I'm not sold on this 'sphere of combat' thing

[Madrax573]

The “sphere of combat” is something that I am not thinking is going to work in the way I suspect people are thinking of…

So, foot, SRV and ships all in combat together… The foot, SRV combat shouldn’t be too bad but the interactions that have been described so far between Foot and ship will not exactly lend itself to this ‘combat sphere’ and no one that I’ve seen has even mentioned the simple aspect of a huge change in scale between foot and ship combat.

Eg. Even the slower ships are still travelling at crazy speeds… my keelback doing 454m/s is travelling at 1600km/h!! You are not having foot to ship combat at those speeds. And the couple of clips showing ships in combat have them going at walking pace which juts won’t happen.

Then we get into the difference in scale for weapons and sensors. Ships won’t be able to lock onto foot troops, and settlements etc will have enough defenses to make ‘bombing runs’ almost useless.. And foot troops won’t be able to carry enough weaponry to hit and kill a moving combat ship anyways. It’s like they are deliberately taking away combat interactions between two of the groups in this so called ‘sphere’.

I am quite possibly missing something here but from what I’ve seen so far there is going to be little foot – ship combat interactions… pity…

 

[LeoBartlet]

I am quite possibly missing something here....

Found if for ya

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey | The Road To Odyssey Part 3 - Sphere of combat | Frontier Forums

 

[gorankar]

You are going to have to wait and see how they work it. I suspect, for actual legs locations where they "intend" for fighting to take place, they will use guns similar to stations and have it be something ground troops have to turn off b4 ships can come in with dumb fires or whatever other AOE weapons Fdev may or may not be adding to the game. SRV will likely be limited to the periphery of these bases on account of how hard they will be to maneuver in the maps we have seen video of.

Out in the open away from settlements, you are toast on foot, if they detect you and have an AOE weapon, or just decide to slam their T10 down on top of your head. Though, considering how close you need to be to detect and SRV on sensors, and how hard it is to see an SRV when moving at speed or from any real altitude, I suspect they will not see you on foot unless they are really looking carefully. Soon enough all will be revealed I suppose.

 

[Madrax573]

Found if for ya

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey | The Road To Odyssey Part 3 - Sphere of combat | Frontier Forums

This is one of the sources where I based my thoughts on.

You are going to have to wait and see how they work it. I suspect, for actual legs locations where they "intend" for fighting to take place, they will use guns similar to stations and have it be something ground troops have to turn off b4 ships can come in with dumb fires or whatever other AOE weapons Fdev may or may not be adding to the game. SRV will likely be limited to the periphery of these bases on account of how hard they will be to maneuver in the maps we have seen video of.

Out in the open away from settlements, you are toast on foot, if they detect you and have an AOE weapon, or just decide to slam their T10 down on top of your head. Though, considering how close you need to be to detect and SRV on sensors, and how hard it is to see an SRV when moving at speed or from any real altitude, I suspect they will not see you on foot unless they are really looking carefully. Soon enough all will be revealed I suppose.

Yeah out in the boondocks you are toast but they keep talking about Foot, SRV and ships all in combat together. So far I'm just not seeing that will be a thing from what they have described.

 

[Stealthie]

You are going to have to wait and see how they work it. I suspect, for actual legs locations where they "intend" for fighting to take place, they will use guns similar to stations and have it be something ground troops have to turn off b4 ships can come in with dumb fires or whatever other AOE weapons Fdev may or may not be adding to the game. SRV will likely be limited to the periphery of these bases on account of how hard they will be to maneuver in the maps we have seen video of.

Out in the open away from settlements, you are toast on foot, if they detect you and have an AOE weapon, or just decide to slam their T10 down on top of your head. Though, considering how close you need to be to detect and SRV on sensors, and how hard it is to see an SRV when moving at speed or from any real altitude, I suspect they will not see you on foot unless they are really looking carefully. Soon enough all will be revealed I suppose.

It's certainly going to be interesting if we get any kind of effective hand-held surface-to-air missile.

... and it'll also beg the question of how come ships don't get any kind of effective air-to-air missile.

 

[wenkman]

well, balanced combat is something we don't do here:

• trading ship vs NPC Pirate
• PvE gankers
• massacre missions, with hunting in low-rez with a fittet combat ship.

elite combat is about fitting your ship/armor in such a way, that the combat is stacked in your favor and you win easy.
if you have trouble at combat, you did prepare wrong.

i expect that to be the same with odyssey: prepare and engineer correctly and it will be like clubbing seals.
don't prepare and combat will be "unfair and to hard"

 

[Bortas]

Eg. Even the slower ships are still travelling at crazy speeds… my keelback doing 454m/s is travelling at 1600km/h!! You are not having foot to ship combat at those speeds. And the couple of clips showing ships in combat have them going at walking pace which juts won’t happen.

Maybe we will get some MANPADS. Can't imagine how they can be more effective against a ship than the much larger ship mounted missiles, though, except some kind of voodoo magic.

 

[Morbad]

... and it'll also beg the question of how come ships don't get any kind of effective air-to-air missile.

Same reason the half-way between tiny and small hardpoints on the SLFs have triple digit APV and large hardpoint damage on a class 1 distributor.

Because the game doesn't make any sense.

 

[Winterwalker]

... and it'll also beg the question of how come ships don't get any kind of effective air-to-air missile.

Maybe sphere of combat has been in back of devs minds for more years than we think. If you can get a lock on something, heatseekers become effective in air to ground. Much bigger than they are now could be OP concussive on the human scale.

I don't think sphere of combat means players on foot need to be matched against a ship (unrealistic) or that ship air power is supreme (realistic) but something in between. Ships are slightly nerfed, foot slightly buffed, is what I think they'll be aiming for, emulating the real world scales while avoiding the total nuke from orbit .. which let's face would be pretty tedious the tenth time you tried to sneak into a base.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Maybe getting it to work is why they're quiet / delayed. Very valid points in the op, someone at frontier just has to make the call on which lore reality will have to be completely overridden to make the "gameplay" work. The cockpit impression doesn't show it, but the ship speeds arent in the gameplay range for fps.

Also last month was the first time i tried multiplayer in elite. The npc's were rubber banding like crazy.. and later on i read in passing that this was due to me having a slf out. How is anything going to work if its possible the experience can be broken by simple outfitting choices? There's a reasonable frontier small possibility that all this will be fixed for odysee?

 

[Jmanis]

Maybe we will get some MANPADS. Can't imagine how they can be more effective against a ship than the much larger ship mounted missiles, though, except some kind of voodoo magic.

Hopefully we can engineer them for different levels of absorbancy too!

...
...
...

 

[Madrax573]

well, balanced combat is something we don't do here:

• trading ship vs NPC Pirate
• PvE gankers
• massacre missions, with hunting in low-rez with a fittet combat ship.

elite combat is about fitting your ship/armor in such a way, that the combat is stacked in your favor and you win easy.
if you have trouble at combat, you did prepare wrong.

i expect that to be the same with odyssey: prepare and engineer correctly and it will be like clubbing seals.
don't prepare and combat will be "unfair and to hard"

TBH I'm not fussed about 'balanced' combat as that is more often than not subjective I'm more looking at it from an actual interaction point of view. As in how are ships and ground based CMDRs supposed to interact in a combat sense given all that has been said so far and lack of addressing the scale issue at all...

I'm just throwing thoughts out there while waiting for more info

 

[Bortas]

Hopefully we can engineer them for different levels of absorbancy too!

Just thinking about the rarely-used ion-disruption special effect for mine-launchers, which causes the engines to reboot... Hitting a ship above a planetary surface with one of those could be funny.

 

[Winterwalker]

how are ships and ground based CMDRs supposed to interact in a combat sense given all that has been said so far and lack of addressing the scale issue at all...

Exceptt I think this is exactly what they mean when they talk about designing for sphere of combat. Total realism would be a triangle .. so instead ships have been unable to target SRV's for years already. IMO there's your clue.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I think the name is the problem. It isn't snazzy enough. They should have called it Theaters of War!!! That sounds way cooler!

 

[Madrax573]

Exceptt I think this is exactly what they mean when they talk about designing for sphere of combat. Total realism would be a triangle .. so instead ships have been unable to target SRV's for years already. IMO there's your clue.

Well to be fair they do actually call it the triangle of combat in the vid at the start...

They talk about a more complete battlespace yet from what I've seen and read described it's nothing like a complete battlespace, it's very much a CQC style shoot out with a little bit of interaction with SRV's and ships... vOv

 

[gooddoc]

Stuff the pewpew.............................what do I get for my buck as an Explorer in the black??
Caves??
Abandoned Settlements??
Ancient Ruins??
Derelict Mine??
Flora??

Added:
Or will I only have the opportunity to provide a 'pretty piccy of the week' as I stand on top of a vast canyon somewhere.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Flora??

This at least. Or kind of. FD have talked about organics that you can harvest/scan. Although as i understand it its not going to be life as we know it. Maybe crystalline/silicon based instead.

 

[Madrax573]

Or will I only have the opportunity to provide a 'pretty piccy of the week' as I stand on top of a vast canyon somewhere.

Space Selfies will replace the Asp in front of things thingy....

 

[Winterwalker]

They talk about a more complete battlespace yet from what I've seen and read described it's nothing like a complete battlespace, it's very much a CQC style shoot out with a little bit of interaction with SRV's and ships... vOv

You're only looking at the mechanics there I think. The expansion doesn't need to reference why people are fighting (be it piracy, powerplay or BGS) because that's not directly relevant to the demo.

CQC doesn't affect the galaxy, while winning a CG flips factions so more than likely (consistency of design) we'll see the same kind of thing we have now; Enter the live area and choose which side you want to support.