Allow turrets on capships to be assigned as if they were standard port weapons to groups. They would track the targeted ship within their firing arc. This would allow with some practiced flying for tridents to possibly fight each other without being game breakingly over powered.

It sounds more like you are asking for a level of automation of turrets rather than pilot control. Regardless, I give this a solid

+1

I'm not sure I would want to see automated turrets, but I would have to see the impact it would make before actually having a clear answer about aye or nay on this subject.

This deserves so badly to exist.

+10000000000000000000000000000000

-1 find a gunner. This is a multiplayer game.

If this is approved, do the same for moth turrets and atlas turrets.

Gunners are ridiculous. I'll continue using plugins before I invite a gunner to my ship. Nor will I serve as a gunner on someone else's ship. Frankly speaking, for the value I get out of the turrets on my trident beyond a method of attracting additional arklans, they might as well not even exist.

I have no objection to this applying to all turreted ships.

Death Fluffy... as I posted in the other thread... Wash's suggestion is game breaking... imagine if you flew a dent with 4 gem turrets with unlimited ammo into a bot sector, all the sss that would drop while the owner or his friends collect would break the demand for sss.

You can do that now with your fancy tcft /defend plugin nonsense. All this does is allow for capship to capship combat

You have a valid point there. That could be equally game braking for farming dynamic queen sectors. An ammo limit- which should already exist imo would still not solve that problem if the player is using cap guass. I may have gotten enthusiastic about this idea prematurely.

I'm not sure that this would be more effective than the current l-mine method using the trident to farm sss and queen sectors.

I'll change my initial vote to neutral. Perhaps someone has an idea to limit this likely overpowering of the trident or other thoughts that will convince me one way or another.

In all honesty, I'd be happy just to get a second large port.

Edit: Good point Hoban. My experience using gems in that way showed it to be less productive. I had forgotten about that. I'm way too easily swayed this evening. Time for me to change back to a +1 and get out of these forums before Capt'n Blood convinces me to go behind the roid with him... again.

-1

Just give us more PORTS on the Trident Type M so we don't have to hope for the turrets to be turned into "new ports" out of desperation.

Don't to "dodging" suggestions Wash. I've been doing that. Won't help. We need to ask for a second large port right away. And again. And again. And we need to HOPE! HOPE FORUM ACTION!

+1 to more PORTS!

+1

Regarding capships being overpowered vs. bots, the solution is simple. Right now, the hive only allocates a few bots to attacking any interlopers, while the rest continue patrolling or mining. This keeps things from being overwhelming when players show up, while at the same time providing a nearly endless stream of enemies to fight. It breaks down when the players are too skilled or powerful, though, since the hive doesn't scale up its response. That could be changed. Make it so that the more bots you kill, the more they throw at you at once. Give them some memory as well, maybe two hours worth, so that you can't just jump out and return to reset their aggression level. They could also be set up to recognize capital ships and begin at a higher aggression level in the first place. Maybe even give the hive some bots with drain weapons.

Also, get rid of any infinite hive presences. You shouldn't be able to ignore the boss and slaughter bots endlessly in crit or central skirmish sectors. At some point they need to retreat if it becomes clear that they cannot win even by throwing all of their forces at the enemy. This gives you an incentive to actually kill off the boss, since if you go for attrition, they'll just leave and you won't get its loot. Of course, a Levi doesn't have anywhere to flee to, but what it could do when it realizes it cannot win is to begin cannibalizing itself to produce a bunch of cheap, fast bots that would emerge from its husk all at once and scatter out into the black to rebuild the hive. The result would be that you complete the central skirmish and mess up the hive's logistics, but the Leviathan doesn't drop anything besides scrap and the hive rebuilds faster than if you'd killed it properly.

Ooooooh, i like pizzaisgood's idea; scaled hive aggro and stuff would be quite cool to see.

Any developer response on this?

I think this is a good idea and much better than adding more forward-facing ports to the TTM or goliath. A capital ship doesn't find by pointing its nose towards the enemy, it's not agile enough and it has better things to do.

I think three things are needed to make both being a gunner and using turrets without gunners more useful and fun:

1) Make it possible to fire all weapons that can reach a target. So, if you are controlling one of the broadside turrets of a HAC, it should be able to fire all turrets that can 'see' your target. This will make it much more fun to be a gunner as you suddenly have some real firepower at your disposal.

2) Allow a pilot to easily see the turret points of view, by either quickly (as in, single button press) swapping screens; by having a multi-monitor setup; or by adding small viewports within the main cockpit view. You can fire all weapons that can see the current target, regardless of your viewport. You cannot target more than one ship or auto-target all ships, that leaves a real role for gunners.

3) To limit how OP this might be, limit turret ammo but let it draw ammo or reload from the main cargo hold. This adds another strategic choice to loading your ship. Obviously, it should be transfer ammo between the capship and docked ships.

Making turret ammo use cargo hold for ammo containment would be nice, but i feel it may break existing weapon design. I dunno, id have to again see it in action before giving a definative responce.

Also, auto-targetting of ships could, in theory, be acheived by spamming some kind of TargetNextinFront code or something. Even worse if you could limit it to spamming targets down to a few you check off in the sector list (future plugin, if this were to become a thing?). But, you kinda have this ability now, it just isnt that useful since turrets arent able to autopilot.

I mean, i'd love this to be a thing, but its so loaded with issues right now...
Maybe if it only applied to capital ships, and capital ships could only equip capital turrets, and existing capital weapons were altered to be harder to use? Also/or, different turrets have varying arc capability?

Missle turrets do have a limited fire rate and only so many shots before you have to exit the turret and re-enter before they are relaoded. So a relaod delay of some type will be incurred for those type turrets.

Turret points of view is gong to far for the pilot. The Radar is sufficient.

Considerinf i have already automated my turrets, in many ways and with varied effects, i have also spent much time playtesting and observing ai capships. I do not think it would be game breaking, but it would revolutionise a lot of the ways capships are used.

For example....

I have found it possible for two turrets with capgauss and a mega posi can deshield a goli and a trident quite reliably. I have done this solo.

As many already learned, the rear capgauss on a goli is deadly... it kills with ease...

But the one thing i have found is that the turrets are always limited in the damage they can apply. My automated turrets rarely achieve higher rates of sss collection than a bit of good old lmining. But it s damned fun....

So yeah... plus maybe a million!

I have zero turret experience but from a logical standpoint it seems automated turrets could be a "real" thing so the question really is does it unbalance the game somehow. Could turrets be range limited or only shoot at ships that are actively attacking (so entirely defensive)?

On the Atlas that I sometimes use for mining it would be nice to be able to use the turret position in some fashion.

In regards to overkill... some numbers may help us along.

A gauss cannon is around 1200 dmg with a reload of 0.4 seconds. A single capgauss turret puts out 3000 damage per shot every 1.5 seconds. During this period of time, the standard gauss has achieved 4500 damage approximately.

Four turrets on a trident are unable to fire at the same target, only two can, so its 6000 per side, per 1.5 seconds, or 4000 per second. Compare this to a gauss, singly, it can achieve almost as much as TWO capital cannons. (3000 per secomd for gauss cannon)

So... capital cannons are in no way op, however in their current incarnation are perfect as they are. Nicely balanced, enough perks to be useful, but not enough to be overpowered. Their main advantage is extended range up to 1800-2000m max i think.

Capital swarms... They reload in ten seconds and with four turrets firing six each you get 24 missiles at i think 850 damage each, which works out at 2.4 missiles per second. This means the damage potential of all four missile turrets concentrsted on a single target cannot exceed 2040 per second. Again, less than that single gauss.

So... capship firepower is always gonna be a war of attrition. Infinite missiles are the only bonus to this... lets look at gems...

Twin missiles, 1.5 reload and 900 damage per missile equates to 2700 damage per second per turret. This is 10800 per second... except gem targetting sucks worse than a greyspace "lady of the night". So, effectively achieving even 60% hits is unheard of. Id say 5000 damage per second in effect was hopeful.

But... a plasma rag can exceed all these numbers except for the gems - but gems will NEVER achieve the full 10800 potential. This is exacerbated further by the opposite sides of the turrets on a trident. Also, the capital turrets are very much long range - both effective to just over 1500 metres. The gems are less so, and any other missile turrets much less so, i think neuts may be able to out damage a cap cannon too, but the numbers i do not know offhand.

So - capital turrets cant be over powered - ai tridents complete with ai turrets tend to lose every battle they enter... and any turret ai we get will likely perform no better. Best limitation is simply "nearest enemy targetting" only, or "designated targetting".

Also - gunners are the most dangerous idea on the planet. I have ended up with kos to uit, my home nation, due to gunners. The only people willing to do it are trigger happy newbs with zero flight skill. Dangerous...

And also, whats the point of having a capital ship with all its potential wasted? Why not open up some way of using the ai that controls turrets for the ai capships available to use, but then make it something that is an award for a difficult mission tree that may require a capital ship to complete. Or maybe make it require some kind of cost, but not be mission based like the furies, maybe it could be done via npcs receiving gunner invites, but needing to be paid first, for an hour or so's work in a turret, allowing you to do hive missions/deneb etc with the gunners on board.

+1 to all that Nys says.