This is not a game for people who like giant battleships.

[Aetrion]

This game is endlessly frustrating for people who enjoy naval combat games, because it's basically one giant perpetual example of disrespecting your audience.

Why did they market the entire game on "These are giant ships, not tiny fighters", and then turn around and make the game about everything other than giant ships?

You like playing as an MMORPG healer? Ok, cool, you single handedly decide team fights. You like playing fighter sims? Have fun. You like being a floating sniper rifle? We got you covered. You like running into people at high speeds? One of the most powerful things in the game. Oh, you actually wanted to play a game about big spaceships? Well, uh, you can sit there with your shield turned on while your healer decides your fate and fire a nuke every 90 seconds. That's fun right? No?

Basically this game seems to cater to everything except the people it was marketed at. Gunnery is meaningless unless your ship is the flying gun. Armor is maeningless unless you have a healer on you, what gives you survivability is popping in and out of cover. Ships with extreme speed or the ability to teleport are commonplace, so maneuvering isn't actually important. Getting blinded and being unable to see anything is commonplace.

At absolutely no point does the game actually embrace being about capital ships. It doesn't reward smart maneuvering, because which side you hit an enemy from is irrelevant, armor and maneuvers are replaced with cover and healing, two distinctly non-capital ship combat systems. Gunnery is also largely irrelevant because as long as people have healers and cover your damage doesn't stick. You have to completely overwhelm them using cheesy abilities.

The bottom line is, this entire game completely contradicts itself thematically. "Control the Colossal" is a joke when you get killed by someone zipping across the entire map in seconds and then ramming into you for thousands of damage, or blinded repeatedly by a corvette which then tanks your damage for 10 seconds before teleporting away. Nothing about that is capital ship combat, it's more like playing an early 2000s MMORPG where people look like spaceships.

[Sevrojin]

its a arena cover shooter but its fun imo i watched gameplay and knew i exactly what i was getting into perhaps do some research instead of looking at tag lines

[Aetrion]

The game is free, playing it is the research. Also, I don't see how the game is excused from disrespecting its declared target audience by catering to every other interest first just because people can figure this out and leave. People are figuring this out and leaving, which is exactly why this game has a lot fewer players than it could have.

[Chibi]

dreadnought is like an arcade game not a epic ship war game. when first though of this i thought of world of warships with spaceships. I hope dreadnought was like this.

1. various classes
Carrier dreadnought that launchers fighters that can launch fast firing misslies or simply disable them with emp missiles.

Heavy main wepons/shielding with some artillery and AA guns. High shield capcaity that harder to overload the ship.

Support with loads of missiles and mines. It put pressure on other ships by carpet bombing at an area and slowly removing their armor plates or simply to keep having them to keep their shields up. It can also house a facialty that can launch repair drones at certain radius. repair drones can only repair armour damage not the interior hull.

Stealth mid armour grade with fast firing close range-high energy plasma cutter guns. it has ability to warp out fast but it disable shields and has high energy cost.

-mechanics
each weapon that fires has a energy cost and each ship has maxium energy value. the player can activate shields but if the shield gets damages it generates heat value which reduces max energy value. If the energy overloaded the ship gets disabled for a 10-15 seconds and the ships automatically try to vent it out.

convential missiles and weapons don't have energy value to fire but has lower damage speed and accuary.

players can also vent out energy during battle when retreating but it makes the ship more vunlerale to attack.

each ship has certain armour value to each side and must be pierced in order to do damage, various weapons can be specalized to destroy shields or armour itself before damaging the hull itself.

gameplay kill the all dreadnought or destroy the starbase the starbase launches frigates crusiers and corvettes at a certain pace, each kill provides resources to upgrade ur frigates and crusiers and corvettes firepower. each player has 3 lives no more no less and the starting spawn area is blocked via spacerift so other players can't camp there.

sadly dreadnought will never make this a reality. my favourite game starsector is 2d space and it has all the mechanics i said above but its more geared to single player only and it was made by a single dev.

[MARAUDER_AU]

LoL have to agree with Atrion for the perception part I thought it would be more tactical capital ship battles than arcade. I mean even the name dreadnaught bring images of a hulking armoured capital ship bristling with weapons. I mean WTF are capital ships doing ducking in and out of canyons or buildings planetside in the 1st place. Capital ships don't cruise around planetary terrain ... ROFL.

That said it can be alot of fun if you get a balanced game, which unfortunately is only now and then. I'm still hopeful it will evolve into a well balanced enjoyable game, although the latest update hasn't impressed me.

[Aetrion]

Going to try and elaborate a bit on what could be done better to make this game more interesting to people who like capital ship combat:

Healing is killing long range combat. Battleship gunnery duels basically aren't allowed to exist in this game, because if people are allowed to get into cover or have a healer who's sitting behind cover you simply can't kill them or score any kind of meaningful damage. This single fact right here basically kills the most defining aspect of capital ship combat. It feels like there is simply no reason to shoot at people unless they are already in a position where they can't get away and they can't get healing. This game forces you to play as an assassin, and makes you irrelevant if you play like an actual battleship.

Even if healing weren't in the game, long range gunnery duels wouldn't be very interesting because there are no weapons that actually act like artillery. Artillery cruisers are so accurate that there really isn't much of a challenge in hitting people. Even fast ships like corvettes can be picked off with relative ease if you have moderate shooter skills. There is no heavy artillery with significant travel time that would lead to real gunnery duels between the larger ships.

Healing is killing maneuvers. Straying too far from your healer/cover is basically suicide unless you're a corvette or light cruiser of some kind which have a reasonable chance of running away once they become a target. Since ships are simply a big blob of hitpoints with no armor facings or anything you can't do significant damage by catching them from behind, or surrounding them so they can't hide their injured side. The only tactical consideration is whether or not the enemy ship can run away or receive heals, and that distinctly favors classes that act as assassins.


So the fact that there is so much healing in this game with absolutely no way to deal lasting damage makes it so that the only way to actually score a kill is to make sure the enemy can't run away. This completely undermines playing like an actual capital ship, because the only way to get kills is to aggressively go after an enemy and hunt them down. Firing back and forth over long distances has no useful effect at all. Even if the total dominance of healing was broken somehow by having more permanent damage, the lack of armor facings or weapons that really emphasize skill in long range fights still wouldn't make it very satisfying.

[PeteSkTemplar]

Same for me - "Dreadnought" - I expected to command the most costly but most decisive platform but reality is that those cheap little inscets - corvetes or some healing bugs are just laughing at you. Forget Sins of Solar Empire FP"Sim":)

[hatani]

Interesting reasonning about some recurrent issues raised.

I could resume improvements in 2 things :
1) Limit "duck and cover" healing system
2) Change unrealistic "healing" by a realistic "repair" system

I could add a third one to boost fights interest :
3) Give a battle bonus for the team which is behind (ie. more than 20 points difference) and a BIG battle bonus for the team which is really behind (ie. more than 50 points difference)

[Aetrion]

Yea, it's tricky, and I don't expect them to change the whole game at this point, but infinite healing just sucks in games.

They could change the healing ships so that they need to first strip materials off enemy ships in order to heal friendly ships. Simply sitting behind cover while the ships above can't die doesn't work then, you'd have to actually go out and deal some damage to be a good healer, and good shooting can suppress healers by denying them the opportunity to harvest materials.

[Brother Belial]

Originally posted by Aetrion:

Yea, it's tricky, and I don't expect them to change the whole game at this point, but infinite healing just sucks in games.

They could change the healing ships so that they need to first strip materials off enemy ships in order to heal friendly ships. Simply sitting behind cover while the ships above can't die doesn't work then, you'd have to actually go out and deal some damage to be a good healer, and good shooting can suppress healers by denying them the opportunity to harvest materials.

Kill the healers. There are many modules to make this easy. Rams, disrupt, Tarterus, rupture.

[Aetrion]

Uh, the whole point of this thread is that the game forces you to try and play "assassinate the healer" instead of "capital ship combat", so yea, I know it can be done, but it's a mechanical contradiction to what this game claims to be. If I want the whole game to just be about killing the enemy healer I might as well play Overwatch.

[Brother Belial]

Originally posted by Aetrion:

Uh, the whole point of this thread is that the game forces you to try and play "assassinate the healer" instead of "capital ship combat", so yea, I know it can be done, but it's a mechanical contradiction to what this game claims to be. If I want the whole game to just be about killing the enemy healer I might as well play Overwatch.

Every ship you fly is a capital ship. I personally can take out 3-4 ships on my own in a Dreadnought with out a healer. Granted that was before the armor amp change, but I could still do it. Could probably still do it now if I tried. It's also the reason this game has teams of 8 and different ship types.

To beat people plqying as a team, you also have to play as a team. It's a basic principle of the game people can't or won't grasp. They feel they should be able to fly around in what ever ship they want and kill anything in a few seconds. This game is not a FPS like CoD etc.

[hatani]

I do agree a full armor orientated dread is seriously strong (but one tartarus and you are dead unless you got a healer) and its my fav ship by far.

Still, this feeling there is no need for such super "healing" system which forces some games to be too static remains strong.

Tactical cruiser would have been more interesting with giant shields, warping astoroids into battle, boosting speed of friends, switching position with someone, creating illusions of ships, changing the affiliation of an opponent so he attacks his friends, and any other "tactical" module you can think of. Read the Sun Zu principles of war, you can find hundreds of "tactical" advices.

Healing is not "tactical" at all, it is just a "medic" power like you find in world of warcraft and it looks akward to see such thing in a battleship game.

To conclude, I find the game super interesting, even with several issues and critics, well done the Dreadnought team, it goes better and better ;)

[Brother Belial]

Healing is just one thing they can do.

[El Poto]

Totally agree with the OP. This kind of mechanics really put me down and it's what made me leave the game during beta. The healing mechanic, the immensely stupid decision to have fixed primary weapons. Then it was so cool, when you started playing, to see those missiles being lunched from your ship... only to make them useless because while they got there, the target had ducked behind a mountain. The retarded debuf mechanics, and the problem is not that debuf mechanics exists at all, is that many times you don't have any other options to "upgrade" your destroyer, so from a damage dealer your only option was to be a crowd controller? So totally agree, World of Warcraft with players dressed as extremely slow or extremely fast ships.

[Brother Belial]

Originally posted by El Poto:

Totally agree with the OP. This kind of mechanics really put me down and it's what made me leave the game during beta. The healing mechanic, the immensely stupid decision to have fixed primary weapons. Then it was so cool, when you started playing, to see those missiles being lunched from your ship... only to make them useless because while they got there, the target had ducked behind a mountain. The retarded debuf mechanics, and the problem is not that debuf mechanics exists at all, is that many times you don't have any other options to "upgrade" your destroyer, so from a damage dealer your only option was to be a crowd controller? So totally agree, World of Warcraft with players dressed as extremely slow or extremely fast ships.

Then this game is not for you. Not every game is for everyone.