In the other recent thread ( https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/35669 ) Incarnate talked about the hassle of rearming cap ships that use cap swarms or other ammo based turrets and I agree that this wouldn't be fun so instead I think all turrets should simply consume energy but have infinite ammo. Turrets already have the stats that show the energy consumed per shot so we should just use these. As for the cap swarm I think, just like the Railgun, it should use 1000 energy to shoot. This would mean a Trident could fire all 4 turrets at the same time and have enough energy after the reload to repeat this because of the long cooldown of cap swarms.

Cap ships can shut down sectors by being able to fire forever and the only way to stop it is to kill it and this isn't very easy. You have to deshield it first while being fired at continuously and when you deal enough damage some players turbo away while still maintaining constant fire at the enemy.
I think this is a major issue in game balance and it shouldn't be ignored.

bro what are you doing

-1

You do know that capships aren't meant to be soloed? A coordinated group of players can easily take one down.

Aryko I think you're looking at the wrong thread?
This isn't about soloing anything. Maybe you confused them because you didn't read the other thread: https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/35669

This here is just a balance with common sense and logic behind it. It just doesn't make any sense that cap ships can magically generate energy when they are being bombarded by PCBs. As for the cap swarms, I don't think anyone would like to have to refill every time they use them and having limited ammo because they are preferred by most.

-1

You indirectly want them to be soloable, it's obvious.

As I said, a well coordinated group can still remove a dent spamming weapons. Doesn't matter if you want them to br soloable or not.

-1 to this proposed idea. This is indirectly making capships soloable. But it's also just a bad idea to go about it. What your saying is that a capital ship gets what? 4 shots before it has to wait several minutes to shoot again? If this that is the case then power cell/recharge rate would need to drastically increased.

Personally I think 500 energy per shot for both the railgun and Swarms sounds better than 1000. Constant fire would drain 500 energy every 10 seconds when using Swarms and the cell has 4000 energy.

@Aryko
How do you justiy that Cap ships can magically generate energy and ammo out of thin air? You learn right at the beginning of the game that every weapon in the game either costs ammo or energy. It violates the basics of VO. The energy costs can be adjusted later but turrets should definetly use energy.

Okay so 8 shots to kill attackers or it's basically dead in the water?

[edited to comply with forum rules -W]

100 energy for capital gauss.
250 for capital rail.
0 for capswarm

Capships don't magically create energy out of thin air. They have a 200mw reactor.

Heinii, you just proposed infinite ammo, then asked how someone else can justify it? What are you smoking man I want some!

@We all float
A 200mw reactor that is being bombarded by PCBs and gets to 0 energy but can somehow still manage to fire the turrets?

@Barktooth
I would like ammo as well but Incarnate stated that it would probably be a hassle to reload and not every station has cap ship docks. If they use energy it would make them balanced already and most would hate having ammo for their main weapon. It would be the same as repairing and reloading forever in a cap ship, it would just be an anti fun mechanic if these things were limited and outsiders can't affect ammo anyways, unlike energy.

@Iron Lord
Cap Swarms need to use energy as well. This is the whole point of this thread. A cap ship, just like any other ship in the game, shouldn't be able to shoot when they have for example 0 energy.

The power cell is being affected by the pcb, not the reactor. What you are looking for is a reactor blaster.

Not everything can be realistic. If you are going for realism, we would not have a space sim game, not would we stop after turboing, or store a huge number of ships in a small ass station. You can't even fly in real life like the way you do in VO, we don't yet have graviton propulsion in the real 'verse.

Sometimes you need to deviate from realism to make the game playable...

@We all float and the power cell powers the weapons and not the reactor.

@Aryko
It's not about realism, it's balance. Every ship uses energy to shoot and PCBs can stop them from shooting. But cap ships are magically overpowered nuclear power plants somehow and don't need energy to shoot energy weapons or use ammo for swarms.

@Heini Please list any reference where it has been stated by any member of the development team that in fact the reactor does not provide any power for any systems on a capitol ship and that it is run completely off the power cell.

We'll wait....

Despite this, I've come to realize that overall the energy consumption of weapons in VO is too heavy handed. Running out of battery charge with energy weapons should really happen much less frequently. Grid itself is sufficient enough to limit use (not of just energy weapons, but all addons), so having another significant layer of energy limiting seems excessive -- at least at the consumption levels we deal with now. Certain high damage weapons should really be the only things that ever completely drain a cell (avalons and rails... maybe also a TU but, honestly it still seems weird that energy is required to place a mine).

If you think about it, what truly is the downside of being on the receiving end of unlimited (or at least 2-5x more) gauss shots during pvp, or aaps or neuts...? You just dodge them like you do the rest. I'd say there is mostly just upside: more exciting pvp battles, botting made easier, etc.

I wasn't around for the first 4 years of development of this game, but my guess is that more powerful weapons and more powerful powercells were added bit by bit, but there was never a grand re-assessing of how energy consumption mattered overall. It was more "well this weapon should have a higher value of [insert specification], so one potential sacrifice is that it takes more energy per shot".

So, while I still support the idea of limited capship turret energy (particularly in the case of cap rails) I think care should be taken to not be so heavy handed with it.

Would be nice if this also came with a shared meter of a shared "turret energy pool" that the captain and all turret inhabitants see and draw from.

@heini i agree that turrets in non capital ships (moth, atlas) should be linked the power cell.

But in my opinion (which could be wrong, because i'm not Guild Software), a Capital ship's sub systems and defenses systems are powered by the 200MW reactor (so that would be shields and turrets). The primary weapon and jump system are powered by the power cell. This is not OP in any sense. It is a capital ship, not a fighter. :-)

I'm not really interested in "quasi-reality" driven justifications of gameplay, like "X should be Y because one of the component objects is called a Reactor!" That really isn't a factor for me in design.

Instead, we should probably focus on whatever creates the best gameplay balance, and perhaps on the pros and cons of different perspectives and ideas of relative balance.

Heini seems to want a capital ship that is substantially more vulnerable that it is currently. A lot of other people.. probably don't want that. I'm likely somewhere in the middle, I still plan on weapons that are specialized for attacking shields, and the relative capabilities of capships will continue to evolve, both in strengths / capabilities, and weaknesses / trade-offs. Capships are a major investment, I want them to come with major advantages, but always mitigated by challenges and weaknesses that keep things interesting.

But, it's a more productive discussion to focus more on the type of balance we want, and why.. than to justify things through "Reactors" or what I may-or-may-not have wanted to do in 2004.

Back to the subject at-hand.. I've long considered tying capship turrets to the main ship's powercell. The only reason why it isn't, currently, is because of how the turrets were implemented as "tiny ships" basically glommed onto the hull, which didn't programmatically "share" any information with their parent vessel.

So, it's purely the way it is due to implementation challenges and time to change it, as opposed to any real "goal-driven" reason (or "Reactors", or whatever). People may recall that player-capships were a bit of a hack-job by us, when we added them (while warning that they would be a hack-job, as we accelerated their implementation based on player request). This is just one aspect of that.