Big body pvp and ways to make it happen...

[Darth Montu]

I am a Star Trek Online convert and I loved the concept of DPS Tanks. A large ship dropping out of FTL and unleashing a torrent of weapons fire or being surrounded, tanking Damage while punching back with as much as youre taking...

I have mental pictures of Ronald Moore's Battlestars going at it, Galatica trading blows and Pegasus dropping and engaging, bringing hell with her.. GLORIOUS!!! (Until Lee got Pegasus destoryed like a weak, moronic manchild whos daddy gave him a battlestar to play with in the bath and could handle it... Reject...but i digress.)

I seen the large ships and was so excited to load them up for battle and pvp in them... Until i began my reseach to do so... I found that the big ships are easiler put maneuvered and too slow to catch other ships.. "OK," i thought, just use turrets right? WRONG. turrents do very little damage. Too little to rely on to do damage in pvp... So then i thought, why wont Fdev just increase the dps of turrets?! Well my own logic answered with, "if they did that then pvp would be who ever could chaff/dodge shots the best...we would only end up with small and medium ships using turrets and agility." Smaller ships are STILL ahead because big ships couldnt dodge.

Then theres the matter of tanking. How can you do it?! Well theres high resist shields with high hull resist and as much cap for both you can get. Combine that with shield banks and you can tank pretty well...for a while...or until some clown comes in with rail bypassing those shields... So you cant really tank, and you cant really dps in a big ship because the pvp meta is high speed/agility and maximum burst damage.

So then HOW does one dps tank?!

Youve got to give large ships something medium ships dont have. I was thinking about addong a combat sensor module slot. And creating a new module: Combat Sensors.

The combat sensors which are able to be used on ships grow with the size of the ship. Small ships wouldnt be able to used them. Medium ships, can use the first level of them, allowing the weapons fire to be slightly more accurate. Large ships though, could use the best class of combat sensor, allowing their weapons fire to be DEADLY accurate while also passively increasing weapon range slighty and increasing the damage done to turrets and gimballed. But just as fixed are most powerful, the gimballed, then turrets, the combat sensors would give biggest boost the turrets, slight boost to gimballed and no boost the fixed.

This would allow larger ships to engage from further out forcing smaller ships to either biuld for longer range or to charge in using their agility and pilot skill to win.

As for tanking, a slight increase to the armor rating of larger ships and a slightly higher shield damage resist giving to larger shields modules should allow larger ships to tank.

Once tested and balanced, roll the changes out to players and NPCs alike.


Whats everyones thoughts?

Ranting of a n00b? Or good idea?

 

[EWanderer]

The problem with Big ships are, that they are flown like the small ship to accommodate the single pilot experience. In reality larger vessels should have mountings facing sideways to cover a larger area due to their length width ration. But that would require multiple people having to join up in MC to make full use of the weapons since they also would come in the three fire version.

Then again I am not really qualified as I usually avoid PvP Combat in Elite since I don't want to grind endlessly for engineers.

 

[Darth Montu]

Im not sure even the big ships are THAT big. Even the cutter is less than 200 meters long. Im sure automation does A LOT. Even if youre correct, there has to be a way to make them viable. Im tired of seeong the same 2-3 ships in pvp.

 

[Hellfire85]

So... Let me get this right...
You want low effort turret boating while your attackers have to dodge the hell away to take you down, and even more armor and shield strength than we already have due to the healthpool inflation?

Are you serious or is this a troll post?

A big ship is not an ez win button. It takes skill, dedication and cash for a healthy amount of rebuys.
It has big armor, big shields an guns, but turns like a brick. That's how it should be.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I do not really get the problem you are trying to solve?

Based on how Elite is designed around the CMDR (ie the player), flying their own ship, and basically, every ship are built to have their weapons facing forward. And the only time a weapon would not fire forward was when using turrets, and that comes with less damage potential, but on the other hand, time on target should increase and thus compensating for this, and this is something that have totally neglected to account for.


The biggest player ships:
209 meter - Beluga Liner
192 meter - Imperial Cutter
167 meter - Federal Corvette
152 meter - Ananconda


NPC only ships:
2040 meter - Farragut Battle Cruiser
1904 meter - Majestic Class Interdictor


Now, we have the Battlestar Galactica, that is 1445 meters long, quite a lot bigger than player ships... and how big a Cylon Basestar is up for debate, but it is atleast the same length as Battlestar Galactica, and could be twice that.


So Battlestar Galactica is ~7 times longer than the longest ship we can pilot.

 

[Azreh Helas]

Large ships are flown as fighters they are essentially huge fighters/transport/cargo ships and are not a team effort like say in Star Citizen (hell even x4 foundation has a crew for all of its ship types). After the Corvette and Cutter there are capital ships who preform the role you are looking for even if a bit ineffective for my taste. The game lore claims that most of the things are automated and handled by computer A.I or drones (empire uses slaves for manual labour but thats waay besides the point right now). The big ships in this game if engineered and outfitted right aare tanky as hell and while no one uses turrets in PvP it can be quite fun to use for a dedicated MC ship.

 

[Darth Montu]

Its just an idea. Applied effort to make the most expensive ships in the game more useful than combat zone bricks or cargo runners with guns. The ships you have the corvette, a combat ship with ISNT used for upper level combat. You have the anaconda, which tries to do everything. And the cutter, which can only really tank.
Now while the big 3 can tank, what does tanking actually get you? Can you tank enough to kill an opponent before they can kill you? Well.... Not if they are moving well enough. Thus, movement>tanking, thus bigger more expensive ships NOT better. So they why buy them?

Am i saying make turrets hit like fixed? No. You could buff turrets by 30-35% and they would STILL be below gimballed while maybe being able to make a dent.

Yes, they have big shields...which can be punched through, big hulls, which make them easy to hit with a fast mover, and big guns which against a well piloted smaller ship, will have litter to no time firing on target, much less hitting/damaging said target in a pvp setting.

And yes, i know there are people like orgymeyer who seem to have figured it out and fly pvp cutters and the like. More often then not, theyre pvping in a wing. 1v1s seem to always favor the more maneuverable.

Now again, I AM STILL NEW TO THE GAME. this thread is more a sharing of my ideas and me requesting clarification and information to where i may be wrong or inexperienced. I dont need the flame. I need to INFORMATION.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Agility is always going to beat size in this sort of game, though. Even in Freespace 2, which had some of the most effective capital ship turrets of any space game, you flew the agile bomber which evaded the incoming fire and dropped high-power bombs on them, or the really agile fighter which took out the bombers and their munitions before they could do damage.

Ships that big are scenery and objectives - there'd be no fun actually flying an Orion-class destroyer with it's turn rate of a couple of degrees a minute, hoping that your turrets and deployed fighters might be able to do something about the attackers but with limited direct influence on the battle.

A big turret boat could be great if you have an objective to secure - though the turrets would need some enhancements - but that scenario doesn't really come up in Elite Dangerous.