The advanced gatling turret is meant to defend bombers from fighters. It makes sense to have such a flexible weapon on a slow ship. But I think it would be WAY too powerful to let something like a Valk have one. That would be insanely unbalanced. But I agree with the first post that the regular gatlings should be available as S-port weapons, mainly because it doesn't have the tracking capabilities of the advanced one. And the regular gatling turret is essentially the same thing as what the old gravitons were (fast rate of fire but inaccurate). I think it would kick ass on a Centurion.

Bottom line--having high autoaim weapons on very agile fighters is BAD. Which also leads me to believe that the Gauss cannon doesn't belong in the S-port class either. Baad!! BAAAD!!!!

I agree with toshiro... But the autoaim is irrevelant because of the spread shot. Even if it did have the autoaim of the gauss, don't change that, because the shot spread compensates.

or another possibility, make it a medium weapon slot, and change all the ships. and then later devs could add a lot more medium weapons, and/or make sunflares medium, so ships like the valk would have 1 medium and 2 small ports, so it could only hold 1 rocket.

the gatling cannon (the non-advanced version) is, in my opinion, pretty useless the way it is now. it can only be mounted on a ship that has a large port and this means it has medium agility at best. but the gatling cannon is a fixed weapon and needs to be fired from a quickly moving platform (read: a fighter).
i suggest changing the weapon from L to S port size.
now, before you start screaming, hear me out.
of course the weapon stats couldn't be left unchanged. it needs to have repeat time increased (i'm against that) or have the energy usage increased (that's what i'd do). the latter would only allow for shorter bursts, especially with double gatlings (vulture). on a valk it'd be even more useful, like dual flare and single gatling, to fend off attackers when your ammo runs out (a single tachyon is simply not enough to keep an opponent bent on ramming you at bay. and the gauss... well, you know how close you have to get to get a hit if the target dodges). the gatling would allow to lay a barrge of fire against vessels boosting at you.
i heard it has the autoaim of the gauss cannon. that could also be reduced to tachyon/graviton blaster level.
and i don't think it'd rival the abilities of the tachyon OR graviton. i rather think it'd complement the choice of weapons we have now.
ok... now you can start =)

Mmmm... That would be my ultimate centurion. Right now I use a phased blaster centurion, but a gat centurion WOULD kick ass!

umm... arolte, it's called "gatling cannon" not "advanced gatling turret"
The gatling cannon does have a use... but one that has such low demand... and advanced gatling turret can do the same job, if not better at it.
I'd like a small port version of gatling cannon... maybe damage reduction?

IMO, the medium port is the best home for things like the Gatling, Charged Cannon, Gauss, Sunflares and a good portion of the homers (with the exception of Swarms. Hornets would be the only s-port homer).


Hey Devs! How about replacing the individual missile graphics from the swarmers with scaled-down hornets?

Hornets? Has my favorite spaceship been shrunken down and turned into a weapon to be fired out of S-ports?! Say it isn't so!!!!

I think he means YellowJackets. They are both big, yellow, scary, swarming bugs with stingers. But I agree with the post. I've thought the basic Gat needs to be downgraded to an S-port for a while. It's a good gun to fly by and gun someone with. A nice pirate weapon.

I would suggest:

That the aiming variable of the gatling cannon be cut in half, yet the damage reduced by 50 to 250/shot.

Keep in mind its repeat rate is 0.075 seconds. Or up the damage by 50 to 350, and make it a medium port.

Reduce the aiming variable? I tell you, the scatter shot effect is MORE than enough!

I think you guys are missing what the non-adv. gatling is for.
Look at the price.

When the game goes final there won't be a zillion spacebucks floating around between the players.

You'd have the gatling to fend off fighters, but when you got the extra cash to afford it you'd upgrade your cargo carrier to have an advanced gatling.

Suggestion:
Add a NEW weapon.

I'm thinking "Minigun".
Carries 1200 rounds of AMMO.
No guidance, medium spread and that waaaay cool noise a heavy machinegun makes :)
600 rounds per minute. (gives 120 sec fire-time on full ammo load, 2 rounds per second)
It would have to fit in a small port and the ammo should be expencive if the shots do much damage.

Wouldn't it be interesting if every weapon in the game had ammo? It would certainly make gameplay different. Anyway, just something to ponder.

Nice! Now ENERGY valks run to dock too! Great!

________________________________________________________________________________
Carries 1200 rounds of AMMO.
No guidance, medium spread and that waaaay cool noise a heavy machinegun makes :)
600 rounds per minute. (gives 120 sec fire-time on full ammo load, 2 rounds per second)
It would have to fit in a small port and the ammo should be expencive if the shots do much damage.
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hm. it's already been pointed out that weapons based on "physically" existing ammunition are not doable with the present code of the test (it'd lag the hell out of it). Just think what happens when you empty a Locust tube at someone.
Nice idea, already been discussed and tossed into the trash can.
i again suggest the gatling cannon be reduced in repeat time and fit to a S port.
also, i think the gatling cannon is quite useless on a cargo carrier, as that ship doesnt really have the option to backpedal and shoot a fighter, i'd rather boost and flee.
damage reduction and/ or repeat time augmentation would nerf it (/me glares at SirCamps...), upping the energy usage wouldnt. it'd balance it for an S port weapon.
me tries to make a point here :)

UncleDave, chill. I'm just as much a graviton/tachyon addict as you or some other players are. I just thought I'd bring that up as something to ponder. The reason I bring it up is because I myself am tired of not being able to chase someone down and kill 'em while using tachyons or gravitons, all because the current line of energy weapons hog way too much energy. Meanwhile rocket rammers are freely roaming about with the capability of killing someone in a chase without the penalty of stopping dead in their tracks. That's what got me thinking about whether all weapons should be ammo based.

In any case, the ammo capacity of the proposed miniguns would be in the thousands (or even ten-thousands). The ammo will last a while, depending on the rate of fire. I'm not talking about reloading every three seconds like rocket rammers. I was thinking that maybe once in a while you'd have to dock to stock up on bullets. I'd say maybe 5-10 minutes of continuous fire until you'd run out of rounds. With the current scale of ships that the devs are using, you could probably fit thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition into drums.

arolte I thought that that would give a lot more lag.

Just think about the advanced gatling and if you shoot it constantly as does your opponant, then youll occasionally lag due to the excessive workload from transmitting all these ammobased packageupdates

cheers

The obvious solution to prevent Vendetta from having to keep track of each individual bullet is to make these weapons hitscan. Meaning you press the trigger and anything in front of that gun gets hit. You won't actually see each individual bullet travel. You'll only see a few tracers and the impact of those bullets. So technically speaking, all those bullets are being "scanned" on a fixed (usually conical) path, which determines a hit or miss if something should happen to get in the way of the scanned area. Thus the term "hitscan" is used.

As lame as it may sound, the "fakeness" of hitscan weapons is virtually undetectable. Lots of games use it flawlessly, and best of all there's no lag connected to it. They're mostly used in 3D FPS games for pistols, assault rifles, and machineguns. They're also used for combat flight simulators as well. So chances are you've played lots of games with hitscan weapons without even noticing it.

As far as hitscan weapon customization goes, the speed at which the bullets travel can easily be set by adding a delay to the hitscan weapon. The damage you inflict usually depends the amount of time your hitscan weapon stays connected to the target. Of course other things like bullet spread and recoil can be calculated for additional realism. And lastly, ammo expenditure can be calculated simply by how long you hold the trigger down.

Anyway, I'm not a programmer so I don't know how difficult something like this would be to implement into Vendetta's code, if it's not already used. But what I do know is that other online games have chainguns and miniguns that don't cause the lag you speak of. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility of ammo based miniguns immediately. There is of course a glitch with the way Vendetta keeps track of ammo in high quantities, at least according to a post that was made by a dev back in the initial release of 3.2. But like any other bug it's only a matter of time before it gets squashed.

I say fake bursts is the right way. Make it so that you appear to fire 50000 bullets, but you're really firing 50 shots of 1 thousand bullets a piece. Send the "start bullets" signal, everyone knows that 1000 bullets follow from there, send the "stop bullets" signal and you're done.

if that is possible to implement (and i think it is), i'm all for it. i wanted another mass driver besides the railgun anyway.
mmm... i gotta get a bind "Miniguns dry, returning to base!" :D