there have been a few posts in roleplaying concerning the tendency of some people to start a fight and then run away when they begin to lose, and part of what this stems with is the fact that it is far too easy to flee from combat.

Some of the fact that running is easy is because a true balance has yet to be achieved in the game, there is no true "rock/paper/scissors" balance yet.

However no matter what we do to the ship stats unless a basic fundamental about turbo is changed, running will always be too easy, due to the way ships accelerate under turbo.

We know that a ship can have a different turbo thrust than its regular thrust, as evidenced by the behemoth, sooo

WHAT IF.....
we make it so that the higher the top turbo speed the SLOWER the turbo acceleration? bear with me here for a moment, i know this idea sounds just a little odd at first.

first lets break the turbo's down into three variants..

[high speed] A ship with a very high top turbo (+5 to +20 depending on the base hull) speed would take a while to get up to speed. (10 seconds maybe?)

[normal] Ships with the normal top turbo (for that hull) would have medium turbo accel (5 seconds to get up to max speed?)

[high accel] ships with low top turbo (-5 to -20 depending on the base hull) would accelerate very quickly (2-4 seconds), but be overtaken on any significantly long chase.

What this would allow, (once we get the basic ship hulls balanced against each other) is 3 variants of each engine type.

maybe it could even be implimented by putting back in a variant of the engine slot, you then choose which turbo package you want to have. high speed, normal, or high accel, depening on the role you have in mind for your ship.

EDIT- wow this post is disorganized.. thats what i get from thinking on the fly.. i'll come back and update it later after i get my thougts more in order.

I'm sick and tired of hearing people bitch about people running away. If you are so bent on getting a kill, chase after them, kill them in a station zone, do something, instead of whine about how they ran away. You Let Them!!!!

Wether you've started the fight, just jumped in on someone elses battler, or were asked to fight, "retreating" to heal, is OK!!! and has nothing to do with balancing issues.

There will NEVER be a balance in the ships, it's just not going to happen, one will fall out of sink, get fixed and another will fall out. An endless battle, I'd rather have the time put into getting the leviathon up and running and a few more cap ship scripts in place personally.

There is NO RULE that says that a player must stay in a fight and die. They are free to fall back from a fight and let someone else take the brunt of an attack, they are welcome to find a repair boat and get some nanite love, they are welcome to jump to a station zone and heal. Stop giving people greif for not wasting there money.

Spellcast, I like the idea!

I like the idea too. More variety is a G_ood T_hing(TM).

And I should stop playing with t_hi_s.

john, do me a favor and delete/edit your post. This thread is not about running away.

I'm not complaining that anyone ran away.. I'm posting a suggestion to a percieved problem in the community, a problem that applies to far more than breaking off from combat. Pirates have almost no chance of catching a trader, bounty hunters cant catch someone who has a bounty, ships can make attack runs on the cap ships with relative ease by making a long turbo run.. etc.

I'm suggesting an idea that would allow for more variation in play style, and hopefully have a balancing effect on combat.

And yes balance IS possible.. way back when during alpha we had a very nicely balanced set of ships and weapons, the devs are just adding so much new content atm that it doesnt make sense for them to retweak everything with each new change to gain balance.

I like it. People can't just fly around till they have an optimum entry point for a battle. Makes escorts vital.

Nice.

"This thread is not about running away"
LOL

do you think that this idea will help pirates catch traders easier? If you do there is something that I am missing, after all, if light ships take longer to accelerate (higher turbo speed) and trading ships accelerate faster (lower turbo speed) then it makes it easier for the traders, not the other way around.

I really need to re-organize the original post..

mousepad
the change is more for adding diversity within the ship class itself, not as much as a change between different ship classes.

High turbo/low accel is based off of the base speed of the hull in question.

Taking the "high accel" mod on say.. a centurion would bring its top turbo speed down closer to that of a "normal" centaur, but it would hit its top speed faster than it does now, making it a better close range interceptor... It would be less able to run from a "normal" centurion or a "high turbo" centurion tho, because over any significant distance they would have a large speed advantage over it. (at the very least the pilot with the high accel mod is hopefully gonna have to stop turboing and change course a few times to throw off pursuit, instead of just being able to turbo straight out to 3k)

and i'm still not making a lot of sense..

(this is the reason i usually edit my posts on notepad for days before i copy them into the forums)

Plus the light ship will even less battery by the time it catches up. Also, since a trader has better short term acceleration, he can simply turbo for short lengths then change direction slightly, making it impossible for the light to ever catch up.

[edit]ya... this is the impression I get from the original post. I'll hold off until you rework it.[/edit]

Interesting idea Spellcast...however I'm not quite sure if I'm percieving it correctly.

First of all, and most obviously, a ship with a higher top speed will take longer to get to that speed. That's just the natural way it works...more numbers to get up. And the acceleration decreases as the speed nears the max, so those trying to get to a top speed will take longer.

However, I think you mean a more exaggerated sense of this. However, in usage in game, it seems awfully similar to range in ships.

The way you prefaced the suggestion, on preventing running away, led me to this. The same idea is already implemented-in batteries, drain, and top speed.

When someone has a high top speed, they often have a higher drain, making them able to run quickly for short bursts-therefore easier to catch by the long-range ships. This hurts their ability to run away.

The same idea applies for the inverse. Those ships with a low drain but low top speed lumber along and are easier to catch by the quick ships.

I realize that what you suggested has to do with something completely different, thrust and speed, but I think in game the two will end up looking similar and having similar affects.

I don't mind if i'm in a heavy and a small ship runs away from me in a heated blaster fight, but it completely ticks me off back when people would sit far back and shoot all the missiles they could and then jump out. or they fight and draw you back to 3000m out and then leave. even though i would have won 9/10 times, i never would kill them, but they got that 1/10 kills.

We need a high-speed low-manouverability missile.
Something with a speed of 250 to 300, that will hit you if you keep turboing away, but will miss if you stop turbo and dodge it. It'll probably also miss if shot at you from the side.

That missile would be useless in a fight, but very usefull to get a running target. So pirates would love it, a capship could use it against those missile rags.

*COUGH COUGH!!!*
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9080
*wheeze* *COUGH COUGH!!!!*

look at Firefly and Stingray.