Slow down Damage!

[Digby Fairweather]

I like this game! I like it a lot. It is made with subtlety and attention to detail. So why oh why does it turn into Space Invaders as soon as combat starts?? If you're in a starter ship, you often dont have time to press a key let alone try to fight back or escape. You jump in, you die. Even with frigates and corvettes, you can often get hit with a stream of missiles that disable you instantly. This is not fun. Combat needs to be more interactive. Slow it down. Lessen the dps. Maybe the firing speeds, maybe the actual damage dealt. Either way, give people a chance to actual issue some commands. I don't even know whether the combat ai is any good, because with a mule escorted by a raven, combat is still over in about three seconds! This is just no fun. Can't even consider being a pirate or bounty hunter. Not because of success or failure, but because of the lack of fun. Now I just have turrets and autofire switched on. I win or I lose. It is out of my hands. Slow down DPS! Let shields actually recover if you stay out of combat. Do some balancing work. This is where the game falls down. The rest is excellent, or I wouldn't bother trying to fix combat. =P

[Meemlord]

Originally posted by Digby Fairweather:

I like this game! I like it a lot. It is made with subtlety and attention to detail. So why oh why does it turn into Space Invaders as soon as combat starts?? If you're in a starter ship, you often dont have time to press a key let alone try to fight back or escape. You jump in, you die. Even with frigates and corvettes, you can often get hit with a stream of missiles that disable you instantly. This is not fun. Combat needs to be more interactive. Slow it down. Lessen the dps. Maybe the firing speeds, maybe the actual damage dealt. Either way, give people a chance to actual issue some commands. I don't even know whether the combat ai is any good, because with a mule escorted by a raven, combat is still over in about three seconds! This is just no fun. Can't even consider being a pirate or bounty hunter. Not because of success or failure, but because of the lack of fun. Now I just have turrets and autofire switched on. I win or I lose. It is out of my hands. Slow down DPS! Let shields actually recover if you stay out of combat. Do some balancing work. This is where the game falls down. The rest is excellent, or I wouldn't bother trying to fix combat. =P

If you're in a starter ship, you really can´t do nothing to other ships. the problem is that you are trying to pick up fights too early in the game. start trading, pay of your loan, buy a bigger ship, keep trading until you have money for something better and try again then. there are a few guides about this in the forums, check them out

[EneCtin]

I agree, the ships take damage way too fast...or hull strength is not sized correctly.

And, worse, combat is out of the player hands.

Think about it, you're in the starting freighter, a pirate comes and 5-10 seconds later you're toast from his puny lasers. Your ship is 50 meter or so, so a minimum of 1 meter of hull should get vaporized until the beam gets to the sensitive internals. That takes time. It shouldn't be over so fast, from a battleship yes but not from a puny pirate..

Some balancing might help:
- decrease damages
- increase hull hitpoints
- 4 quanrants for shields, so evasive piloting might be meaningfull
- asteroids and various oher obstacles to avoid and duck behind
- lasers - freaking range but low damage,
- rockets - almost no damage on shields but OMG on hull
- blasters about the middle.

[Digby Fairweather]

[/quote]
If you're in a starter ship, you really can´t do nothing to other ships. the problem is that you are trying to pick up fights too early in the game. start trading, pay of your loan, buy a bigger ship, keep trading until you have money for something better and try again then. there are a few guides about this in the forums, check them out [/quote]

No, I really wasn't. I was trading. I would just get vaped the moment I jumped in to some systems. Happened in the starter ship, happened in the freighter, happened in the Mule too. Seems to me that the game scales up pirates along with your progress, which means you can never have fun in a fighter, which is lame. Fighters should do minimal damage to big ships, and big ships should find it almost impossible to hit fighters. At the moment, even once you have a fleet, combat smacks of C&C, which would be ok I guess, if you had your own factories pumping out replacements. But when a ship takes you two days to save up for, you want more than 3 seconds of combat out of it! I know it is easy to just reload from the save, but its a strange dynamic and certainly not good for the immersion. I have read the guides. I know how to make money. I just dont see where the fun is. This game is clever and deep, except for combat, which is a bun fight for 3 year olds.

[dvgamble02]

i need help i got the mission to eliminate the moonlight ship or something and its it delta sagittaris but i cant find it. any ideas?

[EneCtin]

at the very least:
- dynamic zoom on the targeted enemy, so you be aware what it's doing and prepare accordingly
- click on space to steer in that direction
- click on enemy ship to steer automatically so that weapons fire in the general direction of the enemy.

[Killer Mango]

combat actually becomes pretty strategy based later in the game once you start fighting bigger and bigger fleets. while yes I agree more fleet controls would be an excellent improvement to the game(group tabs, single ship commands, mabey even ship abilities). slowed down damage would be a little bit upsetting to me. as it is I can have my flag ship soak up damage from five or six smaller ships and still recharge shields at a respectable rate(those are endgame shields) if they were to slow down damage my ship would be more invincible than it already is...and that just wouldn't be fair...basically it is a grind until you can hold your own in combat. if you die you can just respawn at the last planet you visited. you just have to break through the initial loan grind and then it becomes a pretty well rounded game.

[Meemlord]

Originally posted by Digby Fairweather:

If you're in a starter ship, you really can´t do nothing to other ships. the problem is that you are trying to pick up fights too early in the game. start trading, pay of your loan, buy a bigger ship, keep trading until you have money for something better and try again then. there are a few guides about this in the forums, check them out [/quote]

No, I really wasn't. I was trading. I would just get vaped the moment I jumped in to some systems. Happened in the starter ship, happened in the freighter, happened in the Mule too. Seems to me that the game scales up pirates along with your progress, which means you can never have fun in a fighter, which is lame. Fighters should do minimal damage to big ships, and big ships should find it almost impossible to hit fighters. At the moment, even once you have a fleet, combat smacks of C&C, which would be ok I guess, if you had your own factories pumping out replacements. But when a ship takes you two days to save up for, you want more than 3 seconds of combat out of it! I know it is easy to just reload from the save, but its a strange dynamic and certainly not good for the immersion. I have read the guides. I know how to make money. I just dont see where the fun is. This game is clever and deep, except for combat, which is a bun fight for 3 year olds. [/quote]
The point of fighters is that a big ship can only aim for one small ship. that way fighters can overwelm bigger ships at the cost of being... well, smaller. also missiles do quite a lot of damage, no matter how big is the ship that shoots them
If a ship that costs you two days to save up for lasts you 3 seconds, you are simply not making enough money.Once you have 2, 3, 4 heavy warships (or even light ones), what can regular pirates do to you? unless you go to a pirate planet or you have really bad luck, nothing
also, are you using the basic hyperdrive? with the other one, the pirates quite literally don´t have any time to damage you before you jump to the next system
I can agree, however, that small interceptors are too expensive, specially if you take in count death benefits. I only take them for special ocasions where I know I will lose ships anyways, and even then I can´t put them a jump drive, so I can only use them to take difficult planets for example

[Weylin]

I've complained about this, but I don't expect a change, so I'm making the change.

• Scaling down all ships to be smaller and harder to hit, especially Interceptors.
  
• Reducing weapon velocities to about 1/8th.
  
• Redoing turn thrusters so fighters are very agile, and large ships are invariably slow.
  
• Adjusting engines and drag so fighters accelerate quickly, but aren't crazy fast.
  
• Reducing stackability of shields...somehow
  
• Lowering overall DPS so fights last longer
  
• Lowering rate of fire, so projectiles can be dodged and weaved through.
  
• Lowering overall top speeds so fights stay within the screen and dont zip by
  
• Nerfing turn rate and speed of missiles, and making some of them cheaper
  
• Probably removing the outfit expansion in favor of armor plating enhancements. It's just too easy to make something with lots of cargo and hardpoints such as a Bactrian a god-like war machine with massive volumes of shield regenerators. With a hull reinforcement you would get a bit of a safety barrier to buy you time, but it wouldn't repair on its own.

[Digby Fairweather]

Weylin, I'd be super-interested in your modding results. The shield stack is an issue. Definitely needs diminishing returns of some sort. In fact it would be good if outfit expansion had diminishing returns also. Everything else you listed is EXACTLY what I'm looking for. Given the limitations of the format, that would make combat so much more interesting.

Gundrik, I know how to win fights. I know how to stay alive. My point is that it should be FUN! And that means being interactive. It means offering the player at least a small chance to win when the odds are against him. If you enjoy rolling up on the enemy with 10 x the fleet he has and squishing him, then carry on. I dont see how a foregone conclusion is enjoyable. Where is the skill? Pressing 'F'? Don't make me laugh.
Also, the point of fighters in this game is ludicrous. paying half a mill for a 'distraction'? Plus, in my experience, All enemies target the flagship as a priority, so you can't have fun as a player being in a little interceptor escorting your haulers, as you always get popped first.

twood, I'm asking for balancing. If your endgame ship is virtually indestructable, then the devs need to look at nerfing the fitting options for endgame. That is not an argument for making starter ships total paper. Who would actually go to space in such sitting ducks? You'd have to have a gun to your head! I want this game to be great. Bits of it are already, but combat has a long way to go.

[Fluffy]

Heh, I have died multiple times due to jumping into a area that had a fight going on. Sometimes as soon as I would enter any system, I would die before I could either land, or jump out due to being disabled/killed instantly. Lasers usually leave me disabled, but then theres the barrage of missiles killing me instantly.
Still a good game though despite it takes forever to pay off the first mortgage.

[GodMark2]

It should be noted that being able to zoom out as well as in (and zoom independently of the radar and other UI elements) is part of the checklist for the 1.0 release. This would make the missile phase combat not so boring, and allow the dogfight phase to actually stay on the screen.

[Digby Fairweather]

Yeah. Combat as a whole is wired up wrong to begin with. I'm old enough to remember Asteroids, which was considered fiendish in 1982, but at least things werent shooting at you from outside the screen! The AI has a horrible advantage in aiming and maneuvering, and your only option as a player is to be massively more powerful than them. Which is no fun. In practice you can get away with a lot of fights because of the amount of friendly ships who will pile in to help, but that in itself is a total pain. NPCs should be unable to target you beyond a range roughly equivalent to the screen edge. You should get an alarm when you are targeted (noise, not message at the bottom of the screen), and they should fly less competently.

Originally posted by Anonymous Bosch:

and allow the dogfight phase to actually stay on the screen.

With even a small fleet of escort Mules on auto I have no idea who did what to whom. And I can't scroll the battlefield because my flagship is always dead center no matter where the action is.

This is another excellent point. Keeping track of battles is virtually impossible. Space is too crowded and Fleet commands are woefully inadequate.

I don't want to sound like a whiner. I totally get that this game is the product of a few enthusiasts, and there's a lot to like. It just seems right now to be a good old-fashioned trading adventure game tacked to a bad old-fashioned top down shoot-em up. If both halves were fun it would be awesome!

[Digby Fairweather]

Im gonna experiment by reducing the traffic in a few systems and see if it helps with the 'feel' of the game at all...

[7th Circle of Hell]

Turrets are always an answer to lazy combat

[JaxiPaxi]

So what would happen if the ships where smaller and slower. Weapons also slower and less range.. Hmm. I might try this out.

Intresting to see what this will do to the travel time though

Oh, and ships should have more shield too. I think mayb hull is fine for boarding balance.

I\d like some suggestions on how much each should increase/decrease!