As Ive noticed it seems there are 2 weapons out there these days:
Sunflare
guass

And although I dont know how to fix the guass, I have a suggestion fo rthe flares:

Knock down the prox detonation (i.e. Make it like a fast moving avalon with 20m proximity detonation)
Knock down the damage (make it less of a 'god' weapon)
Knock down the reload time (slower firing!)
Make it consume energy (say 70 to start)

as it stands the flare is an Uber-Weapon with high damage, high proximity detonation, high splash, high repeat rate, and NO energy cost whatsoever. And doubling the ammo capacity doesnt help a bit.

Go to s2, cyberseal attacks with tri sunflares.
Bug people in s7, arolte attacks in a warthog, 1 guass 1 plasma.
Bug people in s7, arolte attacks in a hornet with quad sunflares
Bug people in s7, pongping attacks in a hornet with quad sunflares

Too lazy to think of other incidents, but i have seen a lot of those same weapon sets.

Humpy, energy consumption, NO, i can not stress that enough, ammo weapons are made so you don't have a drain on the battery, it has always been this.

When i joined, all ammo weapons didn't use energy, they are the following:
Lvl 1 Homing missiles.
Lvl 2 Homing missiles.
Lvl 1 Rockets.
Lvl 2 Rockets.
Swarmers.
Proximity mines.
Lightning mines.

Now in 3.2 we have these new fangeld ammo weapons.
!!! 110 Rail gun
Sunflares
Jackhammer.
!!! 60 Screamer.
!!! 100 Avalon.
Yellow jacket missiles.
Stingray missiles.
Gemini missiles.
Locust missiles.
Proximity mines.
Lightning mines.

!!! = uses energy

Sunflares are the second slowest weapon, beaten by only the avalon,

1 sunflare launcher, 1500 dmg per round
4 sunflare launchers, 6000 dmg per round.

1 isn't the problem, it's over 2 sunflare launchers that is.

Actually, flares aren't very slow. Remember, their speed is yours+theirs. So while a missile might go 85m/s, a flare has the capacity to go 255m/s, tied with the avalon, hammer and screamer.

Anyhow, I vote to give flares a det radius of 5m, to give swarmers a det radius of 10m and to give seekers a det radius of 5m.

flares? 5m? heck no, 20m and 30 energy per round and 1 sec reload (not 0.5sec)

At times I've felt like quitting until a new version was released to resolve this issue, because quite honestly the whole triple sunflare and gauss thing is getting old fast. More than half the people you encounter today online will rocket ram you to death. I don't like using the sunflares, but sometimes it's needed to scare rocket rammers away. You really have no choice but to use 'em sometimes. Some people with more agile ships, like the centurion and vulture, may get away with bringing down rocket rammers via tachyons/gauss once in a while, but for the most part it's pretty damn hard to do in a non-special ship.

The gauss really belongs in the L-port. It's grouped with the plasma and it looks nearly identical. Its unusually high aimbot system also seems to suggest that it belongs in a low agile ship, NOT a valk or a vulture. If there is a strong urge to give "plasma" weapons to fighters, bring back the blue ions from 3.1.x. For the most part, however, I'd like to see lengthy dogfights using tachyons/gravitons almost exclusively. There's no denying that laser weapons require skill and make battles a lot more longer lasting and fun. Rocket ramming and gauss weapons have ruined it for the most part, however.

Look, as a pirate, I cant turbo and fire at the same time. How the hell am I supposed to chase and take them down efficiently if I have to use energy to fire? By your logic, Blaster, thats a whole fast charge battery + 50 to take down a marauder. No. No. 1 sec reload? When I have what, 3000m to take them down? How the hell am I supposed to do that?

The problem is with the rocket rammers, those who use them at close range. And those who group the sunflares in groups of 3 or 4. If mounting a sunflare had a minor detrimental effect on your ship, maybe that would solve the situation.

I think there should be a limit to either the number of missile weapons on a ship at once, or at least the number that can be grouped together. One or even both of those would pretty much kill the idea of tri/quad rocket ramming.

Example: Limit the number of identical missile weapons to two. Then further limit the maximum grouped missle weapons to one at a time. This would require a "Rammer" to use only one missle rack at one time, causing the attacked player to suffer less damage and have a higher chance of escaping.

It's not impossible to chase someone down and kill them with energy weapons, UncleDave. Learn to conserve energy and time your jumps. Wormholes and stations in particular can be a pirate's best friend. I've killed many people through chases using only Gravitons. Nobody said pirating had to be easy. People didn't have trouble pirating in 3.1.x using 1-port rockets and energy weapons. Now it's just too damn easy with rocket ramming Valks.

And let's say you are right... what about all the fighters that easily get chased down? It's clear to me that the Valk remains as the superior ship of the game. Its high rate of acceleration allows it to outrun almost every ship in the game. And yes, that includes people who don't trade.

A Hornet is not a trading ship, for example. Yet it can easily get run down by a sunflare Valk. A Warthog is not a trading trading ship either. Yet it can easily get run down by a sunflare Valk. Essentially anything with a lower rate of acceleration will get run down by a sunflare Valk, using a tactic that would stop someone from boosting and forcing them to dodge.

Maybe boost tapping was the answer to this after all. I know I didn't have this problem before boost tapping was removed. I don't know why or how, but I was able to escape rocket ramming Valks using it. If rockets are going to be left alone for a long while, I really hope boost tapping will be put back in to escape rocket rammers. Otherwise those rockets need some serious balancing.

Suns are fine.

cembandit, you think they're fine because you exploit the ability to use them in tri and quad groupings.

ok guys we have everybody flying in hundreds of different directions, and this is why NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE. Stop attacking each other and choose something.

here:
Sunflare Rocket Launcher
damage: down 500
speed: same
Splash: same
Detonation: proximity
Det prox: down to 15-20
Energy: 0

Verd: Look, we cant limit what you can fire at one time because:
A it doesnt mesh well with the storyline
B it FORCES the people to use other weaps, and many people dont like to be forced, so they leave
C it makes it so anything with dual flares would be in high demand.

Dave: I agree on the energy part BUT right now pirating is waaaaaaay too easy

Arolte: I know your experiences with flares DO NOT TELL US ABOUT THEM HERE

ok done with what I have to say
/me goes back to sleep

I've suggested this before: Allow rockets to be targeted/destroyed by other weapons. Also, have rockets proximity-detonate on other rockets as well. If you had a det. prox. of 20m, you'd have to space your rockets by 20m or more, or they'd all blow up in your face.

At the same time, adjust grouped rocket configurations to accommodate for this: If there are two flares in a group have the second 'flare delayed by an appropriate amount so that the two rockets don't detonate each other immediately after launch. This would create a less-deadly "stream" of rockets vs. the current "4-power-punch". That is, multiple sunflares would boost the fire rate and ammo capacity by 4x, but would only increase the damage by about half that.

Also, if the ship models were taken into account it would allow for a "B-wing" type ships, that could effectively launch 3 or 4 flares simultaneously by having each weapon port further apart than the prroximity radius. These ships might have other weaknesses to make up for this (i.e., large profile). Small ships like the hornet wouldn't be able to launch more than one rocket at a time no matter what because they are too small.

Sunflares would retain a tactical advantage in quad configs, because you could still "stream" rockets like a machine gun (making it easier to hit targets), but the insta-death factor will be removed because once one rocket blew the whole stream would go as the rockets detonated each other.

This would also allow you to shoot down incoming rockets if you were fast enough.

This would also make rockets a nice de-mining tool.

This would also give the "rapid-fire rocket" pundits a new config to use, without killing balance.

Suns are fine. They need a saftey timer is all.

/rant on

I think the nerfing of boost has bigger effect on the effectiveness of the 'flare than anything since the ability to group multiples of it.

Before even contemplating altering the 'flare I'd want to look at tweeking the boost tapping and see what happens, because the flare has been around forever (effectively since before 3.2) but its the boost that's just been radically changed.

Basically the problem with the old boost tapping is that with a macro you could set it up so that you could move at your maximum speed with only slightly lowered acceleration and no energy expenditure. Theoretically, you could do this simply with skill, but in practice this is something that machines will always have an advantage over people in - and I'm not a big fan of games in which the strategy is obvious but the execution is tedious.

The new boost basically elimenates the problem, but does so with a sledgehammer - elimenating any ability to conserve energy at the expense of slower speed. I think that with optimal boost tapping that there ought to be some speed at which energy expenditure balanced with acceleration to result in roughly constant speed. The problem with the old boost tapping is that that speed was your maximum speed. If that speed were say 2/3rd's your maximum speed, infinite boost tapping would not be so bad. If that balance was a higher percentage of speed depending on the deficient energy - that is to say the more energy required to boost the lower the speed at which you could break even - then I think the engines would return to the intuitive balance the designer intended.

The problem is solved by making acceleration and deceleration follow different curves. Up until the break point, ships should decelerate at the same rate (or perhaps even a slower rate) than they accelerate. Beyond that break point (say 120 m/s) ships should decelerate at an increasingly high rate compared to thier ability to accelerate. I wish I could draw a graph, but hopefully you can see what I mean. At present, I suppect that ships functionally (meaning at boosted speed) always decelerate faster than they accelerate. That's hitting the problem with a sledgehammer.

As for the flares, nothing is wrong with the weapon except possibly that it carries too much ammo - and even that is questionable. Back when the weapon carried 8 rounds, I suggested it carry _12_ because I feared that at _16_ it would generate sufficient damage (potentially 24,000 per launcher) to be a primary weapon elimenating the need for a secondary weapon (you can go back in the archives and read the posts if you like). However, I knew that at 8 rounds it generated insufficient damage to be a real threat _to the ships of the time_. Specifically, if ships like the Prom where to have 26000 hp and the Marauder was to have 18000 hp, then a weapon that could only generate 12000 damage _if every round hit_ (and lets be fair, whether you like the flare or not, they don't always hit) was incapable of really threatening the opposition. Now that ships have more balanced and reasonable hull points, I wish to again make my arguement that 12 rounds is sufficient for the sunflare if only because it would shut some of you up for a few days.

The main arguement to be made against that is that almost certainly tri-gauss would become preeminent, and some of us are as bored with tri-gauss as others are (*Celebrim elbows Arolte*) with tri-sunflare - but mainly because of the stupid aimbot/ barrel rolling/latency synergy.

Giving missile weapons large energy requirements is just stupid short term fixes that hurt the game in the long term - see railgun.

And I feel like (just because I'm in a foul mood) pointing out that when 3.2 was released my very first observation was that having only 2 types of weapon slots (and most ships having only one) would lead to a boring ammount of uniformity in weapon selection - ei no matter what you did almost everyone would mount multiple copies of the same weapon. Which isn't to say that the only solution is to adopt a SG/SR/LG/LR split, but its an obvious one.

As for the gauss, the only problem with it is that there isn't really a big reason for using any other small direct fire weapon. I personally think that tachy's, grav's, and gauss are all about even utility, but perhaps its worth it to consider slightly bumping up tachy's and grav's rof or velocity if only to make people aware that there are other energy weapons out there and get them to try them. I've used all three extensively as the third weapon in my dual sunflare Valk configuration, and getting more hits with tachy's and gauss using less energy seems to make up for guass hitting harder and being easier to aim. I also personally miss the day when the tachy was the king of speed and the grav was the king of fire rate, and think its especially sad that they became vanilla at the same time we were finally given the energy to use them.

On entirely other fronts (just because this wouldn't be a real rant if I didn't ramble), I also think that the railgun needs to be denerfed, that the plasma cannon is still slightly under powered, that the frigate turret weapon could be made into an interesting large weapon slot weapon provided it hogged enough energy, that the prox mine would be better in a small slot, that the phased blaster is utterly uninteresting in its current state and needs to use alot less power for a more moderately effective weapon, and that the ion blaster needs to use practically no energy at all (running multiples of them on a light battery should be reasonably practical).

I don't think 90% of the community has a clue how change X that they are proposing would effect gameplay, and I really get sick and tired of hearing 19 proposed changes to fix one problem. Don't say something like 'Weapon X is too good so we need to do this to nerf it, but because that might nerf it too much, it also needs to get better... and we need to change the whole way the game works to accomodate it', which some of you are fond of doing every time you suggest something.

I think all the problems we've had with weapon balance would have long ago been solved if a policy of only making small changes in each weapon with each update and evaluating it thoroughly before changing it again had been maintained, rather that apparantly bowing to the communities collective emotional pressure and childish tantrums and making all sorts of hither and yon changes. I think it is silly to instead of tweaking a weapon 'A' to replace it with a completely new (and untested) weapon 'C', then when it proves unbalanced/unusable _change some other weapon 'B'_ because weapon 'C' is now useless and everyone is now using weapon 'B'. Duh.

I also think that giving NPC's items that PC's can't get is just a cheap short term solution, but am willing to overlook it provided the devs know that its just a cheap short term solution.

Finally, I think that all the weapon balance issues pale in comparison to the problems with the aimbot and stupid tricks to fool it (though I admit the last few times I've come on and played for 5 minutes the situation seems to have slightly improved), and the fact that los still plays no role in the game or in the rendering of the graphics.

OK, /rant off. I feel better now. ;)

But on the good side, at least the ships are finally close to balanced. We can at least be thankful for that.

Hows about having ammunition stored seperately from the weapon?

ie: A Valk can carry a absolute maximium of 16 Sunflares (for example), regardless of how many launchers they have. This tied with a lowered, but not nerfed, ROF would make things a little more interesting. People who want to offload lots of Suns quickly could still have a multi launcher loadout, but that would bring it's own dangers or running out of ammo too quickly where it might be more effective to include another weapon. Heavier ships would be able to carry more ammo for whatever weapons it mounts, this again would be offset by the lack of agility however.

I like Celebrim's points about making some of the energy weapons more unique, I too miss the difference between the Grav and the Tachs from a few versions ago, they had very different uses then where as now they seem far too similar to one another for my liking.

Anyway, Bleh!

- and, and_but_red!, and_only_gold!

Did I not read Celebrim's post carefully enough, or did my suggestions come through unscathed...? I guess it depends on wether I fall into the category of the "...90% of the community has a clue how change X that they are proposing would effect gameplay, and I really get sick and tired of hearing 19 proposed changes to fix one problem. " I guess I probably do fall into that category... Oh well.

:-)

Seriously, though, I hope Celebrim (and the devs) give some thought to my idea: which is to say, we should find a way to differentiate tri- and quad- group configs from single-configs. Rather than nerfing weapons, this alters tactics of grouped configs beyond just multiplying damage. With my example, you would be able to use 4 sunflares to gain 4x the rate of fire rather than 4x the damage from a single shot. This equals a better chance of hitting with _some_ rockets, while lowering the chance of an insta-kill. And that's just with my lame-brained example... I'm sure others could do better.

I think Beady's solution was a bit more elegant. Simpler and less likely to require major changes in the way the proximity detonation on rockets and mines work. If we used your method, then mines too close together would set each other off for no reason. And Gemini's would become useless since they are fired as a pair.

I also think beady's solution was more elegant, and since slappy has been around long enough not to take this personal, I do think that slappy's suggestion fits into the category changing the way the whole game works to fix one problem, and worse yet, it is a complex change that actually has next to no effect on the problem it proports to solve.

Of course, to be fair, I'm more forgiving of beady's solution because it was a change I was in favor of before hand and not because I think it would actually solve the problem raised at the start of this thread.

A better solution would be to balance the flare (assuming it is unbalanced to begin with) and then look at who to implement separate weapon and ammo in such a way that it minimally impacts the balance already achieved. For instance, deciding that each laucher had a 6 round capacity, and additional flares could be purchased at the rate of 6 per cargo slot would leave a tri-'flare Valk with 42 flares (and no spare cargo space) - but that's only 6 rounds less than Valk has at present and as such unlikely to seriously hinder a tri-Flare wielder. Worse yet, it would just move the problem, since a tri-'Flare Marauder would now be mounting as many as 114 rounds and the Marauder is itself a pretty adequete fighter and the more so if it has 38 flares per laucher. On the other hand, dropping the flares per cargo unit to a level that the Marauder wouldn't overly benifit - say to three flares per unit (Marauder with 48-57 rounds, Valk with 12-21 rounds) - nearly nerfs the flare for Valks IMO much less the poor Vulture pilot.

So in other words, turning cargo into a combat advantage isn't a magic bullet and before we make that change and make the situation more complex than it already is, maybe we should concentrate on the already delicate task at hand.

I might add that 'simply' assigning each ship a maximum cargo of weapons in each class, or deciding what percentage of cargo can store weapons, or adding a new ammo capacity rating to each ship, (Valks can have 16 flares total for instance) is an approach likely to lead to even more complex balance issues than the above because now each ship has a whole bunch more numbers to play with and people will forever be arguing about the balance between ships (which is now finally close to good). If ammo is to depend on ship class, it ought to depend on something directly and the most obvious limitation is cargo - for one thing combat power then has the immediate tradeoff of economic power. And I'll further add that each launcher should still have built in ammo, else we are TOTALLY nerfing the poor traders. Imagine that you HAD to use cargo to buy lightning mines. This is totally different than saying you COULD use cargo to buy lightning mines (which would be cool).

Celebrim, I know that you've been upset with game balance for a long time. But now that they have ONE thing that is relatively stable (IE the ship balance), NOW they can go and balance the weapons.

I don't see a need to equate the missile capacity with cargo. If it was just established that each ship can hold 16 sunflares (no matter what the class). Then when they start to design capital class ships, they can give them extra missile bays.