Persuit in this game is ridiculous. Most ships have either 45/55/65 speed, depending on the varient. And most ships have a varient that has a top speed of 65 with 200 turbo.

Almost ALL SHIPS have the same speed, just different mass and thust. Thus, different acceleration. Slow acceleration will not help you catch someone at a reasonable distance.

Sure, you might accelerate slowly, but once you reach the top speed there is no way your opponent will overtake you. And since you can't fire whilst turboing much, and aiming gives them more of a gap between you, it becomes impossible to chase a running opponent with even a weak lead on you.

The LIGHT FIGHTERS go the same speed as the TRANSPORTS do! It's just ridiculous. Ths game could really use some speed adjustments all across the board.

/agree. I know this is a fairly low-speed game, and I'm cool with that. But that the Light Fighters can't outrun a transport, let alone the Medium and Heavy Fighters, offends my sense of reality. It also means almost nobody uses Cents in battle - you could retain a lot more noobs if you give them a nice speedy Light Fighter to play around in. To say nothing of what a fast LF would do for pirating...

DC and I were discussing this earlier, and we agree it doesn't need to be much - 75 or 80 cruise (80 on the outside), with a corresponding turbo increase. That'd be more than enough.

I would be all for this. I tend to deal mostly with small light craft, and I favor agility and ability to position over damage output or absorption.. Being able to get a higher maximum velocity would be awesome, and I'd even cope with going back to a single gun to get that.

Even with a 45-75 spread (and equally matched turbo) this would be doable. A you could catch up to a slow transport (45) 500m away in a Light Fighter (75) in sixteen seconds. Faster if you Turbo BEFORE they do and get a few extra seconds of speed before they catch on.

This would actually allow a better division between ship types.
You could then split up Fighter and Interceptor.
Light/Heavy fighter, Light/Heavy Interceptor.
Fighters have more guns and more armor, interceptors have better max speed, thrust, and turbo consumption. Maybe not higher turbo speed -- in fact, an argument could be made for lower turbo speed -- but lower turbo energy usage. so that they can maintain that speed for much longer.

If the Heavy Fighter had more Turbo then the Light Fighter, they would always be able to evade. Remember that an evading ship only has to get 3k away to Jump, and that 3k is usually 1.5k if they pick their battleground properly. If they can outrun you for that distance, even if it consumes more energy, they can jump and you lose them and the entire point of having an interceptor would be useless.

Personally, I would argue the other way. Interceptors have higher turbo but slightly more turbo energy consumption. They can go fast and catch up, but only for so long.

Heavy Fighters would have slower Turbo, but better consumption rates. This way, they're balanced for chasing and also STILL balanced to get around the galaxy at the same average rate.

Hmm. I suppose for this we have to come back to the 3k thing; if the distance required to get away was greater, then more endurance in using Turbo would be useful for this type of situation.

I sometimes forget that the flight window is a -really- small one when it comes to escaping.

In a way, I wish there were circumstances where it would be larger (i.e. more than 3k) but I'm uncertain how that could be done while still being fair to the newbie sort.

Here's a thought.. Maybe if the distance you need to reach to escape depends on your own ship mass?

That way a large transport has farther to go before they can jump out.

That wouldn't make a lot of sense, and would just make the game uncomfortably difficult in non-combat situations.

Ion storms are a good way, but there are always bots around when Ion storms are present.

Personally, I think one thing to help the 'Jump away' problem would be a 'Follow Jump' button. If you are in persuit, and someone jumps, you press it and it jumps to there destination right next to them. They COULD just jump away again, but if you're quick you can get a few shots in and still follow them to the next spot.

I also think it would help to have a 5-6 second Jumpdrive cool-down period after jumping. After, I should mention, you regain control of the ship, so not counting the cut-scene. So when someone jumps, and you follow, you have a few seconds to get your berrings, re-target them, and engage before they can jump again. Persuit ships can (perhaps?) have less of a jumpdrive cool-down-time.

Well, transports needing to go farther (due to mass) would help justify them having top speeds matching fighter craft. It'd probably be nicer than dropping their actual top speed, if it came to differentiating speeds amongst ships better. Additionally, I think it would make sense.. Since isn't the theoretical reason for needing to be away from large masses that it interferes with the jump? Wouldn't your -own- mass being larger likewise be a factor in how far away you need to be from something else large?

I do, however, like the idea fo being able to follow someone through jumps, and a 'cooldown' period. These both seem good to me.

Also, it always seemed odd that one could jump out of sector with zero remaining energy.. Maybe if a jump cost energy, that could also affect things in an interesting way.

That could then come back to the point I was making earlier, of having turbo costs matter for catching up to people.

I definatly think a cooldown period for your engine would be a good idea, will definatly mean players will have to look at their stratigies more carefully when jumping out of a battle. Maybe just having it cost a certain ammount of energy would do this? having a cost would also mean players planning to withdraw will need to plan it, could make for some interesting gameplay :-)

A "Follow Jump" concept is in the realm of technological miracles. In order for this to work, you would have to have your ship hack the other hips computer and see where he is going.

It also just seems a bit too easy.

However, I do like the energy-to-jump idea, especially since you automatically start with 0 nergy out of a jump, so it must take some.

Maybe it takes full enrgy to do inter-system warping and half energy to do intra-system jumping.

Orion_Prime, if you are targetting a ship that jumps out of a sector, the game tells you what sector they left into.

It only logically makes sense that you could auto-assign your computer to set up a jump to that location and follow.

You havent seen the valkyre havent you?

That thing has insane acceleration plus it's heavly armed as well and could catch up to any ship.

What is it's top speed?

Because unless it's higher than 65, it's acceleration means squat when you have a reasonable distance on them.

I don't see how that's necessarily the case; you don't need to access their computer to know where they're going. Depending on how the jump concept/story, it'd be perfectly feasible to determine where they were going from side effects on local space.

And, uh, what DireCoyote said.

Those speed increases would totally unbalance combat. Increases in turbo speed might make sense, but a Cent at 85 mps in a dogfight would be a sure thing.

-Asp

I never said 85. I'm only partially considering 75.

But with EVERYTHING going 65, chase is impossible since no one will ever 'catch up'.

I'm with 5/5 dudes, there isn't enough max speed variance, and due to that there is functionally no purpose to most pursuit.

How does max non-turbo speed effect chases at all? I'm assuming that the people making this suggestion have not obtained any high level batteries since even with just a heavy batter you can travel well over 6km without stopping (more than enough to jump), not to even mention the fact that there's a Fast Charge battery that allows you to turbo indefinitely.

For chases both people will be using turbo completely, so why suggest a change to non-turbo speeds which will greatly effect combat, and not effect chasing?

Now I'm in complete agreement that the ships should have different max turbo speeds (and power drains) such that any ship would be able to be caught by a different set up, in the right conditions. I have even suggested this before, but can't find the thread. The basic idea is that all ships would be good at either long distances or short distances, the best at long distances (over 12km) would be the slowest but the battery drain would be low enough that it could turbo indefinitely.

Also if you've just started playing you should know that there used to be a timer during which you had to sit still, without firing weapons in order to initiate a jump. This was taken out early during the new Universe. It's basically effectively similar to the cool down idea and it has also been suggested that this feature get put back in (with a reduction to 5-10 seconds instead of 15).

When persuing, you can't fire without draining your Turbo. Which you need to continue to persue. So, we imagine that you'd catch up to shooting range at Turbo, drop down to normal, fire rapidly to do damage, and then re-turbo to catch back up.

Higher base speeds means more engagement time whilst not turboing.

Though admitedly, even then the other pilot has probably already jumped out. Escape is just WAY too easy in this game. It needs a delay.