After reading the Semi-Cap Ship thread, I realized that I had lots of ideas for full cap ships. Here they are.

Assault Frigate: 1000000c
Length: 150m
Hull: 80000
Manueverability: Very Low (lower if fewer than 4 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 4
Battery Slots: 4
Cruising Speed: 2/3 average of engines (if engines average to 60, speed is 40)
Turbo Speed: 2/3 average of engines (if engines average to 120, speed is 80)
Weapons: 2 foward-facing very large slots for anti-cap-ship-weapons, 2 hemispherical turrets
Cargo: 60
Docking Space: 4 fighters
Special: Basic Capital Ship


Beam Frigate: 2000000c
Length: 200m
Hull: 75000
Manueverability: Extremely Low (Lower if less than 3 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 3
Battery Slots: 3
Cruising Speed: 2/3 average of engines
Turbo Speed: 2/3 average of engines
Weapons: 1 Hemispherical Arc turret, one Beam Cannon slot for a beam cannon
Cargo: 60
Docking Space: 4 fighters
Special: Very slow turning


Light Destroyer: 2500000
Length: 320m
Hull: 100000
Manueverability: Extremely Low (Lower if less than 5 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 5
Battery Slots: 5
Cruising Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Turbo Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Weapons: 3 Hemispherical Arc turrets, One Very Large slot, Two large slots, One small slot
Cargo: 100
Docking Space: 10 fighters
Special: A basic heavy capital ship



Carrier: 3000000c
Length: 400m
Hull: 300000
Manueverability: Extremely Low (Lower if less than 5 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 5
Battery Slots: 5
Cruising Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Turbo Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Weapons: 2 Hemispherical Arc turrets
Cargo: 200
Docking Space: 30 fighters
Special: A freighter/carrier


Heavy Destroyer: 5000000c
Length: 400m
Hull: 800000
Manueverability: Extremely Extremely Low (Lower if less than 7 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 7
Battery Slots: 7
Cruising Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Turbo Speed: 1/2 average of engines
Weapons: 4 Hemispherical Arc turrets, one Beam Cannon slot for a beam cannon, two Very Heavy slots, one Heavy slot, three Light Slots
Cargo: 60
Docking Space: 12 fighters
Special: The second-most-powerful ship



Battlecruiser: 10000000c
Length: 800m
Hull: 1000000
Manueverability: Very Extremely Extremely Low (Lower if less than 10 engines are mounted)
Engine Slots: 10
Battery Slots: 10
Cruising Speed: 1/3 average of engines
Turbo Speed: 1/3 average of engines
Weapons: 6 Hemispherical Arc turrets, two Beam Cannon Turret slots for beam cannons in a turret mount, one Beam Cannon slot for non-turreted Beam Cannon, three Very Heavy slots, four Heavy slots, three Light Slots
Cargo: 100
Docking Space: 20 fighters
Special: The most powerful ship

/me cant decide between the carrier and the battlecruiser :D
of course I cant afford teh battle cruiser but hey...

Heh. Ok, cool.

I think your ships are a little on the small side. They dont' have to be as huge as the one the devs are making - which I think is probablimaticly big - but, they should be big enough to look impressive. Somewhere in the middle would I think be a good comprimise between game play and eye candy.

I think that your bigger capital ships are abit undergunned and underpowered. I think fighting them would get tedious. I think that up above a certain level, multiple engines/batteries will get kinda ridiculous. For instance, I think that your battlecruiser would be a better design with ~40 engines and batteries (for one thing the equipment on the ship would stop being such a small fraction of the total ship's cost). So, I think that it is better to have fewer 'capital ship battery' slots once you get above ~6 fighter sized engines.

I think you play Homeworld. I like Homeworld. It's an excellent example of balancing a large range of ship types to create a combined arms effect. I'd be perfectly happy with Vendetta as 'Homeworld Online'.

I like to see the thoughts. I'd really like to see the devs thoughts.

Yeah, I love homeworld. If only Homeworld 2 would come out now instead of Q3... :)

Me puts his credit card.
SL)I'll take 2 battlecruisers please.
Me listens to the silence
SL)Do i need to show you how to swipe the card?
Me watches everyone's eyes dilate.
Ship seller) Um, excuse me sir but we don't have that ship in stock.
SL) Damn.

=P

/me has stolen all the stock :P

I'd like to point something out:
I don't think devs are likely to give there opinion because they already have there ideas in mind and don't want to muddle our ideas, if they don't muddlewe will make ideas, tweak them until we all like them, then the devs will come along and farm our crop! We get what we want, they get what they want.

oh and, 800m, wow, talk about hitting the broad side of the barn.

Ummm... Rogue, Quake III has been out for years... :P

SL: You are probably right.

I would like to point out that at last report, the dev's frigate (the _frigate_ mind you) was 720m long.

I think that roguelazer's new lengths are a good bit more reasonable than that for the speeds at which objects move and the ranges of the weapons we have at present in Vendetta.

Q3 = Quarter 3

I think you guys are still in the fighter mindset. When was the last time that you saw a Star Destroyer using an X-Wing's engine, even if it was using 40 of them. LOL

There will probably be new engines, that occupy either "large" or "very large" engine slots. You don't need to worry about 40 engines.

SirCamps: I think that is what I just said.

"I think that up above a certain level, multiple engines/batteries will get kinda ridiculous...So, I think that it is better to have fewer 'capital ship battery' slots once you get above ~6 fighter sized engines."

Big engines. Big batteries.

I want bots to have these ships. This way you have to almost get a group of fighters together to take one out. Also, they could accumulate some really nice bounties.

I personally think the hull strenghts are a tad low.

as an example.. lets look at the light destroyer..

hull 100,000, extremely low maneuverability, max speed 100 (full all out turbo, with all heavy engines) and a length of 320m

vs

1 rangarok, 2 avalon launchers each with 4 torps.. 8 * 12000 = 96000 damage. and a trio of uhh say, heat seakers (easily the extra 4000 damage).
i'm betting that a skilled pilot could get all 8 torps and quite a few heat seekers into it without taking damage. mount an efficient engine and a fast charge battery on the rangarok, get out about 6 or 7 kilometers., point to intercept the frigate and turbo. at about 4k start launching avalons. (160+35 = 195m/s torp speed) i dont think the target could change course in the 20 seconds it would take the avalons to reach it, a pair of torps launches every 4 seconds, 12 seconds to get all 8 torps into space(fire, reload, fire, reload, fire, reload, fire). the rangarok starts to turn away at just under 1k from the target, but the torps are already on their way. spray out half a dozen heat seekers as you turn, bye bye cap ship.

the problem continues on up the chain of ships but could be easily fixed by multiplying the hull amounts by at least 5. after all, a prom has 28000 hull and is only what.. 21 m long? using that as a basis for comparison.. i'm guessing cap ships are going to have massively larger amounts of hull.

other than the hull strengths tho, the ship concepts look pretty good.

Spellcast: I agree with you, but I don't think that the fix is to radically multiply the ammount of hull points that they have.

You are absolutely correct that against an unmanuevarable target 100,000 damage would be quite easy for a pilot to do in a very short time using tactics like you decribe (and others). This results in fights with capital ships being unfun because they are too short and the capital ship has little it could do to defend itself. We could certainly attempt to fix that by multiplying the ammount of hit points that they have and that would be a partial fix. I'd recommend about 300,000 hull points for a destroyer. However, if we up the h.p. too much (say to 3,000,000 or something) then looked at fights between capital ships they would become rather uninspired slug fests. In other words, two capital ships would pull up next to each other and we could calculate exactly how many seconds it would be before one gunned down the other. Seeing as Vendetta wants to compete with EVE-Online and the like, this wouldn't in my opinion be a good thing. Problem is, without 3,000,000 hit points, they will go down quick to just a few fighters.

You could solve that problem by uping the damage from capital ship weapons to a point at which a single hit was consequential, but the problem then becomes that the fighters get blown away completely by the first hit of a capital ship level weapon. That may be what you want, but it makes the game pretty unfun for the fighters because it tends to turn engaging a capital ship into pure luck. As a fighter, you basically hope you don't get unlucky. In the mean time you tediously beat down the capital ship with repeated runs on it.

I'm not saying it couldn't all work (it has for some other games) but I think you could do better than that.

My solution would be to implement 'armor' (or shields or other defenses) in some fashion for big unmanueveable ships. Basically, capital ships would be immune to say the first 600 damage from any source. A tachyon would only do 50 damage per hit to such a target. That's the equivalent to multipling the hits points of a capital ship by 13 with regards to tachyons. Against tachyons my armored 300,000 hit point destroyer is as tough to destroy as a 3,900,000 hit point unarmored destroyer. And the bigger the capital ship, the more 'armor' it could carry and the more fighter level weapons it would be basically immune to. But against a capital ship level weapon (say Avalons) the armor is almost immaterial, and the fights are still tense and tactical between capital ships.

One of the most interesting things about this to me is that a weapon well suited to fighting fighters, say an advanced gatling, would be poorly suited to attacking capital ships. So there would be tradeoffs and different weapon load outs you'd use depending on the target you were fighting. It also means that the weapons most likely to do good damage (rockets, homing missiles, avalons, ect.) are in limited supply in any attack run and protecting the ships carrying them would be a priority.

However the Ragnarok/Avalon problem you mention is another story and one that has had me worried in the long term. Armor wouldn't do didly vs. a 12000 point smack. I've been wondering whether giving the Avalon 4 shots per launcher is a good idea. I've been wanting to see them limited to 2 shots per launcher, but I've been waiting on seeing capital ships before pushing for the idea - people are already touchy about the Avalon getting 'nerfed'. The ragnarok makes a good case study, because the problem will only get worse if we implement ships of an intermediate size between fighters and capital ships (see the semi-capital ship thread). Imagine a ship with 4 or 6 large slots and the ability to launch 16 or even 24 avalons for as much as 288,000 damage from a single source in a very short period of time. Even 600 armor would only stop 14,400 points of that. Part of the solution to that involves yet another gizmo I've mentioned from time to time (ECM field), and I do think that a capital ship ought to have some manueverability, but still 48,000 damage in basically 8 seconds per launcher is alot coming from a fighter - especially considering the big lumps it is coming in.

Well, you also gotta remember that these ships that I made up all have turrets. My ideas of these turrets are NOT like the turrets we have now, but more like the bots guns with larger range, more damage and unable to move (besides spinning). Now, can you picture the fire from even one of those? I would say that if they had a range of 1500, attacks with avalons would become much harder. And if they could shoot incoming warheads, well, there's the solution. Just set up one turret to auto-shoot warheads and 2 to kill players. Therefore coming closer than 1500 could be painful, and shooting from 1500m+ means a high chance of warheads being destroyed. In this a new kind of teamwork is needed much like that seen in Homeworld, with dodging and nimble fighters trying to attract the attention of the turrets while the bombers hang back to launch their heavier weapons. But, unlike Homeworld, a player-controlled version of these would be able to select targets easier, and kill off the bombers. That kind of weaponry basically necessitates teamwork to counter.

PS: What would you think of me doubling the number of turrets?

PPS: Also, I feel that cap ships should have regenerating health similar to that seen in Homeworld: Cataclysm.

PPPS: Yes, I know I play too much HW. So what. :)

roguelazer: The problem with any AI controlled turret is that if the weapon speed is 'slow' relative to the ships speed, human players find it very easy to always avoid them. If the weapon speed is 'fast' compared to ships speed, then no humn agency can avoid the attack, and you are forced to dumb down the AI to where it is deliberately missing. If you do that, then it's basically luck whether you survive attack on the capital ship, which isn't all that fun. I'd expect the average turret to be not particularly more dangerous than the defensive turrets and flag protectors we have now - just mobile.

And even a1k0n's 'little green man' ship's 360 turret was as much of a liability as it was an assistance because he was relying wholely on the AI's ability to target and some of the better dodgers out there simply stood back and took him apart.

I'd be pleased if you doubled the number of turrets, especially of the secondary weapons. Your ships are a little under gunned vs. fighters. Just keep in mind that each turret generates about as much lag as a ship with all that weapons fire it produces.

I'm not a big fan of 'shooting warheads'. I'd rather a defensive field destroyed a certain percentage of the incoming warheads sometime before they reached thier prox range (say at 100m or so) - thereby reducing damage. Shooting warheads seems awefully arcadish to me, but that's really just a personal preference. I guess there is nothing that wrong with the mechanism except that its a long standing problem with all video games that shots at a distance on small targets are statistically easier than they should be. It effects everything from football simulations to first person shooters.

Incidently, I noticed that you are using my 'very large' weapon slot terminology. That was meant to mean something like a beam cannon or other very heavy weapon, so its a little redundant to use both.

Capital ships self repairing would be cool provided it consumed resources (scrap metal widgets, or propriatary electronic widgets or whatever) from the cargo hold. But basically all you are doing is adding 'armor', in that you are making light weapons have less of an effect. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't do both if you have the oppurtunity, but the devs can only put so much on thier plate.

Quantification of my Very Large and Beam Cannon slots: Beam Cannons, which I feel can only be mounted in a spinal mount in all but the larges of capital ships, require a special slot to hold them, much like in Homeworld. Very Large slots, on the other hand, are for the more powerful cap ship weapons like the heavy avalons, the large mass drivers and the other "large-but-not-beam-cannon" weapons.

If you forget...a beam of energy or what ever can be bent, twisted, and redirected through the use of magnetic fields and reflectors. SO, a beam cannon need not be mounted in the spine of a craft...been playing a tad to much HW. My personal statement is this.

There are two categories of weapons. First is fighter scale and second is capitol scale. Fighter scale weapons are like the ones we know and love. They are automated and if a fighter gets in close enough they get to dodge the plasma or what ever.

Capitol scale are the big boys. They are meant for over whelming power. They track slow so they are not good fighter killers. But they have greater range then there smaller brethren. By the way...any one familiar with BattleSpace...under appreciated cousin to battletech...the book/board version.

In this the player could choose how best to arm his ship. He can install smaller guns for fighter cover while having the bigger guns for the slugfests. And if you add in the defense fields to the equation, you remove the general fighter weapons from the battle between caps...if they get that close that is. Opinions?

SYBER.. personally i WANT to remove the general fighter weapons (at least the vast majority of them) from a capital ship battle. at least the "energy" weapons portion. tachyons, pulse lasers, even gravitons should not be able to do a significant amount of damage to a capitral ship, at the cost and size/maneuverability disadvantages a cap ship should have, one of the advantages it needs is to be basically immune to a small fighter weapon.

Celebrim --
please refer to our earlier discussion on sheilds for my views on those. alternatively.. i do like your armor, however, lets take it a step further, instead of assigning it a specific damage reduction number, give it a percentage that scales based on the amount of damage done.
(shouldn't be too hard to code, it's just a table) thus maybe anything that does less than 600 pts has 100% of the damage absorbed, anything that does between 600 and 5000 has 75% of the damage absorbed, anything doing 5000 to 15000 has 50% absorbed, anything else does normal damage)


and in game it's easy to explain,
<insert technobabble, something like "the radically collapsed plastic polymer electrobonded to the hullmetal alloy in our advanced capital ship armor provides a dramatic reduction in the amount of impact and burn damage from small energy beams and projectiles blah blah blah.>>

give each "class" of capital ship hull a different table, maybe the destroyer in the above example uses the values laid out in this post, with heavier ships having higher values and smaller ships having lower values.


roguelazer: ai controlled turrets are not something i would like to see on player controlled ships. What i wouldn't mind seeing are "bubble turretns" with hemispherical or quadrant based cones of fire that have a set number of fighter sized weapons ports and are customizable, that can be controlled by a human player. something similar to the vehicles in the game "Battlefield 1942", but with customization in the weapons.
then the primary "capital ship" level weapons, could be controlled by another player with a full 360 view degree arc in all directions(you could have "dead" zones where certain weapons couldn't turn to fire), while another person flys the ship, and maybe controlls a few forward facing weapons.