In a few other threads, I've remarked on how boring Capship combat is compared to small ship combat.

Incarnate has said that he sees VO as very much of a naval game, and with that idea in mind, I'd like to present a way of making capship combat complicated.

Base Idea: Make cap ships like warships of the 17th and 18th century.

How can we incorporate this model?

Well, to start, the capships that we have currently suffer from a couple of problems:

1) the capship weapons have wide angle fire, this minimizes the advantages of positioning, such that pilot skill doesn't really matter. Moving into a blind spot (Akin to old vessels firing a broadside through the aft of an enemy's ship) is nearly impossible.

2) Capship weapons individually target. Instead of working in concert to apply zone defense of a region, the capship merely tries to hit everything in range that it can aim at. If the speed of the weapons and the autotargeting is good, they will hit without fail, if not, they will be useless against any ship that can maneuver quickly.

This balance is tricky, so tricky in fact that putting a human being into one of these turrets effectively weakens the ship.

Solutions:
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Capship weapons should be locked in one direction on the ship, with a very small angle of fire. akin to cannons on old seagoing vessels.

In order to make them effective, given the removal of their autotargeting, they should all be focused in a couple of major directions, the size of their projectiles should be increased (think of capgauss the size of small asteroids.

Players as crew on the ship, instead of becoming gunners, would become artillery captains. They get to choose the general direction to point a battery of weapons, the speed at which to fire those weapons, and possibly whether the ordinance should explode at some range.

Flying a capship becomes a delicate dance of moving to bring the full brunt of your batteries to bear on the other capship, each circles the other, jockeying for position.

Using the weapons on a capship becomes the art of deciding at which range and region of space your fire is best concentrated.

Capship velocity should be adjusted based on its angular velocity. A capship inside your battery's range should be able to move about as fast as you can turn to keep your batteries on them.

Hence, if your capship angular velocity is 'w', your battery artillery angular velocity is 'b', and the capship's forward velocity is 'v'

they should be pretty closely related by:

(w+b) * R = v

where R is the ideal range of your batteries.

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This kind of directional emphasis allows a special job on a capship for a tactical shields officer.

The shields officer would have control over the shield density over the ship. While the Artillery officer's job is to anticipate the enemy ship's range and motion, the shields officer's job is to anticipate the enemy fire and direct the shields to compensate. They would have access to an elliptical interface, where they could negate a percentage of the damage in one of a number of places.

A simple case would involve 6 regions on the ship.

Fore, Aft, Port, Starboard, Deck, Keel

The shield officer divides points to these regions with the aid of an ellipse overlaid on top of a third-person view of the battle.

They get 200 points to divide up, each point represents a percent damage reduction.

Hence, if they know for certain that all of the fire will hit the aft section, they could move 100 points there, and take no damage. (Though the shield strength suffers for every hit they absorb)

Meanwhile, a pair of capital ships could attack in such a way as to guarantee to hit at least 3 sections of the ship, meaning that the shields officer would not be able to negate it all. This would be a job for the pilot, who would need to reposition the ship so as to maximize the effectiveness of the shields.

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We can add additional jobs here,

With shields being depleted, weapons requiring energy, and the ship needing energy to move, the last role would be to manage energy to each of these 3 areas.

Again, we have a points system, where the engineer can apply energy to the weapons, to increase firing rate. To the shields, to improve regeneration rate, or to the engines to maximize maneuverability.

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Basically, capital ship combat could be beautiful and complex, and I don't think we have to look far to find the solutions for it.

nice

sumething in a similar vein with Inc feedback

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/25498

Yeah, I like that, we can toss in a submarine model while we're at it.

EDIT:

Though I disagree about difficulty of implementation of broadsides, the AI is actually a step down, and if pilots and artillery officers are using a third-person view of the battle, I think it's pretty playable.

Oh Hai shape. I'd like to invite you to consult on a little MMO I'm building. Your thoughts intrigue me, I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I've said this before, but turret placement needs to be significantly improved. The blind spots on the Trident in particular are absurdly large, and the turrets themselves have insufficient overlapping coverage. I can appreciate the notion of a capship being able to bring more guns to bear on certain vectors and less on others, but I find the reality of there being vectors where no guns can be brought to bear completely unacceptable. The current lack of shields on the Trident M due to technical issues just makes the problem all the more apparent.

Lets see if I can provide a Trident Captain's perspective.

I've got mixed feelings about this suggestion. On the one hand, it's really cool and detailed gameplay and I can't say I wouldn't like something like this to be implemented in VO. But I think it's heading in the wrong direction for a couple of reasons.

Your improvements don't leave anything else for the capship pilot to do in combat besides steer, a job which is currently boring enough as it stands. I think we should be going in the opposite direction.

Automate the turrets and give the capship pilots control over targeting, for instance, set these turrets to fire on this enemy, set the other turrets to fire on this enemy etc. etc..

The reason is you require less people to man a capship. It's hard enough to get 5 people together for a battle as it is, having 5 people PLUS another 5 people to get a battle going is really rare, so people end up fighting in their ships and just using the capship as a repair base anyway, leaving the pilot bored and usually vulnerable because he has no way to defend himself without shields or guns.

If the devs implement something like this, it should be IN ADDITION to the automated solution. There aren't enough people regularly on to be able to man capships in this way. And the pilot of the capship really needs to be entertained and rewarded for bringing the capship along. He/She is currently punished with frustrating gameplay, and that's a huge problem for capital ship content atm.

Another potential problem with this is if you are delegating all these tasks to the capship crew, it makes it more frustrating for the pilot. If something goes wrong he/she is going to get the shits and could potentially blame it on the crew. It's really frustrating watching your gunner shoot stuff and trying to get them to switch targets to another one.

my 2c.

Well, I think the idea is that there wouldn't be a fixed pilot. There would be an overall captain who has authority to kick people out and what-not, but any authorized person could man any station. So if you only had yourself, you could act as pilot, then get up and switch to the shields, then hop into the artillery station to adjust the targeting, etc. This would obviously be less efficient than just having a crew set up on voice chat, and the captain in some kind of overview station where he can watch in 3rd person and place down markers and highlight priority targets and stuff to help him command his crew.

I wouldn't be opposed to some amount of AI assistance when there are no humans, particularly with the larger ships. But it shouldn't be incredibly good AI. Humans should be better. Since we aren't talking about individually controlling each and every turret, I think it would be manageable to use humans. One human to pilot, one to manage the artillery, and optionally another to sit in the overview station and coordinate. Either the overviewer or the artilleryman could also handle shields as a side function, though do have a second overview seat where a dedicated shield operator could sit, in case they want to micromanage it. There could also be additional artillery seats to allow optionally dividing up the turrets among multiple people.

So you could be efficient with as little as two people, and have the option of having more to lessen the workload.

-1 I had to read again to choose a side. Why think about ship-of-line configurations when turrets and fighter/bomber support exists? We need more tactical variations:

Instead, what we need, in my opinion, prioritzed:

1. Use own turrets. Simplest low-hanging. Why only the captain can't leave pilot seat and go somewhere else, while other players can?

2. Decent anti-capship weapons for pilot. Something like capship-grade avalons, gauss, etc.

3. Easier access to more capships variations. Trident mk.1 as freighter, mk.2 as assault, mk.3 as light and fast, mk.4 as carrier, etc. (or Types M,S,P,L,C)

4. Shields. Yes, after the other three. Preferably, for civilians, half-ship shields only. Or a weak total shield with option to divert its energy only to one side (up,down,left,right,front,rear)

5. Shared ownership, or at least allow more than one pilot, using keys.

6. New AI turrets, with a tactical panel for the lonely captain. Probably implemented as an "Firing Computer Addon"

7. New capship models, allowing more tactical and strategical variations.

So far a Trident-M is simply a (much) larger Moth with docks. We need other tactical roles instead of make cappies worse. When you see a PC trident now you know what it is and what it can do... while should possibly be a unarmed freighter with 3000cu, or a heavy armoured without cargo, or a carrier with 12 fighters/bombers inside it... That's when strategy would play a role.

Alloh loses thread.

Alloh loses thread.

It's ok, he's used to that.

Ships-of-line tactical were interesting when ships had no turrets, and no "flying" support, but only large, smoothbore, muzzel-loading cannons and no way to calculate artillery shoots, thus limited to direct-angle shots with visual aiming.

Can you imagine modern carriers using ship-of-line, short-range, direct-aim gunnery, with its fighters/bombers in hangars? If implemented as OP proposes, then instead of capship-capship battles, we would have carrier battles, since would be far more efficient to leave turret and fly a rag against enemy... and trident pilots watching powerless the battle...

Despite fancy, original proposal is stupid. And what sort of competiton is Shape engaged, to state losers and winners? Seems more that Shapenaji, the OP, loses his arguments.

Alloh,

A) It is CURRENTLY more efficient to fly a rag than to man a turret, turrets are not known for being particularly effective

B) It would NOT be more efficient to leave the ship, since a talented artillery commander would choose a blanket area of space to simply vaporize. Weapons become about zone-defense, not point-defense.

C) We ARE limited by short range, direct aim shots. If we upgrade to long range, pre-calculated shots, we remove ANY element of player skill beyond who fires first when two ships enter the sector.

D) You lost the thread because your suggestions were primarily concerned with the arrangement of pilots and AI, and thus were Off-topic.

Your other suggestions merely repeated what I already said, or suggested things which were unrelated to bringing skill to capship battles, and more related to making custom capships.

EDIT:

If your goal is to suggest gameplay UNRELATED to making capship battles skillful, please make your own thread to that effect. This also applies to the other thread involving battery capacity as well.

Shape, suggest[ing] gameplay UNRELATED to [anything in the original thread] is sorta Alloh's thing.

Back on topic:

Ideally capships would have a combination of anti-fighter point-defense and long-range area-defense. The latter suited more for capship vs. capship battles, and the former to be used as suppression fire against more maneuverable targets at close range.

Take the HAC, for example, which currently has 21 turrets. There's no way you'd ever get 21 people together to man the turrets plus a pilot, and even if you did, it wouldn't be an efficient use of manpower. I'd keep 6-8 of the turrets as-is for point-defense, incorporating some automation along the lines of what TRS suggests. Players could man these turrets individually if they choose, or leave targeting to the AI (which should be less efficient).

Then in addition, have heavy ordinance, long-range weapons banks that link 4-5 ports together and are controlled by the artillery captains from a 3rd person view. There could be 3 sets of these manned by 3 crew members, generally facing in the fore, port and starboard directions. I disagree about having these weapons locked in one direction; that puts the burden of aiming entirely on the pilot, and you may want to have the starboard side directed differently than the port side. Instead, I would suggest allowing for some degree of motion but just make it really slow to change the angle at which the weapons are facing (and perhaps even limit to one axis of motion).

I like that meridian, though I don't think we want to emphasize point-defense on cappies too much. If cappies are self-sufficient (they can do all their own protecting) then there's no need for fighters.

In an exchange between one of Darth Vader's subordinates who died in a very big capship and the big helmethead himself:

"They're too small for our turbo lasers"

"We'll have to take them ship to ship"

Capital ships should do great job of wiping out incoming fighters on approach (2000 m, right before swarms become effective, but the artillery captain needs to be aiming for them, and the ship needs to be oriented correctly), but have great difficulty dealing with them if they get into close range.

I don't think we want to emphasize point-defense on cappies too much

In regards to Tridents I'd agree with you needing support from fighters for proper defense, but my post was directed more towards HACs. Without any point-defense they'd be way too vulnerable to fighters at close range that can simply out maneuver the big guns.

With the handful of turrets that I am proposing to keep there would still be blind-spots that would allow a skilled fighter pilot to be dangerous, and some fighter support would still be good to have. But at least the HAC wouldn't be totally defenseless by itself.

The thing is, if a rag gets into range, the point defense weapons will be useless anyway. Right now, they get to 1700 m, they can unload everything, and the damage is already done.

So point defense isn't really helpful unless the HAC has to worry about small light fighters which are not bombers, and those simply aren't strong enough to break the shields.