Would depend heavily how fast the shields can go up again and possibly if there is a mechanic that negates excess damage to the hull when the shield breaks - that might be useful.
Any Improvements on Engineering / Combat Balance?
- Thread starter Frenotx
- Start date
Just one quick suggestion: I think there should (almost) always be some bleed through damage. Otherwise shield tanks will always have the advantage of free unlimited "healing" which means they can in theory stay in combat indefinitely. Even the best hull tank will sooner or later have to retreat.
For example, shields at 100% would absorb all of the incoming damage, shields at 80% will absorb 80% of the damage and the remaining 20% will hit the hull, etc.
But that would require a big balance overhaul and I don't see that ever happening, unfortunately.
For example, shields at 100% would absorb all of the incoming damage, shields at 80% will absorb 80% of the damage and the remaining 20% will hit the hull, etc.
But that would require a big balance overhaul and I don't see that ever happening, unfortunately.
You could have it so small ships have potentially less bleed through because the cohesions shmesions and large ships suffer more bleed through.
I agree with your assessment. The question is, whoose opinion would lead to a more interestingly designed game? Or back to the car analogy, who would be the better advisor to set up a car? My mom, who probably would not notice the difference between FWD and RWD, or a seasoned rally driver?
This is a premise most games are designed around.
Yep. Been wanting something like this for a long time. The almost perfectly binary state of shields (SAFE <-> NOT SAFE) makes balance very difficult, unless shields are kept small enough where the expectation is that they will break and reform many times throughout a single fight. If ever it becomes possible / an option to keep your shield up for the majority, if not entirely, of a fight, it becomes the ONLY option, and fights turn into what they are now: nobody takes any damage or is at any risk unless they intentionally decide to stick around (despite having ample opportunity to leave), or screw up on a truly catastrophic level. Fights are fought until "nearing the risk of actually starting to take any damage", rather than to the death, near death, or significant damage.
An interesting comment.
I'm not sure a rally driver would be suitably qualified to set up a useful car (apart from expressing his/her/it's personal preference) for everyone, although designers might... (assuming, of course, eveyone was going to be forced to drive a rally car)
Would you have your Mom driving around in a 1,200 BHP rally car to do the shopping, drop the kiddies off at school, run her grandchildren off to the park? Knowing that everyone else is also being forced to drive the same 'cookie cutter' car, regardless of ability?
ETA: I have some sympathy for those who have made the effort to excel in combat and flying skills only to feel frustrated because the game doesn't cater for them in any meaningful way (just a nod in passing, if they are lucky) but the game does have to cater for all skill levels and is unlikely to move to combat focused (it may happen, but that is improbable) as it would server to alienate the (alleged) majority of players who are not combat focused.
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and at that point the game is even worse than ~4 years ago after engineering. back then i was running hulltanks deliberately pve, for all the added content you get (malfunctions, smoke, warnings). HRP frag cobra in CZ was my favourite, loved the FAS. but changed npc loadouts killed it for me ... instead of npc loadouts to counter shields, fdev went the way of adding a lot of npc with missiles. plus guardian shieldbooster allowing me to run a shieldtank(!) cobra mkIII. sad. (luckily i never played the game for its combat content).
Right, maybe in the same way most gamers are not qualified. But I recon those professionals can give more and more valuable feedback, because of the way and extend they interact with systems - to use a more general term.
No, but this is not what I was after. Skill can hardly be replaced by technical gadgets and even if that is the case, skill still adds on top.
Back to the point I was after, the designer/ engineer can use the feedback to make appropriate changes to reach his goal, which is not necessarily said rally car. An unskilled driver can never provide feedback on how a car reacts when driven on the limit, because he does not reach that limit (by far). How can he provide useful feedback on that topic? It is like asking a blind about colours.
This tranlates to ED or any game. It is more efficient to listen to feedback of those who used the game mechanics to its fullest extent, rather than someone who has not left the sidewinder.
It is easier to, sort of, scale extreme feedback down, than scale low quality feedback up. If the game is well balanced, it is a benefit everyone, even though lower skilled or inexperienced players might not notice it.
Well those hardcounters currently are what prevents armor tanking from being viable, so I just assumed you would wish those to be removed. If not, I would like to hear your proposals for how armor tanking can be made viable again while baking-in some kind of penalty for doing so.
Because without the penalties, everyone will just switch to armor tanking for all the reasons I laid out. Then it will be the new meta, then people will call for it to be nerfed. Just like they want shields nerfed....
It's not a road block, it's gameplay and reasons to do the gameplay within the game. This happens in pretty much every game ever played. You need to play the game to get things, get to places or open sections.
Interesting... You and me both. Though my ships are well engineered and perfectly capable, I still feel like engineering went way too far to begin with. But alas, it is what it is..
Z...
How is it gameplay when you can't even interact with it because you can't get around it? It's a fricken roadblock is what it is. Well, at least we don't fondle these where I live.
Oh and one more thing. "Unlocks" are for "additional" gameplay to unlock. Not stuff the devs lazily put behind a friggen raodblock from the vanilla game and brainwashed players telling them it's new gameplay now and we just have to unlock it again. And make players pay the money for that "update".
Well, I will try to do my best to answer your request. The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about this is that, like in certain other games that I have played, armor integrity (comes with a low level of self repair) requires considerable and constant expenditure of energy. This is not quite like the hull repair units that we have now in this game. This is actually the armor itself (call it energized or powered armor) perhaps in combination with a module, that is itself, energized all the time to keep integrity maxed. In my vision, the armor would still have the bonuses and penalties that armor currently has, but perhaps has a bit more hit points and is more problematic to penetrate (either remove a lot of the armor penetrating engineering specials that already exist or somehow add a bit more resilience to the energized armor). Make all internals that are NOT exposed to the outside (like the power plant, etc) MUCH more problematic to penetrate (notable exception to the thrusters which should ALWAYS be exposed). The energy requirements of this advanced armor and/or modules should be sufficiently high enough that there would be absolutely no way to run a good armor AND shield setup at the same time. Pips management could be handled in the same way as shields. This is just one idea that I thought about over the last little while. If anyone else has got some good ideas on this, it would be nice to hear them. Brainstorming this whole matter is a good thing and maybe, just maybe, the devs will consider making combat a bit more varied.
Eh, that doesn't make any sense.
Let me put it this way. Yesterday I researched Liquid Tuning in Oxygen Not Included, I can now effectively cool stuff in the game. Today my Aquatuner doesn't work anymore because some update effed up my progress and I have to do 4 weeks of tedious work to just unlock it again. That's Elite Dangerous.
No, it's nothing like that.
Matter of perspective. It is like that to me.