from 0 - 100 m/s in 10 seconds. (obviously in the real game environment there will be variation, but for this example we'll give everything the same baseline.)

Ship 1.
Empty Mass, 3000
Gauss Cannon 1200
Gauss cannon 1200
Railgun 600
Total mass 6000. the ship has doubled in mass, cutting its T in half. The result of this is that the ship dodges half as fast. In a speed trial it will now take 20 seconds to reach 100m/s

Ship 2
Empty Mass 9,000
Gauss Cannon 1200
Gauss cannon 1200
Railgun 600
Total mass 12,000 - The ship only increased its mass by 33% it will take it 1.3334 times as long to dodge, and it will only take ~13 seconds to go from 0-100.

I think the Serco should get a missle that could be reasonably able to hit a Valk if fired fom a positive launch window, as well as turreted weapons that have a much better auto fire. What the Serco need are weapons where a slower less manuverable ship can hit a smaller faster ship. Not that the Serco shouldn't have fighters, but the Inati should have better ones and not that the Itani shouldn't have usefull larger ships, but the Serco should have beter ones.

Well I haven't been actively following everyhting spellcast.

I just wanted to answer this post in the post of icarus a little while ago, but it was closed a couple hours before I checked the site.

Since I didn't want to post any more of this BS about unbalancedness and being so appauled by it I thought I would just not state it and wait for another of these threads to pop up.

And as soon as it did I posted my idea. It seems however that somebody else already had that idea before me :D

Now, if just the devs put in some time or mayb even sarahanne to post a small in progress update about this stuff. then people would not have been complaining on and off about the unbalancedness.

Anyway, its in production so it will be available soon[TM]

cheers

I would disagree with the statement that a valk has too much armor.
In a neut III battle, the IDF takes a whopping 2 extra hits (2400 dmg) than a vult, and the rune takes just one extra neutron hit.

Add to this the fact that when firing at a valk, if you hit it with N3's, it generally gets hit more than once. i.e. once you get an angle on it, the stream is gonna be able to hit a few more times because of the available area to hit.

This is not generally true for the vult. You'll quite often hit it only once.

I think also that the idea of adding special missiles that will hit a valk is problematic, since there are many good serco pilots who want to use real strategy/skill, not just a weapon that immediately defeats any interesting maneuvers a valk pilot can come up with.

I do, however, believe that the reason why the valk is "bugged" is that it is currently the best platform for several N3's. Since they let it keep its speed and attack from nearly any available range. Against rockets you can keep a good distance and tag the person continuosly (much like rail strategies of auld)

Not so with gausses/rockets, which have ranges at which they are most effective. This makes them very interesting weapons to fight with, since the pilot needs to get into a range where his weapons will work.

These are, however, lesser weapons than N3's and will rarely be used outside of botting until the N3's have some inherent weakness.

I've said it before, but I think it is a very bad idea to have a weapon like the N3's as a prize. It's not like losing the prize forces one side to give up their N3's, since everybody stockpiles, such that the lack of availability of N3's is nothing more that a situational inconvenience. And even if the game were re-engineered such that one side DID lose access to them, the game would become so one-sided as to make it unplayable.

Simply speaking, there should be no superweapons in a skill-based game. Only special weapons that let capable pilots explore new strategies.

The CTC needs to be played for something else. Whether it be for control of a particular station, or for the economy of a nation, whatever. The game should not force its effect on every duel.

Give me my gausses back.

Actually Spellcast, that is EXACTLY what I was pointing out. The ratio of change with the sunflares differs by a factor of about 2 from the Prom III to the Valk, *by virtue of the Prom's already high mass rating*. Making it even higher would only serve to reduce that ratio of change even further.

Both the Valkyrie and Vulture are fine as is.

The devs should also consider the same treatment the Prom is getting for the Ragnarok, Warthog, etc. That would allow them to better use heavy weapons.

I also think Centurion should get a Thrust boost so the MkIII can out accelerate a Valk. (Note the Itani border guardian has the same mass and thrust of a MkIII but with more armor and an extra small weapon according to Vendetta Gate).

I think the ship buffs should come before any weapon changes.

Celkan: The problem there is that the prom is too slow to use the sunflares from the start, adding anything more on top of that simply kills off the already lame beast.

hmm, ok i see that now celkan, but your numbers are soooo much less interesting to look at than mine. :)

anyway, lets hope it happens soon(tm)

Spider, another way of looking at it is

If the prom gets X3 mass and X3 engine attributes, the effective weight of the sunflares becomes 400 to the new prom, as opposed to the 1200 they are to the current prom.

EDIT:! Which brings up a very interesting Idea in addition to increasing the mass and engine of the prom, we could also decrease the mass and engine of the valk, drop the mass to 2K and cut the engine by 25%. that would make it even more agile, but each weapon added would have a higher effective mass. the N3's would have an effective mass of 250 instead of 200. (every little bit helps?)

ooh. I'd like to fly that 2k valk with one NIII or something.

It might flip out like the centurion supposedly does if you lower its mass any further..

My only response to this is the NuetIIIs need nerfing bad, thier existance makes using most other weapons foolish if not suicide. They are vastly overpowered and take a lot of fun out of the game since you are pretty much required to use them to stand a chance in battle.