Firstly, thanks for the "In Progress". I can see we're going to have some exciting times in Vendetta.

Anyway, I'd like to bring up a point that I've mentioned before about balance, which I haven't seen discussed in much detail. I think the battery should be built into the ship along with engines, and here are my reasons.

At current what we have are Heavy and Fast Charge, and a series of poorer batteries, which are only used by low-level characters.

1) All ships have very similar power systems reguardless of their function. This doesn't seem right to me. I imagine when larger ships have larger engines, they will naturally take more power to run. A side-effect to this is that when the engines are not running full-blast, the ship will have more power for weapons. In other words, the power systems for larger ships should be able to fully supply their larger compliment of weapons.

2) This penalizes new players (it takes a lot longer for them to get to 3km, and ion storms are much more dangerous). I realize this is partially due to slower engine, and naturally cheep/free equipment shouldn't be as good as high level stuff. However perhaps it would still work if the low-level ships could be good overall, but not excel at any particular thing.

Anyway, the first point is obviously the most important. This would work into the different ship varients, so more combat-based varients might have more energy/engines with a tradeoff in cargo capacity and mass for example. Also it could reduce the amount of fire power a light fighter can have, which would give medium/heavy fighters a purpose.

Opinions?
[edit]
hopefully more clear now.

You have read a1k0n's statements, right? Bigger ships will be getting bigger engines (and even more mass).

Umm, did you read my post? The whole point was not about the engines. I am well aware of the engine rebalance scheduled for Monday.

I am talking about --making the batteries built into ships-- as engines are/will be.

Basically I agree in general with the plans to balance large and small ships, but I think just changing the engine power and mass to make heavier ships more manuverable with lots of weapons is... not quite enough.

The only advantage large ships have in terms of weapons is more weapon ports, but they have no additional energy to fire them, which puts fast fighters at a huge advantage (with nearly the same potential to dish out damage).

I agree w/ fleabait. Currently, having more than 2 or 3 energy weapons is pretty much pointless, which is one of the big things that makes the Hornet a pretty worthless ship. But rather than having batteries built in to the ship, I think a better solution would be having multiple battery slots for those ships w/ 4 or more weapon slots, basically give the Hornet & Ragnarok 2 battery slots, and maybe other ships as more ships get added (especially capital ships).

[edit]
Oh, and of course all but one of the battery slots would need to only power weapons, so that you don't end up with infiniturbo w/ heavy batteries.
[/edit]

Maybe all ships should have 2 options like the fast charge and Heavy (1 large capacity but slower recharge, and 1 smaller capacity but faster recharge) at the time of purchase. So when you buy your ship, you can pick which you want (and heavy should have a lot larger capacity).

I second The Kid, right now with infinite turbo fast charge seems like the obvious choice for everyone, but once that's gone (i'm hoping it will be in the patch) people are going to want to choose between the 2 styles of heavy or fast charge, and if the battery is built in, it's just going to lead to twice the variations of ships.

As for mulitple battery slots, i don't see that as an answer. as bigger ships come around bigger batteries will too, and complaining about the current batteries draining too quickly with more than 3 energy weapons at once sounds about right to me. you shouldn't be firing 4 weapons at a time for very long, any ship with more than 3 ports should have more than one type of weapon equipped, and thus have different weapon groupings.

If the weapon mass was more balanced, I don't think you would have many people complaining that their 4 neutron IIIs drain the battery too quickly, because i can think of many better combos i'd use if i could remain competetive with weight.

Ok, this is getting too close to the type of balance discussion I don't usually take part in. Basically, the Hornet & Ragnarok are supposed to be able to deal out more damage than other ships, right? If that's not the point, then why are they there & why do they have the many weapon ports? Yet, as it stands now, they *cannot* deal out more damage, because the limiting factor is actually the battery, not the number of weapon slots.

Yes, of course the damage advantage needs to be balanced out, but have you flown a Hornet or Ragnarok much? IMO their mass already balances out their superior damage potential - but because of the battery limiting the damage they can do, they don't really have the advantage they are supposed to.

[Edit]
Oh, and as for infiniturbo, I for one do *not* want to see it taken away, although I am all for it losing it's unmatched advantage. And I could be wrong, but the way I read it is thus: trader ships and other long distance ships will have engines with low enough turbo drains that they will still have infiniturbo, but their engine will max out at a lower turbo speed. Interceptors & such will have higher turbo speeds, allowing them to catch other turboing ships, but they will also have a higher battery drain, and so will be unable to infiniturbo themselves.
[/edit]

[Edit 2]
Also, I wasn't thinking of quad Neutron IIIs when I "complained about the current batteries draining too quickly." The situation I was thinking of was a Hornet with 4 Rail Guns, something that would be my choice of ship for Hive Queen hunting (& other capital ships, like the Frigate that will be returning soon). Currently, in order to use 4 Rail Guns, you *have* to use the Heavy Battery, and after the initial shot, you can choose to either just shoot one or two rail gun(s) at barely bearable intervals, or wait half an hour (slight exaggeration) for your battery to recharge enough to fire all four again.
[/edit]

[Edit 3... I'm getting carried away here, aren't I?]
[Quote Cam]
As for mulitple battery slots, i don't see that as an answer. as bigger ships come around bigger batteries will too
[/quote]
Here's the problem with bigger batteries: any battery can fit in any battery slot in any ship. So say they introduce a Heavy Battery Mk2, that allows me to totally own Hive Queens in my Hornet+Quad Rail. You put that same battery in a Vulture, and we're right back in the situation we started from - in the long run due to having equal battery capacity & recharge, the Vulture can deal out as much or more damage. It's now just a longer long run.
On the other hand, if the Hornet has two battery slots to the Vulture's one, the Hornet will be consistantly be able to deal out more damage (assuming it can hit; remember I'm looking at fighting Hive Queens & Cap ships), which is as it should be. And before you start saying that's unbalanced, try a 1v1 duel in a Hornet w/ Quad Rails, fighting a Vulture with anything. The Vulture will win, hands down.
[/edit 3... and I really am done this time]

so if there is an L battery port? you need to fit a Large battery inside a ship fitted for one? That would solve the "heavy Batt mkII in vult" issue you bring up, at the cost of cluttering the inventory/buy screen even more.

Beolach is hitting on the point I am trying to make here. For an extreme case, consider if a capital ship had to rely on a single Heavy or FC battery. It obviously wouldn't be very effective... Now, of course a Rag isn't even close to the size of a capital ship, but it seems like there still should be varying degrees between it and a vulture for example.

My thoughts on the ship varients are that our current ships have an assault varient or cargo transport varient, and that the engines and batteries would just be tuned to reflect that. Perhaps ships built for fighting would have more power and weigh a bit more because batteries are taking up some of the space that is otherwise used for cargo.

A downside to my suggestion is that it might reduce the variety in ship design. But on the other hand, it might improve it - like if all the varients were useful with different strengths. Anyway, I guess I'll stop rambling now and just trust in our developers.

@Spider: A L battery port could effectively work out to be about the same as having multiple batteries (and maybe even better, in terms of how easy it would be to tweak balance), except that then you have to have special L batteries. Multiple battery ports have the advantage of not needing any new types of batteries to be developed.

One suggestion I saw recently that I liked was to have subsections for the buy menu, but unless/until something like that is implemented, another problem w/ L batteries would be yet more clutter on the buy menu (admittedly not a big issue).

[edit]
/me slaps himself for not reading the last 12 words of Spider's post before replying.
[/edit]

Either introduce multiple classes of batteries, or make it so batteries are useable in parallel, with the smallest ships being able to use only 2-3 batteries at once, but the much larger ones(Rags, EG.) being able to use closer to 10 to offset their much larger energy consumption. (Of course, each battery would be much weaker, and this assumes that the Rag, EG., would be using far more energy for things like turbo, to insure balance)

Without completely breaking a lot of the game, there is _NO WAY_ you can make all ships use the same set of batteries.

The question is, how should the difference between 'big' and 'small' batteries be implimented?

Mounting multiple batteries in parallel wont work without some significant changes.

Currently a "battery' performs 2 tasks that dont really go together. 1.) It generates power for the ship, and 2.) it stores a reserve of power for use.

I would like to see the 2 functions split.

Create a Generator port that holds a new "generator" equipment item. different generators would become availible at different levels, with larger generators having more mass. every generator would have a small built in power storage of 100 units.

The batteries we have would become batteries in truth, only storing the power that the generator produces. Each ship could then have a varying number of battery slots. small ships would only have 1, larger ships would have more. larger batteries would be able to store more energy, but have a correspondingly higher mass. It might even be possible to then have a battery take up cargo space while being used.

I would also change the energy needed to open a wormhole to a flat amount of energy, maybe 300 or 400.

This would allow a large ship with multiple batterys to have a significantly larger energy reserve than a small interceptor. Giving it the option to turbo for a much longer period of time, or to expend a larger amount of energy in combat.

Edit larger generators would produce more energy / second. just in case that wasnt obvious.

"Without completely breaking a lot of the game, there is _NO WAY_ you can make all ships use the same set of batteries.

The question is, how should the difference between 'big' and 'small' batteries be implimented?"

I could quibble with the first point, but I won't because its basically true. However, I think you are mission a couple questions between the first and second sentences.

1) How fine of control do we really need over a ship's battery capacity in order to balance things?

2) Is the problem with the Ragnarok it doesn't have more power, or that all the useful weapons take up too much power?

3) Are we squeezing too much design space out of the game if we carefully allocate all ships to have the same relative ammount of power for thier weapons?

4) If we make various variants of ships with different power levels, how different is this really to making different batteries?

5) With the upcoming ship rebalancing, could we solve the problem just by making heavy batteries that high thrust ships could easily carry without marked loss of manueverability but small low thrust fighters couldn't?

6) Multiple batteries is a big advantage in potential firepower. Is there any disadvantage we want to enforce to carrying multiple batteries?

I think these are viable questions, and I like that someone is addressing it. Assigning each ship a custom powerplant in the same way that we will soon be giving each a custom engine is certainly one possible plan. And I'm encouraged that the contributers in this thread have noticed that if you play with the available energy, you MUST do something about how easily turbo is paid for. Back before infinite turbo was common, I had to spend alot of 'breath' trying to convince people that this was true.

However, the problem I have with most player's suggestions, is that even if they are on viable topics they don't seem to carry them through. As the above list shows, I have alot of questions about how this plan would actually work. To kind of demonstrate where my thinking is right now, I've not only decided that a1k0n's custum thrust plan is the best way to go, but I've already moved beyond that and come up with what I think is a viable alternative for putting configurable engines back into the game. Player's like to set up thier ship's in the manner they feel is best, and if Vendetta is every to become a true RPG then its the sort of thing which is needed. So I'm going to need alot of convincing before I decide that less configurability is what the ship's really need. We could take the same arguments you make for batteries and make them for weapons equally well.

As a side note, I find it amusing how before we had alot of configuration options we had almost daily rants from someone demanding that we unloose the genie and let players fully design thier own ship's, and now that we have alot of options the community seems to be swinging toward 'please take that freedom away from us'. Since this is no place for a political rant, I leave the relationship of this behavior to the shifts in world politics up to the interested reader.

> 1) How fine of control do we really need over a ship's battery
> capacity in order to balance things?

That's a very good question, to which I haven't the slightest idea for an answer.

> 2) Is the problem with the Ragnarok it doesn't have more power,
> or that all the useful weapons take up too much power?

I would say it's that it doesn't have enough power. While of course they could be improved, the Rail Gun, Gatling Turret, Plasma Devestator etc. all work well enough when you only use one or two, but when you use more than that, you run out of energy & end up effectively only using one.

> 3) Are we squeezing too much design space out of the game if we
> carefully allocate all ships to have the same relative ammount
> of power for thier weapons?

I'm not sure what you mean here...

> 4) If we make various variants of ships with different power
> levels, how different is this really to making different
> batteries?

You mean if the batteries were built into the ships? The only real difference I can think of would be a very cluttered buy ship menu as opposed to a very cluttered buy item menu.

> 5) With the upcoming ship rebalancing, could we solve the
> problem just by making heavy batteries that high thrust ships
> could easily carry without marked loss of manueverability but
> small low thrust fighters couldn't?

I hadn't thought of that, and I think it could work well. The one thing that might foul it up, is there's a wide range of mass for different ships. The Hornets mass between 5800 & 6000 Kg, while the Ragnaroks mass between 9800 & 12000 Kg, so massive batteries might overbalance in favor of the Ragnarok. Also, it might end up giving the massive cargo ships more combat strength than they perhaps should have.


> 6) Multiple batteries is a big advantage in potential
> firepower. Is there any disadvantage we want to enforce to
> carrying multiple batteries?

At least for the current situation, I would say no. When compared w/ smaller, lighter ships w/ one battery, the more massive ships' disadvantages should simply be their low maneuverability & large size. Compared w/ other massive ships, I think it much easier to balance if we just assume they will all be using all their battery slots, rather than leaving some empty. But with the upcoming engine changes, the maneuverability advantage of smaller ships may be decreased enough that we would want further penalties for multiple batteries in larger ships. But I can't really think of a penalty that would really work, so I'd say keep the disadvantage of the larger ships their low maneuverability.

Yay! Someone actually answered me in a thoughtful way.

1) "That's a very good question, to which I haven't the slightest idea for an answer."

That's a fair answer. Look at it this way. Suppose we distinguish the different classes of ships by the number of batteries that they have. The bigger the batteries, the bigger the 'jump' in available power between clases. The question 'Are batteries small enough that we can produce all the different classes of ships we need' is then equivalent to the question, 'Does the Ragnarok need to be of a different class of ship than a Centurian?'

Up until this point, I've been saying that a Ragnarok is similar enough to a Centurian that we can basically treat it as a variation in the idea of 'fighter'. Centurians are small zippy fighters and Ragnaroks are big lumpering fighters. But, if they are not and heavy fighters and light fighters are of different classes, then it is probably the case that the overall size of batteries needs to decrease because it is likely that _medium fighters_ are also a different class. We might want to give a Ragnarok several times the power of a Centurian, but we probably don't want to give it several times the power of a Wraith. Unless we make the batteries relatively small (and increase the number you mount) there will always be some ships which are relatively energy starved compared to the bigger ship above them (with more batteries) and the smaller ship below them (with fewer weapons).

2) "I would say it's that it doesn't have enough power. While of course they could be improved, the Rail Gun, Gatling Turret, Plasma Devestator etc. all work well enough when you only use one or two, but when you use more than that, you run out of energy & end up effectively only using one."

OK, that might be true but you have biased your answer by listing only energy hungry weapons. It may be true that all the effective weapons are energy hungry, but that doesn't mean that all effective weapons _should_ be energy hungry. Shouldn't there also be energy efficient weapons which are effective? Might there be some way to balance energy efficient weapons against energy hungry weapons? What about rockets? Guided missiles? Ammunition consuming direct fire weapons (like 'cannons')? Some people may recall that when the rails were energy efficient, the Hornet was one of the best ships in the game.

3) "I'm not sure what you mean here..."

I mean that people are complaining about the fact that some ships have more energy per weapon than other ones. Should we actually care? If we were to come up with a formula that gave ships X ammount of energy per small slot, and Y ammount of energy per large slot the result would be fair, but we've elimenated from the game ships which are relatively energy hungry and relatively energy efficient. Plus, we've elimenated the need for players to care about the energy efficiency of thier weapons. In other words, we've elimenated the need for those energy efficient weapons I mentioned in the previous post. We've just as effectively reduced the ammount of design space as if we didn't give players options to configure their ships weapons at all.

Is this really the most interesting way to handle the problem? Is this a bug we should elimenate, or a feature we should be looking for ways to exploit?

4) "You mean if the batteries were built into the ships? The only real difference I can think of would be a very cluttered buy ship menu as opposed to a very cluttered buy item menu."

*smile* And that's precisely what I'm thinking, only you've just said in a far more amusing manner than I would have.

fleabait the first post really reminded me of Xwing, where you had some fixed amount of energy, and you had to distribute it as you chose between your shields, weapons, and engines... i think?
man that was cool.