Well, nobody's made a thread yet, so I may as well...

We've finally got some real bomb/torpedo type weapons in VO. Thanks devs! They need some adjustments to make them useful for anything other than nuking station docks. I can see why they were used for that in the past, it's about all they're good for with their current stats.

Here's some of the problems that make them ineffective against capital ships and turrets:
- Aiming: In order to fire off all 8 torpedos needed to take down a Trident shield, you have to start launching them a good 3000m+ away. At this range, the error in the game's angles becomes a big enough to make them miss their 10m prox fuse by a long shot, even on large targets like a Trident or Teradon lined up carefully while zoomed in. Station defense turrets? Yeah, right. Good luck!
- Energy use: At 120 energy per shot, firing 8 of them requires a grand total of 960 energy or 19.2 seconds of charge time on a FastCharge battery. Combine this with the flight time to keep up with the missiles you're launching and slow down to the same speed to effectively "stack" them, and you need to be several kilometers away from your target to even have a chance of launching all 8 and getting out of the way of the blast.
- Collateral damage: The blast radius on these is huge, big enough to easily catch two or more friendly fighters in the blast and get you kicked out of a skirmish group. This isn't so much a problem with things like station conquest or bombing player capships where mass killing is a good thing, but in missions it might cause trouble.

Possible short-term ways to "fix" these problems:
- Make them homing missiles. Even with really crappy homing (worse than Stingrays) this would fix the aiming problem and make waiting for recharge times feasible. The 35m/s speed might be an issue here though. Can missiles have different speeds when flying guided versus dumb-fire? I think 55m/s is reasonable here.
- Reduce their energy use. If they only cost 60 to fire, you could launch 8 of them off of a heavy powercell and not need to wait on recharge making it more practical to fire them from less than 3000m away. Aiming them at anything not at a dead-stop would still be a huge pain though.

Splash damage? Honestly the huge kaboom these make is a lot of fun. I don't know if I want to suggest reducing that at all. :)

Discuss!

Also: make them targetable and shoot-down-able like mines. This way, you can effectively protect a capital ship without having to suicide a fighter into the oncoming bombs.

I vote more damage, less splash, no launch energy (or at least much lower launch energy). These things don't need heavy splash, they are for taking out heavy ships not for taking out crowds of light ships. And energy to fire dumb-fire anything seems silly at best :p

Double the damage, half the splash would be a good start, with 50energy per launch?

You see why there was no problem in Avalons now apart from stations. But same effect can be caused on a station exit with nt2 and jackhammers, infact, that's more effective, less risk of blowing yourself up.

I am just glad they are back, there is 0 reason this weapon should be removed from the game.

My thoughts:
- Thank you devs for implementing this.
- Make them guided with similar maneuverability to Stingrays, or maybe worse.
- PLEASE don't decrease the blast radius or splash damage. Big damage requires a big explosion, this has risk. I would vote to increase blast radius to 300m.
- Increase proximity detonation to 35m.
- Increase damage per shot to 15,000 or 20,000.
- Increase speed to 55m/s.
- Decrease energy usage to 50.

AND prohibit docking at any station except Nation Barracks stations and Corvus Barracks for ships that have these equipped or as cargo, similar to with Purified Xithricite. OR prohibit Avalons except at Nation Barracks and Corvus and trigger temporary KOS if anyone enters other station sectors with these equipped or in cargo.

Don't:
-Increasing the prox will lead to wide spread exploitation, don't do that
-Limiting docking is also very bad and has no decent purpose

Do:
-Making them guided may be ok because stacking will be more possible
-increased damage is also a good idea.

- Make them homing missiles. Even with really crappy homing (worse than Stingrays) this would fix the aiming problem and make waiting for recharge times feasible. The 35m/s speed might be an issue here though. Can missiles have different speeds when flying guided versus dumb-fire? I think 55m/s is reasonable here.

+1, this suggestion will really help to solve aiming problem.

Try harder Arf. I have managed to not only stack two tubes of Avalons from 2.2 km, but to also stack up three tubes of gems and have them all hit at the same time. Granted this was vs. an asteroid, not a moving target. If you disregard the gems, it only takes like 1000 meters or so to stack the avalons, plus whatever space it takes you to get out of the way before they hit.

-1 to increasing speed. -20 to docking restrictions.

I can see where homing might be nice, but on the other hand it makes them a lot less unique. I like the idea of an extremely devastating weapon that is difficult to actually use effectively without a lot of practice. I guess I could accept it as long as it was very poor. Fire them twenty degrees off target from 2km and they should miss. But if you do make them homing, make their deceleration very poor so that you can't just cruise at 35 m/s and start dropping them like we do with swarms. Or just don't give them a deceleration. Have them keep their velocity flare-style, and if that makes the homing work very poorly if they are launched from a ship doing 220, that's the bomber's problem.

For everyone that thinks these things need guidance, think again... at 35m/s (or even 55m/s) guidance is useless for anything that's not standing still. dumb-fire as they are now they traval 35m/s plus your ship speed, guided they would travel at launch speed regardless how fast you are moving, even a trident could easily outran them.

+1 damage increase
+1 splash decrease
+1 energy reduction
-1 increase speed
-1 guided
-1 docking restrictions

Granted this was vs. an asteroid, not a moving target.

You'll find it's much harder to hit a moving target (even tridents and other capships), especially because of the energy usage and bad autoaim-prediction for rockets.

I don't think Avalons need much tweaking, I agree with drazed's votes. :)

Having finally played with them a little bit this past weekend, one could easily imagine these in the same role as airborne torpedoes (e.g. Long Lance from WWII). This suggests the following (much of which has been stated, but I'm just throwing out my 2cents)

* 65 m/s speed
* 15k damage
* No guidance
* Minimal energy to launch (I believe 50 units has been mentioned by several)

However, having said that, since capships don't yet know how to swerve to avoid torpedo attacks (and you guys have yet to learn the concept of an anvil attack), they should also be:

* Targetable (one reason I'm bumping up the suggested speed)
* Capships should be allowed active anti-missile defenses. Heck those kind of things exist now, why would people suddenly get stupid about capship defense in some 2500 years?

I also don't agree the splash damage should be bumped up. This is space, there is literally no concussive force any distance out of an explosion. The only damage one would suffer is radiative (both from photons and leptons). However, to make the game "seem" more real, some splash damage is called for. I would say no more than 200m, but more likely 100m.

I have managed to take out tridents and nearly took out a teradon with avalons and sunflares, but that's not the point. The point here is they're useless in any real combat situation against a moving target in a sector full of fighters. The ridiculous process of trying to line up a shot to stack all of these and make an effective strike means we'll just keep using Chaos Swarms, because they work better.

Keller, the difference between this and WWII is that WWII ships hulls don't magically recharge unless you hit with ALL of your torpedos simultaneously, which is what the case is in VO. If a single volley of two Avalons could down a trident shield, then their current implementation wouldn't be quite so silly. As it stands they're awesome for taking out turrets and dealing lots of damage to already de-shielded capships, but then again, so is a Megaposi... and they don't cost thousands to reload.

Really, the more i think about this, the more I think just making them really crappy homing would vastly improve their usefulness against big damage targets like capships and turrets. Making them targetable and interceptable would balance them out better. Without guidance, they've got nothing to offer over the way we kill capships now.

PS: You need a lot more bombers to translate the "anvil attack" tactic into 3 dimensions. Capships can strafe and roll to avoid hits, and with nearly a minute notice to move 10m, they have plenty of time to do so.

+1 50% damage increase
+1 energy reduction to 40/shot
-1 increase speed
-1 guided
-1 docking restrictions

I agree that these SHOUDL be difficult to use so -1 to homing, in my experiences lining up either directly behind or directly in front of an oncoming capship makes them easier to land. Tridents and Teradons SHOULD be hard to hit with them, they should primarily be used for the larger, much more cumbersome HAC's and Connies. The only gripe i have is the energy cost and reload cost, though an increase in damage to around 20k would make deshielding quite a bit easier.

How about special bonus damage against shields in addition to whatever other changes seem apt.

+a lot Maal

Rather than extra damage to shields, how about having them ignore or pass through shields like torpedoes to in Wing Commander?

No. That would make things too easy. You'd have to nerf the damage way down to justify it, and then they wouldn't be Avalons anymore.

Basically, it comes down to (aside from the damage debate) either:

A) Leave them unguided, but increase the speed (or increase their damage substantially)
B) Add minimal guidance and leave them being slow (with a possible long increase in their duration so they can track longer)

Actually, I think it comes down to:

damage: everyone agrees should be about 50% higher
energy: everyone agrees should be reduced to around 50/shot
splash: leave or decrease
speed: opinion varies
guidance: opinion varies

I personally do not see a need for a speed increase in unguided, since the speed depends largely on the players ships speed. Only time speed increase would be useful is if they were guided, since guided weapons cruise at absolute speed, so they kind of need to travel at least as fast as the ship they are guiding towards or would be near useless.

Easiest thing I can think of to improve these while not pissing anyone off is increase the damage and decrease the energy usage. And perhaps decrease the splash (if only to counter-balance the fact both damage/energy would be improved), or make them a bit heavier (also as a balance for having improved damage/energy).