Ok I know it was purposeful that you disabled the ability to issue capship commands while in the turret.. but it's really sucking right now IMO... This is pushing me into having to run multiple clients to be effective at player capship battles, something I would have thought would be unappealing to the devs..

Can you please bring this feature back or give us some hope that we can actually operate more than one gun on our capships again?

+1 being able to send the the capital ship commands from the turret while not in control of the cap ship was a huge came changer and was a huge positive to the game in my opinion.

+1 being able to follow or patrol or even defend/attack were decent methods of self defense.

+1 the disappearance of this has seriously hampered the functionality of defense/attack as a capship captain..

..really, if we can now command a capship from another sector, then being able to command it from the turret should still be in place.

+1, it made unrats a bit more fun, having two golis working on the undent while defending them using the turrets.. It also made player capship vs capship more fun to me, you aren't stuck with just your megaposi while a group of bombers jumps in to murder you.. all in all it makes for a more fulfilling defense, and less stressful offence.

+1 for it's return. (I know I'm a week late, but just saw this post)
tl;dr version: Using commands while in the turret allowed for a more "in-depth" level to combat, mining, and a few other activities.

As a pilot who loves to use Capitals in combat I can say it was a blast to have warfare where you order your capital to attack then be able to dock R/R as a bomber then fire again (Unrats specifically on this example), now upon docking your capital the previous commands are disabled you must issue the attack command again and again.

With large conflicts I enjoyed being in conflicts against other players, both capitals on attack while the captains are using other turrets, be it rails, swarms or PCB against both the enemy capital and fighters.

It was a fun and exciting feature to have, it gave a whole new lever of/.. "Intelligence" to the capital, and having it participate in combat rather than, for lack of better means... Being a "sitting duck" when you tell your capital to 'follow <target>' while you're fleeing from enemies.

I'm unsure what the reasons were for the removal of this feature, but with it's removal we lost a whole new level of combat.

There were other perks for mining as well as /patrol when you need to get in the turret, but don't want your capital to be a "sitting duck" against rag/ave bombers. It didn't make it impossible to bomb a patrolling dent while you were in the gun, but it was much harder.

I'm unsure what the reasons were for the removal of this feature, but with it's removal we lost a whole new level of combat.

Basically, we had some support-ticket complaints of "exploits", that claimed the ability to use the main gun and the turret at the same time were creating a game imbalance. Someone had their capship destroyed by this technique, and they were grumpy about it, and also claimed it made it too easy to kill Leviathan and other high-level targets.

Honestly, I thought this was all a bit BS (yes, it did add the "ability" to use two weapons, but I knew that when I designed it); but further investigation showed up some other, more serious issues. Like, for instance, a capship that had been commanded to remotely "mine" would continue mining after you logged off, which was definitely not an intended "feature".

So, I decided to redo the remote commands to work in a single, consistent, and established way. Sometimes this is important, because I may give Ray an implementation goal without a lot of explicit exclusions (ie, "make it do this", but without saying "make it do this, but not anything else") and he may do a simplified implementation without thinking-through secondary ramifications of how it's being done, and what that may mean. And then we end up with perma-mining capships.

This doesn't mean I'm opposed to adding features back in, but I at least needed to start from a place of knowing exactly how everything was working, and not having.. uhh.. extra features where magically you can continue doing things after leaving the game.

(I'm sure someone is thinking "Offline features! Great! Add that!". NO. Not yet anyway. That's something that will require a lot of gameplay balance and control factors to mitigate all kinds of issues, from trivially boiling roids to seriously harming the server. We are not ready for that level of autonomy, on many different levels).

So, you could say that this was re-implemented for technical reasons, really, even though the visible output was gameplay impact.

Basically, the entire construct of "remote commands" was heavily re-written (down to fundamental concepts, like how data is moved around during sector changes), and the mechanics are a lot more robust now (or should be), and I also know exactly where "I stand" in terms of the functionality and limitations.

Also, now the entire command infrastructure works galaxy-wide, which was another impact of the re-write.

I still want to add the ability for capship commanders to utilize turrets in a more direct fashion than the current situation, and I think adding back some of the previous functionality is fine. But, the limitations and benefits of the system should be cohesive and "as-designed" and work the same way under all conditions, which was not the case before.

I'm not real sure what that answer means.. respectfully..

I do appreciate the new functionality of capship commands.. as we all were/are very excited about them. Particularly "following across sectors" which I would have dropped to my knees to beg for myself.

We still do have the awkward issue of a ship that is "intelligent" as well as "intended for multiple players" and there is some balance still missing from this as many individuals have participated so heavily in capship building (a measure of the great success of this content addition)

Capships are supposed to be significantly more powerful than normal ships.. SciFi tradition be damned otherwise... and in reality, people with extra advantage against leviathons are using multiple accounts and lua scripts to man their guns.. not using attack/turrethop which is inferior by a long shot.

I'll be honest instead of attempting to avoid the real abilities we lost with this feature gone, because only through this honesty do we truly have a conversation about how the game is actually played.

Player Combat

Player combat is critical to this game, and that includes involuntary player combat as well as the ability to position yourself where you are very unlikely to engage in player combat at all. This is a balance that is complicated and I admittedly study the faction rules to my own advantage on my notorious pirate character "Munny". This character will always take advantage of the holes in those rules, that is his nature. That's as honest as we all know to be true about that character and other "pirates" or nefarious character types. The game is considerably more boring without such player characters, you can see that by simply looking at the chat log and removing references to them.. you'd have nothing left.

With the entry of capital ships into the verse we gained some new possibilities. These came with advantages and disadvantages for ALL player types in the game.

1. you can move your cargo with shields that protect you from small ships and bots...
2. you can potentially dominate a large portion of a sector against small ships and bots with player/gunners.
3. you can mine extremely large quantities in a single trip.

It is inevitable that the introduction of capships would also introduce capship battles which we were/are all excited about. I know you recognized this and enabled it more freely by creating the insurance mission and we have appreciated and taken advantage of it. It was suddenly not as grevious to lose your capship in a little PvP fun/excitement or risky bot sector endeavor.

A critical improvement came with capital ship commands.. and we all love them and hope you continue to improve/develop them. The reason for this is because we are all currently using a significant amount of LUA code to pilot and fight in our capships and that code is not always freely available to everyone. The issues that players have tried to address with these plugins largely center around managing all the turrets from one place. We all know that complexity is a major factor in game development for these things and I won't pretend you guys aren't working your asses off already.

Why was this feature useful you might ask?

1. Mine while fighting bots from your turrets.
2. PCB a capship opponent while you attempt to deshield him/her from your other turrets
3. Follow an opponent/bot while shooting others from a turret
4. Patrol a sector while killing bots with your turrets (farming)
5. Avoid a swarm/deshielding attack while still firing from your turret

None of these things are possible without multiple accounts now.

This just a small list of things which were lost with this change. There is something in there for everyone and every play style. We needed some multitasking automation because it's just not reasonable that myself or someone else should have to launch a second client window or a third or fourth in order to begin to take advantage of all these things... and let's not pretend that that hasn't become standard practice for people who spend a lot of time in their capships.. this change just made it even worse. There is a mass of suggestions in this forum regarding automation of capship turrets and other related suggestions that attempt to present ideas for improving capship turret controls. It is important to your player base.

Lua plugins abound for capship automation... plugins to hop between turrets on button press, plugins to coordinate fire between 3 or 4 open clients ("gunners" on separate accounts), plugins to cycle through turrets and fire them each one by one.. These all seem like low hanging fruit for game development to me since this has all been done by amatuer programmers stuck with LUA api restrictions. Seems it shouldn't be difficult nor unrealistic RP for a capship pilot to fire all his guns with a single key press at the selected target.. no aiming needed.. just seeking missiles or gats with nice A/A.

Biggest losers for this change is mobile users and windows users.

Capships are now almost impossible to destroy with another capship unless you run multiple clients... The goliath can't pcb another goliath and deshield him at the same time nor can it follow to maintain this. A trident can't catch a goliath, and suffers the same issue as the goliath against other tridents. You must stop following and stop firing your primary weapon to use your turrets insuring your target will instantly escape.

I'll stop ranting now...

-1
No need for mposis and pcbs fired at the same time. That breaks the game.

-1
The feature was removed for a good reason, and there’s still plenty of bugs and exploits lying around in VO. The last thing we need is to add in one that breaks the game hardcore

-1 As a mobile user I see no advantages.

No need for mposis and pcbs fired at the same time. That breaks the game

How does that break the game? The pilot that equips the pcb is giving up a slot that can do damage. It is called balance.

Damn there are ppl who are using turret bots. With that, megaposis and other stuff those dudes get waay too big of an advantage. Say whatever u want. I am against it still. And will be.

And
WaF
Using 6 alts with golis, and several mposis and caprails capable deshielding a levi is broken op, AND NOT BALANCED!
We have enough exploits ppl use to ruin ppls day, no need for more.
Also still, pc players in a significant advantage compared to us mobile ones cuz they can open as many clients as they want.

We have enough exploits ppl use to ruin ppls day, no need for more.

You clearly know about a lot of exploits. Please report them in a support ticket.

-1 for so many reasons

I'm not real sure what that answer means.. respectfully..

This thread is about the desire to bring back certain features that were removed. So, I responded that "I still want to add the ability for capship commanders to utilize turrets in a more direct fashion than the current situation, and I think adding back some of the previous functionality is fine.".

The feature was removed for a good reason,

It was removed because we needed to re-write the entire way the commandset worked. Not because of "exploits". Any concerns about.. I dunno.. Leviathan shields? Those are trivially fixed in 10 seconds, by tweaking the Leviathan's.. shields. Or the capship weapons. Or both. Whatever.

The only certainty in life, is Change, and that goes double for VO.

I have a vision, and I am working towards it. I've written about it in a number of other, historical threads.

Using 6 golis to deshield a Levi is not broken or over powered.. you are using 6 capital based ships... You can deshield the Levi in a solo behemoth miner mk2. I just don't see how having to use 6 ships to deshield something is OP.

Anyway, I didn't get the chance to experience what it was like to command your capship while you could simultaneously use it's turrets, but hopefully will be able to sometime in the future. I love the progress GS has made made with capships this year. We've come a long way since having tridents with no shields and I look forward to seeing further improvements.

I'm just going faith that Incarnate will continue to work on it... and thank you for the reply sir.

"-1 As a mobile user I see no advantages."

You lost the same advantage as everyone else.. it doesn't matter the platform.

"Using 6 alts with golis, and several mposis and caprails capable deshielding a levi is broken op, AND NOT BALANCED!"

I agree this is a sign that some functionality is broken/missing and that is the cause of exactly what you are talking about. However that has nothing to do with having a goli that maintains fire with it's main gun while you are on a turret. That feature actually reduced the misuse of multiple alts in a goli. Now, without it.. you will most definitely need an alt in your goli to at least man one of the turrets.

"No need for mposis and pcbs fired at the same time. That breaks the game."

I don't understand.. did you not think that statement through? Did you know you can do that on a simple hog? You cannot however, fire 2 guns at the same time on a goli now.

"The feature was removed for a good reason, and there’s still plenty of bugs and exploits lying around in VO. The last thing we need is to add in one that breaks the game hardcore"

In case you didn't understand all that has been posted here. The feature that was removed had nothing to do with people using multiple accounts/alts to man capships for Levi killing. However, that WAS the reason that was given. Someone complained about something they didn't understand and caused a feature to be removed that had nothing to do with it at all.

Fun Fact: A single skilled pilot can deshield and destroy a Levi by stacking enough avalons. This does not require capship guns at all.

haxmeister makes some good points. He points out that the inability to use capship commands from a turret encourages people to use multiple accounts to run their capships. I've seen players use 5 accounts at once to pilot their trident and man all the turrets. I think his goal is to reduce the advantage of having a pile of mobile devices or computers much more powerful than the game normally requires. I encourage people to re-read his long post. I'm glad incarnate is not opposed to this in particular, I can wait for any resolution to come in it's own time.