how about sheilds which take low damage form missiles but high damage from lasers etc
and hull taking the reverse, then you would have great trouble rocket ramming

ehhe

Why would you need that, I have here, in my hands a globe of prediction :D

cheers

I don't really care if people rams and dies with you, but I don't like it that a light ship (like a valk) can ram, kill, and survive.

I want to disagree about the Valkyrie being "marginally" better than other ships. It's still in a league of its own. It has excellent agility, armor and firepower. Some ships can match it on one or two of these attributes, but the third, usually agility, will make the difference. The closest _fighter_, the Vulture, is outclassed in all three of these attributes. (Remember that there are only 3 fighters... the Valkyrie, Vulture and Centurion... others are attack ships, bombers and traders)

Even in a Valkyrie, someone was kind enough to point out to me that arming dual flares and a tachyon made me a dinosaur in terms of tactics. The arms race has dictated that a Valkyrie with triple sunflares is _the_ effective combat vessel in the game.

Despite inelegant climate we now have I still love Vendetta. I'm sure these problems will be rectified in the future and that the game will be more fun than
ever.

Asp

The only problem I see with the Valk is that it is ludicrously agile AND has a relatively large amount of hit-points. Downgrade either of those attributes and it would be a very well balanced ship.

Kuvagh: I disagree about the "dinosaur tactics". IMHO people are using tri-rocket-valks because they emulate other people. Due to this fact, it's possible to beat tri-rocket-valks - because people aren't used to fight against non-rockets users.

The problem is that people are quite reluctant to try other configs - and if you know this fact, it can give you quite an advantage because people tend to be inflexible :-)


Regards,
Mark

"The arms race has dictated that a Valkyrie with triple sunflares is _the_ effective combat vessel in the game."
hmmm there's like only one person who can kill me with out issuing with that set up a good number more can kill me if they stick one energy weapon in (me in my vult). Tri flare valks are great for getting quick kills if the person is paying attention and knows how to dodge you'll have to go and reload long before you kill them. During which time the target will have plenty of time to repair or run.

I SHOULD be able to fly ANY ship without being outgunned by EVERY person I meet because of a ship and a weapon which is clearly unbalanced.

Hunter, If I follow your line of thinking in 3.1 then when I was flying a light and you were flying a heavy. the chance of you beating me would be infinitely small "granted, it is still existent, but I wouldnt count on it if I were you".

It is exactly the same now. Every ship has its countership. Do you wan tto kill a valk, then you need to outhull him, a prom is a nice ship for this. Do you want to kill a vult, use the warthog, you want to kill a rag, valk/vult is very effective. And you can go on with this for every ship.

I have to admit, that a valk is superior in any way, but in my opinion, once 3.3 coms out and missions are in, being able to obtain 1 single valk will take a lot off effort/time. So in the end everything will be balanced, but not only by the weaponsstatistics, but also by the availability of them.

PS: besides in your opinion a thog is pretty unbalanced to, because it is able to take out every ship in the game. "just load up with a tach/gauss and a screamer, let them fly and see your adversarie whimper". Like I said before, every ship/configuration has its use.

PPS: I have to admit, tri flares are very effective and very hard to dodge at <150m. And at the same time annoying, but Im sure that the devs wil find something or have an idea to resolve this issue.

cheers

I agree with Hunter (again). The whole point of balance is to give the player their OWN CHOICE of ships and weapons without dying every single frickin' time. If all people use are tri-sunflare Valks, what choice do you have left but to either die all the time or ram 'em back? You can argue all you want about telling people to get skill and tell 'em to get close to bring them down with you etc., but that's simply a way of avoiding the problem without offering a solution. The whole point of the argument is ship and weapon balance.

Whether you choose to accept it or not, eventually more and more people will get sick and tired of this rocket ramming arena and leave. While this is a TEST and all, this is a serious problem that has dragged through quite a number of releases without the slightest bit of tweaking. I only hope it gets fixed soon before the problem worsens, or we start losing more beta testers in the process. If you're having a miserable time testing a game and are not even getting paid, why would you want to stick around?

Anyway, hopefully Guild is simply in one of those busy phases and will take careful consideration of this problem shortly. And hopefully the increasing number of threads cropping up that discuss this problem will serve as some indication as to how urgent it is. Of course that's not an invitation to spam the boards either.

Oh and FYI, In 3.1.x the heavy ships, especially the Ragnarok, were WAAAY more maneuverable and easier to defend. Granted they weren't much of what I'd consider assault ships, but rather beefed up cargo vessels, they did the job of self-defense quite nicely I might add. This is exactly what I was talking about with less agile or weaker ships having the ability to defend themselves properly (or escape easily).

Why is this considered balanced, you might be asking? Because the player can choose a trading or national defense role in 3.1.x and not have to worry about dying 99.9% of the time they encounter an agile fighter in the field. While other pilots could choose to use the light or medium ships instead for combative purposes, and still have an excellent rate of survival. There wasn't a single fighter or bomber (or weapon for that matter) that dominated the game at the time. That's what balance is all about.

Yes the ships are unbalanced at the moment. Yes we have a problem with flares. Yes the devs are extremely busy with more important things. Yes they'll deal with balance when they get a chance.

/me waits until after 3.3.1 or 2 to make a post about ship balance.

Okay okay okay...

I'll say this once more for all the people. It isn't the damage or the fact that you have tri sunflares in valks. It's the fact that money is soosoosososososo easy to come by that losing one ship is like losing a penny. People who "rocket ram" have enough money to support them through thousands of rams.

Now lets say in the future...a valk cost 100k...5k a piece for each sunflare rocket launcher...not to mention engine and battery...

Now if money is hard to come by aka...it takes you 4-5 MAJOR trade runs to get to 100k. People aren't gonna go outload a valk with 3 sunflare rocket launchers and come at full speed ramming you. Because if you get in that rocket rammers way and he loses his 120k+ ship it's going to take him another 40mins-2hours based on what comes along while he trades.

People would be a lot more careful and less "rocket ramming" crazy if money was an issue.

Yay for SF! I agree, but SOME PEOPLE keep saying that money shouldn't be balance. Good post!

For testing purposes the economy shouldn't have realistic prices until it's the econmy itself that needs to be tested.
:)

i agree that money should be harder to get. that'd stop a lot of the lemming attacks.

While I agree that the economy needs to be fixed, I still believe ships and weapons need balancing also. There are still a lot of rocket rammers out there that can get tons of kills without dying. Money or not, they'll still use the config that'll get 'em easy kills. A Vulture pilot dying 4-6 times trying before taking a tri-sunflare Valk down isn't any better, for example.

Reading thru this i got an idea, it was mentioned for the nukes but i think would work here, hhaving an arming time after the missle left the ship, i think all missles would benifit from this, but of course having different amount of time to arm for each missle. And it also works for hose poeple who claim its not real, all torps in subs have a couple second arming time as not to damage the sub that firered it. I feel this would fix the problom of rocket ramming without nerfing the gun. It would now require skill to kill some one with a tri/quad rocket set up. As for ships i feel all are balanced, wepons in my mind are the only thing that need adressing, as of now. This is just my thought on the matter.

HellsFire

PS i just woke up sorry for the many many spelling errors

actually the safeties on torpedoes and the like can be removed.. they are set right before launch in most cases

Well when I mention ships I really mean the agility of them by what engine they use. So I guess what I meant was balancing out the engines. There's just too big of a gap between the medium engine and the heavy engine. The medium should consume more energy, or the heavy should consume less. Or something with the torque needs to be changed. Actually, I think you could get away with making all engines have the same recharge rate. An engine with a higher capacity will still take a longer time to recharge than an engine with a lower capacity. It just might work!

I'd say a 1-2 seconds for each missle and 5 seconds for an avalon.

Right now you can fire 2 missles a second same with avalon torp. If you make it so that it is impossible to endlessly click to shoot off all rockets near a target thus causing a rocket ram and gave some time like 1-2s to reload than a person can rocket ram but then the target has atleast 1-2 seconds to turn or go somewhere else before the enemy can fire again.

Or another idea is allowing only 1 rocket to be launched at a time with a .5-.75 arm rate for the next missle tube on ur ship then they can't just unleash 3-4 rockets at just the click of a button.