Should ships always have the ability to flee?

[Snarfbuckle]

We have a few mechanics that seems...broken.

- Interdiction forces a target to stop
- Once stopped they can be hindered by object mass
- They can always high-wake
- Multiple ships mass lock have no effect

There was some ridiculous example of a X4 corvette wing attacking another corvette and they fought for about 10 minutes without breaking the targets shields and then it high waked.

- First issue is of course the surviveability of a corvette against four times the firepower
- Second is the ability to high wake out of danger so, well, easily.

So, a few thoughts
- Have ship mass affect the frameshift drive charge up timer by +25% per ship size +0/+25/+50
- Have mass lock factor be a additive from all ships within range
- This promotes wing gameplay
- This promotes smaller ships being able to engage a larger ships (small pirate gang against T9)
- Allow mass lock factor higher than the target to disable the ability to jump (X4 eagles can then mass lock a T9)
- Mass lock factor below the targets mass lock works as a percentage speed reduction to jump charge (6 mass lock vs 12 mass lock adds 50% more charge up timer).

This would mean that outnumbering or outmassing a ship would stop a ship from jumping while smaller ships can work together against larger targets.

Additional Idea:
- Increase overall range on larger vessels by say, +25% per size class
- Increase the charge up timer for frameshift drive by +25% per size class

Larger ships travel farther, but require more computation time for jumps and supercruise. Smaller ships have usually shorter range but are quicker to jump.

 

[777Driver]

Well thought out but no thanks. Accumulative MLF would become a major hindrance outside of combat. Nothing broken with the current implementation, this should really be in the suggestion forum.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

I agree that additional mechanics could be added to the game to assist with certain gameplay styles and give more depth. Piracy in particular needs that.

But preventing a player from being able to leave an attack, is all about giving the attacker power and removing any sense of control from the target. If it becomes inevitable that a player is going to die if they are successfully interdicted, then they may as well explode on successful interdiction.

At the moment piracy is not very functional within the game, and it does need further development. There needs to be a balance that allows pirates to feel rewarded whilst leaving the target feeling their demise isn't inevitable as soon as they are interdicted...

 

[Gunnet]

Yes, ships should always have the ability to flee unless they have suffered serious FSD or thruster damage.

 

[JonLuis69]

Lol, do you really want to put another nail into the open coffin? 'Cos that's what this idea would do. If there was no means of escape then why bother even playing the game?
Kudos for doing some work on the post though, nice one.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

Well thought out but no thanks. Accumulative MLF would become a major hindrance outside of combat. Nothing broken with the current implementation, this should really be in the suggestion forum.

Outside of combat it should not really be a problem since it's mostly about range from a target.
Sure, "hugging" might be a new griefing method to stop people from going into SC.

The broken part about the current implementation is that ONE ship with a mass lock factor of 12 can lock a ship but two ships with a mass lock of 6 cannot.

That, does not make sense and mass lock itself have no clear explanation either.

- It's not based on mass (T-9 at 1000 tonnes have ML16 and the Icutter at 1100 tonnes have 27)
- It's not based on armour or shields
- It's not based on hull volume
- It's not based on FSD size

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Yes.

 

[defekt]

Yes, they should.

 

[Ashnak]

No. At least not in the way you proposed. Too one-sided geared towards the attacker.

And I especially do not like the bias for larger ships regarding jumping, there's no real justification for that. I would acept a change which makes the charge time dependent on the jump distance, though (similar to fuel use perhaps), but otherwise, jump characteristics are determined by FSD class to ship mass ratios, and that's fine with me.

As for the changes in combat/pirating: there's one thing that could make me accept your proposal as a balance on the victim side: make self-destruct destructive. Depending on ship size, create a blast that will severely damage/kill all ships within a reasonable range (several km at least). After all, we're running a nuclear fusion reactor in our ships - shouldn't be too difficult to turn this into a nuclear bomb. This might neccesitate some more changes for balance and would create a niche for suicide bombers (should you be able to take down a Corvette by detonating your Sidey?), but would also change the pirating playstyle: a pirate would have a very strong incentive for communicating with his target and keep them alive - as soon as the target perceives itself in a non-escable situation, it might as well trigger the suicide switch and (hope to) take the pirate with them.

Inside a station's NFZ, that suicide switch might be disabled (computer) or the station might simply be able to detect an uncontrolled fusion reaction and cancel it via a damping field (which might produce some interference in all ships within range...).

 

[Riverside]

The best form of defence is not to be there. The second best is to move out of the way.

I don't want to be forced to fight, particularly against another player. I'm more likely to get out of effective weapons range & talk than open fire. You should always have a choice.

 

[Jon flint]

At present there is sort of a method in game to prevent a target escaping... thermal cannons.

A couple of ships firing overcharged thermal/incendiary cannon rounds at you will push your heat to 160+ when you're sitting still, try charging your fsd and you'll be taking masses of module damage in no time. I breifly saw 220% heat while escaping the other day, before I fired off my last heatsink. If you're out of heatsinks, all you can do is hope the heat damage doesn't cause an fsd malfunction before you can jump away.

+4 vettes attacking one and they took 10 mins and couldn't drop the target's shields?!? Were the 4 equipped with nothing but mining lasers???

My Corvette has pretty good shields (4329mj with approx 55/49/65 resistances), Mr Wizard and friends in a mix of big ships took my shields down in under a minute before I did a brave sir robin and ran (that's without using reverb torps either).

 

[Snarfbuckle]

Yes, ships should always have the ability to flee unless they have suffered serious FSD or thruster damage.

The problem here is that interdictions are mostly useless because a ship only have to boost, pick a star and jump.

There is a difference between the possibility of flight and ALWAYS able of flight.

- Damaging thrusters or FSD before they get away is either very difficult for a lone attacker or require specialized equipment.
- There are few ways for a pirate player to SAFELY interdict and KEEP a target at location before they can just jump out.

It's in short, too easy to get away when the simplest way to avoid interdiction is to allow interdiction and then boost and leave.

- - - Updated - - -

Lol, do you really want to put another nail into the open coffin? 'Cos that's what this idea would do. If there was no means of escape then why bother even playing the game?
Kudos for doing some work on the post though, nice one.

This is not about open, it's about interdiction in general.

Right now it's better to adhere to an interdiction and then, leave.

Boost, and jump.

Attackers have too few tools to keep a target at location short of blowing them to pieces.

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The best form of defence is not to be there. The second best is to move out of the way.

I don't want to be forced to fight, particularly against another player. I'm more likely to get out of effective weapons range & talk than open fire. You should always have a choice.

Of course, choices matter but right now it IS too easy.

In the extreme example 4 cutters cannot hold a single cutter in place as it jumps away and they could not even crack the shields.

The only reason I fight an interdiction today is because I cant be to waste the time to boost away.

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At present there is sort of a method in game to prevent a target escaping... thermal cannons.

This also means that we need specialized tools and need to attack a target and almost melt them. Hardly useful for a pirate.

It's a method, but hardly a good one.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

No. At least not in the way you proposed. Too one-sided geared towards the attacker.

Perhaps, but I do think that overwhelming force should work, at least in regards to mass lock.

And I especially do not like the bias for larger ships regarding jumping, there's no real justification for that. I would acept a change which makes the charge time dependent on the jump distance, though (similar to fuel use perhaps), but otherwise, jump characteristics are determined by FSD class to ship mass ratios, and that's fine with me.

That part was merely an idea.

As for the changes in combat/pirating: there's one thing that could make me accept your proposal as a balance on the victim side: make self-destruct destructive. Depending on ship size, create a blast that will severely damage/kill all ships within a reasonable range (several km at least). After all, we're running a nuclear fusion reactor in our ships - shouldn't be too difficult to turn this into a nuclear bomb. This might neccesitate some more changes for balance and would create a niche for suicide bombers (should you be able to take down a Corvette by detonating your Sidey?), but would also change the pirating playstyle: a pirate would have a very strong incentive for communicating with his target and keep them alive - as soon as the target perceives itself in a non-escable situation, it might as well trigger the suicide switch and (hope to) take the pirate with them.

That would hardly help anyone because you can bet we would get waves of "bombers" blowing themselves up against ships.

The victim should of course be able to get away but more focus should be aimed at the interdiction element and not after loosing it.

- Have the target's FSD size difference between it and the FSD Interdictor give one or the other a bonus.
- A stronger FSD drive have an easier time to break loose
- A targets stronger FSD drive gives more damage to an attacker at high speed and vice versa
- Larger ships (FSD size 5 and up) becomes automatically more dangerous to interdict

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The best form of defence is not to be there. The second best is to move out of the way.

I don't want to be forced to fight, particularly against another player. I'm more likely to get out of effective weapons range & talk than open fire. You should always have a choice.

Of course, but when the easiest way to get away is to allow an interdiction and THEN flee then something is borked.

 

[CMDR Percivus Keenblade]

Should ships always have the ability to flee?

Yes.
Nerfing FSD jumping? Nope.
Instead case should be boosting FSD jumping so it means a guy flying a multipurpose or a PvE vessel who doesn't want to fight an interdictor wearing his best PvP pants on his FDL is able to simply choose to not fight against such unfair advantage. A PvP on/off switch if you will. This could chill down the neverending Solo/Open battles a bit and introduce more players, specially players who arent plannning to wear their PvP pants that day to play Open, with some clever mechanics/balance added to make non-lethal piracy profession not die out, in mind. Why would anyone not wearing his PvP pants go play in Open with such strangled FSD jump capabilities after all if what you said was the case?

And what would happen to the PvP you ask. Well, two people fight each other, and one of them, realizing they are definately going to blow up quickly retracts and wakes out. Is it so important to see that explosion effect? The other guy still can claim they won the brawl without seeing the sparkshow. The other guy is going to suffer a repair bill anyway so it's not like he goes away unaffected. And he could be chased again if the attacker is real mad about killing the guy. In the end ships getting blown up becomes a rarer sight and one can boost about his skills of murder by blowing up ships before they were able to get away.

But meh. People value seeing those spark effects too much.



PvP pants = fitting your ship to the max engineering grades, best PvP experimental effects, best PvP weapons and filling every centimeter of space inside your ship with SCB, SB and hull/module packs

.

 

[Riverside]

If you interdict another player & they high wake, you have probably achieved your objective of removing them from the system.

If they have a tanky build well they got good & it would be unreasonable to complain that they are just better (good enough not to lose their ship to you at any rate).

If the massive shields are a problem complain about the shields (many of us have already), or the continual escalation of shields & weapons that only serve to widen the gap between a PvE & PvP build (and lessen the usefulness of the PvP build for anything else).

Being able to escape is not the problem, and it certainly doesn't need to go from 'too easy' to impossible.

Take a high wake as a win, be happy.

 

[Bunkerkind Anni]

is high waking even a realistic option these days?

as far as i know, almost everybody has a faster loading time between systems then me.
i am also pretty sure that anyone who is fit to interdict me my trading ship, is able to jump further then myself

so, how many milliseconds do i have in the next system to avoid getting cought right again. especially if the attackers have been in a wing.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

If murder hobos weren't a thing, I'd say a way to hold a ship in place longer would be excellent for piracy. but alas, murder hobos are a thing, so we need a way to escape.

Murder hobos are why we can't have nice things.

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is high waking even a realistic option these days?

as far as i know, almost everybody has a faster loading time between systems then me.
i am also pretty sure that anyone who is fit to interdict me my trading ship, is able to jump further then myself

so, how many milliseconds do i have in the next system to avoid getting cought right again. especially if the attackers have been in a wing.

You have a several second lead on the target.
They need to scan your wake, and then charge for a jump, then make the jump.

In that time, you could either A) jump again, making tracking almost impossible. Or B) drop out of supercruise immediately after hyperspace, boost for a while(just in case) and then high wake again, making you completely impossible to track.

 

[varonica]

Ah yes, the old "certain death for traders and explorers" argument.


If you are a trader or explorer we should be able to kill you any time we want, wherever we want, however we want. The end result is every ship that plays in open has to be fully fitted and engineered for combat to have a chance, way to restrict open to PvP only. No specialised traders, miners or explorers, everyone has to play my way.

Down voted.

 

[Fire70]

We have a few mechanics that seems...broken.

There was some ridiculous example of a X4 corvette wing attacking another corvette and they fought for about 10 minutes without breaking the targets shields and then it high waked.

.

This is about the only broken thing I have seen in this post.

Many of those looking for PVP don't consider anything other than overwhelming odds in you favor as 'PVP"..

 

[varonica]

This is about the only broken thing I have seen in this post.

Many of those looking for PVP don't consider anything other than overwhelming odds in you favor as 'PVP"..

True, it would make much more sense if PvP fans attacked each other rather than defenceless traders, miners and explorers. At the moment it usually turns out to be PvP ship V PVE ship most of the time, and then someone comes along every few weeks with a plan to make it impossible for PVE ships to escape!

PvP V Turkey shoot is what they actually want.