Why not subject weapon prices in each sector to the same dynamic economy code?

The most popular weapons like flares and gauss would become more expensive than ones that are used less often. In certain "warzone" sectors (s7, s9), the price of weaponry would be higher in general. Also, the prices of flares where people buy back their precious triflare valks (s18 and s4) would skyrocket.

No:
Sam
Sam II
99.9% of blue nation
99.9% of gold nation
99.9% of red nation
99% of the NPCs
100% of the Def bots

""___I don't know if you've actually tried or you're just being ignorant, but a fighter can easily catch up to a heavy ship that's strafing backwards. The reason being that it has higher agility, so therefore it can change direction much more quickly. Even when a ragnarok or centurion is spiraling backwards, it does so in a much more slower manner than a fighter. This is because of its lower acceleration rate. Boosting away is also out of the question, because more than half of your battery's energy is depleted on changing direction alone. No matter how you look at it, the fighter will always catch up to it.___""

Arolte.. this is me.. SPELLCAST!!! When have we ever dueled that I havent spent most of the fight backing up with you barely even getting close to me. Addmitedly a vulture will catch up towards a rag, but if the pilot of the rag is using his gats and gausses effectively.. the vulture isn't going to have a particuarly good shot. The only ship that I cant effectively fight in a rag without resorting to swarms is a tri flare valk. I may not win all the time.. but I can make em know they were in a fight.

""___Sorry, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense why this weapon exists the way it does now. From a logical perspective it defies the general idea that higher agility ships would have weaker or lower auto weapons, whereas lower agility ships would be given more auto weapons to compensate for its sluggishness.___""

this is your opinion. you are entitled to it. I applaud you for having it and being willing to share it. to me The gauss seems to make a lot of sense It is a high end small port weapon, combinbining a lot of damage with a fairly good amount of accuracy. It is far from undodgable, and it has a moderately high energy consumption and a reasonable refire rate. please keep in mind one additional fact. the devs have made money very easy to get right now so that we CAN test the various weapons and the like.. in the final game it may be MUCH harder to get gauss cannons which would make them balanced by availibility as well.

Name currently AGAINST lowering ther autoaim on the gauss

Spellcast
Blitz
Suicidal Lemming
RogueLazer
StarFreeze
Durgia
Magus
Urza
Paedric
SilentSuicide
Renegade
Fenix
Kuvagh

Vote away. The title is pretty self explanatory.

I personally feel that the Gauss cannon is WAY too good for an s-port weapon class. It just doesn't make sense to give high agility ships a high autoaim weapon. I feel that the autoaim should either be decreased or the speed should be decreased. Right now it's pretty much impossible to dodge gauss cannons fired from point blank ranges. Thus the controversial term of "gauss ramming" has been invented.

And before people start complaining about the Warthog's gatling turret, keep in mind that it has medium agility, low hull points, and is pretty easy to hit with a large center of mass. The Vulture is much harder to hit. And the Valk makes up for its size with armor. Plus if you know how to dodge right, you can easily avoid the tracking of a gatling turret at moderate ranges with no problem in a high agility fighter. Not only that, but a single gauss bolt does more than twice the damage of a single gatling shell. And unlike the gauss, it suffers from an inaccuracy spread.

Petition Signers:
Arolte
toshiro
Celebrim
Blue Nation Flag
Red Nation Flag
Gold Nation Flag
[NPCDEF ] Gold 3
[NPCDEF] Red 2
[NPCDEF] Blue 1
[NPC] Pubdila
[NPC] EULA

If you lower it's autoaim it will be just worthless.
You can't chase with it, so it's only good in dogfights.
Not sure how a speed decrease would affect it. It still won't solve "gauss ramming".

I know a solution! STOP FLYING 50M FROM A GAUSSER. heh.

Lemming votes, no.

I vote that since I can dodge it it's not too high.

I've been known to advocate faster energy weapons in the past, but it wouldn't hurt to tweak the gauss down 10 m/s or so.

by all means, decrease the autoaim. i vote yes.

I agree that the gauss is the superior energy weapon at the moment, and something ought to be done by way of balance, but I'd rather see the tachyon up by 20m/s or so, or the grav given a faster cycle rate, or some such.

I give this a big no. The gauss is a very good weapon for starting n00bs and I think it should be kept the same so n00bs can have some chance of defending themselves. Not to mention it's really good against rocket rammers. It's what holds them back.

Now, to all those who say no... WHY?! It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. You might well slap on a turret that fires 180 degrees on a vulture and valk, because that's essentially what it does now. It's essentially a very slow-firing and powerful gatling turret. Not in the sense that it fires continuously, but more in the sense of its autoaim level. I'm sorry, but the autoaim and speed is just way too high to be acceptable on high agility fighters. It's nerfing all the other energy weapons.

And if you're ever on, it shows. Just look at its popularity. Today people barely use tachyons and gravitons because it just doesn't have as much damage or autoaim as the gauss cannon. 99.9% of the time It's either gauss cannons, sunflares, or both. It's never anything else. Some people have experimented with the flechette for a while, but they've always reverted back to the gauss. On occasion you'd see a vulture of valk pilot using tachyons, but most of the game it's gauss. Clearly there's an issue here if people use nothing but the gauss.

StarFreeze, solving a problem with another problem isn't the solution. Rocket ramming is a whole 'nother problem in and of itself. You still have tachyons and gravitons that are useless. And you still have low agility fighters/bombers getting slaughtered left and right because of this weapon.

Celebrim, making all the other energy weapons more powerful still gives lower agility fighters a huge disadvantage. I still fail to see why a weapon that can be equipped on high agility fighters need such high autoaim. If they're highly agile to begin with, why do they need to have such high autoaim? Think about that.

I vote NO!

And in response to arolte's post here are my reasons.

The Gauss cannon is far from undodgable, nor is it the "only" s port weapon used. You just have to learn how to fight around it. Tachyon's could definitely use a 5m/s speed boost, and gravs could use a 10 m/s speed boost just to make them a little more useful tho. don't get me started on the flachette cannon.. it's a good start but needs some major tweaking. (up the damage a bit? reduce the scatter a bit? i'm not sure)

Now, the solution here isn't to make the Gauss worse, but IMO the VULTURE needs to be just a hair thicker.. (maybe 125% as thick vertically?) as for the VALK, well I personally think that it has about 1k too much armor.. but that is my personal opinion, It seems to be an ok ship to me. (keep in mind that i never use the valk, so i'm hardly biased towards it)

I think no as well.

Dodging gauss is easy if you are not close to it. Go to 200m and see how often you get hit. If you are at point blank of course it will hit you, thats why it is point blank.

Weapons need a range, making all the s-port weapons basically the same would ruin it. There needs to be some good s-port weapons and then a scale downwards. Gauss is at the high end of the scale, but if you nerf it then something else will be and it will be complained about until we are all left with pee-shooters.

Maybe if we nerf all the good weapons, the flechette will eventually be useable!

No way.
I have dodged dual gauss vultures in a hornet before. The adv. gat. is far more unbalanced on the warthog than the Gauss ever was on any other ships. I, like Celebrim, would rather see the Tachyon, Graviton, and Flechette beefed up to match it.

There has yet to be a logical response to my question as to why the gauss has such high autoaim when it is already being equipped on high agility ships. Can someone answer this? If the ship is capable of turning on a dime, why does it need an autoaim system? I'm still not convinced that it should be left alone. It's just way to easy to get kills with it.

Yes, it is dodgeable and I understand that. But the distance which you need to keep yourself safe from a gauss sort of negates you actually being able to hit your opponent. So you're spending thirty some minutes taking pot shots from a distance until someone is brave enough to get close, in which they get burned badly. It's like having a staring contest. That's how dumb it is.

In addition to that, medium and heavy ships really don't stand a chance against gauss vultures and valks. Due to their higher speeds and higher rate of acceleration, all they have to do is plug themselves right up to a heavy ship and squeeze the trigger. Just aim in the general direction of the target and boom. This is fair for medium/heavy pilots how?

I feel that if you're going to use a high agility ship, you should learn how to aim. That's what its balancing factor is, not slapping autoaim weapons on uber fast ships. There should be a fair tradeoff of either owning a fast ship with low autoaim weapons, or owning a slow ship with high autoaim weapons. Reversing the two is a recipe for disaster when it comes to gameplay balance. The gauss right now is ruining the balance.

Arolte: You are making the flawed arguement that if something doesn't 'need' something, something shouldn't have it. So what if a ship doesn't 'need' autoaim, that doesn't mean that it can't have it. Frankly, I think that tachyon's work just as well as guass up close to a heavy pilot. Just aim and the target and boom. Yes, you have to be a little less lazy in your aiming, but it doesn't take that much work. I can hit a heavy with a tachyon just fine.

The real advantage of the gauss isn't that its better against low agility ships than tachyons; it's that it's better against high agility ships than tachyons. No other energy weapon can consistantly peg a Vulture or Valk even in the hands of an experienced gunner. Attempting to protect the heavy pilots by weakening the gauss is a fine but a futile gesture that would only result in no energy weapon being capable of threatening a high agility fighter, and we'd be back to an all Sunflare fest.

The problem IS NOT that there is one two powerful weapon, but rather that there are too few usable weapons. Other than Sunflares and Gauss, no other small slot weapon frequently hits an experienced pilot in the hands of an experienced gunner. Oh sure, you might get in a few 'pings' with a Gemini or a Railgun, but not often enough to make a difference.

If we lower the railgun energy requirement a bit, up the tachyon speed, decrease the graviton cycle time, find a good tweak for the flechette cannon, and find more ways for a heavy fighter to say 'stay back' to a light fighter, then everyone will have alot more choices. I've been saying stuff like this since 3.2.0.

Err.. and you can take my name off your petition, because its a forgery. I don't ever recall saying I agreed with you.

However, I'm not totally opposed to weakening the gauss just a bit (either in reducing the autoaim 5 degrees or so or in dropping the damage by 100 points or so), primarily because I think its first strike effect is alot stronger than I originally credited. But I don't even want to bother with that until the more important changes or made. As I've been saying for the better part of a year now, the problem isn't primarily that something is too good, but rather that not enough things are.

You can't fix everything by nerfing it.

My answer is no.


And arolte its a referendum, not a vote yes because I propose it / say so.

The Gauss is strong yes. But remember the old days when you had blue lasers and blue ions? Did you see anybody use green lasers or green ions. No, why because the chance of them hitting an experienced pilot was small.

Draw this line on to now. And you will see that as well gravs as tachs are the green ion and laser from before. The only problem is that we dont have a blue ion. So just bump up the tach and grav, so the chance of them hitting a target gets boosted, like with the old blue ions/lasers.

As cele so nicely stated. It isnt the gauss that is totally off, but the tachs and gravs that aren't worth a damn as a good offensive/ defensive countermeasure / weapon.

So please respect OUR opinions in stead of trying to make this a support aroltes proposal thread.

PS: There is no need for a advanced gatling on a medium ship. A tach is more then sufficient. I even propose a gauss because of its better autoaim, but leave the big slot for a swarm or a Big rocket :D. The only place where a use for the gatling is accepted, is in the wraith, atlas and higher up "so proms, rags , ...". Still an atlas with an advanced gatling is foolish, it can better use a proxminelayer or a rocket or so.

PPS: But naturally, this is only my opinion, and everybody else is entitled to disagree with this. And I wont hold this against them.

cheers

"Yes, it is dodgeable and I understand that. But the distance which you need to keep yourself safe from a gauss sort of negates you actually being able to hit your opponent. So you're spending thirty some minutes taking pot shots from a distance until someone is brave enough to get close, in which they get burned badly. It's like having a staring contest. That's how dumb it is."

-That's exactly how it is like fighting an adv. gat. hog in a vulture. I can dodge a 2x gauss vult for a little bit in a heavy engine hornet or a medium engine Vult. But I can't dodge an adv. gat. hog consistently in anything less than a heavy engine vult or cent. It's the same issue Arlote. Except it's not an issue. The Gauss is a good weapon. The only problem is that there aren't enough other weapons to match it.