Forums » Suggestions

Sunflares (a rocket rammers view)

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Aug 29, 2003 Icarus link


Aug 29, 2003 dragos link
/me applaudes icarus' post.

actually a good idea.. i like the one with share ammo particularly
Aug 29, 2003 Pyro link
I feel pretty much the same way, since I LOVE using flares... The quad-flare hornet is way too powerful (luckily, I can dodge... :P), and tri-flare combos are insanely powerful also. Uni-flare, I have no problem with, and bi-flares are annoying, but not quite broken. However, when you're talking three or four flares at once, it's evil... Personally, I love the idea of shared ammo (I suggested that for the railgun problem). Use four flares? Fine, you only get 4 shots. Three? You get 5 shots. However, when you use two, you get 8 shots, and 16 when you only use one at a time... Wow... I'm incoherent... Must... Eat... Lunch...
Aug 29, 2003 spectre_c_me link
i dont care either way, but something is needed. i have outlawed myself from nukes and mines. the tri-flare valk is just the biggest annoyance i see these days. i will use it only when i dont like someone, other than that i dont use it, valk is a botter to me, thats about it. the flares are in serious need of a change

-IO
Aug 29, 2003 Kuvagh link
Icarus: Thanks for supporting my idea about one rocket tube for fighters and 2 (or more, I guess) for attack ships and larger ships.

Dragos: I'm glad you're into this, too. Maybe the ideas could even be combined. It seems to me like rockets should take up some space in the hull somewhere. If the ship isn't carrying rockets they could swap the magazine with a cargo unit.

Pyro: Yeah, flares are really fun when used the old fashioned way. I enjoy "jousting" with another fighter and letting off a single rocket on a pass. The quad-flare Hornet doesn't concern me when I'm in a fighter because it's so slow, but for other slow ships it's a big concern.

We've got the agreement of both a rocketeer and an energy guy, a pirate and a cop, a heavy pilot... representatives from two nations so far.... I like it. :)

Asp
Sep 02, 2003 Forum Moderator link
This thread has fallen off topic

[locked]
Aug 29, 2003 Arolte link
1. A dynamic bulk/mass system needs to be implemented for every ship to make rocket and missile ships have lower agility. Agility will increase very slightly as each rocket is expended, but one must also take into account that the launcher itself must have some mass as well. Energy weapons should have little or no effect in bulk/mass due to their infinite supply of rechargeable power. And as usual, cargo should. Of course I'm probably only dreaming here that something like this will ever be implemented in the near future, since it'll probably involve a lot of complex calculations. I can be patient though.

=)

2. While the distribution of ammo between all the ports may lower the number of shots that a rammer can have, it still won't prevent rammers as you'd think. The damage and proximity of each rocket is still there. Rocket rammers usually don't need to spray and pray with all those rockets, even though most do. But the most experienced rammers will only ever need three or four bursts.

And even if they do run out, the acceleration of the Valk allows them to escape just as quickly as they came. In other words we'll still see rocket rammers doing hit and runs. They'll still dish out the same damage, but instead they'll probably end up docking more, giving you LESS time to kill them (which is probably worse). There's nothing more annoying than not being able to run down and kill a chickened out empty rocket rammer.

=(

3. The proximity of rockets need to be reduced so that they're a contact-only weapon. The speed needs to be increased slightly in return. I think that's definitely a fair and balanced tradeoff. A lot of people have requested this, so if petitions have any meaning on these forums I think the devs should take this request into consideration.

The same may apply to guided missiles also. In fact you can probably get away with making guided missiles contact-only, and improve the tracking/speed of them in the process. The one thing I like about this is that you'll know the target will get 80-100% damage rather than the blast radius crap that usually happens. I can't tell you how many times I only received 2% damage from a guided missile because of the proximity BS.

=(

4. Reloading time needs to be upped. I'm quite amazed at how fast the rockets fire. The sunflare launcher spits out rockets like a machinegun. Why is that? Doesn't it take time for the loading mechanism to kick in and put another rocket in the tube? The time between sunflare shots should probably be changed to reflect that. Heck, it might even cut down on the lag a bit. While you could argue that in the future they'd have some uber fast loading mechanism under the hood, I think we can argue that the reloading delay is a necessity for such a powerful weapon (for the sake of balance).
Aug 29, 2003 Sage link
One, mabe two of your suggestions Arlote, but not all. I think slightly (emphasis on slightly) slower RoF and a proportional ammo decrease per extra launcher would be very useful. But I've found that station mining is the only way I can kill a talented valk rammer, but then the problem of collateral damage comes up. So something needs to be done to be able to shoot them as they are running too, or, as Arlote said, they will still do hit and runs, just more running.
Aug 29, 2003 Celebrim link
1) Possibly, but that won't in itself solve the problem. People would just load less than there max load out of rockets, and they'd still be able to run away easily when they ran out of ammo. You have all sorts of pilots firing 4 shots and then stationing, which is just as boring of a game development as I could imagine.

2) I agree fully. Sharing ammo won't prevent ramming. I just want to point out that the same argument is equally applicable to point #1. Also shared ammo is not very logically intuitive to me unless a) you get _zero_ ammo when you buy the launcher and b) you have to store all ammo as cargo. At that point, shared ammo is logically fine, but again doesn't solve the problem and might make it worse in some cases (the Marauder using all of its cargo for rocket ammo, for example).

3) I don't agree. One of the primary reasons I use rockets is that I'm on dialup. Having a prox radius means that I don't have to be aiming exactly where the opponent is when I'm being effected by lag. Besides which, if everything is basically a fast contact weapon, you might as well have one weapon. A contact rocket is basically functionally identical in concept to a railgun. People ask for lots of crazy things - it doesn't mean that they are good ideas.

4) I'm in agreement with this. My recent experience with rockets has shown that the whole communities skill is sliding. I can tell the whole communities skill is sliding by how many more fights are decided or finished with one or both sides issuing. How people can take pride in blowing themselves up and hoping to escape with 10% hull left, I don't know. In fact, I dare say alot of the so called 'kills' that people are getting aren't kills, but enemies dying in the wake of your explosion. I'm always opposed to any weapon that takes no skill to use. The rocket can be a very skillful weapon, but the ease of using it in a ram and the wide availablity of cash to replace ships has encouranged more and more people to just charge straight ahead spraying and hope for the best. That hurts all of gameplay, and the easiest solution I can think of is increase the cycle rate to return rocket tactics to more of the 'well aimed snap shot' usage that we mostly saw from the best pilots in 3.1 (the 'jousting' that Kuvagh mentions that all of us oldtimers like so much). 'Spray and pray' is highly effective only if you can shoot so many rockets that you not only don't really have to aim, but can assume that enough will hit to do the job.

So maybe we should start by upping the cycle rate to .7 (like the gemini). It wouldn't bother me, because I seldom fire more than 2 groups in a pass anyway, and when I do its always from behind the target rather than these head on sprays I see so often now.

5) I've supported breaking weapon slots into 'gun only' and 'missile only' (and maybe a third 'either' category) since 3.2.0 was introduced. This would bring back some of the balance and interest of multiple weapons that we had in 3.1.
Aug 29, 2003 Arolte link
Well, I don't think sunflares should be labeled as a weapon for high ping players. You're always free to use guided missiles if that's ever a problem. As a past example we can look at the Avalon. The Avalon's radius was reduced dramatically, and as you can see the "fix" became a great success in how it is used now. The whole station nuking thing is a whole 'nother problem itself. But once you take exploits out of the factor (which is something that will be fixed anyway eventually), you'll see that it's being used more properly (against frigates, turrets, and bombers) and will probably be used more so once missions are implemented.

And you mention railguns. Railguns and rockets still greatly vary in speed and damage inflicted. The railgun is a totally different weapon that behaves in a totally different way than the rocket, regardless of the proximity detonator. In fact, one thing that I started thinking about to make that gap bigger was to maybe eliminate the "drag factor" of strafing ships for the railgun. In other words the railgun slug itself wouldn't move along with the ship, but rather it would move at the speed of light with zero autoaim, allowing you to hit something at the exact point of the reticule without all the aiming distortion of a strafing ship (unlike something rocket users have to cope with). It'll actually be harder than it sounds, considering the fact that the reticules wobble during strafing maneuvers due to the "dampers", so I think it would be a nice unique weapon in that sense.

As far as #4 goes, I'd hate to be forced to use rockets. I'd much rather have an energy weapon occupy that rocket port instead, since I'm not a big fan of rockets (and I'm sure some of you aren't either). For example I always like to have a sharpshooter type of configuration where I get energy weapons exclusively to fire from all the ports, but at a low rate due to energy consumption. If it's going to be energy or "either-ports", then yeah I'm all for it. I think that's where the idea of M-ports come into play.
Aug 29, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
Im sorry as this may seem as a flame, and I may seem misinforemed(dont have the time to read the whole thread), but heres my view on flares, balancing and whatnot, which(I believe) at least used to be shared by celebrim:
Instead of totally changing gameplay in a way that might nerf things that you dont want to be nerfed, why dont you tweak the specific facts about the flare you dont like:

Arolte, you dont like rocket rammers, give it a safety fuse like mines have

Icarus, all the launchers dont need to hold one set amount of ammo, that would nerf each flare being linked seperatle to give an ammo advantage, why not reduse the ammo amount per launcher? mabye down to 8?

Celebrim, why change s and l ports into sm, se, lm, and le ports? it would change the whole gameplay and give rise to many new balancing issues and complaints, it would also limit the customizability of the weapons you carry.

Conclusion: tweaking the problem seems to *me* a better solution than turning the wh0ole gameplay of Vendetta on its head, even now, just one weapon added into the game throws off the balance of the whole game. Look what happened to the rail, we whined so much about it that it was set to a abomidable effiency rating.

hell, if you wanted you could up the armor of all ships, and up the damage speed and whatnot to equalize with the flare. Instead of telling the devs to nerf something, ask them to upgrade everything else to meet the capabilities of the weapon you dont like. As a player said not to long ago, "It seems what we fly now are Glass Ships...". This is what you get when you ask for things to be nerfed, or reduced in someway, instead of asking for other things to be upgraded to meet the level of the thing that you think is too strong. Increasing things, not decreasing, is the key to good gameplay, and therefore good sales for guild when the game is released as Pay-To-Play. As well as benefiting GS in the long run, by Increasing, instead of Seacreasing, you build a better, happier community. Like in 3.1, it seemed to me that a ship, even if it was deadfully outmatched, could last at least 5 minutes against some other ship, we dont have that now, because instead of asking for _increases_ you asked for nerfs, major changes in gameplay, and decreases. Please stop this trend of asking for the decreasing of ships, the community and GuildSoftware will be better in the long run for it.


P.S. As I said before, this may come off as a flame, or as if Im misinformed, I didnt have the time to carefuly analyze everybody's comments, and if ti comes off as a flame or anything similar, I am sorry for that.
Aug 29, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
wow, thats the longest post ever ever written about one topic...
Aug 30, 2003 Celebrim link
Long? You were the very soul of brevity as far as I'm concerned. ;)
Aug 30, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
lol...long for me :P
Aug 30, 2003 Arolte link
Pfff... what a n00b. Celebrim and I are the king of long posts!
Aug 30, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
long for *me* :P

usually my posts are less than 10 words long :P
Aug 30, 2003 Renegade ++RIP++ link
/me eyes arolte,

/me eyes celebrim

then He points to one of his longer posts and remarks: My post is bigger then yours :D

Ok my account on rockets:

16 is to much.

So what I think was dropping it back to 12, then decreasing , yes decreasing the proximity to 5m. If you want precise strong rockets then take the screamers. If you want some that are easier to aim : use the jackhammers. small weaponslots are supposed to not be better then their large slot equivalents. And the tripple sunflare is better then the double screamer.

And if the devs really dont want the rammingtechnique in the game, then they could also opt for an armingsfuse.

Besides, if you look closely then everybody prefers the sunflares above the gemini and the small slot homers. So to distanciate you from those rockets, an idea would be to increase the prox of homers to 10m "if they arent already at that prox" and at the same time devrease the prox of rockets to 5m. And like everybody knows, hitting someone with a 5 m proximity straight line , isnt easy. But so more worth the rewards.

And maybe downing RoF of the rockets with a tiny fraction, maybe to 0.65 or 0.7 ?

cheers
Aug 30, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
and I quote myself...."...Arolte, you dont like rocket rammers, give it a safety fuse like mines have

Icarus, all the launchers dont need to hold one set amount of ammo, that would nerf each flare being linked seperatle to give an ammo advantage, why not reduse the ammo amount per launcher? mabye down to 8?..."

both those idea were expressed in there rene :P
Aug 30, 2003 Renegade ++RIP++ link
Ay humpy.

But if you would in my version have a tripple valk :

it would still have 12 shots with each a volley of 3. At the same time those 3 will give a proximity "spherical" explosion of about 10 "imagine hitting someone with a screamer?" Not that easy, I can guarantee you that ;)

In your version of a tripple valk:

he shoots 4 times, then runs to the station, undocks, shoots again 4 times, runs and docks again. Still ramming possible, still devestating, so there will still be a lot of people complaining.

in my version, people will use rockets sparringly because they will only shoot one if they are pretty sure that it will hit, otherwise it will be a waste of ammo/rocket. So it will be more like a backup if you come to close, expect a rocket in your face type of weapon :D. In stead of a dump as manny rockets as you can from point blank so i will surely hit him at least 4 times so I kill him and i get issues.

cheers

And if the problem of ramming still existed, putting in a safety fuse, not before. I clearly dont wanna nerve the rocket, because they both have their place in the game. For instance : energyweapon as primary, and when you shot so many gauss shots that your battery needs recharging fast and you see your enemy approaching or when you are boosting and dont want to slow down, that you then can shoot somethig energyfriendly :D
Aug 30, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
thatswhat I meant by minor *tweaks* rene, I was just using specific examples to counteract other peoples arguments..