I am fed up with people using skill-less tactics against the frigate.

The frigate should have its health doubled but the turrets the same.

When I say skill-less I mean they take out 1 or 2 turrets and just attack the frigate directly, without moving.

The turret needs to have some anti-fighter missile launchers, imo. Perhaps swarms that go twice as fast as the current ones. The frigate at its original health is good (same goes for its turrets - 4 nukes per turret, I think).

Yea. Draining 3/4 of my battery with tachs will take out a turret (or thereabouts.) They need to be better armored.
I'm against frig swarms though. Maybe geminis would be better off. I just think a huge frig to frig battle with lots of fighters on both sides will make swarms a little too laggy.

Also: Be sure to fix the defense net hole by the underbelly docking bay. If you get in there, you can just sit out of range of all turrets, and blast away. Perhaps that would be a good place to set the heavier defensive weapons.

Okay, both the turret's and the frigate has health problems.

I just soloed the entire frigate, 1 turret after another until they were all gone.
It is exactlyish 8 shots of gauss per turret, sometimes a shot will hit the frigate instead of the turret.
My setup:
Vulture
2 gauss cannons
Heavy engine
Heavy battery

I'm no expert but i don't think it should be possible for a medium fighter to take out a full blown capital ship.

The very tip of the nose is a big safe spot. Fly to right next to the two front turrets and blast them from the side. Now, the whole frigate is open to ya.


On a totally different note, can we get "Frigkill groups". As in, join a group and if anyone from that group kills the frigate, the entire group gets the bounty.

I feel that the frigate should have gemini launchers, 2x as many turrets, and 500k hp. It has a 30 minute respawn time, it shouldn't die in 30 seconds.

Also halve the respawn time, i don't want to feel like i am playing EQ.

That or add a minigame.

This is a little hokey, but I'd like to have it that a player is unable to do direct damage to the frigate until:
A.) All the turrets are destroyed.
2.) Certain areas are destroyed ("shield generators or something to that effect)
C.) Did anyone catch my "Home Alone 2" reference?

A2C. We get it.

I agree, kinda. But right now, 4 people can destroy the turrets in under 2 minutes. So you'd better make those some -good- shield generators.

The turrets need to be part of the actual frigate (not destroyable). And the health needs to be doubled. And we need a turret in the docking bay.

And rets under the wings, except if we had rets there they'd blow up their own frigate. :P

None of this is suprising. I've been opposed to separately destroyable turrets ever since the frigate was introduced because they make the frigate almost impossible to balance.
The original post is here: http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com/?action=msgboard&thread=1458.
I can only hope that the current system was envisioned to be temporary in some details.

Imagine what your fighter would be like if an explosion doing a mere 500 damage permenently disabled your weapons systems. Well, having the turrets being destroyed on a frigate is even worse than that. Because the frigate will never be able to manuever compared to a fighter, its like not only losing your weapons to the first 500 damage taken, but losing the ability to turn to face certain directions. Combat would become comical and frustrating.

Secondly, I've been worried since the Frigate was introduced that it has too many blind spots in the turrets field's of fire against targets that get close to the Frigate. However, the 'fixes' of forcing artists to design ships with a utilitarian lack of blind spots, or of putting more turrets on the ship until ever blind spot has a turret covering some tiny little arc just simply don't cut it. Putting turrets down in the armpits and docking bays only highlights the lack of utility in the design, while constraining artists to realistic engineering principals will lead to a bunch of visually unimpressive designs that won't 'Wow' average gameplayers on first look.

Fortunately, there is a much better solution.

Make every capital ship act like a 'lightning mine' so that any ship coming within 50m or so of its hull and staying there is subject to extensive damage.

And of course, as I've been saying for more than a year now, the only really good way to balance capital ships versus fighters is something like the armor system described in this post:

http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com/?action=msgboard&thread=1416

There are a variaty of other defensive measures that are important, but armor is critical.

Lastly, I think that the Frigate needs a main battery. All these small (well compared to the size of the frigate) weapons are great, but while people are exploiting a few particular problems they are forgetting about other ones. For example, people used to solo the Frigate simply by doing torpedo runs from greater than 1km out and attacking the Frigate with Avalons from beyond the range it could respond. Without a main battery of weapons not only is the Frigate vulnerable to straight forward attacks from fighters, but combat between two capital ships is uninteresting and predictable.

Therefore I strongly advocate that the 'Frigate' (a horrible title for the ship BTW) be given a main battery as described in this post:

http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com/?action=msgboard&thread=2314

For those of you that are looking for anti-fighter missiles, check out the Appolyon launchers.

I think the parts of the frigate (examples turrents, nose, tail, wings engines ,etc.) should each be destroyable and have bounties so everyone can get some money by fighting it so not only the person who gets the last shot get money.

/me is more in favour of "Anti-Frigate Group", wherein all members of the group share the bounty if one group member kills the frigate.

Ah, Celebrim! You're back in your groove, I see. Do you remember the "Dev Beam Cannon" weapon? That colored line that would reach out and smack someone from sector 4 nearly to 12? We need five of those: One each on the top and bottom edges of the hull, just back of where the nose chisel ends. One near the engines, one on the tip of each wing. Fire rate is one shot every ten seconds, hemispherical field of fire for the hull-mounted, spherical for the wing-mounted. 30 second cool-down, and 8500 damage per shot. You heard me: 8500 damage per shot, enough to make a nice pot of dead from any light fighter. Warning for the shot is a red "laser beam" sight visible for five seconds before firing. You're a level 12 Paladin, and the frigate is Duriel. In other words, barring exceptional skill, you're dead meat.

In all practicality, it is the responsibility of the frigate's fighter wings to keep other ships away from the hull. Remember how an X-wing blew up the Death Star? That's what happens when your fighter pilots fall dowwn on the job. However, the era of player controllable capital ships with launchable fighters and manable turrets has not yet come.

Your suggestions would be good ways to compensate in the meantime, but they will be supeceded later as the game progresses. Therefore, it would essentially be a waste of the developers' time to play with turret placement until they:
A. Get it mobile
B. Get its fighters operational
C. Figure out how to outfit it
D. Figure out how to dock/shuttle from it to a station
E. How its weapons will work when a human is piloting it

And all that is just for the frigate and similar Capital ships. I heard a comment once that they will eventually redesign the navigation system. Then there's the rather dull station architechture... (I mean internal)

On another note, I think splitting of bounties between /group members would be an excellent addition to the game. Then, such a system could apply to, say, a flag-capping group (while that lasts) or to a battle group invading serco territory.

Yeah, the frigate won't be very formidable until it has a fighter wing or two. Also, I'd imagine it to be pretty fast, so when it's in trouble, it could just blast out of there as long as the engine wasn't damaged.
I love the idea of a lightning mine hull. That would be a good way to keep enemies from trying to dock in your home station as well. Maybe the lightning shield would destroy missles before they hit, reducing damage to the hull.

a lightning mine hull would, in my opinion, make the ship too strong.
it's not meant to go up against a fleet of bombers all alone, as was said in previous posts.
plus, a lightning mine hull is not feasible from a logical pov.
you can't dock at stations without endangering ships from other nations you are not at war with, e.g., other ships can't dock with you (who might bring the vital batch of flares to defend your ship).

Toshiro. a lightning mine hull would not have any effect against a fleet of bombers since it only reaches out about 50m.
A bomber strike is going to come from farther away. (as far away as i can launch and still hit. i do not want a large slow bomber anywhere near those turrets.) As for docking, it would be very easy to make it selectable so it can be turned on and off.
Hmm for that matter make it use a weapons slot or an electronics slot. IT can draw a set amount of power when on. (for a baseline I would guess that at it's smallest size it would need to draw about 60% of the power recharge rate of the smallest size battery for a capital ship) Of course we could also have different size versions that do different amounts of damage and use different amounts of power.

hmm for that matter, here is a scaled down version that could be mounted on a large fighter craft.

Size Large
Damage 100/second
range 50M
Power usage 35/second.

Then you make it also affect missiles and rockets. (at 50m you are still gonna be in the blast radius but maybe you dont take quite as much damage.)