Forums » Suggestions

More L-port weapons necessary

Nov 18, 2004 Spider link
Right now, the prom is nerfed by the complete lack of usable weapons. Weights are incredible and cut both the prom and the warthog down into unsuable ships.

Currently, there have been more and more light weapons added, creating a nice diversity, even if its unbalanced enough that you only see one set of weapons ingame. (other rant)

however, there have been no additions on the L port side of weapons.

This leaves us with one usable gun for the prometheus at the moment. The Gatling Turret.
This monster weighs over 1295 kg, and will further impede on the usability of any ship its mounted on.

Below that, theres the gatling cannon, that we all know... just how much it sucks.

If you had a manouverable ship, like the Warthog, you could equip the Plasma Devastator, or its variant MkII, however this is not an option with the top-heavy prometheus, which is left with the only alternative being swarms.
(dont even try jackhammers or screamers. they are even worse)

So, to counter the totally Uber Neutron mkIII, lets hear it for the :
Gatling Turret: Extreme
Mass: 400kg
Velocity: 215m/s
Damage: 800
Delay: 0.1s

And a few updates to the normal Gatling Turret:
Gatling Turret mkII
Mass: 600 kg
Velocity 190m/s
Damage: 500
Delay 0.1s

Gatling Turret mkIII
Mass: 400 kg
Velocity 190m/s
Damage: 500
Delay 0.09s
Nov 19, 2004 randomize link
word. there are hardly any viable L port weapons for PVP.
Nov 19, 2004 CrippledPidgeon link
Not only is the Prom pretty nerfed from lack of good weapons - PDII and GT are somewhat useful... but not at the same time.

Maybe a new railgun-like cannon, extremely long range, extremely fast, and no autoaiming.

New missiles - there is a lack of good missiles and rockets for large ports. There is a huge gap between the low level missiles and the swarms.

Maybe a short or midrange beam cannon. Instant hit on whatever's in the crosshairs under 400m, no autoaim, and insane powerdrain.

I dunno. I want the Prometheus, but there just aren't very many things that it'd give me over my faithful Warthog.
Nov 19, 2004 Soltis link
Missiles need to be useful. There should be ways to counteract them, but they need to be actually useful, which at the moment they are not. Limited ammo + bad AI + slow + limited lifespan + can be outrun by every ship with a good battery + expensive ammo = TEH UBAR SUCK.
Nov 19, 2004 Spider link
Soltis: Missiles are useful at the moment, just enough useful. What he requested was a missile that somewhere between the Stingray and the Swarms. Something like an L-port Gemini would be.

At that, Rockets. We really could use some more variation here .
Nov 19, 2004 Celebrim link
There has long been a problem that L port weapons were not distinctly better than S port weapons. So much so that most people would have prefered to equip an small weapon in their L port for much of the games history. Making the L port weapons extra heavy has probably made the problem that much worse.
Nov 19, 2004 Viper2560 link
Celebrim has a good point here. In order to fix this issue id have to say that the wieght should lessened just a bit. New weapons should be made. And a couple of these weapons need to be really worth haveing and dealing with the extra wieght. Im not saying make an Uber Cannon that kills a Prom. in one hit (although that would be quite fun) but something that will kill somehting in few amount of hits. Make Variations of it so newbs can use it once they can get the warthog. If someone could make a stats board of wut they think this weapon should be like that'd be nice
Nov 19, 2004 Celebrim link
As a rough guideline, the following things should distinguish a large port weapon from its small port cousins:

1) It should be much more energy efficient than a small port weapon, for example on average doing about 50% more damage per point of energy expended. This need not necessarily mean more damaging, it could also mean less energy.
2) It should be much more weight efficient than a small port weapon. A large port weapon which weighs twice as much as a small port weapon should be roughly as effective as 2 1/2 small port weapons. For example, a L port weapon weighing 1200kg should do 2 1/2 times the damage of a S port weapon 600kg (for only 50% more power).
3) It should be faster than an equivalent small port weapon by about 10m/s.

A L port weapon which has only one or two of the three advantages should possess that advantage to an proportionately higher degree. For example, an L port weapon which is no more energy and weight efficient than a S port weapon should be much much faster than same. In addition, Large port weapons should be able to do things that small port weapons can't. In particular, there should be caps on the maximum damage of a small port weapon (probably at about 1200), and caps on the maximum autoaiming arc of a small port weapon. For example, just because the advanced gatling or avalon torp is a fine L port weapon, doesn't mean we can reverse engineer its equivalent S port weapon. In some cases, the equivalent weapon just shouldn't exist.

(Although this is off topic, there probably shouldn't be classes of L port weapons which don't exist as well, for example highly specialized anti-fighter dog fighting weapons - but since those classes don't exist for S port weapons yet either and probably shouldn't until we get medium sized and larger ships I'll leave the topid aside.)

When I set out to try to balance the weapons (some time ago), I started by creating a default S port weapon as the baseline. It would look something like this converted to current standards:

Default Small Weapon - (S)
Damage: 600
Cycle Interval: .2
Energy/Shot: 10
Velocity: 180m/s
Range: 5s
Weight: 400kg

From that you can define a default large weapon, something like the following:

Default Large Weapon - (L)
Damage: 750
Cycle Interval: .10
Energy/Shot: 7
Velocity: 190m/s
Range: 5s
Weight: 800kg

That might be a little rough, but its certainly a start in the right direction. If a L port weapon isn't about this good, you'd always prefer to use a ship with more S port weapons instead, especially since most L port carrying ships are presumably a little more massy than thier S port carrying counterparts.

And from those two weapons you can begin diversifying your weapons by increasing one advantage to make a weapon more specialized, while proportionately decreasing another statistic to keep the weapon balanced.
Nov 19, 2004 johnhawl218 link
wether weapons are stronger faster use less energy there will always be ther uber set that everyone will eventually figure out and use, which will become the standard set. A way to diversify would be to make different types of defensive messures, like shields, hull armor, anti-missle intercepters, etc. If those were introduced into the game then one set of weapons may work great for one type of fighter but would be totally useless to another forcing you to know your enemy and equip accordingly.

An example would be:
Ship with shields can deflect energy based weapons upto a certain amount of damage, but is totally vulnerable to projectile weapons.

Ships with thicker hulls can take a pounding from projectiles but energy weapons make the armor overheat and there can be explosions.

anti-missles is pretty cut and dry, but there could be several more, this is just off the top of my head.

This idea also would mean that the ships themselves would need to be more customizable, though I think this is needed as well. There should just be generic ship chassies that we then equip personally. We should be able to select what types of weapons ports we want on our ships, there should be a generic amount of space available for weapon slots. Also, we should be able to select our armor types or combinations of both, as well as battery types and hopefully someday engine types for faster ships.
Nov 20, 2004 Celebrim link
"A way to diversify would be to make different types of defensive messures, like shields, hull armor, anti-missle intercepters, etc."

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/1494#16495

Notice the date of the post.

"We should be able to select what types of weapons ports we want on our ships, there should be a generic amount of space available for weapon slots. Also, we should be able to select our armor types or combinations of both, as well as battery types and hopefully someday engine types for faster ships."

Not too long ago, you used to be able to select your engine type. Unfortunately, it lead to balance issues. Plus, being able to choose your engine isn't nearly as interesting as you might think. There was pretty much always a best engine, and being able to choose your engine didn't lead to more diversity.

There has been a fair ammount of talk about volume systems to allow you to select your slots of various sorts. It's my opinion that this actually isn't as interesting as you might think either. You actually get alot more variaty out of not being able to select what slots your ship has.

You might find this an interesting read as well.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/2402?page=1
Nov 20, 2004 andreas link
400kg is way to light for a L-port weapon. I like the current weight, but the other stats (damage per second, speed) could be tweaked.
Nov 20, 2004 johnhawl218 link
@Celebrim

That is your opinion! Not mine…
Nov 20, 2004 Spider link
I quite agree with celebrim. The current limitations makes people change ships based on task and style, and causes more tradeoffs for other reasons.

The generic solutions are seldom as clean in the end, since the interface tends to be confusing, and it leads to serialization and habits, and always tend to end up with the same final solution for most players.
Nov 20, 2004 Celebrim link
jonhhawl21h: Well, sometimes when I say things here, you are right, it is just my opinion. And when its just my opinion, you are free to disagree with me, and almost certainly will be able to come up with good arguments to support your opinion. If you do that, then I'll probably nod my head and say, "Well, yeah, that's one way we could do things."

Opinions are great. Everyone has a right to them.

But sometimes when I say things they go beyond being my opinion. At there heart, games are nothing but mathimatics. If I can take one element of the game and convert it to numbers, and then contruct a mathimatical proof of a claim about that element, its no longer just my opinion. You can still disagree with me, but unfortunately you can't do so without looking a little foolish.

The first 90% of your post is either something which I can't disagree with because I can construct a mathimatical proof of it, or else I won't disagree with it because we share the same opinion.

The only part I disagree with is the idea that full customization will lead to a more complex 'better' game. That just isn't so, and it isn't just my opinion that it isn't so. It's a fact. For something like engines, it ought to be perfectly obvious that having a range of engines to choose from would probably either force us to make engines alot more complicated (which we could do, but it has problems) or else that there would be one best engine that pretty much everyone would use. Having one best of something is basically the same has not having any choices, which means that the effective number of types of ships could potentially _decrease_ if we gave people more choices.

If that isn't yet obvious on reflection, consider a simple case. Imagine the game was just a little bit simplier than now and engines just had one characteristic. You can call it thrust or maximum speed or whatever. Whatever it is, all engines are the same except for that one thing. So lets choose thrust and diversfy our engines:

Engine #1: 150N thrust
Engine #2: 160N thrust
Engine #3: 170N thrust
Engine #4: 180N thrust
Engine #5: 190N thrust

Which engine are you going to choose when deciding to equip your ship? Engine #5 is the best engine every single time no matter what sort of ship you are building. That's not an opinion. That's an absolute certainty. And the same would be true of a simple 'generator' component that produced a certain ammount of energy per second, and the same would be true of a 'capacitor' component that stored a certain maximum ammount of energy. In fact, the same is basically true of or more complex battery components. There isn't enough real complexity involved for true trade offs.

In the real game, even worse problems came up. There wasn't enough complexity in engines to make for true tradeoffs, so certain engines would tend to 'break' certain ships. An engine that might be fair on a Centaur was not fair on a Valk. To fix the problem we might have to get involved in such complexities as fuel consumption and volume. After all, thats the sort of complexities that limit the choice of engines in the real world. But these complexities themselves have problems. Alot of people would be very much opposed to a fuel system.

But what about mass? Isn't that a solution? Well, it turns out that in some cases, no it isn't. In the case of engines, mass is not actually a fully independent variable. Because what we really care about with an engine is acceleration, varying mass and thrust simulataneous doesn't lead to real complexity. If I have an array of engines of different masses and thrust, there will _still_ be one best engine which produces the best acceleration. The only difference is that it now requires some math and knowledge of physics to figure out which one. But the game isn't any more fun. It's just more complex. We don't want to do that either.