Ground weapons against ships... Any stats anywhere?

[Kira Goto]

I don't even think its "for balance"

That was sarcasm. The quotation marks were supposed to be indicative of that because whoever thought and decided this ridiculous state of things was 'balanced' instead of making anything other than on foot weapons effectively useless - besides the Scaab because of its pinpoint accuracy - against on foot opponents (not counting missile bombing which requires minimal thought or aim) and artificially inflating foot weapon damage against ships and vehicles to absurdly ridiculous levels...

... I don't think I need to take that further to illustrate my views.

 

[Elpapo]

Just Tried a pair of fixed medium beam lasers at less than 20m distance at ground level against a group of enemies that just had their shields taken out by a grenade.
Seemed to do almost zero damage.

Each of 3 suits have bulid-in positive resistances against thermal too, like crazy, 75% and more at G5, and they starts from 38% from G1 for artemis(wich npcs dont use at all), but npcs uses mavericks and dominators, so its 50% atleast, but its more, as your average scav uses g2 or g3, while elite ones are always g5.

Its also because its really hard to hit those npcs with ship based weapons(unless explosive was used), as they are few pixels wide, and again, ship based weapons, are in fact, often weaker per shot, than foot counterparts. What you did was simply tickle them, same as if you would "gaze" a ship with beam for fraction of second.

It feels like there is at least a 10x nerf factor from ships to ground and a 10x buff factor from ground to ship.

There is no such thing, its just by "design" feels that way.
I know its poor and pita, but it is what it is.

But between the 4 of them they managed to reduce the G5 thermal resistance enhanced shields with G5 resistance enhanced and G5 HD boosters on my vulture (resistances all about +40 down to nearly zero in less than a minute (FULL SYS PIPS) all while their shields rebooted and the beams depleted the capacitor.

4 onfoot npcs can have greater firepower (in terms of DPS) than any npc corvette or conda, and they can be quite nasty, if within thier falloff range.

What onfoot weps cannot do, is module dmg (there is no breach chances at all, thus modules cannot be damaged by it), have low range (100-150m) but thier DPS is higher when upclose.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I'm certain many of us of a certain vintage have played table top RPGs using dice and endless tables read from thick tomes....
Back in the 80s we played a tabletop RPG that had three "tiers" that tied three separate almost standalone games set in a shared universe together.

1. on foot RPG with soldiers, mercs, assassins etc.
2. planetary vehicles and installations with cars, tanks, mechs etc.
3. space vehicles and installations with spaceships satellites and space stations etc.

Damage was applied using numbers of d6 with occasional minus or divide modifiers

On foot was the lowest tier and when applied against planetary vehicles, all the dice were reduced to a single point of damage and anything +3 or above was considered an extra point

3d6 -> 3 points
5d6 -> 5
3d6+3 -> 4 points
4d6 x 2 -> 8 points

Anything with any minus modifier lost 1 point.

3d6 - 3 -> 2 points
1d6 - 1 -> no points
2d6 / 2 -> 1 point

The same was applied when stepping up to spacefaring tier
every dice of planetary tier damage became a single point only in space tier.

Finally, handheld weapons had absolutely no effect on space tier by the stint that spaceships are designed to survive deep space with all its gamma radiation crushing G forces and multi km per second micro meteor impacts, thus a hand weapon's damage to spaceships would have been nonsense.

going down tiers was hilarious...
Each point of damage becomes a whole dice of damage in the lower tier.

A laser that did 3d6 damage in space would do between 3 and 18 D6 of damage to planetary tier!
and planetary tier doing 2d6 + 2 for example would do between 4 and 14 dice of damage to a soldier.

If a 3D6 spaceship weapon shot at a ground pounder, it would theoretically do (3d6)d6 worth of damage, so anything up to 18d6 damage (between 18 and 108 damage)... we usually just classed a hit as instakill except when we wanted a comedy moment.

This background in tabletop gaming is why I find the whole concept of a hand pistol damaging a Corvette immersion breaking.
I don't even think its "for balance" as a poster above mentioned.

Ground troops should have to pull out artillery or at least SRVs to damage ships. full stop...

Still, this game is what it is and I have no illusions that any major changes are incoming..

I was wondering when we would get to D6 Star Wars. It's one of the first examples of scaling us old dogs think of.

Striker did the same thing for Traveller. No one laughed at ship sandcasters after Striker was published. 2500 m/s of sand in your face cleans out that stubborn infantry...

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Frontier designed a "magic system" MMO for ground combat in Elite. One that almost every Killer DM would reject.

 

[Morbad]

I tried to point out the absurdity of the situation in the EDO alpha, but this was already many years after the game stopped pretending to care about internal consistency.

Frontier's attempts to balance the 'sphere of combat' took a path of least resistance/most kludge. They decided to keep the same (already increasingly incoherent) mechanisms for infantry combat as they had implemented for ships, but instead of scaling down things like damage units or resistances appropriately, they just capped ranges of small arms and called it a day.

Any real attempt at a serious rebalance of damage and defenses would surely upset more players than it would appease, so isn't going to do anything to increase or retain revenue, thus isn't going to happen.

 

[huehnerfaust]

We had the same discussion when ody released, nothink changed since. Look at the suggestion forum, countless threads who wonder about the same think.
But keeping the discusson alive is good . Maybe one day we might even get rid of these console menues while on foot.. emote wheel someone?

There is no coherency in elite game design, its just whoever had the lead at the moment wanted to stamp there silly design on it. Without looking at the rest of the game.

Touch a skimmer with your ship for example and witness how this little drone one shots your 5k mj shield.

But elite is still my favorite space game, so ignorance is bliss. And lets keep hoping for the better.

 

[metatheurgist]

I think the game had to start on foot for it to make sense.

 

[gbjbaanb]

It wouldn't affect anyone if they updated the damage numbers and the unit hitpoint numbers as well. In fact you'd not even see a difference if an AR-50 stopped doing 1000 dps and started doing 10dps instead, as long as your suit stopped having 10000 hp and had 100 hp instead. Then small arms woulnd't damage ships and nobody would even notice the numbers had changed for infantry combat.