Arolte, when were you a pirate? Beta? we didnt have moths in beta... :P

Hmm, I have taken out about 63 moths since they were introduced, and its all usually because I either a) found a damaged moth (some of the moth pilots actually think 30% will get them home, so they dont repair, they are usually right) b) They havent really been that clever (but they learn, usually after i have been behind them for 3 systems, I get a *how the hell are you following me?*) and dont bother to change course (for 3 or more jumps) c) they have turned round to shoot me d) chased them into storms.

Yesterday I found Alamar out mining in his moth, in my Maud, I has 2x sunflares, and an Nt2 blaster, I promtly fired all my guns his way, died to the sf, undocked (i was homed there) and repeated the attack - I dont know exactly what HP i got him to, but he was sitting still. (and I still didnt get the kill)

The best moth killing setup actually used to be a cent mk2 (230 infiniboost and 1 s port, so how gavan is getting 2 blasters on one i will never know) or a Valk Rune (Also had infiniboost, but 220, 3 s ports) but both ships now drain.

Maybe dont nerf the moth, and maybe just make faster pirate ships, but as it stands, if your in a moth, your usually getting to where you are going, unless you are really dumb.

The best ship I know of for killing moths is a triflare valk, its quick, it can turbo on a full FC for around 10,000m, and its weapons take no energy. However, even though you outclass the moth by 50m/sec, its still quick, and it doesnt take long to get away. Also, with triflares you have to hit almost every single shot, if you miss more than 3 shots, you might as well turn around, as you wont have the firepower to take it down.

I load between sectors near instantly (sub 1 second) and am an extremely good chaser, even then someone with load times around 15 seconds and doesnt know anymore than how to press turbo can get away nearly everytime. Being able to follow your prey doesnt matter since if you arnt fully warped in when they warp out, you dont get the message. Also the warp in points in an empty sector can be over 1000m apart rather often, which means it doesnt matter anyways. If I had the ability to warp in with the same relative distance from the moth as it was when we warped out, then yes, they would be quite killable with the right ship, as it stands though they are for all intents and purposes invincible.

There also isnt a single energy weapon in the game that can kill a moth on one battery charge. Even taking an infiboosting ship and turbo tapping itll take signifgant time to actually kill. Keep the moths top speed how it is, but drop its accel by a third, and then a skilled pirate could catch a trader, and the trader would still have a good chance of getting away because of the retarded armor.

As for adapting, you name it, ive tried it. A hornet with weapons has such awful accel that it is seriously outclassed speedwise by a moth. Centurions can be ok if you can chase them through multiple sectors, but any experienced pilot isnt going to let that happen. Centaurs are too slow with weapons as well. Valks are good, but the same issue of energy comes up, which is why I use rockets on them. Mauds are turds AND targets, if you do somehow magically catch up to the moth, it starts dropping mines, and you start dying in one of those. vultures are borderline being usable, but the issue of energy comes up there as well, any vulture that stands a chance of catching a moth has a high enough drain that once it does catch it, it cant fire anything at it. Hogs dont stand a chance normally, although that TD might be able to catch up with one, it cant pack enough firepower to kill it alone. Rags are completely out of the question, as are other moths.

The talk about getting ahead of a moth and dropping mines just plain wont work, even if you are good enough at piloting to figure out by sight what angle you need to be at to get that distance ahead of them in the right spot, you simply dont have time, not to mention anything with an L port will be lucky if it can even catch it (TD hog excluded, but whats one mine going to to a full speed moth? absolutely nothing, string a moth with 10 flares and it barely budges, a single mine isnt even going to scratch the paint.)

Slowing down the moths accel wouldnt make it worthless either, since it still has the largest cargo hold in the game by far. It would just make it more like a transport ship, instead of a monster truck with nitrous, uranium armor, a house sized trailer, and the ability to mount artillery cannons upon it.

Im willing to take the running moth challenge myself, except I get to bring weapons, and you can bring however many people you want to hunt me with you like.

I wasn't sitting _that_ still after you fired, but I say still _when_ you fired. you did two runs at me and got me into the 30% range.

I considered repairing after the first attack, but thought I'd fill up anyway. this is so utterly b0rken. I shouldn't even consider mining more after getting attacked, I should run for the hills.

Tramshed, I said it before and I'll say it again... the Hornet needs a serious boost in thrust. There is no question about it. Anyone who disagrees will get slapped by me.

=P

mmhh create a ubership to beat a ubership...

hornets are already quite deadly... and I fear that if you beef them up a bit more you are going to make the valk useless. Although valks are still way mroe agile then any hornet... (not to mention don't get rocked around so much as a hornet when it gets hit by a darned flare...)

I doubt a boost in thrust will make the Hornet uber. Torque and size seem to be main factors involved in that, and the Hornet isn't about to beat a Valk or a Centurion in that respect. It just needs more thrust so that it can carry its own weight.

There's no point in giving a ship that many weapon ports if it'll just slip and slide everywhere with a full loadout, or take forever to speed up. Take a look at the Ragnarok for example. It's not uber but it has enough thrust to carry its own weight around.

Only deadly hornets I ever see are either missle-spamming boats, surprise railers or ones with less than four weapons.
And while the energy hornets might have a vague chance of dodging a string of energy weapons, rockets chew them up like water.

I don't missile spam in my zornet... nor use rails... but you do make a valid point.

Rockets are their weak spot but also their strong point... since they can make mincemeat of anyhting that moves very very fast... even faster then with a rag (MGC).

But we can always try to make them better. Still i wanna hear some more opinions from people.

PS: but im offtopic again :( ...sigh...

Yeah sorry, didn't mean to go off topic. I think I made a suggestion about the Hornet in the ship balance tweak thread that was made in the general forum a while back. If anyone else has anything more to add to that we might want to move our discussion there...

http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/10687

i'm availible pretty much anytime arolte.. hows 4:00 PM EST for you if you are still interested

Huh. I actually did nerf the Moth turbo acceleration last time we did a balance update. Or I thought I did. A little surprised this is still a big issue.

So what is it now? How tough would it be to add turbo thrust to the ship stats screens in-game? I didn't know you had changed it. Also, are you ever going to change N to kN?

Personally, I think lowering the max turbo speed would be better than decreasing the thrust. I'd say try it at 180m/s, I'd guess that would probably still be too fast, but might be OK, and if it is still to fast it could be slowed down another 10m/s.

OKAY:!

so i bring up the vendetta client at 3:50pm today to log in, connect to the patch server, its verifying files and
*BOOM*
this thunderstorm rolls in like nobody's buisness, knocks out power to my entire street, and they just got it back on about 5 minutes ago.

If you were looking for me arolte, well, we can reschedule if you still want to test it. i get off of work at 7pm tomorrow so i can play between 7:30 and 8:30pm EST.

anyway, what did you lower the turbo thrust to incarnate, because I havent really noticed any difference in how it handles.

incarnate,

the reason this is still a big issue is the prevailing opinion is wrong about how the moth needs to be nerfed.

It doesn't need to be slower, it needs less armor. The moth is already catchable (by the admitence of even the stongest "nerf the moth" supporters) and the slowest trade ship available. the problem is it's also a tank. Pirats can't take a running moth down, not because they can't catch up to it but because they can't do enough damage during the time they have before it can escape. After all i've even heard stories of how stationary moths are too tough to kill.

Think about real world transports: A transport ship will be slower than a warship, but the main reason the warship is able to threaten the trade ship is because one good hit from a deck gun of any caliber will sink the transport.

Now given that the moth has a lower top turbo speed than any other ship (with the posabl;e exception of the bus) then we can assume that the unbalanced factor is the moth's armor (which is higher than any other player operated ship presently in the game).

Try cutting the moth's armor to 50% or 70% what it is now. I can garantee that it will make the moth more piratable.*

If anyone doubts this logic think about what would hapen if every moth you ran into started the battle at 50%. After all many pirats can get a moth down to 50% to 30% in the space of one sector.

Beolach,
I don't think you realy understand what lowering the armor will do. Even if the moth only had 50% it's current armor a decent pilot can still survive an attack from a single tri-flare valk. Some of the rockets will have to miss, but that will be made a lot more likely if the valk has to deal with escorts in order to line up it's attack. And if the pirat is using energy weapons he will have to get in closer range to sucessfuly attack the moth. And what about repair guns? they could concevably (i don't se this ever hapening but a more practicle aproach may exist) allow a convoy of moths to repair each other on the fly. there is also a psychologicle effect. A player looking at the stats of the moth now comes away thinking that it is invulnerable because of it's extreemly high armor. So they don't bother hiring escorts. But if the moth is vumnerable enoug (and visably vulnerable enough) that it can be reliably killed by a competint pirat then traders would be more willing to hire escorts.

Also think how much more willing traders would be to pay if they know they are in killable range and are sitting on 120cu of mission cargo.

And finaly, remember: the moth shouldn't be the easiest pray around but it should be easier to kill than it is now. and given the extra payoff for catching one, it should be worth the effort.

*disclaimer, i do not garantee that the exact amount of nerfing i perposed will make it perfectly balanced, just that it will make the moth more piratable and be a step in the right direction (as opposed to weaking it by reducing it's thrust).

> Beolach,
> I don't think you realy understand what lowering the armor will do.

Heh, you don't think I understand what it would do, I don't think you understand what it would do. :-p Here's the thing, it has to be possible to kill, but not too easy to kill. Ideally, I'd say 1 Moth fleeing from 1 pirate should have roughly 50% chance of surviving, and 50% chance of being destroyed. If we start lowering the armor of the Moth in order to achieve that goal, the balance point of where the Moth achieves that 50% probability depends greatly on what the pirate is using to chase it. What that means is that there will be one specific ship & loadout that would be the best at destroying the Moth, and we have a choice between two options, both of which I think are bad. Either we can balance the Moth's armor so that if the Pirate is using the best ship & loadout to chase it then they have that 50% probability, but that has the problem of effectively removing variety from the game, because there would only be one pirate ship & loadout that would be worthwhile; or the other option would be to lower the Moth's armor even further, so that other pirate ships have the 50% chance of killing it, but now we have the problem of the Moth having less than a 50% chance of survival if the pirate is using the best anti-moth ship.

All of that is just looking at 1v1 Moth vs. Pirate. When we consider escorts, I still think lowering the max turbo speed is a better solution than lowering the armor. Here's the difference: if we lower the armor, we are effectively making it so it takes less time to destroy the Moth, while if we lower the turbo speed, we are giving the pirate more time in which to overcome the Moth's armor. Consider 1 Moth with 1 escort, being attacked by 1 pirate. Usually, the pirate should lose, since this is a 2v1 battle. You said "Even if the moth only had 50% it's current armor a decent pilot can still survive an attack from a single tri-flare valk. Some of the rockets will have to miss, but that will be made a lot more likely if the valk has to deal with escorts in order to line up it's attack.", but I think you are overestimating how difficult an escort would make it for the pirate to destroy the Moth. If the pirate just ignores the escort, he'll probably be able to destroy the Moth: sure, the escort will probably destory the pirate, too, but that just means that this is a situation where everyone loses - the trader loses his cargo, and the pirate doesn't gain it. I'd say a lose-lose scenario like that would be worse than the guaranteed Moth wins scenario we have now. On the other hand, if the Moth keeps its high armor, but has a lower max turbo speed, then it will take the Pirate a longer period of time to destroy the Moth, which gives the escort enough time to have a chance of destroying the pirate before the Moth booms.

I very much agree with Beolach, a slower moth is a lot more interesting for gameplay than a less armored moth. also, I had 51% left after doing a run against 5 people through 5 systems in grey. if you removed 40% armor, I'd still be alive.

the biggest problem with the moth is the same as any infiboost ship these days, if it gets a leg up on a fighter, it's damn hard to catch _and_ kill.

Get a group of 10 people with rails. That'll do it.
I mean HOW DO YOU MISS A BEHEMOTH!? Heck 5 people with rail guns should do it. I mean you can't run from a rail gun. 1500m distance. The problem with these other guns is they top out at 600m. SO it takes more than one person... SO WHAT?!?! If grey space was more profitable you'd have more moths and more pirates grouping up to take down moths. Right now its just not worth it. If there was a constant stream o' moths running through bait, then that would be interesting :)

/givemoney Devs 2c

I think some of you are fooling yourselves if you are calling yourselves pirates, flying things with less than 120 cu and trying to pirate things with 120 cu. A pirate has to be able to haul his booty back to port. Unless you have a 'pirate' or two hanging around in an empty moth, taking down a moth is purposeless. You won't be able to haul back much of any of it's cargo. And after you start shooting at them, I doubt they'll stop to type out a /givemoney command (nor do I know why they would bother in any ship).

I see that as actually being a completely seperate problem, Siro. There really needs to be a good pirate ship with decent cargo. I think that's a niche the Marauder should fill, but doesn't.

But, I would still say that the Moth is still too fast & should be slowed down.

Nah it's really easy.

Kill the moth
Grab a moth
Collect Cargo
Profit