It's cool to be able to specialized into a roll, but combat is something that can happen at any time (outside of like, deep space exploring). As such, everyone needs to be able to be able to put up a real fight without needing to compromise their ability to do the task they're specializing for. Specializing in combat should be about adding utility, not capability. Think things like wake scanners, bounty scanners, modules to field-repair between fights, cargo and limpets for loot / pirating, and maybe even things like prison cell modules for interesting bounty mechanics down the road. Ironically, all of these things currently have no place on an optimized combat fit, since using any of your utility out internal mounts for anything other than defenses puts you at a significant disadvantage. These are all things that will increase the efficiency and available options of the combat-related CAREERS, without just directly giving you huge in-fight advantages / making the actual combat easier.I like those
In particular moving SCB/SBs under the shield generator.
I remember when specialist weapons were first introduced, could only be bought at a few markets and they had trade offs in the way you describe. Increased damage in exchange for a meaningfully shorter effective range and jitter. They were removed from buying early on release (maybe even launch? memory's hazy) but those that already had them could got to keep them till engineering arrived and made them obselete.
Honestly I didn't think much of them at first, but hindsight makes me miss them a lot.
I know that FD/Sandro were a fan of ship specialisation, they wanted ships to be built for, and be better at, a specific role which is fair enough in principle but in respect to combat that's always been a mistake from my point of view as it greatly reduced emergent combat gameplay.
I don't think that approach is going to change though, too far down that path.
Griefers make open impossible, and how easy the solution is.
- Thread starter NisseNeutron
- Start date
So having to kill 50+ sec ships per day is perfectly reasonable, but locking someone out who kills 50+ sec ships is silly.
We have different definitions of silly.
Edit: but hey, if you think killing 50+ sec ships is logical, how about limiting locking CMDRs out based on Pilot Fed Pilots kills? You still can get your grind on.
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Certainly a solution, but I can't imagine it being a rewarding one.
Personally, I like being invested in my characters and I have them strive mightily for the survival of their ships. Game is more fun, for me, this way.
I see this argument all the time.
It does not at all jive with my pre-Engineers (2.0 and earlier) experience, which was considerable.
As far as it relates to solutions to this perceived problem, I strongly disagree with just about all of this.
If every ship was exactly the same in all ways, there would still be gankers indiscriminately destroying other CMDR's vessels, and there would still be players complaining about how their CMDR's vessels were indiscriminately destroyed by gankers. I'm highly doubtful it wouldn't even be less common.
Equipment is really not that large of a factor when it comes to this. Gankers aren't frequently going to interdict superior pilots without superior numbers and when they do they will just abort the attack and find easier targets, just like they generally do now.
That there is a difference between PvP and PvE balancing shows just how absurd the current state of NPC AI and demographics are.
No it's not.
It's still too predictable and still too limited relative to CMDRs, even bad ones. They feel deliberately artificial, which is the opposite of what they should be. It's ok for me to be able to see that artificiality on close inspection, but it's quite far from ok for the NPCs to wear it as a badge of pride.
I don't always know what a CMDR will do, and the less experienced that CMDR is, the less sure I am. I almost always know exactly what an NPC is going to do in any given situation because they follow a script and it doesn't have all that many permutations to it.
If I, for whatever reason, decide to have my CMDR take his G5 FDL against a soft target, he doesn't magically become a worse pilot.
Sorry, but limpets, fuel scoop, cargo rack and whatnot in a combat ship make no more sense than the 3rd and 4th seat and a bicycle rack in a racing car.
And being able to put up a real fight in trader ship against a specialised combat ship is something like racing in your family van vs a F1 car, or fighting in a truck against an M1 Abrams, for that matter.
Sorry, but limpets, fuel scoop, cargo rack and whatnot in a combat ship make no more sense than the 3rd and 4th seat and a bicycle rack in a racing car.
And being able to put up a real fight in trader ship against a specialised combat ship is something like racing in your family van vs a F1 car, or fighting in a truck against an M1 Abrams, for that matter.
I agree. I've never felt that specializing for combat should be any less of a thing than specializing for exploration or mining.
What I would like to see is organic scenarios where specializing purely for a the actual fighting is impractical due to other considerations like expenses or logistics, which are huge strategic factors in war, and not insignificant tactical considerations in a given battle. The problem is that various "QoL" shortcuts and all-round inflation have removed these things from consideration all together. I can just mail my CMDR's combat ships anywhere and resupply is always available and always cheap.
Pre-engineers wasn't all hand-holding and singing songs. Ganking still happened plenty.
Engineering has just created a wider disparity between a combat build and a non-combat build, by making combat builds more combat builds, and non-combat builds more non-combat builds.
"So having to kill 50+ sec ships per day is perfectly reasonable, but locking someone out who kills 50+ sec ships is silly."
Depends on your point of view. Killing is a legitimate way of influencing the BGS- locking people out of doing that severely limits the BGS in turn.
You forget the BGS is / was (depending on your view) about filling buckets / finding that sweet spot on the curve. Unless you adjust murder influence high amounts are required, and are logical from a gameplay perspective.
If I were you I'd forget about trying to tie anything to lore inside the game, since its been neglected so much. It would be better to do something like I suggest here https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...-npc-player-scan-spawns-an-atr-vessel.533172/ which does not preclude any activity, but makes things progressively more complex the more you do.
This, and, as far as I remember, it was thought to be a great idea as an enhancement for the game to send your ships around
as most other blindsided enhancements some people come up with again and again
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Well it could have been so much worse. FD were considering fast travel for your ships to and from any system.
Personally in general I am all for plausible mechanics in the game and it is plausible that you could pay to have a ship delivered for you. The important part is imo that doing it yourself is always the cheaper and faster alternative....
It wouldn't actually be an issue if the credit economy was not so broken with players earning 100s of millions an HR
Maybe something like a war in some remote system in the middle of nowhere which cannot be reached without a fuel scoop and you'll need to rely on field repairs and returning to fights (after the rebuy screen) is pretty much impossible because you respawn too far away? Well it would be interesting (although a bit frustrating if you died too early because of some bug like desync rams etc). But yeah it definitely won't happen in the bubble anymore.
No issue with that, I am not the one complaining or whining cause been ganked ( actually I love interdictions cause I can always use some more practice with fixed weapons
), but also, I dont ask for any kind of easing existing mechanics cause of issues like thisOh and yes, credits, who called for easier cash??? It was fine for me, took me 2 years to get my first cutter
I've not read all 9 pages because lol sod that.
The solution to always getting killed in open is to not fly in open, and it's a lot easier than implementing some half-baked, much-harder-to-code-than-you-think-it-is scoring system that causes more problems than it solves. Remember crime and punishment and how it did nothing to deter gankers while being a much bigger pain in the backside than the old bounty system was to mostly-lawful players? 'cause I certainly do.
The solution to always getting killed in open is to not fly in open, and it's a lot easier than implementing some half-baked, much-harder-to-code-than-you-think-it-is scoring system that causes more problems than it solves. Remember crime and punishment and how it did nothing to deter gankers while being a much bigger pain in the backside than the old bounty system was to mostly-lawful players? 'cause I certainly do.
Gameplay trumps realism. If you must latch on to realism, then look back to the age of sail where a trade ship very well could be packing cannons, and certain kinds of cannons were even sold specifically for this purpose.Sorry, but limpets, fuel scoop, cargo rack and whatnot in a combat ship make no more sense than the 3rd and 4th seat and a bicycle rack in a racing car.
And being able to put up a real fight in trader ship against a specialised combat ship is something like racing in your family van vs a F1 car, or fighting in a truck against an M1 Abrams, for that matter.
If you're doing combat missions, chasing down a target, using plasma slug munitions, or just generally moving around, a fuel scoop can indeed be very useful, especially considering the anemic range of some combat ships. Limpets are very useful for collecting materials dropped from downed targets. Cargo space and limpets are critical to doing actual piracy. Repair limpets can be useful for keeping a ship patched up between skirmishes in extended sorties (or at least conceivably could be, pending balance tweaking). An SRV can be helpful for gathering synthesis materials, as well, for rearming without needing to return to a station. Then there are of course the bounty and wake scanners, and cargo scanner if you're looking to liberate cargo. Many other modules could be added in the future for combat-related careers, as well, such as the aforementioned prison cells, modules to give you more max ammo. There are plenty of modules a ship can currently carry that assist with combat career efficiency, and many more that could conceivably be added in the future.
Taking pretty much any of these is foolish now, but that's only because of the substantial amount health you have to give up to do so. Many of those modules aren't relevant specifically for exclusively fighting and killing other players, but that's an small sub-specialization of "combat" as a whole, and even of PvP potential encounters. If my proposed changes were implemented, you could still choose to leave all your optional slots empty if you really wanted to. It would potentially save you a bit of weight and power, and give you a slight edge against a more loaded ship. You would, however, have the option to bring a slightly more broadly capable vessle, without significantly gimping your chances in a fight. Who knows? Maybe we'd see a few more people looking into piracy if they could bring the gear required to do so without trashing their combat readiness, relatively speaking.
The point is to give options without having to gimp your ability to properly fight, which is the only activity that can potentially be thrust upon you. You don't have to worry about all ships being able to bring a full mining build, because you don't have to worry about someone interdicting you and forcing you into a mining race... to the death. At any point in time, however, (with the exception of deep space exploration), another ship very well could interdict you and force you into a combat situation. The only way for those sudden situations to remain interesting for all parties, is if all parties can remain equiped for a fight, even when they're not looking for one.
It is a great ease of laziness enhancement, but as with anything else, it cuts both ways.
No C&P and no logistical considerations remove all rational limitations from combat vessels, which leaves people recommending absurd contrivances that would artificially limit their ability to specialize...probably to no meaningful effect to the source of complaints like the OP's, but serious negative effects to situations wherever the existence of a pure combat vessel would make sense.
If it was a matter of fighting behind enemy lines where supplies had to be brought with you and repairs conducted in the field...with any wing of pure warships needing their own supply tender (that could potentially be followed and knocked out) things would be far more interesting.
Fighting on one's home turf, or with the legal sanction of the local powers that be, should be far easier than operating in the heart of hostile territory...but it can't be, because Frontier and much of the player base is wholly consequence adverse and because there are no distinct fronts, or logistical depth, when the inhabited space can be crossed in three minutes.
I don't really care about lore. And I am aware that BGS is filling buckets. And yeah, if finding a sweet spot entails killing 50+ ships, I very much would adjust that mechanism, possible replacing it with decreasing returns. Just like it is done with selling exploration data.
I don't care about lore, but I do care about games making sense when I play them. And the part of my quote you focused on doesn't, regardless of my point of view. Killing is indeed a legitimate way of influencing the BGS, keep in mind I am talking about mass killing. If it takes those types of quantities per day, surely we agree that has ventured into the silly.
The gameplay perspective for me is that having to grind 50+ kills each day, isn't much to write home about with regard to gameplay. But hey, to each their own and all that. And it won't be taken away just because a random forum person blurps his opinion and finds the whole thing silly.
Have fun!
And the limitations being advocated for combat vessels would do almost nothing to help gameplay while further degrading plausibility and verisimilitude.
A galeon that was packed with trade...rather than extra shot, powder, and marines...was a substantially inferior combatant. It ran lower in the water, was more sluggish, could neither maintain the same rate of fire nor level of damage control, and could neither capture ships nor repel boarding attempts, as effectively.
It'd still be able to deal some damage to another ship on its way down if someone came along with the intent to just sink it rather than loot it, enough to make such random attacks risky and pointless. Which is.. not the case in Elite, where Rinzler's guide to trading in open literally says to ditch the guns to save weight since you don't stand a chance of getting through the shields, never mind winning, against a dedicated combat ship.
Just substitute "killed for no reason within 10 minutes" for "griefed" and your own post doesn't sound so much like hyperbole....
Its going to be funny in Star Citizen. They don't have any solo mode and they just brought out a tiny ship that can solo or zerg all the big ships they sold for thousands of dollars.
I'm going to watch that with a bag of popcorn from a distance to avoid stains on my shirt... Goonfleet are totally ready for their favorite strategy being put on anabolic steroids.
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meanwhile I log into open and it's just crickets chirping
I was even going to the engineers today in my paper-hull paper-shield anaconda, I made a tour of Zac Nemo, Bris Dekker and Liz Ryder before returning to my home base, and didn't see a single other player until well after I'd docked and switched to the ship I was fitting the modules to.
I don't really care about lore. And I am aware that BGS is filling buckets. And yeah, if finding a sweet spot entails killing 50+ ships, I very much would adjust that mechanism, possible replacing it with decreasing returns. Just like it is done with selling exploration data.
I don't care about lore, but I do care about games making sense when I play them. And the part of my quote you focused on doesn't, regardless of my point of view. Killing is indeed a legitimate way of influencing the BGS, keep in mind I am talking about mass killing. If it takes those types of quantities per day, surely we agree that has ventured into the silly.
The gameplay perspective for me is that having to grind 50+ kills each day, isn't much to write home about with regard to gameplay. But hey, to each their own and all that. And it won't be taken away just because a random forum person blurps his opinion and finds the whole thing silly.
Have fun!
I'm all for a rebalance, since negative actions are hard to achieve while its almost impossible to stop the flood of positive ones. The new influence curves need more tweaking.
"I am talking about mass killing. If it takes those types of quantities per day, surely we agree that has ventured into the silly."
Since EDs BGS is an abstracted simulation sometimes numbers are not what you expect. Higher populations require more work to influence, so numbers can get very high (which become less if you have more people doing the killing). If its just you then its time to roll up the sleeves.
"The gameplay perspective for me is that having to grind 50+ kills each day, isn't much to write home about with regard to gameplay."
Its very, very easy to mow down that many if you know what to look for and do. Plus, I get to see the very extremes of the C + P and the BGS which is about as dangerous as the game gets.
"But hey, to each their own and all that. And it won't be taken away just because a random forum person blurps his opinion and finds the whole thing silly."
Aaaaand out comes the snark.