Canyon Chasing Behaviour Promoting

[londonx]

The other night I attacked a small POI base on a planet which triggered an offensive response from a nearby outpost that was in visible range. Excitingly the planet had some great canyons in which to evade the outpost weapons and I was sitting in the fast and maneuverable Vulture, when a couple of Navy ships were sent after me I was anticipating a fight to the death within the canyon itself, however the ships just hovered at normal high flying altitude and blasted me from above no matter how tight I was to the canyon walls or how tight my turns were.

I feel that a more cinematic and gameplay inspiring response would be for the attackers to try to join me at my altitude and get on my tail or attempt a Canyon level evasive run if I were on their tail. It would be a great ship-weaponry leveller particularly for solo pilots and would move the combat outcome more toward flying skill and would reward highly maneuverable smaller craft rather than brute force ones; imagine one of the NPC wings crashing into the side of the Canyon after a tight turn.

To promote or generate lore around the idea, for both human and NPCs, automatic weapon tracking could be made less precise the further away a ship is when aiming at an object moving relatively nearer the planet surface (ground level radiation interference or visual tracking more difficult if target moving fast past surface clutter?) or the NPCs would rather get low with the target to prioritise attempting to hit the targets thrusters. Or perhaps a surface cloaking device could be fitted on the top surface of the ship that works only at a certain altitude so tracking systems can only work if lateral with the cloaked target.

 

[Arry]

That is the insane thing about chasing a target into a canyon, when it is easier to rise above and follow and target then from above. But as you say, it would ruin the thrill of the chase.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Jitter could be artificially augmented to all weapons, bar fixed, to become worse the further you are from a target that is hugging the surface.


Or
Being close to the surface partially masks your ships signature, making you hard to target from above, unless you're close.

The solution is fixed weapons, or get down and dirty with your target.

Programming the AI to not crash continuously, but without making them precision pilots, would be fairly difficult, especially to scale with rank.

Plus, add some sort of "flying below radar" mechanic to surface bases, and you have a cool system for entry and exit to bases.

Even if it makes no sense lore wise, it'd be such a cool gameplay mechanic, it'd be accepted by all but the more hardcore immersion/sim crowd.

 

[Armholeeio]

Canyon chases - excitement - cinematic , rubbish tactically. Nape of the earth flying is great for sneaking in and attacking a target as your less likely to be tracked by early warning radar but once you are in the target zone you have to pop up to be at a safe deployment height or if detected you have to peel up high and fast. Rule of thumb is if you have the high ground you have the advantage to dive down and do a straffing run so you need to try and reduce that advantage to the enemy.

 

[ZainlessBrombie]

Does not make enough sense to not hurt the game if you ask me. However canyon fights ARE a really cool thing and a nice gameplay chalenge as you pointed out, so how about this: On atmospheric planets there could be storms raging throwing rocks all over the place, damaging your ship if you leave the canyon. Surface ports are protected by their shields (as some already are) or are in canyons themselves, and from there you could go and fly in canyons and reach nearby places.
(Landing would require.. I dunno either a risky dive before your shields die or you'd have corridors that are shielded.)