Please use Odyssey as an opportunity to rebalance ship combat

[Haradrim]

Ship combat is currently showing years of neglect. There's a large list of weapons that no one ever uses because they're pointless as is. In Conflict Zone PVE, ship hulls are often bullet sponged up to a comical number making it feel more like a Korean MMO than fast and strategic space combat. Capital ships can't even solo a single engineered ship, and they take forever to kill a CZ NPC while focus firing it. It is very silly and immersion-breaking to see a giant ship do such little damage against 1 much smaller ship.

In PVP, you have the FDL as the only viable ship. Why would a game with this many ships choose to have one ship as the PVP ship for this many years? The viable weapons list is even smaller in PVP as well. Throw in engineering and you have an even bigger mishmash that makes any immersion take a big hit. Personally, I'd prefer for combat to be much deadlier, but I'll take any large balance pass at this point.

 

[gorankar]

How do you think they should go about doing this?

 

[Kulgrinda Kosmarjus]

Let me put it this way. Prior to engineering, the game was more or less balanced. Sure, there still had to be lots of work done to make it enjoyable for all kinds of tactics, but it worked, there weren't OP metas. Or my memory is wrong.
However, IMO after the introduction of engineers, base stat tuning, primary effects, special effects it all made a complete mess, and FD doesn't even know where to begin solving all this. Especially taking into consideration PVP combat, PVE combat, and most and foremost- the feelings of carebears with big ships that got blown up by silent running ships with rails and shield gen mines.
If it was me (and quite gladly it isnt):
-Use more physics (as in, my 821 m/s courier explodes when I try to fire dumbfire missiles )
-Give some love to the small ships (don't you hate it when your small ship decreases much faster in speed after boosting than an fdl?), decrease the capacitor energy consumption in all SYS/ENG/WEAP
-nerf the fdl so people would choose other ships for combat
-FIX the OP thermal conduit stuff
-reintroduce silent combat
-make overheating actually painful so people would finally stop using dirty drives left and right
-abandon the absurd shield booster system (you get one shield, you can boost it a bit with engineers - thats it)
-abandon the absurd hull/module reinforcement system (you get to modify your hull with engineers - thats it)
-get rid of the idiotic special effects on certain weaponry (take your pick) - i.e. corrosive
-emissive special effect needs a nerf in duration

I could go on but I'm not getting paid for this.

 

[Fake Newts]

Lol and you ask this just as they're adding high-cap long-range railguns to the game for the lucky few who happened to be free this week. They also literally said a few months ago that "Ship combat and SRV combat is in a healthy place right now" during an Odyssey Q&A. They have no intention of addressing the balancing issues, they won't even acknowledge that any issues are present.

 

[CMDR Egmont]

Yeah, I like Thermal Conduit as a game mechanic but it’s ridiculous that you can cook your ship for like 10 minutes and have it remain operational.

 

[Trollymctrollerson]

OP your assessment of the current situation is correct. Your optimism that frontier have the will or expertise to fix the situation is misplaced.

 

[Haradrim]

How do you think they should go about doing this?

Overall, I'd like to see combat be more dangerous, just as the game's namesake implies. Large ships can still have better health and defenses than small ships of course, but the current bullet sponge combat and limited good ship options make for very very bland gameplay after years and years of the same thing. I think WW2 simulator games are the gold standard of fun, skill, and intensity which is also mirrored in Star Wars cinematics (don't get me started on the newer video games though, those throw all of it out the window like Squadrons). Obviously this is space and not WW2, but the sense of danger, having to really rely on your maneuvers to not be blown away, alongside getting kills with well-placed shots is profoundly more rewarding than getting any kills in Elite currently is. Not asking for auto-tracking weapons to be 1 hit kills in this game, but I definitely want combat to be deadlier. I'd rather the divide between NPC strength and player engineering not be so incredibly massive either. It would be nice if it was more challenging

 

[Trollymctrollerson]

Overall, I'd like to see combat be more dangerous, just as the game's namesake implies. Large ships can still have better health and defenses than small ships of course, but the current bullet sponge combat and limited good ship options make for very very bland gameplay after years and years of the same thing. I think WW2 simulator games are the gold standard of fun, skill, and intensity which is also mirrored in Star Wars cinematics (don't get me started on the newer video games though, those throw all of it out the window like Squadrons). Obviously this is space and not WW2, but the sense of danger, having to really rely on your maneuvers to not be blown away, alongside getting kills with well-placed shots is profoundly more rewarding than getting any kills in Elite currently is. Not asking for auto-tracking weapons to be 1 hit kills in this game, but I definitely want combat to be deadlier. I'd rather the divide between NPC strength and player engineering not be so incredibly massive either. It would be nice if it was more challenging

Id like TTK to be about 10% of what it currently is. The game is designed for ww2 dogfight combat except that in WW2, when you got your plane pumped full of bullets you usually crashed and died in short order. Planes could and did keep flying with bullet holes yes, but they certainly could never be called 'bullets sponges'. What we have is flying tanks that pretend to be spacecraft. The problem with a drastic reduction in TTK is that average or below average players are at least half the player base and they would start getting killed alot. A shift away from 'grind to win' towards 'skill to win' would be great for people who have great skills and terrible for people who are accustomed to grinding gear in place of honing skills. 'Time served, grind to win' seems a core tenent of the ED design philosophy so dont expect any changes.

 

[CMDR Egmont]

The balance problem is complex. If you reduce TTK for combat fit ships then ships which aren’t combat fit will get instagibbed. Frontier has the right idea. Ships which aren’t set up for combat should at least be survivable. That’s what we have now and the result is combat ships which are bullet sponges. I don’t think major rebalancing is warranted or possible right now. I would rather see the glaring problems fixed... inconsequential heat damage, frail canopies, shadow rams, instancing, insufficient ammo pools, etc.

 

[Danieros]

Why have an entire module targeting system if your expectation of ship combat is a shorter TTK than CZ ships? Which by the way is already short - CZ ships have shields nowhere as good as a player can have through shield booster stacking. Their hull is strong, but power plant targeting is a thing. Proper flying to target power plants will reward you: blowing up even the largest stuff like cutters or corvettes while they're still at like 70%-80% hull.

That said, I do agree that a lot of ships, blueprints and experimentals deserve a look.

 

[aRJay]

....

In PVP, you have the FDL as the only viable ship. Why would a game with this many ships choose to have one ship as the PVP ship for this many years? The viable weapons list is even smaller in PVP as well. Throw in engineering and you have an even bigger mishmash that makes any immersion take a big hit. Personally, I'd prefer for combat to be much deadlier, but I'll take any large balance pass at this point.

You have to keep in mind that unless all the combat ships have exactly the same stats one of them will always be better than the others and it won’t take long before the competitive players realise this and that ship becomes the choice for combat.

The only way to get variety into the choice for combat ships is to restrict access to ships so that if you were a Federation based player you could only use Federal combat ships but Elite isn’t structured to make that practical.

 

[Fake Newts]

You have to keep in mind that unless all the combat ships have exactly the same stats one of them will always be better than the others and it won’t take long before the competitive players realise this and that ship becomes the choice for combat.

Balance in games doesn't mean identical stats, this is patently false. There are tons of competitive games with multiple distinct, viable choices.

 

[Fake Newts]

The balance problem is complex. If you reduce TTK for combat fit ships then ships which aren’t combat fit will get instagibbed.

You're right that it's complex but non-combat ships already do get instagibbed. We essentially have the worst of both worlds. Stacking defensive modules means Anacondas can vary from ~900 to ~40,000 effective health... That's not a healthy spectrum. Narrowing the gap between the lower and upper limits and making it so ships had dedicated defence slots rather than sacrificing health for utility might help.

What I do think people may overlook though is that the time investment required to do anything in Elite is a major factor - while I personally dislike the bullet sponges in CZs etc, if you think about it from a player perspective, spending upwards of 10 minutes trying to find a fight only to have it end in 30 seconds would just be annoying.

In consenting PvP fights tend to range from about 4 minutes to 14 minutes depending on the level of aggression and some skill factors, I think the lower number there is decent as it doesn't drag while still being worth the travel time, but the upper is too much.

The other issue is wings. High CZs are a slog solo but with a wing you can delete ships fast, making the enemies fun for both contexts might be tricky. Personally I think combat bonds are still too low given how much tankier CZ ships are than RES ships, and specifically spec ops suck because they don't contribute to massacre missions and just soak up a ton of ammo -they should be a fun challenge but everyone I know just finds them tedious.

Yeah it's a complex issue, for sure, but it could be a lot better handled than it currently is, it would be nice to see Fdev at least acknowledging it.

 

[Haradrim]

There is still a good opportunity to use the repair of odyssey to balance combat. It is clear ship combat has gotten away from itself with how poorly engineering and everything else flow with each other. Keeping the game in the limited state it is now by allowing all the other weapons and ships to languish as essentially unusable in any serious way is not good for the health of the game.

 

[Nepeta Uchiha]

FDev did said they were going to look into every single ship in the game for balancing tweaks BUT....... that was before the abysmal Odyssey launch so this may have changed.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Any time is a good time to balance ships. Odyssey, an update entirely focused on legs stuff, isn't specifically a better time than any other time.

The question on how they should be balanced... that's a huge can of worms.

 

[T200]

Overall, I'd like to see combat be more dangerous, just as the game's namesake implies. Large ships can still have better health and defenses than small ships of course, but the current bullet sponge combat and limited good ship options make for very very bland gameplay after years and years of the same thing. I think WW2 simulator games are the gold standard of fun, skill, and intensity which is also mirrored in Star Wars cinematics (don't get me started on the newer video games though, those throw all of it out the window like Squadrons). Obviously this is space and not WW2, but the sense of danger, having to really rely on your maneuvers to not be blown away, alongside getting kills with well-placed shots is profoundly more rewarding than getting any kills in Elite currently is. Not asking for auto-tracking weapons to be 1 hit kills in this game, but I definitely want combat to be deadlier. I'd rather the divide between NPC strength and player engineering not be so incredibly massive either. It would be nice if it was more challenging

Id like TTK to be about 10% of what it currently is. The game is designed for ww2 dogfight combat except that in WW2, when you got your plane pumped full of bullets you usually crashed and died in short order. Planes could and did keep flying with bullet holes yes, but they certainly could never be called 'bullets sponges'. What we have is flying tanks that pretend to be spacecraft. The problem with a drastic reduction in TTK is that average or below average players are at least half the player base and they would start getting killed alot. A shift away from 'grind to win' towards 'skill to win' would be great for people who have great skills and terrible for people who are accustomed to grinding gear in place of honing skills. 'Time served, grind to win' seems a core tenent of the ED design philosophy so dont expect any changes.

I think in general ED is handicapped by the manner in which it's structured solar systems, necessitated FSD-JUMP's, and relegated combat to being interdicted out of supercruise in an instanced manner.

But more apparent, at least to me, is that a great many things seem designed in a vacuum away from everything else, ships don't have default loadouts or default system setups that would make hot rodding them interesting, instead everything is modular enough that it really becomes boring in many ways.. some ships are better at specific things sure, but that's mostly because they have the additional modules that allow them to be better at those specific things.

 

[gorankar]

Reduce TTK by much and then you have any ship not meta combat specced getting one shot. Ships not combat meta specced already have only 3 choices when confronted with PvP, run, log, or die. Reducing TTK by any significant margin essentially means those people that dare to outfit their ships for anything but combat have only 2 choices, log or die. This is not conducive to increasing the open population.
I do agree ship could use a rebalance, but every suggestion I see has so much unwanted baggage with it that I am left without wonder as to why Fdev has done nothing. They don't know what to do to fix it. At least, not without taking the game back to vanilla and getting rid of anything that inflates HP or DPS from stock. Which most of us can agree, is so unlikely, that it is hardly worth mentioning.

 

[CMDR Egmont]

Thought experiment:
1) Make cargo capacity (but not mass) independent of optional slots. Ships set up for trade could be made more durable without imparting a buff to ships set up for combat.
2) Make big ships more fragile but also far more lethal.