Will the "big ships" of the game ever have a truly distinct and meaningful combat role in Elite: Dangerous?

[Ransurias]

Will the "big ships" of the game ever have a truly distinct and meaningful combat role in Elite: Dangerous?

After unsuccessfully pushing for a Federal Corvette that has something resembling a real purpose for existing aside from the novelty / credit sink, I stopped playing for a few months, deciding to take a break. After returning to check things out... nothing's really changed. New class 4 hardpoints seem like vaporware at this point and might end up being DOA due to efficiency problems, as do the touted fighter-class ships (which, honestly, I wouldn't expect to be much of a game-changer due to the extremely low damage and fragility of Condors).

So, I guess I just want to know whether there's really any hope for big ships (particularly the combat-oriented Federal Corvette) when it comes to combat in this game. I really don't want to be just another FAS / FDL drone to be effective in PvP, and I'm not terribly interested in hull tanking / silent running DBS builds that seem to be so effective for PvP these days.

 

[captain slow]

Some people in this game have a very bizarre idea of what balancing means. In ED, balancing means that a billion credit ship with huge guns must be balanced against ships that cost < million credits and have peashooters. People seem to want that so that's what the developers cater for. Some of us realise that a billion credit warship should tear through entire ranks of small ships but we seem to be in the minority so big ships really don't have a place outside of PVE res mining(both bounty and actual mining)

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

No.

8 characters.

 

[Darrett]

Some people in this game have a very bizarre idea of what balancing means. In ED, balancing means that a billion credit ship with huge guns must be balanced against ships that cost < million credits and have peashooters. People seem to want that so that's what the developers cater for. Some of us realise that a billion credit warship should tear through entire ranks of small ships but we seem to be in the minority so big ships really don't have a place outside of PVE res mining(both bounty and actual mining)

I'd like it if FD would define what they want in terms of balance. For me, a balanced setup is one where if you have an Anaconda and you're not configured to fight small ships (no turrets, fixed weapon setup), and I show up with 3 Eagles and a Vulture, we should be able to destroy you, probably taking a loss or two in the process. The credit cost on my side isn't anywhere close to the cost on yours, but additional pilots and the poor configuration VS small ships on your side should matter.

However, if I show up with the same group and you're loaded out with turrets, then I'd expect the Anaconda to destroy or chase off all the enemies. In exchange though, another Anaconda that shows up with the configuration I mentioned earlier, should be able to destroy you as they're optimized to fight other large ships.

I'm not really sure FD has ever sat down and spelled out what they want, because the concept that a ship the size of a Vulture should even consider going up against an Anaconda solo is insane.

 

[Vasious]

New class 4 hardpoints seem like vaporware at this point and might end up being DOA due to efficiency problems,
.

What do you mean by that?

 

[Ransurias]

It seems strange (or hostile?) to describe ship-launched fighters as vapourware. Every indication and Elite's history suggests that if the fighters are scheduled to be the Big Thing in 2.3 (or whenever), then they will be released in 2.3. There is no reason I've heard to assume that 2.3 will be abandoned. Vapourware doesn't mean "what things are until after they have been released". (And if fighters were not actually promised, then it would be similarly strange to call them vapourware)

Er... Except I was referring to new class 4 hardpoints as vaporware, not fighters. [yesnod]

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

No.

8 characters.

^ This. The big ships aren't even in the game yet and likely won't be for awhile. Same goes for the Class 8 weaponry they'll likely have.

 

[Archvillain]

Er... Except I was referring to new class 4 hardpoints as vaporware, not fighters. [yesnod]

Yup. I had already deleted my post because I realized I'd probably misinterpreted, but was ninja'd by you quoting me. Ah well.

Personally, I think it makes sense to assume that ship-launched fighters will make big ships different, because if it wasn't going to make a difference... why would they spend so much time and money to do nothing?

 

[Ransurias]

What do you mean by that?

Efficiency problems or the allegation of vaporware? As far as the latter, a screenshot released last October leaked a dev build that supposedly revealed a "huge beam laser," which -- to my recollection -- ED's community generally interpreted as being close to being finished and set for release. While this interpretation didn't have any factual merit, people in general have been expecting class 4 hardpoints for some time, now, especially with the C4-centric Federal Corvette that's now been available for roughly half a year or so.

As far as efficiency problems go, it's reasonably well-established by now that larger weapons have an often notorious tendency for being energy inefficient. This is particularly conspicuous for weapons such as the Plasma Accelerator, but is also notable on various versions of the beam laser. Class 3 beam lasers already cause significant problems regarding weapon capacitor consumption and overheating; if class 4 beam lasers are similarly non-linear in terms of efficiency, they could very easily become niche-y or even entirely redundant, since a ~25 - 30% damage gain quite possibly wouldn't be worth monstrous drawbacks in terms of efficiency and overheating.

 

[GluttonyFang]

You want to PvP in large ships, wot?! Not if FD wants to kill large ships with their balancing!

*Chuckles in the background*

 

[Commander Biscuit]

Solo pvp role maybe not, but small and large ships have roles in wings dont they?

Balance is actually important otherwise everyone after a certain period would be flying the same ship and the game would get incredibly stale. Also balancing 30 ships is a pretty tall order and I have to give props to the dev team for managing to allow small ships to still have a use in this game in the hands of skilled players.

As for single corvettes tearing through wings, that's just Warcraft mentality "I spent hundreds of hours grinding for this gear, and anyone that didn't should be a free kill to me" Unfortunately this game will require skill no matter what you're piloting. I'm sure a decent Vette pilot could do pretty much miracles in it, since that's true for just about any ship in the game.

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

You want to PvP in large ships, wot?! Not if FD wants to kill large ships with their balancing!

*Chuckles in the background*

Healing lazors! Duh!

 

[kofeyh]

^ This. The big ships aren't even in the game yet and likely won't be for awhile. Same goes for the Class 8 weaponry they'll likely have.

Elite: Dangerous is not a large ship space flight simulator. There are no immediately plans for huge player-owned ships. Never mind that the engine is not designed for large ship combat, or that the community will stand for what is ostensibly a class of ships that cannot be taken down by a small wing of small fighters. For heaven's sake the large faction cruisers that jump in to CG's have been driven out by solo commanders by knocking out modules!

The problem, is that people want epic space battles, but do not want the compromise that comes with it. Namely that large ships must perform like large ships (think cutter, type-9) and small ships would be ineffectual unless in large numbers. As much as an epic scale of battle sounds very epic and amazing and romantic; it won't happen at all soon, if ever.

ED isn't that game. It could have been. But it isn't. It isn't because:
- everything must pitch at the same rate to be considered "fair".
- all weapons must do similar/ identical damage to be considered "fair"
- small ships worth at most a few million must be able to destroy a ship worth half a billion (or more) to be considered "fair"
- endless demands for defensive measures (HRM, SCB) to be nerfed to be "fair"

.. the list goes on. Frontier are adding a darned ship killer gun that renders SCBs redundant, for heaven's sake. For a moment, consider you are piloting a capital class ship, worth several billion, and a CMDR in a sidewinder uses the appropriate rail gun and bam your shield is dropped because you used a single SCB. So now you have capital class ships that literally cannot defend themselves and are pointless as they can't stay on the field long enough for their guns to have any value.

Large wing battles are going to become dead. Large ships are pointless. SCBs will literally become assisted suicide. All of the things you need to support and allow large ships to enter the battle field and provide that huge fire support are being ripped out of ED.

So no. All signs point to a shift from FDev to optimise the game for small ship combat.

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Healing lazors! Duh!

Assuming you're not being sarcastic - remind me again how you regenerate a shield when it's offline. In your own time.

 

[Ransurias]

I had already deleted my post because I realized I'd probably misinterpreted, but it was ninja'd by you quoting me. Ah well.

Personally, I think it makes sense to assume that ship-launched fighters WILL make big ships different, because if it didn't, what's the feature for?

I'm just cynical, at this point. ED has been out for about a year and a half, and fairly questionable, half-baked concepts and gameplay elements have been implemented on numerous occasions. Ticking off a few examples, I could point to the rather poor state of Powerplay that seemingly encouraged highly counter-intuitive behavior amongst players affiliated with a given faction, the decidedly egregious state of mining that dragged on for many months after the game's release, the rather extreme disparity in profitability between the game's handful of activities to partake in, the Horizons expansion's utter lack of profit motive for exploration and nagging sense of sameness and emptiness, the placeholder-esque, amoeboid-in-complexity state of "trading" that continues to this day...

I get that some of this has been improved upon as the game has aged, and that Frontier isn't a particularly large outfit with a great deal of resources at its disposal, but some things -- particularly in terms of balance -- really, I think, could've been thought out a little better. And so I guess that with fighters, I'm kind of expecting more of the same -- maybe some rag-tag Condors that I can deploy that essentially give me four extra small hardpoints pew-pewing once every ~10 seconds before they're destroyed by a bit of stray gunfire. Underwhelming and of questionable use, in other words.

 

[kofeyh]

You want to PvP in large ships, wot?! Not if FD wants to kill large ships with their balancing!

*Chuckles in the background*

Frontier announces the next DLC - Elite: Small Ship Combat; coming in the Fall.

 

[DaveB]

The "big ships" already have a combat role - just not against min-maxed rail-de-lances outside a wing. In a wing, the "big ship" is your "support ship" for sustained heavy DPS and probably something of a tank - You build it as both a shield and hull tank with weapon loadout such that it can keep up sustained fire for a LONG time. You don't need to maximize the 'conda's jump range, you can load on the weight to add survivability so long as it can jump as far as its wingmates. Even so, it won't last long against opponents optimized for prompt burst-damage and that can target its big modules and bigger silhouette so unless the other three ships in the wing are cleaning house while the opponents are daft enough to be concentrating on the big target, it will likely blow quickly.. but then this 4-pilot wing that you started against is down to one or two ships and you've still got three builds capable of going toe to toe with them. If the opposing wing DOESN'T concentrate on the big ship until its dead, you end up with a 3-on-3 furball but one set of 3 has a big slow heavy weapons platform weighing in on its side... Either way, having one big ship along is a force multiplier.

 

[kofeyh]

I'm just cynical, at this point. ED has been out for about a year and a half, and fairly questionable, half-baked concepts and gameplay elements have been implemented on numerous occasions. Ticking off a few examples, I could point to the rather poor state of Powerplay that seemingly encouraged highly counter-intuitive behavior amongst players affiliated with a given faction, the decidedly egregious state of mining that dragged on for many months after the game's release, the rather extreme disparity in profitability between the game's handful of activities to partake in, the Horizons expansion's utter lack of profit motive for exploration and nagging sense of sameness and emptiness, the placeholder-esque, amoeboid-in-complexity state of "trading" that continues to this day...

I get that some of this has been improved upon as the game has aged, and that Frontier isn't a particularly large outfit with a great deal of resources at its disposal, but some things -- particularly in terms of balance -- really, I think, could've been thought out a little better. And so I guess that with fighters, I'm kind of expecting more of the same -- maybe some rag-tag Condors that I can deploy that essentially give me four extra small hardpoints pew-pewing once every ~10 seconds before they're destroyed by a bit of stray gunfire. Underwhelming and of questionable use, in other words.

It's not all bad; by the time that feature is release, two AI sidewinders with rails will easily destroy a 1 billion credit corvette, because of "balance".

I do like this game, but the direction it's taking in trying to address gripes, by some very weird choices, is a bit sad making.

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

Elite: Dangerous is not a large ship space flight simulator. There are no immediately plans for huge player-owned ships

It's been strongly hinted that the Beluga is coming this season. It's too big to dock at a station and will likely be the foundation all future large ships are based upon.

Assuming you're not being sarcastic - remind me again how you regenerate a shield when it's offline. In your own time.

Definitely was sarcasm. That said, I'm willing to bet the function of the healing lasers will be very pro-active. Using them re-actively is going to be like doing a really bad PUG in a fantasy MMO. The healer gets the heal off about the same time the player dies. You don't want to be with those kinds of folks. From a PvP standpoint, the healer is going to get focused from the getgo, so their utility is going to be questionable.

 

[kofeyh]

The "big ships" already have a combat role - just not against min-maxed rail-de-lances outside a wing. In a wing, the "big ship" is your "support ship" for sustained heavy DPS and probably something of a tank - You build it as both a shield and hull tank with weapon loadout such that it can keep up sustained fire for a LONG time. You don't need to maximize the 'conda's jump range, you can load on the weight to add survivability so long as it can jump as far as its wingmates. Even so, it won't last long against opponents optimized for prompt burst-damage and that can target its big modules and bigger silhouette so unless the other three ships in the wing are cleaning house while the opponents are daft enough to be concentrating on the big target, it will likely blow quickly.. but then this 4-pilot wing that you started against is down to one or two ships and you've still got three builds capable of going toe to toe with them. If the opposing wing DOESN'T concentrate on the big ship until its dead, you end up with a 3-on-3 furball but one set of 3 has a big slow heavy weapons platform weighing in on its side... Either way, having one big ship along is a force multiplier.

HRM is being addressed, along with SCB in the next release. The large ship is now unable to sustain shields because SCB is literally a suicide pill, so will either have to jump out early, or basically be sacrificial for the common good. That is expensive to sustain, either way. The game is being optimised for smaller ships in 2.1.

As for the new weapons, if they have any appreciable damage output, you can bet there will be calls for nerfs, so that the 5 million small combat ship can still go toe-to-toe with a half billion or more large ship (which now can't use SCBs).

 

[Vasious]

Efficiency problems or the allegation of vaporware? As far as the latter, a screenshot released last October leaked a dev build that supposedly revealed a "huge beam laser," which -- to my recollection -- ED's community generally interpreted as being close to being finished and set for release. While this interpretation didn't have any factual merit, people in general have been expecting class 4 hardpoints for some time, now, especially with the C4-centric Federal Corvette that's now been available for roughly half a year or so.

As far as efficiency problems go, it's reasonably well-established by now that larger weapons have an often notorious tendency for being energy inefficient. This is particularly conspicuous for weapons such as the Plasma Accelerator, but is also notable on various versions of the beam laser. Class 3 beam lasers already cause significant problems regarding weapon capacitor consumption and overheating; if class 4 beam lasers are similarly non-linear in terms of efficiency, they could very easily become niche-y or even entirely redundant, since a ~25 - 30% damage gain quite possibly wouldn't be worth monstrous drawbacks in terms of efficiency and overheating.

Doesn't speak to if they will be efficient or not, but Weapons coming in 2.1 are still coming in 2.1, just 2.1 was pushed back.

We have had videos in the recent road to beta live streams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBe8UEI_Lew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mQCv6x3mkI