Forums » Suggestions

Changes to the Behemoth

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Jan 07, 2006 ctishman link
"I'm all for giving it MORE ports instead of less, as long as it can't run from everything. (a moth with two L ports and one S would be VERY welcome in the universe for mining)
"

Did you even read Apoc's initial post? His point (with which I agree) is that the Moth is far too common, and that nobody uses anything else because the Moth does everything. I'm sure it'd be welcome for miners to have the moth do more, but that would further reduce the usage of every other ship.
Jan 07, 2006 Renegade xxRIPxx link
i don't use it to dogfight nor do i use it to fight anything...

i do use it for trading (factionwhoring) and mining and only just for getting miningxp up, but really I don't care that pirates have it rough... they should have it rough in stead of easy as they have had it always... even during alpha... And as people stated, there are pirates who can kill moths but not always or even a lot, but aren't you at least proud on that and don't you feel elitist in stead of being able to pwnzr that 100th moth in the exact same fashion. If your objective is money then go trad eor mine. If your objective is to feel elitist then be a pierat... If you make pirating just as easy as it was before you'll end up with a population of 90% pierats and 10% traders... and that is unsurvivable...

We traders already have to do boring runs to get some money and be antagonized by people willing to reap major profits (we lose a ship and the cargo and fail the mission if we die, you just lose a ship...) by picking on ships that can't fight back...

as if fighitng in any whip loaded with cargo is a possibility... its just a guaranteed funeral ever since the introduction of cargoweight and the vulnerability during warp.

Maybe before that introduction i would have agreed with everyhting postulated, but at the moment... no.
Jan 07, 2006 fooz2916 link
Don't forget about the ecomony redux, where the factions' supplies will be tied to trading. There should be an extremely profitable trade run across gray space, which would have a significant impact on the factions. If all traders are shot down, gray space takes a big hit. I'm sure that there would be some pirates that are aligned to a faction (through investment in stock), and will actually protect traders to that faction.

Trading in a lone moth SHOULD be extremely dangerous in gray space however, so knock the top speed to 150-160.
Jan 07, 2006 Spellcast link
renegade, are you playing the same game as I am????

If you dont want to risk combat there are several thoulsand sectors in nation monitored space where you can be almost perfectly safe. go there and trade. (hopefully the economy redux will make it worthwhile)

The moth should be extremely veunerable, especially in a place like greyspace which is uhh SUPPOSED TO BE LETHAL AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. and pirates have NEVER had it easy, where did you come up with that ridiculous idea.

there were 90% pirates/combatants in the alpha because thats all the game was, a combat oriented network test engine for the server code.
Jan 07, 2006 Lord Q link
Spellcast,
i understand what you are trying to acomplish by slowing the moth down, but the moth isn't big enough to be the center of those sorts of battles. the moth fills the same role in VO as the firefly class in the television series by the same name. it's a civilian transport that can carry a respectable quantity of cargo efficently. It's not ment to have a fleet of escorts everywhere it goes. (not because it can't be killed, but because it dolesn't carry so much cargo as to be a worthwile target). the epic battles around cargo transports should center around capitle sized transports, not around moths.

think about it:
can one moth load of cargo pay for 3 escorts?
can one moth load of cargo make attacking a moth worthwhile for 2-5 pirats?

and the problem isn't with the low cost of trade goods, it's with the fact that the moth just isn't that valuable a target
Jan 07, 2006 fooz2916 link
If a full moth isn't in danger in gray space, then what is?

"think about it:
can one moth load of cargo pay for 3 escorts?
can one moth load of cargo make attacking a moth worthwhile for 2-5 pirats?

and the problem isn't with the low cost of trade goods, it's with the fact that the moth just isn't that valuable a target"

Which is why trading in gray space should be much more profitable, so you can afford an escort, and the pirates actually make some money off a lone moth pretty easily.

Nerf moth speed to 150-160 so the pirate can actually catch and kill the moth. Add a 10K good that goes for 15K on the other side of gray space, that's 600K per mothload, and 10% can go to an escort (probably in a Tang Taur, which makes 250K off it's own cargo). If the pirates get the cargo, that's 1.2+ mil (1.8 if they finish the trade run)
Jan 07, 2006 FSNI link
A full moth is definitly in danger if pursued by a fast ship and a dedicated pilot...as things stand is almost perfectly balanced...IMO.

If I am running thru CLM occupied grey space (or even UIT space) I will switch to the tung taur and go twice or more rather than attempt a straight run in the moth...how many of you people have actually tried to catch a moth away from B8?

If your experience is in B8 where there is always something to watch and people flying all ninny-nonny its merely a case of not noticing me until I am 2000+ meters out, and thats too late to start chasing.

I get popped in me moths when I am surprised by a WH camper, who is waiting for a target, is close enough to figure my vector, and smart enough to figure out where I'll be in a few minutes and follows me to the jump...there the flares knock me a bit, I tumble thru the jump, and on the otherside, with the luck and persistance of a pro, its rinse and repeat....

Oh, and if you fire willy nilly as the moth is fleeing, you drain your battery and you can't follow the jumps...fire less, fly more. Wait for the shot....

Just a tip or two from a moth-runner in grey...spread out from B8! Space is big! Post sentries! Talk to each other, no matter how fast the ship, It can't out run the radio...

MAM
Jan 07, 2006 Lord Q link
fooz2916,
you missed the point. a moth should be in danger of being attacked but not be the center of an Epic battle between pirats and escorts.
if the moth is too hard for a lone pirat to catch (i'd say a good pirat should have a 50-50 chance of catching a moth provided they do everything right) than the problem is the moth has too muct armor, cut it's armor to 75% it's current amount. and see how that does. cutting the armor makes the moth take less time to kill so that it can be killed in the available time.

there should, and (i hope will) be a larger capitle class freighter that can carry enough cargo to be worth hiring a multitide of escorts to protect. these transports operated primarily by guilds should be slow as heck, but have Gigantic carying capacitys to make them worthwile targets for an entire guild of pirats.
Jan 08, 2006 Renegade xxRIPxx link
spellcast the game is still only a combat oriented network test engine for the server code (and the devs know it and are working on it).

But ever since the introduction of the moth, there has finally been a halt to the dumb idea that traders need to be targets for jack and joe with the hat. Pirating wasn't that easy during alpha because you had at least a chance to fight back, but now, ever since the introduction of cargoweight tradeships have been considered to be targets. And i'm not playing a game to be a target, i'm playing this game to make sure that luck/skill name it whatever you want make me able be successfull. Not because some people think all traders have to do is fly from point x and deliver to point y and let ourselfs be harvested on a daily base while they consider themselfs to good to do it themselfs. If you do ocnsider yourself so elite, well you finally have soemthing that tests your eliteness or luckyness and now you want it to dissapear since it makes pirating to damned hard... something that is part of the game, but of something which I don't think it is supposd to be done by 90% of the population... that is just not sustainable... it will just end in people stopping with trading or trading while there are very little people on. (That is what happened during alpha - beta... although cargo was for most people then secondary... they just wanted to blow people up)...

And then if you didn't notie more and more people started to populate the server, and you saw the influence of pirates on people... in hte end there where many people that jut quit trading, since all you did was fly to a sector, get blasted and lose more then you could gain. Which then got solved by the devs by adding a way bigger universe. A universe that is now so thinely populated that it takes ages for somebody to be seen and for a pirate to find a target.

If you want to complain that pirating anything is to damned hard, then the reason for it is that its so easy to remain unnoticed by people due to the lack of online people and due to the abundant amount of runoption/hide options. And not solely because of a ship... I think that has been made quite clear by the convoys that have been appearing and being killed so massively and last time i noticed they contained moths as well...even although it are only bots... but some people act like bots as well with their /+turbo bind...
Jan 08, 2006 UncleDave link
"spellcast the game is still only a combat oriented network test engine for the server code (and the devs know it and are working on it)."

No.

GREY SPACE IS SUPPOSED TO FOSTER NON-CONSENSUAL CONFLICT BETWEEN PLAYERS. And I'm not sure what game you were playing, but tradeships have never been able to fight back against their predators- nor even run effectively until the behemoth/weight system arrived. You totally fail to take into account that what slowed the tradeships down (cargo mass) also slowed down the pirates (prohibitive sunflare mass) along with other tweaks to make pirating harder (most ships losing the infiniturbo or 55/s drain.) You also assume the game is going to revolve around one man's quest against the universe- this is not the direction the game is going in. Have you SEEN the size of some of the bot convoys? And can you imagine how awesome it would be to get a player one that size together? That's the situation the behemoth is INTENDED for. It shouldn't be able to outrun a lone pirate as easily as it can now- even groups of 2 or 3 have trouble taking down a moth. Pirating is supposed to be hard NOT because the trade ships move like Road Runner, but because the repercussions are great enough to make your life very hard (as in the bounty system, for instance, or faction hits in monitored space.)

STOP talking out your ass, and realise you'll need to fear pirates instead of being able to run 100% of the time.
Jan 08, 2006 Renegade xxRIPxx link
uncledave...

In my mind, the game is nothing more... and that is the reason why they are working on the content... but most of the content that is in place is either broken or in between fixings... just think about the hive, the ctc part, the...

thats is just utter bs, maybe they weren't as effective as they are unloaded now, but they sure were able to fend off decently for themselves and could kill pirates. Maybe not the ultimate pirates/pk-ers like icarus and phoenix, but many times while i was trading you had a chance in fighting back. The marauder with tripple flares was decent at countering valks, not perfect but it was possible, and multiple times I did so. Nor was i the only one. In most cases people just preferred to drop a mine (delaying person in pursuit) since they didn't want to stop on their traderun since practically everybody found trading the most boring and senseless job to get money which turned many to pirating since it was more exiting... again draining the number of traders. Anyway the weight might cripple pirates a bit, but seeing as i, as trader, never leave home without equipped weaponports I am just as much crippled in that regard, so please don't start with that...

There is a difference between non consensual conflict, and the point i'm trying to make. I always hear the same thing coming through, i can't kill that tradeship every time... There are people that can kill a moth, it takes some more teamwork, skill or whatever you might wanna call it. But in the end it diversifies people who are able to sucessfully do it from the people that aren't. And those peoplet that are able to do so now have something to be proud on... in stead of being the 10000th person able to kill a dumb moth, just like being able to pirate a regular centaur means nothing now... Its the same thing as medals...

Yes i have seen the size of such a convoy, i have seen htem getting owned by 1 person (but i'll just state that is the AI's fault). I don't really see the specialness of a group of 15 people doing something like that together... nothing special... gets done pretty much every day...

My point is however that if you reduce the moths ability, i won't ever bother to go into grey space to trade... especially not once the universe gets more populated and you'll encounter practically a pirate in every sector... since that is what you are trying to make the game into... for a successfull game you need to make sure that a small minority is preying on your moneydelveries, otherwise people just won't bother to invest in things with such a risk... It is still non consensual pvp, but its not like every jack and joe can do it...
Jan 08, 2006 ctishman link
Okay y'all, cool down the rhetoric, and stick to the facts. I admit I started heating things up with my comment to Cunjo, but it's getting hard to actually get to the points of your posts, sandwiched as they are between layers of "you missed my point" and "I don't know what game you're playing".

Please keep it straight and to the point, as you're not arguing to convince your detractors. You're arguing to convince the devs.

My 2c: The problem with taking down a Moth is that there's no incentive to work on harder targets as a group. Whoever fires the shot that kills the Moth gets most of the XP and first crack at the cargo. I think that to solve this, we need a system to enforce even splits of XP, cargo-related sales profits and mission-related rewards between all of the members of a group. With that in place, individual pirates who couldn't take down a single target would work together to kill it, and share the credit.
Jan 08, 2006 Spellcast link
My point is however that if you reduce the moths ability, i won't ever bother to go into grey space to trade...

Ummm, I think this is the point we are trying to make renegade.
A moth shouldnt be IN greyspace not without escorts anyhow. grey space is supposed to be dangerous. Choosing to take a lone moth through sedina,odia,bractus should be a heart pounding worry-fest with a very low probability of survival, Be it from PC pirates or an NPC menace.

especially not once the universe gets more populated and you'll encounter practically a pirate in every sector... since that is what you are trying to make the game into...
Please stop putting words into our mouths. we arent trying to make the game into anything of the sort. What we would like is for greyspace, an area that is supposed to be very dangerous to traders, to be, umm very dangerous to traders.

for a successfull game you need to make sure that a small minority is preying on your moneydelveries, otherwise people just won't bother to invest in things with such a risk... It is still non consensual pvp, but its not like every jack and joe can do it...

I dont see it like this renegade. I see it as a small minority of the traders should be willing to risk the insane danger of greyspace for a significant profit.

IMO if you want to do a 'safe' traderun you should pretty much be restricted to nation monitored space, where the strike force 'police' are there to defend you from career pirates. The game needs some changes, to make the above scenario feel right;

An economy rebalance would help by making modest profit availible inside nation territory and giving greater rewards for venturing out into grey space.

Getting the hive code (and the hive hunt missions) worked out so that the hive can expand to the whole universe, allowing stations to offer missions to clear out the direct routes between them and the nearest wormhole inside nation space to make trading safe there.

Slowing down the moth to make it a true bulk carrier. There is almost always a tradeoff between the amount of cargo a vessel can carry and how fast it can deliver it. Small volume transports are usually used for quick delivery, Large volume transports almost always take significantly longer to deliver the cargo, but make up for it in lower operating cost per item delivered, since they can haul a lot at once.

the last thing that is needed is to make it more worthwhile for pirates to work together. one good way to do this would be to massively increase the value of some high end cargo's. If they cost 10,000 to buy and sell for 13K or so on an average run then it's worth the effort for pirates to group up to take out such a ship.
Jan 08, 2006 ctishman link
If they cost 10,000 to buy and sell for 13K or so on an average run then it's worth the effort for pirates to group up to take out such a ship.

I think this is a great idea.
Jan 08, 2006 Renegade xxRIPxx link
well then have it your way, i gave my opinion...

But then you will need to seriously increase the profits o nthe items since i still get more money easier by trading in safe space.
Jan 08, 2006 Lord Q link
am i the only one who doesn't think a moth is supposed to be the true bulk freighters?

i mean in the backstory there were mining ships bigger than a HAC! Those are what you should be teaming up to pirat, not a moth and it's 5 escorts.
Jan 08, 2006 Shapenaji link
I totally agree about the pricier goods, if we had a million cred mothload to take down, we might have a reason to gang up.

And I agree with Spell that a moth should NOT be traveling through Greyspace. It would be the thing that separates the newbie traders from the experienced ones.

As it is, you don't need to employ any tactics or tricks to evade a pirate, you just hit turbo and absorb damage.

My Hog CAN take out a moth in 1 sector, on condition that the moth appears right next to me at the wh. If it doesn't, I have to turbo to get to it, and then I've got roughly 450 energy to spend, with little-to-no recharge time. With my layout, that's 27000 damage roughly.

Get a second person you say? well sure, but here's a snag for you:

if they bring mines, I do about a third of that damage, at best. Meanwhile, the mines get BETTER with more people attacking.

Indeed, why do we have to team up against a single person ship?!

Team up against the HAC's or the midfrigates, but the lil ships?
Jan 08, 2006 fooz2916 link
Grayspace Trading Now:

Moderately efficient
Low chance of being blown up

How Grayspace Trading SHOULD be:

Extremely efficient
High chance of being blown up if not escorted

Solution:

Moderately efficient --> Extremely efficient: Create uber trading good.

Low danger --> High danger: Nerf moth speed to 160 m/s, give an armor boost so escorts have a chance to protect.

@Lord Q: Moth is a true bulk freighter, but on a smaller scale than what's to come (which will need a bigger player base).
Jan 08, 2006 ctishman link
No, you're not the only one. However, for the moment (that is, until the new medium freighter Luis is working on is done), we've got to bumble along with this.

I remember reading a bit back that Incarnate considered everything we fly (excluding the cappies) to be a fighter at the moment, so the Moth is just a cargo-carrying fighter, which makes the cargo capacity of the Cent equivalent to sticking a brick of Xith in your glovebox.
Jan 08, 2006 Spellcast link
remember reading a bit back that Incarnate considered everything we fly (excluding the cappies) to be a fighter at the moment

I think that was pre-moth tho ctish. when the moth was announced it was listed as a new high volume transport iirc.

As far as i'm concerned grey space is meant to be dangerous for ALL traders. I'm also for lowering the top speed of the centaur, the atlas, the wraith, and the marauder, tho not as much as the moth. knock the moth back to 160 and maybe 180 for the centaur, atlas, wraith and 200 for the maud.

But then you will need to seriously increase the profits o nthe items since i still get more money easier by trading in safe space.
that would be the part of my post where i mentioned the economy needing changed and high end cargo's needing to be worth way more.

am i the only one who doesn't think a moth is supposed to be the true bulk freighters?

if its a bulk freighter or not doesn't matter, i'll say it again, grey space is supposed to be dangerous. Think of grey space as the equivalent of any currently anarchic civil war involved african nation (whichever ones they are at the moment. Somolia of a few years ago comes to mind)
Transporting cargo across it is insanely dangerous unless you are carrying a small amount at very high speed (say in a jeep) or in a convoy with heavy escort.

Most of the universe(world) is fairly safe for trading, but there are areas where it's just not an easy prospect. Even if the moth is the equivalent of a 1 ton pickup truck, (a fairly small cargo hauler compared to a semi or a freight train) it should be in danger if its in a dangerous area.