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HAL's January Update
http://www.starsonata.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=30100		 Page 4 of 11
Author:  Battlecruiser23 [ Sun Jan 11, 2009 9:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Seer vs FC. FC wins no matter what if this happens. T15 Radx wep called Radiation Cone + Rad Control 25 = pwnage to any seer trying to kill them.
Author:  Voodoo [ Sun Jan 11, 2009 9:47 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Raiyushi wrote:
That and I'd love to see how Seers will survive in wars now... Forget actually trying to find them, it's all about Spray n Pray!


Stealth is being taken out behind the shed and executed with this update. Unless shots don't hit stealthed hostiles in their way, anyone with a multiple projectile weapon will be able to easily gun down seers.

Max235 wrote:
As for the tactical update.
I think it have to be tested too. We can't say wether it's nice or not atm. but i imagine myself in a rosemary DG with a Vmag, with no way to focus one of them... not to mention how Catapults/excomms will be impossible to use...


This is a good point as well. If there is a stupendously well augged AI in a DG that you just don't want to fight or can't kill, it could ruin a whole DG chain for you.

Also, how will PvP levels work with this?

I like the concept of being able to blockade shots but I'm not sure how well it will work.
Author:  Ivelios [ Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:46 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Here's my suggestion: Implement this only for projectiles that can track.

Reason 1:

Non-tracking weapons like pulses usually do a lot more damage than tracking ones. And they pose the most danger to drones and Capships. At least weapons that track you can steer away from your teammates/drones if they're aimed at you. Pulses on the other hand have long range and travel in a straight line, so there is a lot more chance of a wayward pulse going over a stationary target.

Reason 2:

As space is 3 dimentional, it doesn't make sense that pulses should travel between planes, right? At least tracking projectiles are "smart" bullets that could retarget to hit the nearest closest object.

EDIT: Nevermind, it's worse than I thought :shock:
Author:  HAL [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 12:14 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
With the space is 3d argument, then you could easily dodge just about every pulse gun/unguided shot ever fired at you.
Author:  Ivelios [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 12:28 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
HAL wrote:
With the space is 3d argument, then you could easily dodge just about every pulse gun/unguided shot ever fired at you.


Touché Hal, touché.
Author:  Battlecruiser23 [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 1:02 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Ivelios wrote:
Here's my suggestion: Implement this only for projectiles that can track.

Reason 1:

Non-tracking weapons like pulses usually do a lot more damage than tracking ones. And they pose the most danger to drones and Capships. At least weapons that track you can steer away from your teammates/drones if they're aimed at you. Pulses on the other hand have long range and travel in a straight line, so there is a lot more chance of a wayward pulse going over a stationary target.

Reason 2:

As space is 3 dimentional, it doesn't make sense that pulses should travel between planes, right? At least tracking projectiles are "smart" bullets that could retarget to hit the nearest closest object.


I like this. I would allow capships to sit in the rear of battle instead of in a base or surrounded by bases.
Author:  Ceno [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 1:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
i like it
Author:  Qu4NtuM [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 2:49 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
HAL wrote:
There will be lots of new goodies for the next big patch.

Combat Mechanics
Weapon projectiles and laser beams will now hit any hostile target in their path. This will open up a whole new realm of combat possibilities, such as using a tanked capital ship to protect team mates in light fighters.


Well, this is a nail in the coffin for me. My setup is gonna be completely worthless after this... and the overall problems slave masters are gonna have... GG

Don't think I'm ever returning to the game.
Author:  Utumno [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 5:12 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Resistance augs:

Resistance augs - under current condition - are not used as they give much smaller boni than shield/shield recovery augs.
simplest example: Resist augs vs. Defensive augs - the Defensive aug that is 3 Tier lower (tech wise) is still better than the resist augged.
Resist augged concepts are only used for aggro management (shield bank size).

The only exception is the Serenity aug - currently it has the highest tanking capablity in game (including T20 augs) - as AT kicks in twice on this.

Ofc for the rebalance, after rebalancing all the augs in game we'll see how the stats on those will be - so the above is only true for our current situation.

Seer:
That sounds like I can safely assume that the new visiblity system won't go in for the rebalance.
With all the added work with this either the new visiblity system will just look like the current one with some parameters changed or there won't be the workforce/time to implement it.
(I hope here for a "No, you're wrong - don't be so negative" from the staff)

Atm I don't see how I can fight along a DM or FC with every bullet 'in the air' that crosses my path hitting me.
As Seer I've to go quite close to the enemy and hit him from behind - I cannot hide behind a capship as I can't do significant dam from there.

Also handy would be if we get the client side tracking bullet bug (after stealthing) fixed before that is put in ... atm it is not good but not critical.
After putting in that all stuff may hit one it would be good to know where this stuff is - so that we get a chance to dodge it.

Fighters:
I have seen slaves mentioned, but not fighters.
So, how are they going to be fixed?
Obviously they're going go get mass-slaughtered fast:
- weak shielding
- smart like slaves
- they're always trying to swarm the enemy (nothing wrong about that but they're going to get hit a lot)

Slaves - aggro management:
An aspect of slaves not yet mentioned is aggro management;
I put a lot of effort into passive aggro management (initial and sustained) with different type of fleets;
The slaves are not used as damage buffer by mean - nor they can fill the role in.
with the current tools available to manage slaves - especially in this case their location - I see this efforts wasted.


Weapon firing momentum:
Sounds like fun to me :-)
Will be strange ofc with full tracking weapons on slaves...
I always was missing this;
Referring to a previous post - the effect the pushes you back when firing a weapon is conservation of momentum;
light/radiation has a momentum as well - ofc it's much smaller than the impact of a massive bullet ... without going deeper into this - yeah, laser would have that momentum conservation too - pushing you back.
Author:  Ivelios [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 5:55 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
So, let's sum it up.

The consensus so far is that this change blows, this opinion shared by most people, all from different classes.

Seers are wary about the change because stealthed ships will still get hit by bullets meant for their allies and that in pvp stealthed ship could be damaged by someone who cannot see them, but can fire at a clearly visible object, if the seer gets in between.

Engineers are wary because give the fragility of most high level drones this change will lead to bigger losses. Yeah, you can "tank away from the drones", but that doesn't really work if you're fighting multiple strong AI. Some bullets will inevitably hit and with the nerf to charge drones, you'd want to stick close to drones and keep an eye on their health. But if you move closer, more bullets will hit. Keep in mind that players will no longer be able to instantly heal a drone by scooping and redeploying.

Capship classes are also wary about the change, since most of them are not really the tanks admins picture them to be. Surprisingly enough, most people in capship actually want to avoid losing shields as much as anyone else. This is because most people aug their capships for damage, as capships already have only 2 augmenter slot and if you want to be able to kill anything, you'd want to use these two aug slots to increase your DPS. A really good tanking setup is useless for solo play, simply because it won't do as much damage, leaving the capships of today completely unprepared for the change.

Alright...now this part is important. If you've skimmed through the previous points, at least consider this one:

Scenario 1: Bana Run

As you enter the bana queen level, you see 3 Kasa Quu drones, the queen herself, about 3 (4?) level 1500 bana AI and a bunch of Ishis. All of them open fire at whoever enters.

Now since the queen recently got a shiny new tractor, I'm assuming you want us to fight it near the warp and the Kasa Quu drones. So with the drones firing, Bana queen firing, level 1500 AI firing and ishis flying around, the screen is going to be *thick* with bullets. After this change most of these bullets are going to hit something, be it an SD that got into the path, a capital ship that'll get damaged the most because of its sheer size (and as explained above, capital ships are more fragile than they look!), a drone laid by an engineer (and drones (BFDs) tend to die pretty quickly, so I can't see how they could be used safely when a bullet passes over their location every second), a shield monkey (that's supposed to be *healing*, not losing shields getting hit by AI), or the main DPSer who is already attracting a lot of attention from queen and how will have to deal with the *extra* damage from other AI.

So ShMs are getting hit, drones are getting hit, everyone who's not supposed to get hit does get hit, everyone who is supposed to get hit, gets hit more. It will be pretty lame if we'll have to have a capital ship over us at all times. It's not fair to the people inside such a ship, since the don't get to do anything fun besides being a "meat shield". It's not fair to everyone else because of the additional risks and headache.

I mean yes, I can see some interesting tactics emerging with this change, but the majority will suffer. To the majority of players this won't make the game more fun. Group runs will suffer, Solo play will suffer more. More frustration in exchange for a dubious promise of new tactics emerging. Not a very good deal, I have to say.

As a final note, changing the game in a way that allows for new ways to fight the AI is good - adds variety. Changing the game in a way that makes people depend on one single method of dealing with AI (having to bring a meat shield on every run in this case) is bad.

P.S. Sorry for the ranty post, it's getting pretty late there. I hope I have outlined some serious problems that might arise with this change. Even if I am wrong, I am sure my fears are shared by a number of other people and explaining why I am incorrect/correct will help alleviate them.

P.P.S Ah, thanks to Utumno for outling other problems I haven't even thought about (fighters getting blown up by bullets, missiles getting blown up and a bunch of other flaws)
Author:  Ivelios [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 6:09 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
Just one more thing.

I like this idea personally, provided that it's used sparingly. I would love it if some new weapons introduced had this effect. I would love it if some new AI fired such weapons. I would be overjoyed if a new uber had this ability to hit whatever crossed paths with its shots. Heck, may be this could be used to beef some of the weaker ubers of today. But changing all weapons and pretty much the entire game to work like this is taking it too far. Point is, the work put into coding this will not be wasted and can be used to enhance the gameplay if used properly. Or it can ruin it.
Author:  HAL [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 10:31 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
One idea I am toying with is to give some ships a chance to "dodge" bullets that aren't targeted on you based on the type of ship you are flying.

For example, maybe fighters would have a 95% chance to dodge shots that aren't targeted at them because they are so small and agile (even if the AI controlling them is dumb).
Author:  pip8786 [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 10:54 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
HAL wrote:
One idea I am toying with is to give some ships a chance to "dodge" bullets that aren't targeted on you based on the type of ship you are flying.

For example, maybe fighters would have a 95% chance to dodge shots that aren't targeted at them because they are so small and agile (even if the AI controlling them is dumb).


I think that's a really good idea. We could even add a whole slew of items that make it so shots that aren't targeted for you tend to miss.
Author:  bank1 [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 10:56 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
my setup of flying around my drones dodging the shots will be useless if the drones take all the shots now if the ai miss me, now we will all need Dnaughts or capships to tank the shots
Author:  pip8786 [ Mon Jan 12, 2009 11:18 am ]
Post subject:  Re: HAL's January Update
I think it's kind of dumb to complain about the game getting harder... If a game takes no skill at all, its dead boring. I've quit playing waiting for the new reset because then it will actually be worth playing again (ie. a challenge). I won't be able to sit in one place anymore, makes it more exciting and skillful.
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