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Hi. Did 2.2 make it today in the end? Taaa
Update Unofficial Alpha news for beta backers
- Thread starter Cmdr Eagleboy
- Start date
Unfortunately no, there was doubt that it won't make today, so it's tomorrow then.
Thanks for the info
I'd like to see the max number of players in the instance tested. I think it would be quite the fun scenario to have 32 or more players spawn in one instance of ethics and credits.
This thread is great. Have some rep.
I will arrange to move this thread to General and make it sticky for everyone, not only backers to see. So don't worry if it does disappear from PBF, look for it in General
Awesome, this is the thread I was looking for so as to subscribe to email updates for.
LOL!
When I 1st saw this message I figured general was a better fit than private backers, however after just seeing "moved" this morning my 1st thought was it had been moved to Alpha....... which would have been genius
When I 1st saw this message I figured general was a better fit than private backers, however after just seeing "moved" this morning my 1st thought was it had been moved to Alpha....... which would have been genius
Stachel
Banned
Here's a very brief rundown of the weapons we have been testing (only my opinion of course
Gatling Guns – Fairly low powered but quite effective. A must for those sneaking about doing some silent running. Drawback is there’s a loading time between magazines and I suppose you could eventually run out of ammo if you weren’t careful. Also has the most awesome sound effect!
Gimballed Pulse / beam laser – Gimballed weapons are great, easy to use and have a wide targeting area. They are not the most powerful and can be confused by silent running where they can’t lock on because of the lack of a heat signature.
Pulse lasers – An old favourite, require a decent level of accuracy due to the pulsing but do a fair bit of damage, don’t overheat too badly either. The exception I’ve found is tri-burst pulse lasers which I think are tragically pants!
Beam lasers – My favourite for general play, powerful enough to do a lot of damage and they don’t heat up to badly (especially if you divert power to weapons). These will reduce a sidewinder to smoke in a few seconds.
Rail guns – Require great accuracy but are very hard hitting. Seem to be very expensive in-game as well. Great against larger targets but against a sidewinder far harder to use.
Lasers are available in different classes and that signifies the damage they do and also the time it takes for them to overheat. i.e. the more powerful the quicker they overheat. You also get some mixed load-outs combining lasers and Gatling’s etc. which can be quite handy. At the moment we don’t know what the weight of the different weapons are but I presume you will have to take that into account in the final game.
There isn't much point in having variety in weapon systems unless there is equal variety in defensive configurations.
I disagree.
Tried to write this four times so far, can't make my point make sense when I write it out
I'll simplify, for my arguement to make sense.
Say there are only 2 defensive parameters, shield and hull strength.
Say there are also only 2 attack parameters, damage to sheilds, and to hull.
There is no reason why you can't have only 3 defensive configs (high shield, high hull and a balanced mix), while at the same time having dozens of combinations of attack configs (all shield dam, all hull dam, 50/50, 25/75, 75/25, 33/66, 66/33 etc).
Now extrapolate that to more parameters. It's still valid.
On top of that, you can have variety inside a parameter. Take Damage Per Second, you can do 10 DPS by applying 20 damage every 2 seconds, or 1 damage every tenth of a second. The two weapons would be roughly equivelent (for this parameter), but feel very different. The sweet spot between the two will be personal taste.
Some parameters suit such variety better than others, DPS is a good example of variety, Hull hitpoints would be a bad one.
Between in-parameter variety and the possibility to mount multiple different weapons at the same time, I can see it being entirely valid to only have a half a dozen defensive configs but a hundred weapons, for each particular power/size/cost range.
Different weapons suit different purposes. Going against an Anaconda with a Gatling gun or a pulse laser is pointless, they don't do enough damage. Going against a sidewinder with a rail gun is pointless because you need to be very accurate and sidewinders tend to move around too much.
To some extent, there are lots of different defensive configurations (in the final game), each ship has its own stats. For each ship, currently you can deploy heat sinks to attract missiles as well as having the shields and hull.
From what I have read, Frontier are trying to get a balance, to ensure battles don't go on for too long.
Currently (and this is my opinion) its looking like shields can be taken out a bit too quickly with some of the weapons, and the hull can be taken out far far too fast. Frontier have put in lots on nice failures like various bits of the ship failing as you take more and more hull damaged, the worst one is the life support (which I don't think there is a way to repair it). The trouble is, once you start losing your hull, the ship is normally destroyed in the next 10 seconds and you have no opportunity to suffer various ship failures and try and shift power consumption around to keep the ship going.
There will be shield upgrades in final game and I'd expect to see hull armour upgrades too... just to mix things up a bit more.
I skipped over a lot of stuff to try and make my point easier to write.
Speed, agility, shield bleedthrough, shield recharge time, stealth, hull soak... theres a host of defensive parameters I skipped (offensive too)
No doubt there will be upgrades, sidegrades (+5% thing, -5% other thing), hull/manufacturer quirks (maybe individual ship and equipment quirks too
). But I was talking about directly comparable systems.And speed/manoeuvrability is very relevent, even when we have identical ships, as they are affected by the power assignments. Manoeuvres are also hugely affected by Flight Assist off, and use of lateral thrusters.
Don't forget these are newbie ships, probably equiped with newbie shields and a basic hull...
this!!!
I dunno if anyone remembers the sidewinders in the earlier games, but they were pretty damn pants.
A few solid shots and they were space dust. I imagine we will only be in these very early game, whilst we earn some money for something stronger.... And suggest the sensible commander will be staying in the safer systems at this time.
Now if only I could get me a lead belly Wolf Mk II
Agreed - you definitely wouldn't want to take your sidewinder into a system where ships routinely have a lot of the more powerful weapons available in alpha. That said, I'm sure there will be more powerful weapons about that aren't in alpha. I guess all Frontier are doing is seeing how the balance works - it doesn't matter if its unbalanced at the moment, providing Frontier agree and take steps to balance it.
With regards to the hull, I vaguely remember the cobra had front and back shield (1 bar for each) and then 5 or 6 bars of hull or energy or something before you got destroyed. In other words, the hull was much stronger than shields where. In Alpha, I suspect the shields are stronger than the hull for the Sidewinder and Anaconda (not sure about the Cobras).
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I think what's important to remember that FD want to give not only chance to survive battle, but also escape. When met with two Cobras, in game I will run if I will have only Sidewinder, no matter how powerful my weapons are, they will torn me in pieces. So Sidewinder shields and hull must be powerful enough to survive such onslaught for several seconds, before escaping.