What were you guys thinking?

If you think they're bad now, it's a good thing you weren't there when we first discovered them on Zarniwoop... they had 230m/s velocity, IIRC. :!
-:sigma.SB

Actually, I think he's refering to how bad they suck.

have they changed in this release? cause they used to rule!

I had to go through all the bot drops in a panicked rush last friday night and nerf them so they wouldn't completely imbalance everything (they were all super scary, as people from the test server can attest). So, I wasn't really thinking.. I was just trying to nerf stuff to within "normal" usable range. If there's something wrong with them, post about it. I try to test with as much stuff as I can, but I couldn't test with everything.

Hive posis aren't too bad... they have their ups and their downs. They're really no better than AAPs, because while they have better auto-aim (which I might remind everyone can work against them as it does the AGT - rolling undermines the auto-aim) they also have three tims the weight of the AAPs, making them impractical on light fighters. Just about the only place where the Hive Posis really excel more than usual is in killing runners and in pirating (since you can fier them while turboing at a target without slowing to line up a shot)

Remember though, if the queen weapons are overpowered, that's not too bad a thing, because it takes so much time and effort to acquire each one, and they're lost again just as easily... sure, the person using them might get in a higher number of kills than usual before they're destroyed, but once they're destroyed, that's it, and someone else (such as the person who finally beat them) could get to pick them up, which more or less evens it out.

The reason the Hive Posi is useless is because it has exactly the same damage as an aap, a touch more energy drain, a touch more delay, AND three times the weight.

By the time you've killed enough queens to outfit a two-small-port ship with hive posis, you've earned yourself the queen badge, allowing you access to mega-posis, which are far superior to hunting down traders and runners that aaps/hive-posis.

IMO they should be at the worst, the same as aap's. At best, maybe aap's that do 900 damage?

Hive Positron Blaster

Damage....900
Velocity..210
Energy....18/blast
Delay.....0.24
Mass......500
Port......S

Or likewise, make it a large that is just a tad better than a MegaPosi.

EDIT: after reading about the uber-aap-prom (with which I don't have any personal experience), maybe it would be a good idea to bring the auto-targeting down to "good".

No, No, I mean they're frikkin awesome.

Excellent autoaim?
210 m/s?
1500 kg isn't enough,

Hell, I'll fly a 6-7000 kg cent/vult anyhow. They weigh the same as advanced rails.

But that autoaim is insane at under 200m.

Ooooh. See this is why I shouldn't talk about stuff I don't know anything about :P

Hehe,

I think Hive Posi is the best weapon, I'm still flying my undefeated SCP with Dual Hive Posi. :)

well there's more to why an SCP with dual hive posies is deadly than the fact that it has hive posies.

i've never used the hive posies myself (i'm too lazy to kill enought queens, and too cheep to buy them from all the would be arms dealers). but the mass of them while high doesn't seem unusable, even on light fighters. I've flown tri-gauss and tri-rail valks with decent sucess in the past.

as for the auto aim, well i can't hit a darned thing with the AGT so i'm inclined to say it shouldn't be a problem with the hive posie either, but i might not be thebest judge of that.

"i've never used the hive posies myself"

Then shut up and leave talking about hive posis to those who have used them. You're worse than Gavan (sorry Gavan =P)

Shape's right about them being rough at close range, but then, is there a reason pilots can't adapt and fight hive posi usrs from further away? I bet my rag could take down a hive posi SCP if I decided to not hold back with the rockets and missiles.

I'm with shape in that they're not heavy enough - make them more of a beast to use and people will be less likely to try and use them... but more importantly, do something about the SCP's mad thrust which pegs it as so uber that adding more weight to the posis only serves to make it harder to counter (the weight is nothing to the SCP)

firsm, if I wasn't on hiatus, I'd come whoop your hive posi SCP and add them to my collection - you can't be that much harder to kill than those queens =P

/me gets out calculator and damage tables

Now, all you 'hive posis are too buff' folks, listen to this:

Mk1 and Axia Posis have a ratio 1.6 Dmg/Kg per shot. Hive posis have a mere 0.53 Dmg/Kg per shot. Most energy weapons have a damage ratio of at least 1.5 Dmg/Kg per shot. Even rails at their lowest efficiency have a ratio of 1.6 Dmg/Kg per shot. The only weapons that are comparable in inefficiency are Gatlings and Flechettes; both of which are support/suppressant weapons. For a direct-fire gun, hive posis are sorely behind the curve.

Besides, when one looks at the Damage-Per-Second (DPS) ratings, Hive posis do only as much damage as a Mk1 posi. Plus, the AAPosi only does 3809 DPS; wimpy compared to the Mk1 Neut's 4000 DPS.

ok, Dmg/kg is not a useful ratio.

I would also point out that DPS is misleading, owing to the fact that the first shot has no delay. With that, the Hive Posis actually do comparable damage in the first second than neuts.

furthermore a stream of Hiveposi may often hit, where a neut will just land a single shot.

Until you have had your ass thoroughly kicked by em, you just don't know.

Cunjo:
200m is close range?!

if you can hit things that aren't movin on constant velocity vectors outside of 200m consistently, I praise you as the second coming of Ramanujan.

Not to mention that you can just turn off autoaim, and they become regular aaps.

Let me add,

I don't think that having REALLY nice weapons available as rare drops is a bad idea. After all, if you gang up and kill the person, that's it, they're gone.

However, I STRONGLY dislike improving autoaim as the method for making the weapons better. It COMPLETELY goes against the training the people need to learn so that they can aim. Make them fast, or high damage, high refire rate, Let them do something strange to the person that gets hit, but NO IMPROVED AUTOAIM.

(Also, this being said, I will not duel anyone using rare drops, its not a duel, its a collector's contest)

Well you guys always want new weapons, ships etc... but know all you do is just complaining about it. Besides, we've had this SCP discussion long enough. And it's not like I'm flying this setup all day long. :)

Regards,
firsm

Visitor, might I point out that since Damage and Weight are not interlinked variables, a damage:weight ratio calculation is completely pointless and means nothing.

Damage/second can bear some significance, however it only really counts if you also factor in accuracy, at which the Hive Posi clearly excels.

For example, the Law Neut does 4884.6 damage per second per gun, while the Neutron III does 4285.7; since the two neutron weapons are alike in every other aspect, the Law Neut is clearly superior. However, with both neuts, you probably only hit the target once in every five shots, and that's if you're incredibly god-like in your aim and your target is big or slow-moving. So by that measure, your applied damage/second is only 976.9 per second per gun. Compare that to the hive posi, which has a damage/second potential of 3200 per gun, and can consistently land at least 1 in 3 shots on even a fast, light fighter, no aim required, for an applied damage/second of 1066.7.

Yeah, hive posis do more damage a second than N4s.

I both agree and disagree with Shape. I think that this is not necessarily a bad thing for the same reasons, however I do think that the high autoaim isn't too terrible an area of improvement. Yes, it's kinda cheap, but then, so are a lot of other things, and nothing's ever stopped people from being cheap anyway.

The more pressing question, however, is if it is feasible to lower/remove the auto-aim from them in the first place, considering that the queens use them. The queens clearly REQUIRE a turreted positron in order to be effective with them at all, and the game engine may or may not allow the queens to mount something other than what they drop. On the other hand, you could raise their weight through the ceiling - 3000 kg, 10000 kg, etc.. - and it wouldn't affect the queens in the least, so raising the weight to make them more appropriate and balanced for players would be a good way of handling it.

I didn't intentionally improve the autoaim of those posis. Most of the bot weapons had intentionally wide autoaim, because at various points the bots were so bad at flying that we needed to make up for it with super-buffed autoaim. It's lame, but it was a hack that existed. I tried to nerf all the autoaims to reasonable levels, but apparently I may have missed one. I'll check into it next week.

[Edit] it's also noteworthy that I intend to put actual turrets on queens soon, to improve their automated defenses despite their obviously maneuvering constraints. That'll make the case for nerfing the autoaim a little better.

Sounds good, inc...

...hope you don't mean insta-kill mining beam turrets >.>

Yea, sure hope you don't make queens boring like the cappies are.

Hive posis's suck.
Anyone still using auto aim is a N00B!