Forums » Suggestions

Random ideas for fixing player tridents

Aug 28, 2012 Samwise9 link
As of right now, player tridents are completely overpowered in some aspects and completely useless in others. Sorry if any of these suck; I'm just letting my mind wander.

1) Infinite energy for the L-port weapon
It seems silly that the weapon of a capital class frigate is held to the same restrictions as the ones in single-seat fighters. This would allow them to be more of an effective weapons platform and able to defend itself a little better.

1a) If the L-port weapon takes ammo, have it reload over time.
The speed of the reload would be proportional to how much ammo for the weapon costs. For example, a swarm or jackhammer launcher would reload fairly quickly, but an avalon launcher would take at most a few minutes.

1b) Mounted energy weapons would gain a damage/velocity/autoaim/ROF boost. (possibly allowing it to aim past a 180 degree arc)

2) Jump delay.
The jump drive would need at most thirty seconds to "spool up" (possibly more for wormholes). This'd fix the annoying tactic of sector-hopping to get away.

3) Damageable engines to break their jump drive
The engines would become separately targetable entities, like turrets. After sufficiently pounding on them, the trident would lose its ability to jump and/or lengthen the aforementioned timer. This is intended to be relatively difficult, but not impossibly so. Loss of turbo or general speed is also a possibility, but I can see that becoming a pain.
I see this working in one of two ways:

3a) The engines start at 100% integrity. No performance is lost until they reach 0%. When that happens, a sort of "blow-out" occurs; the engine still appears intact, but a series of small explosions or something similar shoot out the exhaust to indicate it's crapped the bed(perhaps the panels fly off, but that'd take some modeling work). It is at this point the loss of jump ability or timer lengthening is attained. To regain jump ability outside of docking, someone with a repair gun would need to bring them back to 100%, or maybe less. I'm not sure if only one or both engines would need to be destroyed for this to take effect.

3b) The engines start at 100% integrity, and the jump timer would be gradually lengthened as they take damage. At 0%, ability to jump would be lost. Simply bringing it above 0% will fix the jump drive.
Aug 28, 2012 TerranAmbassador link
+1 to everything
Aug 28, 2012 ryan reign link
+1 to everything.
Aug 28, 2012 Pizzasgood link
+1 to most, but instead of infinite energy, it should either have multiple powercells, or a special trident-only or capital-only powercell with a large capacity and increased recharge and grid.

That way high powered capital class weaponry can have energy draw without impairing the use of lighter weapons.

Requiring separate trident powercells could also cover the jump delay, by making the capacity high enough to take a while for recharge to 25%, ala heavy vs FC.
Aug 28, 2012 tarenty link
+1 to all, with cappie cells as rin describes.
Aug 28, 2012 redotter link
+1 to everything including cells.
More shooting drains cells, takes longer to jump. Stop shooting = jump away sooner. Poker game and risk assessment.
I can see the group chat now:
MC> STOP GODDAMN SHOOTING
pop> Grrrrrr <keeps shooting>
*pop has been kicked out the airlock>
<ship jumps>
....
..
.
Aug 28, 2012 Samwise9 link
The Trident's turrets don't put any drain on the power cell. I don't think they should, either.

They definitely need more of them though, but I tried to avoid putting anything beaten to death up.
Aug 28, 2012 TheRedSpy link
No.'s 2 and 3 are two solutions for the same problem. Ditch 2, delays are stupid. I prefer the idea that the jump drive should be destroyable or that the Trident cast a field that makes it impossible to jump unless you are 3,000m away from it. In turn, the trident has to get 3,000m away from other ships in order to jump unless they have keys or something (in sectors, not wormholes. That solves your jump problem and adds proper combat dynamics into the equation without stupid delays. Delays are a lazy persons solution, shame on all of you who propose delays.

Shields, capgauss, lending and auto-turrets are the capship essential features. Until these happen nobody will know exactly how useful tridents are in real situations.

The so-called 'multi jump problem' really isn't a problem with the trident content at all, it's a problem with the lack of objective-based combat in Vendetta. A trident is a capital ship, it's not meant to be destroyable by any less than a team of 4 players in a reasonable amount of time. It certainly is not something you should ever be able to kill in one sector if it is moving, the NPC tridents dont even die in 1 sector if all the border turrets are shooting it.

The problem, put simply, is that there are no objectives in Vendetta worth risking the Trident's hull to achieve. If there were then they would be blowing up left, right and center and the change you would actually be calling for is the abolition of the insurance wait time.
Aug 30, 2012 redotter link
^ +1
Aug 31, 2012 Samwise9 link
+1 to TRS
Aug 31, 2012 abortretryfail link
There are things worth risking a Trident for. One of them is some of the oldest gameplay content still in the game: Capture the Cargo.

This doesn't address the problem of the Trident's ineffective and utterly stupid turret placement, but yeah...

+1 to auto-reloads.
+1 to jump delay.
+1 to damageable and repairable subsystems (jump drives, impulse engines, turrets, etc).

Oh, and give us a damn place to dock at that isn't 30km away in a defective sector full of fog where radar doesn't work right, the 3000m jump indicator doesn't work right, and the station you dock at has no textures.
Aug 31, 2012 Samwise9 link
"This doesn't address the problem of the Trident's ineffective and utterly stupid turret placement, but yeah... "

Like I said, I tried to avoid mentioning anything previously beaten to death. But that's why I suggested the autoaim boost.