Tank/TTK balancing?

[Teh Smoo]

I've been running this through my head, balance-wise.

Total values for resist and pool:

First off, limit ships to one each of hull and module reinforcement modules. It's more which size you want than just filling every available slot with bulkheads. That makes it WAY more important what you put on it and the armor, rather than having invincible builds with stacked resists and sheer points. You have the armor adding in too, as well.

And in the same vein, shield boosters are limited to 2 per ship as well. So you have to choose between patching resist holes and augmenting sheer points. More hardpoint variety, instead of just overcharging and running shields galore.

This would reduce huge HP values of combat ships. And it makes sense, as well, how many layers can you even slap on things before your ship is a flying brick of solid metal?

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TTK:

Invincibility. No less than that. Every time you lose a ring of shield, you become immune to weapon fire for 5 seconds, including a shot that would have taken out the shield entirely- you will never lose more than one ring every 5 seconds.

Same deal with bulkheads. Either at 50%, or every 33% the hull "energizes" or something. *waves hands* This does the same thing- you never lose more than 33% or 50% of your life in 5 seconds. Maybe 50% for 8 seconds for one module, and 33% and 5 seconds for the other?

And also modules. It protects from disastrous module damage by self-sacrificing, and tamps down massive module hits in the same way as bulkheads do hull.

FSD charging is paused while shield/hull is invulnerable. Fair's fair.

This does not protect against ramming damage with non-ships. Probably should protect against ship ramming, though. So, you can still crash with planets and stations.

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Projected gameplay effects:

Hopefully? You won't even notice the TTK thing unless your whole combat schtick revolves around one-shotting people. This is intended to give people enjoyable dogfights. It's not fun to get one-shotted, and it's not super fun for attackers either. Unless their gameplay revolves around upsetting others, and in that case, they can __ my __.

And reasonable ship builds wouldn't notice, either. Traders and explorers won't see the slightest change. The only ones who will, are people who DO want ships that are basically flying bricks of reinforced metal.

The problem is that boosting tank to maximum has absolutely zero effect on DPS. In EVE, you can do that as well, but the modules that boost DPS use the same slots. So you have choices: maximum tank with unboosted DPS, maximum DPS with paper tank, or somewhere in the middle. Meaningful choices, instead of just filling optional slots with engineered bulkheads, and every hardpoint with shield boosters, and STILL having the exact same weaponry.

 

[coca_fr]

Indeed right now hull tanking can be considered as a huge shield. In fact it seems shield and hull are almost considered the same except hull doesn't get recovered in the battlefield.
Shields were too strong with shield boosters and they were nerfed. Maybe hull tanking could be rebalanced as well.

I don't think hull tanking should be limited as you say, but it should impact a lot more your speed and agility !

For now your speed and agility is almost not affected by hull tanking, so there is no point in not doing it. In fact if you do a combat ship you all go for maximum shield and hull/modules tanking.

In PvP the guy with more shield/hull wins unless he is completly unable to know how to fly his ship.

A Federal Corvette with 6K MJ Shield is almost indestructible but as this kind of ship is made for big battle it should be strong.

If hull tanking would affect a lot more their speed and agility, the big 3 would be more stationary military support ships with a lot of turrets. We would then need turrets for all weapons class as they would become even more slower to move.

Hull tanking should be balanced with less agility and speed. Et voilà the problem will be solved !

As concerned to your TTK idea i don't understand it at all.

 

[vampireuk]

The ships that rely on hull strength over shield strength are technically already at somewhat of a disadvantage as you cannot regenerate hull damage during combat. If anything hull tanking should be looked at further so ships with a high hull strength have some benefit to having more hull armour than shields.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Personally, I think the whole thing needs looking at.

You shouldn't be able to fit the most powerful weapons, the most powerful shields, and the most powerful armour, and still be able to manoeuvre most ships.

Shields should use more power, lots more. And be more effected by the ships mass. So shield and hull tanking isn't possible. So either take good weapons and poor shields, or ok weapons and good shields, but hull tanking now degrades your shield strength.

Armour ship weigh more, but use no power. So you can fit those powerful weapons and hull tank, but you'll have weak, or no shields.

All shield and armour related modules should occupy internal slots. So you can only have so many of each, instead of loads of SBs, SCVs, MRPs and HRPs.

Or something along those lines. It's not fully thought out yet. Still working on it.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[coca_fr]

I understand your idea of balancing things out, but they are more made for smaller ships. And it's indeed already the case for the them. The more they weight the less fast and agile they are. But it's could be even more increased.

As concerned to heavy ships : if you take a very heavy battlecruiser like a Dreadnought for example .. You remove all it's cannon or you add a lot of them and it will still move the same way, very slowly because it's original mass is already heavy and adding weight doesn't change anything, or just at the margin.

If you take as example the XVIIII century you had a lot of heavy battle ship with dozen of canon and they were still fast... with hundreds of men piloting them.

Tug can pull a lot of weight for their size. Imagine if you had an engine as powerfull as this made for bigger ship... You could simply move very fastly even if you had a lot of mass.

So now if you take into consideration that in space there is no friction... It's completly irrelevant to say you cannot go fast if you weight more. But when gravity comes into play it's a different story... When you are close to a planet you slow down very much and gravity can pull you down and make you crash without you with your thruster could do nothing.

 

[Teh Smoo]

I understand your idea of balancing things out, but they are more made for smaller ships. And it's indeed already the case for the them. The more they weight the less fast and agile they are. But it's could be even more increased.

As concerned to heavy ships : if you take a very heavy battlecruiser like a Dreadnought for example .. You remove all it's cannon or you add a lot of them and it will still move the same way, very slowly because it's original mass is already heavy and adding weight doesn't change anything, or just at the margin.

If you take as example the XVIIII century you had a lot of heavy battle ship with dozen of canon and they were still fast... with hundreds of men piloting them.

Tug can pull a lot of weight for their size. Imagine if you had an engine as powerfull as this made for bigger ship... You could simply move very fastly even if you had a lot of mass.

So now if you take into consideration that in space there is no friction... It's completly irrelevant to say you cannot go fast if you weight more. But when gravity comes into play it's a different story... When you are close to a planet you slow down very much and gravity can pull you down and make you crash without you with your thruster could do nothing.

Yes, but realism MUST take a back seat to game balance, for the sake of gameplay. Making people choose between durability or DPS has ALREADY WORKED for more than a couple games. Letting a ship max every category at once seems a poor choice to me.

The TTK invincibility-shots thing just prevent a ship from taking lethal damage before the pilot has a chance to react. It's a blanket solution that would keep ANY weapon from one-shotting people in any event. You can still get smashed, but at least they'll have to hit you what, 6 times? Minimum?

Unless you ram a planet, or smash into an asteroid too hard. Having a shield that could withstand planet impacts at top speed for any ship just seems a little much to me.

Plus, stacking up a ton of bulkheads seems a little unrealistic to me. So limiting stacking is gameplay AND realism at the same time.

There's a few options for frying people through shields already, those seem more or less workable to me. But a ship that can stack 8 boosters AND a max SCB or two, AND bulkheads, without any of it affecting weapon loadout? There are no trade-offs being made there.

 

[coca_fr]

I don't understand your point with you can't have good weapons and good hull.

A tank has good weapons and good hull, but it's slow. For now Tanked ships are still too fast and agile. They should be a lot slower. This is that way it should be rebalanced in my opinion.

I think missile / torpedo should still do damage if they are destroy close to its target.

 

[Teh Smoo]

I don't understand your point with you can't have good weapons and good hull.

A tank has good weapons and good hull, but it's slow. For now Tanked ships are still too fast and agile. They should be a lot slower. This is that way it should be rebalanced in my opinion.

I think missile / torpedo should still do damage if they are destroy close to its target.

You CAN do anything. You CAN a ship with good weapons and good armor. You CAN have a ship with a special weapon that destroys every other ship in range for 100km without even aiming, in a massive AOE, that fires 100 times per second, and uses no ammo.

But, this SHOULD not be the case. Because balance.

If you require people to choose between ability to attack hard, and ability to defend hard, they have to make choices. They need to decide what their priorities are, perhaps work with others. Maybe they decide the best defense is to not get hit in the first place.

But currently? People can just stack bulkheads in every single optional slot, for a BUTTLOAD of survivability, and have the exact same weapons as if they did anything else. There is no choice there. No trade-offs. Just a lot of engineering, and a few more tons of mass.

Contrast that with EVE: shield tanking requires mid slots, which impacts ship power (capacitor), some DPS modules, propulsion modules. If you go overboard with shield stuff, you lose a few key modules, plus you become easier to hit. Armor tanking is low slots, which is most of the DPS modules, and a few fitting modules, which very much impacts DPS if you fill the lows with plates. And power-draw is a lot more important, as the EVE powerplants are far more limited for overcharge-type boosting, as you can only boost that with rigs and low slots, and if you do THAT, you tie up slots that could be used for DPS as well.

So you can easily make a glass cannon, or a toothless brick, but finding a middle ground takes actual decisions.

 

[coca_fr]

Of course.

Because Elite Dangerous is not a competitive game. ED is not CQC were all weapons are the same for all and only skills make the difference.

ED is a whole grind. You can often win because you have grind more and you are richer, not because you have more skills.

A bigger ship should be feared. It's not like a small ship is supposed to challenge a battle ship.

If the grind cannot allow you to be stronger, better, why plays this game at all, as it is nothing but a big grind ?

But i agree with you that ships were badly specialized. Biggest Military ships or multi-purpose ships can haul more than hauler... Multi-role ships are almost better to anything else... 3 big ships are better at transporting passenger than passenger ships... Defenetly even if ships are cool they were very badly specialized.

So i agree with you that something needs to be done about ships specialization. Specialized slots should be added to all ships. For now only Military ships have specialized compartment with military slots and Beluga Liner is really restricted in its use.

The whole thing needs to be rethought.

 

[Teh Smoo]

@coca: You're a lot wrong.

Small ships should absolutely challenge big ships. Get behind someone. STAY behind them, and watch those big fixed guns be useless. Or chaff any turrets. Having "bigger=better" would limit gameplay, and force people into the biggest ships. This devalues the small ships FAR too much.

Grinding is not a game, grinding is NEVER A GAME. Grinding is a means to an end, a way of calculating the value that should be applied to time invested.

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I said nothing about ship specialization. The Beluga doesn't matter, since none of the luxury missions matter enough to make the passenger-special ships important. And the fins were a bad idea because docking slots are small. Adding armor slots to every non-military ship would also be silly, or even worse, changing existing slots to military only.

I posted something once about giving non-combat bonuses to various ships or ship lines, THAT could be interesting.