Yes! Not sure if this counts as "minor" or not but I highly recommend giving the cap ship turrets a boost in armor and power. They are far too wimpy right now.

The turrets are easily destroyed and aren't damaging enough to be a sufficient deterrent.

/me dances for joy and will buy momerath a beer next time I see him IRL. (Actually that goes for all the devs. Do I hear Water Street calling?)

Let's just see if spawning the IDV Sola in Jallik E-15 solves things. It will help tremendously. Baby steps.

And - let's really name the ship the "Solra" just to mess with "SolraBizna" It'll freak him out.

Thanks momerath42 for your help. I think spawning the Itani ship at Jallik e-12 would help.

But since we’re using Scenario 2 for the next battle I would ask that all the cap ships be spawned or DevWarped to their ready positions. That would cut down about 1 to 2 hours from the battle. So something like this would happen:

19:00 Cap ships are spawned in their capital systems. Players may enter the cap ships
19:10 Cap ships are dev warped to their ready positions (one at a time I guess)
(UIT -- Azek I-16, Serco -- Initros O-12 and Itani -- Edras H-15)
19:20 After all ships are in position players are given 10 min to get to the ready position of their ships.
19:30 Battle begins. After all sides report ready and the event coordinator says start.

Even starting the Itani cap ship in Jallik won’t really solve the underlying problem. The cap ships die too easily in 1 ion storm.

If you take the above suggestion we will save about 1.5 hours. I think fewer players have been involved because it takes to long to start the battle. No one wants to wait 1 to 2 hours to start. And it will give all side plenty of time to get into position.

This won’t stop the cap ships dieing enroute to Sedina B8, but the odds for their survival go up. And at least the battle would have started.

If you agree to devwarp all the cap ships into position we’ll have a battle this week. If not I’ll schedule it for next week.

Thanks Again
JB

Is it really necessary for them to start in the home systems? It would be much easier to just make them spawn at their ready points (and wait for however long). We can even make a new guide-executable command that does this. "Devwarping" is not what most people probably think; the teleport command doesn't work for non-players on the production server (it does work in our latest version).
I hope that we'll also have taken steps to make the capships harder to kill, though I don't expect to have fixed their penchant for humping asteroids by this saturday.

I thought people near their capital system (especially new players) might want to jump in there. But its not really necessary.

So you can have the cap ships spawned at there ready positions around 7pm GMt on this Saturday?

If you are sure you can do it I’ll post information for the next battle to the role-playing forums.

I did see one of the developers warp the itani cap ships once when the cap ships first came online.

(BTW is 7pm GMT a good time for you?)

My goal as always is to take some of the heat of the developers by adding some (limited) content to the game.

JB

OH, DUHHHH.

/me laughs at his own stupidity.

Yes, please just have them pop into adjacent sectors to B8 (Like A8, B7 and B9), wait 10 min then jump into B8. This would make the most sense and would TOTALLY make Jestatis happy.

That makes ME happy! Thanks Momerath. It's kind of nice that you can handle some of these little annoying things as you learn the code.

Leber mac its not about making me happy. Its about making everyone happy (and you not whining about losing 4 hours of your life every saturday :) (Btw it does make me happy though :)

So you need to set up 2 scripts i guess. One that starts the ships at: UIT -- Azek I-16, Serco -- Initros O-12 and Itani -- Edras H-15 for senario 2. And one that starts the ships at ajacent sectors to Sedina B8 for senario 1.

That would be very helpful to us all (including the guides). I guess with the new spawning places we could acually start the battle at 7:10pm GMT.

Thanks Again
JB

I'm really happy to help! I'll definitely add both those functions. Any input on how long the capships should hang out at their origins?

I'd suggest a 15 min holding pattern with a 10 min and 5 min remaining warning.

It takes awhile to form groups and assign jobs to every player. Some nations are better organized than others.

"though I don't expect to have fixed their penchant for humping asteroids by this saturday."

does this mean there will be an update on saturday?

/me hopes

No, who me?, we make little server-side changes all the time. I am in no way announcing anything; saturday referred to the day I assume we'll be having our next capship battle.

ah, well, ok

I agree with sarahanne, 15 Min seems fine to me. I'll re work the rules a little and announce the battle for this saturday later on today.

Thanks again

JB

Andy and I had a fun night of pair-programming. We've got a function to do the scenario 2 spawn as outlined. We also experimented with reducing the bots-per-player calculations in order to make it sensible to escort the capship instead of avoiding it to reduce the bot risk. We also upped the armor on the capship and its turrets, and changed the turret weapon type. I'm not sure how much of these additional changes we'll actually put in place, but I'm pretty sure the capships will last a lot longer. In our test we even got some fighting between the capships.

Outstanding. Now I hope I can make it Saturday! Aaaaaahhhh!

You finally got the caps to actually fight each other, how wonderful, can't wait to see that. How bout getting them some beam weapons next =) Keep up the good work.

Actually we did give them beam weapons last night. I'm not sure whether they'll get them on the production server; its up to incarnate I guess.

Is it possible to give the cap ships different weapons on different turret areas?

I think it would be interesting if you had to dodge different weapon fire in the same battle.

Eventually this could lead to the capships having missile turrets and players could bring ammo re-loads to the cap ship for these turrets.

The cap ships should be able to hold enough ammo for at least one battle, but it would be nice to have multiple kinds of turrets, but I think that is already in the works? I've seen caps with railguns before, missles/rockets would make the most sense against another cap ship thoug, plus the all mighty beam weapons momerath mentioned.