FWIW, I recall them saying on a livestream that endless thrust was an issue that they would be looking at addressing.
Flight Model: Has FDev Lost Their Way?
- Thread starter Frenotx
- Start date
Not necessarily... IME lower end ships typically can not take out higher end ships that easily. Though there is plenty of precedence in sci-fi for it to be plausible.
If you are talking about an FDL/Chieftain/FAS taking out a Corvette/Anaconda/Cutter, then you are ignoring the point that those ships which are smaller in a physical sense are designed for combat and taking down larger craft is not that unreasonable.
Where smaller craft than that is concerned, they are going to be more vulnerable but theoretically could still do it - there is nothing wrong with that.
What is badly wrong is when ships can be made effectively invulnerable to damage.
The differences between the lower end craft and higher end craft (physical/pad size is a distraction and moot) is a mix of size and number of weapons. As you go up the scale of ships, the weapon size S/M/L/H goes up and the number of hard-points tends to get balanced accordingly. The key measure seemingly used to balance hard-point sizes and counts is hull cost, at any given hull price point for a given role the weapon mix is roughly comparable.
FD will have to be careful how they attempt to address the concerns, their attempt to address shield booster stacking is a prime example of how not to try to address balancing concerns.
There are many ways they could have dealt with the Shield Booster stacking but they took a rather ham-fisted approach which irked some.
Where the perma-boost is concerned, assuming they address the actual underlying issue(s) with some form of counter balance (e.g. increased heat generation) then I don't see any way anyone could legitimately object to it. Hard capping things or introducing diminishing returns rarely goes down well.
I think you missed the point, but nvm. Games, esp. space games all seem to think along the Star Wars line of things... 1 fighter with luck & skill can take out a Death Star. In reality? It would be like trying to sink the Nimitz with a rubber dingy. And if it's a case of bigger = slower, then let us fit multi systems to large slots (ie. 2 mediums or 4 small turrets - the same idea as AA guns or phalanix system), or maybe I'm wrong.
I take it you never saw this...
[video=youtube;s8_OcN5FXmg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8_OcN5FXmg[/video]
You realize that had Luke missed he would have been recorded as the largest feminine hygiene product in sci-fi history?
If the Rubber Dingy is carrying people armed with the right weapons then they could theoretically take out a large warship.I think you missed the point, but nvm. Games, esp. space games all seem to think along the Star Wars line of things... 1 fighter with luck & skill can take out a Death Star. In reality? It would be like trying to sink the Nimitz with a rubber dingy. And if it's a case of bigger = slower, then let us fit multi systems to large slots (ie. 2 mediums or 4 small turrets - the same idea as AA guns or phalanix system), or maybe I'm wrong.
As for missing your point, I do not think I have. In ED, a Sidewinder for example can theoretically damage and possibly eventually kill an Anaconda but it would take them a LONG time to do so assuming the Anaconda is equipped properly (and not using an OP god build - which would make the task more unfeasible if not impossible). The Anaconda by contrast could take out the Sidewinder in a much shorter time. There are enough hard-points on the larger ships as it is to justify a split between turrets and main guns - they do not need more.
Head up the range of ships from the sidewinder and the balancing factors vary from ship to ship. There is little or no evidence of "lucky shot death star one-hit kill" circumstances (reminisce of Star Wars A New Hope) in ED nor most other space flight games I have played - they all (inc. ED) are largely fights of attrition (weapons v. shields/hull points) with skill being a factor both in avoiding and dealing damage. The amount of skill on both sides varies depending on the match-up in question. The larger craft typically can take a lot more punishment than the smaller craft and a good pilot would know when it is tactically advisable (e.g. when the circumstances are unfavourable such as shields dropping too fast) to bug out of a fight and when it is best to avoid a fight in the first place (e.g. you are outmatched such as number of opponents and/or types of opponents).
There are other situations to consider too and while module sniping does allow for a degree of "lucky shot" circumstances, it is something FD have nerfed at least once (no more power plant damage implicitly forces a ship to explode). Personally, I have found module sniping to be less effective at killing a target than going straight for ship destruction. I believe module sniping is intended to be for pirates primarily so they can steal cargo without destroying the target and potentially the cargo with it.
I just want to point out that we have some control over our flight models. I don't use A-rated dirty drives on my large ships, for example, because I want them to feel heavy with somewhat accurate momentum. I do wish that main engines were a separate module from thrusters (pitch / yaw / lateral), because I'm often more interested in top speed than I am maneuverability, but you can't change one without changing the other. I'm not going to lose sleep over it however, as I rarely PvP and even PvE is just a small part of my overall gameplay.
Cmdr Esquisite,
Firstly I feel I should earlier have welcomed you to the forums and saluted your interest as a fellow PvP-er. Let me do that now. But I still have more to say.
Look, I feel bad here because you’re new to the forums, you’re doing well in PvP using your small ships and I really respect that. I’m not trying to belittle your achievements or discourage you from posting, nor either to patronise you, there’s only so diplomatic I can be in a wall of text, so please just take the above as read. But you are wrong, and I’m going to spell out why.
Sorry man but you’ve got your small > large proposition all wrong. PvP skill and outfitting are the advantages … and together they can sometimes overcome the disadvantage a small ship faces against a large. I’ve done it in Courier but that’s nothing. Nitek did it in a Type-7 (OK, not a small, but you get the point). Archon Fury has done it loads of times. But the point is that in this game, spanking those who only half know what they’re doing sheds zero light on apex PvP combat.
In apex PvP, there is to my knowledge not one single example of a small overcoming a large 1v1. (Yes, you read that right.) This is because the inherent advantages of the large are, in the right hands, too great. Like wwwaaaaayyyyyyy too great.
I could bore everyone with a 100 page book on this topic, right through my full-fixed Anaconda days in 1.3 and 1.4 to Archon Fury’s days as Cillit Bang, to Betas, to Nitek, to Morbad etc. etc. etc. but suffice to say that when you tell us about "sub system targeting" you are not exactly telling the people you’re talking to (or about) something new. We have been in thousands of PvP engagements, sometimes at the highest level.
I was part of a team that won Season 1 of the PvP League undefeated using full-rails and no shields. Believe it or not, we did actually give (and receive) a fair bit of subsystem snipes.
Morbad (the Vette guy I cited) has a unique multi-shield-drop build and strategy, with his Vette set up so that the hull will actually reach 0% before a critical module fails, even under concerted PvP wing focus with plasma and super pen rails against one module.
But that’s unique to Morbad because nobody else in serious PvP will let a big ship shield drop to a single small, not ever.
Note that when I said that Ryan_m (one of SDC’s most feared and knowledgable pilots) had credited Morbad’s build on these forums, this is not exactly a guy who gives his praise lightly.
Quite literally every small that has ever faced me in Anaconda or Corvette or Cutter has left or died without denting me. Continuous TLB? Lol. Dispersal? Lol. Trying to keep close? Lol. Chaff? Lol. None of it makes any difference, the hitscan will hit you, the rails will gut you. And with an SLF you have 40 DPS constant (about 10 DPS normalised over time) hitting them the entire time as well. And I repeat, I’m not even predominantly a Big Ship pilot, two years in Courier here, before that mainly FdL, before that FAS, before that Clipper.
So, let me cut to the end of the 100 page book and spare you the other 99 pages. Let’s get to the incontrovertible proof.
Neither you, nor any other forum user, will be able to link here, now, in this thread, one single video that shows a 1v1 between two apex PvP-ers in which a small beats a large. Not one. Over three years of live game. Approaching 3,000,000 customers. Tens of thousands of PvP vids. And not one vid of two guys who actually know what they are doing, 1v1, with the small beating the large.
Git googling if you will, man. If we set the bar at two ‘names’, two guys both with at least some demonstrable achievement in the PvP Leagues or similar, two guys who are both credited by the PvP community as credible threats, you will not be able to link one vid, because that vid does not exist, because that fight does not exist. (Note that I'm not here asking someone to find a vid of a good guy who was at the time asleep running into a barrage of torps or mines, I mean an actual fight, an attrition fight, as you yourself mentioned.)
This is not a criticism of anyone, including yourself, but the historical record does not lie. Law of large numbers. If it could be done – to someone who knows what they’re doing – it would have been done. At least once. And it hasn’t been, not even once, because a small can’t beat a large piloted and outfitted by someone who really knows PvP.
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Would it be fair to say (from a noddy/simple persective) that it's because it's simply impossible (unfortunately) for a small ship to stay in the blind spot of a big ship?
ie: You can do this with an NPC, but NOT with another CMDR?
[video=youtube;zn7w9kxOamY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7w9kxOamY[/video]
It's rare I enjoy a wall of text, but here I am wishing you'd written the 100 page book
The simple fact is that in space, with full freedom of movement (particularly with FA Off) and agility exaggerated thanks to drive mods, the agility advantage of smaller ships amounts to very little. Big ships can turn pretty damn quickly even on the spot, in some cases have the speed to dictate engagement range themselves, and have no legit physics such as G-forces to tear the ship apart.
Vertical/lateral thrust are perhaps the most useful aspect of small ship control, as they override inertia quickly enough and accelerate quickly enough to use vert/lat thrust far more effectively for evasion...but even then in PvE and the odd PvP fight I find myself circle strafing against the opponent in my cutter. Really now?
The more you play ED, the more you realise it's a numbers game. Do I have more defense and firepower than the opponent, and does my specific loadout happen to have the advantage against his? With this in mind it's fairly obvious that even if a small ship can be survivable (don't get me wrong, a lightweight iCourier w/ dispersal field and/or chaff is a total pig to kill) it doesn't mean it has the figures to actually take the big ship apart-even without its multiple SCBs, each charge of which can carry more effective HP than the entire small ship itself - while evading a far bigger array of weapons.
Shame really because it means there is decreasing difference between large/big ships outside raw numbers. I would love big ships to be so much more: genuinely difficult to pilot but with devastating effect if used correctly. A small ship should have an agility advantage, and it should be difficult to pilot the big ship, to the point that multicrew becomes a genuine asset. I always think of Angus Thermopyle piloting Bright Beauty in The Gap Cycle books: he had to hook up multiple relays and servos to his bridge to be capable of piloting the ship without a crew. But if you do make the mistake of sitting in a large ship's sights for long, you should watch part of your ship liquidise before your very eyes.
Anyway...*ahem*.
Read what I put above - as large ships have full freedom of movement/no aerodynamics to rely on, and with modded drives, there indeed is almost no such thing as "staying on someone's six" unless the opponent is a poor pilot. It's far less prominent in PvE because NPCs do not get FA Off.
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Yep, as ED has progressively become more and more of a paper-scissors-stone affair, with combat outcomes becoming more and more dictated in outfitting, rather than at combat time, I've become less and less interested in it.
The issue started IMHO with the poor choice of offering gimbals and fixed, where a single unified more tactical solution rewarding better aim would have been more productive, and has now been blown out of the water with the Engineers and its "Magic: The Gathering" approach to upgrades and magic spell side effects...
why people that have no idea about the flight model write is beyond me , here some [FONT="]propositions [/FONT] that may work towards a more interesting close to the original idea fights
add thermal or time limits to boost (permaboost addressing), there is another option to divert a larger portion of the boost to main engines thus limiting boost bleeding effect may work or not ?
Missiles with faster lock mechanism and higher yield but with min encage range so it will be a long range wpn only and force pilots to stay close in order to avoid a missile hit
Better ecm that will limit both lock and radar range so pilots will have to move closer and will limit in wing fights cmdrs staying in the perimeter strafing and shoot missiles or using lr lasers
Area big shielded slow moving missiles (big ship only) that will force wing pilots to have roles instead of just focusing and make bigger ships relevant
All these are addons try to solve a problem around it cause to be honest if you want close quarter fights to be the norm lr wpns/sensors and high speeds permaboost need a serious nerf
, here some [FONT="]propositions [/FONT] that may work towards a more interesting close to the original idea fightsadd thermal or time limits to boost (permaboost addressing), there is another option to divert a larger portion of the boost to main engines thus limiting boost bleeding effect may work or not ?
Missiles with faster lock mechanism and higher yield but with min encage range so it will be a long range wpn only and force pilots to stay close in order to avoid a missile hit
Better ecm that will limit both lock and radar range so pilots will have to move closer and will limit in wing fights cmdrs staying in the perimeter strafing and shoot missiles or using lr lasers
Area big shielded slow moving missiles (big ship only) that will force wing pilots to have roles instead of just focusing and make bigger ships relevant
All these are addons try to solve a problem around it cause to be honest if you want close quarter fights to be the norm lr wpns/sensors and high speeds permaboost need a serious nerf
I think we've disagreed about views on gimballed/fixed weapons previously, but that aside, I agree with engineering being akin to "Magic: the Gathering". I would have loved to see modifications being based on pure and simple gain and offset: small adjustments such as "shield gains 10% better resistances all around at the cost of 15% capacity", that you wouldn't smack on every ship without consideration, because it could be a disadvantage unless you specifically need the resistance for a bi-weave or SCB build.
What triggers me is that ultimately FD are catering to players that want to jump in any ship and melt Elite 'conda after Elite 'conda after Elite 'conda. We could have had a much more natural approach to ships, and simply drawn attention to the fact that if you want to play God, you can do so at your local HighSec LowRES.
Like completing a Wing assassination mission in solo with a medium ship (FAS or FGS)? Like dominating Haz RES and conflict zones with only two CMDRs in an instance? How is that balanced?
All that in-game footage demonstrates is that CMDR's Tarkin and Vader probably aren't part of the canon of apex pvp'ers who know what they're doing.
How about a compromise?
Speed and manoeuvrability nerfs only kick in if hardpoints with weaponry are deployed. You could make any old rubbish up for the lore - "the extra energy requirements needed to maintain power to hardpoints blah blah blah.."
That would keep the likes of me happier - I get to keep my Anaconda specifically engineered for permaboost to enable very fast low level terrain-hugging and canyon-running, and it keeps the PvP-Pro_bros happy because during a fight ship speeds/manoeuvrability is hobbled.
This would also keep non-PvP'ers happy because they'd be able to escape better due to not having hardpoints deployed, hence having greater speed and manoeuvrability than the rabid PvP'er who's got their weapons deployed.
Win win win all round methinks.
Speed and manoeuvrability nerfs only kick in if hardpoints with weaponry are deployed. You could make any old rubbish up for the lore - "the extra energy requirements needed to maintain power to hardpoints blah blah blah.."
That would keep the likes of me happier - I get to keep my Anaconda specifically engineered for permaboost to enable very fast low level terrain-hugging and canyon-running, and it keeps the PvP-Pro_bros happy because during a fight ship speeds/manoeuvrability is hobbled.
This would also keep non-PvP'ers happy because they'd be able to escape better due to not having hardpoints deployed, hence having greater speed and manoeuvrability than the rabid PvP'er who's got their weapons deployed.
Win win win all round methinks.
The FAS is a very capable ship, so I don't see the issue with that. If I get an assassination mission where there are 4 condas in a wing, I get my handed to me though.
Conflict zones in theory should be even without player interaction. With one player choosing one side, the scales would tip to that side.
Haz res again, depends on the luck of what ships you get.
After doing several hours of bounty hunting in compromised beacons, I feel the combat is quite balanced, and only when I get cocky I get my handed to me.
truesilver, it is always amusing to read you being so serious about pvp ... until one realizes you're talking about elite:toys'r'us. hilarious. keep it up!
Fair question. I don't really have an opinion (I don't fly those 3 slippery things) but it seems to me OP has a point. +rep