Shotgun slices through walls like hot knife through butter. Yesterday I took on a com base: 1) Motorbike slalom through the plasma cannon fire to the base wall. Risky, but fun. 2) Shoot three guards in the hangar bay, put a couple shots into the back wall - epic loot chest. 3) Blast through chest and there's the base core. Pop. No more plasma cannons, no anti-personal turrets, no more spawners. A couple minutes to mop up the left overs. That's just a bit too pat. I like the idea of being able to burrow under bases, or blast through walls and doors - but structural walls should be essentially impervious to small arms fire, requiring rocket launchers or HE charges to blow through, and armored walls should be impervious to anything other than placed charges. Only doors and windows should be so vulnerable to small arms. Perhaps there could be some kind of outright armor values on these suckers that a weapon needs some kind of penetration stat to beat before it can damage it? As it stands now, the walls in most bases are nothing more than a 'polite suggestion' to anyone with a T2 shotgun, sort of like police line caution tape.
It would be nice if the T2 versions of basic projectile weapons, rather than doing vastly more damage, had better firing characteristics. Faster ROF, less kick, bigger magazines, less scatter, better scope/sights... But it's kind of odd that the same bullet does twice as much damage coming out of this rifle, rather than that one. It also makes the advanced energy weaponry seem kind of lame by comparison. You need these expensive new ammo types for guns that don't really do any more DPS than the upgraded T2 projectiles, which are cheap as dirt to fire. Further, the laser rifle, is far less accurate than any weapon other than the rocket launcher.
I think balanced wise, they're moderately fine. They just need smoothing out. Of course, the reload animation is something needed to be done. Adding more really late game weapons would be fun, so stuff like melee or more laser guns.
Hand weapons are hyper accurate. The lack of travel time on basic projectile weapons, and a lack of real scatter make enemy ground soldiers relatively uninteresting and deadly to fight. Basically a war of ammo and healing resource attrition. Because of the lack of projectile travel time, Evasion is essentially pointless unless you can quickly get behind hard cover, and the only way to go toe to toe with an opponent is to continually 'suppress' them with your own fire. As a result, engaging more than one soldier in LOS at a time is fairly suicidal. Distance doesn't help much either as the scatter on most weapons is so low that you are effectively either in range, or you are not. There is very little 'middle ground' to exploit. Enemies never dodge or evade when shot, which would give you some time to change targets and disrupt multiple opponents, by spreading fire among them. As it stands the only effective method for ground combat is to fight around corners so you can face one opponent at a time, suppress it with constant fire until it dies, then retreat, reload, and lure the next one out, always ducking to cover if two or more enemies are ever in LOS. - Suggest adding projectile travel time and real scatter to projectile weapons, more severe for lower tier/shorter range weapons. Scatter should increase quickly with rapid shots, favoring lower rates of fire at longer ranges. Travel time will make evasive tactics more viable, as it generally is in SV combat. - Suggest giving enemy units more variable accuracy profiles. Having them all behave as inhumanly accurate marksmen is not interesting, and basically becomes an exercise in exploiting poor cornering/pathing AI. - Suggest adding in more variable movement behavior and animations to enemy soldiers. Evasion, panic, cover seeking, aggression, etc. Their tendency to mindlessly walk in your general direction makes them both predictable and exploitable in suitably complex terrain, and obnoxiously deadly in the open.
Heavy drones aren't. Finally got out of my home system, to the other 'terran' planet (forget it's name). Started running into heavy drones there - but they seem virtually no tougher than the ones I was fighting at the start of the game, and now I have a pulse rifle, so in effect they seem much weaker. (EDIT: actually, it turns out that most of the large/heavy drones ARE considerably tougher - though not very dangerous other than to your ammo supply... It is specifically the Large Cannon Drone that appears to be made of tissue paper, so it may just be a missing zero in its hit points. - but this was the predominant drone on the planet I was playing on last night, today I went to one of the lava planets and encountered other large/heavy drones with considerably more HP, but still quite easy to evade.) As with soldiers, it would help greatly if the drones engaged in a wider range of combat behaviors, such as sudden lateral evasion, hit & runs, bobbing, and so forth, to make targeting a more interesting problem and not a simple matter of suppressing them with a continuous stream of fire. (Normal difficulty, btw).
Maybe add legendary level weapons for completing complex / long missions. Add Armor options (and legendary armor for special missions).
I want Epic CV/SV/HV weapons. Please please please give me a reason to care about losing my ship and about killing aliens.
Maybe remove epic weapon drops entirely and replace them with constructor recipes so that you can craft epic weapons on demand. As mentioned above, this idea could also be expanded to include epic weapons for vehicles. If you've fought through a POI and found the recipe/blueprint, you've earned the right to craft one on demand imo.
To be honest i don't mind the currently availlable weapons. I only wait for some mods that implement energy weapons (and finally a decent shield system) that are based on the ships energy generation, instead of using actual ammunition (except for missile weapons).
I would really like to see Turrets on ships be more configurable. Specifically, if I approach a base with a core, my turret will just sit there expending all of its ammo, trying to shoot trhough layers of steel blocks to the core. I'm planning to go in and pop the core myself, so there is no need for my ship to try to do it for me. If I turn off the turret, or set the targets to less than "all of them", then it will happily sit there and let itself get blown up by any drone that happens by. If I leave it running, it will run itself out of ammo, and then happily sit there and let itself get blown up by any drone that happens by. I would like to see something like "Aggressors" added to the turret config. The only advantage so far for my ship to shoot at the core like this, so far, is that it is pointing it out for me (spent 30 minutes trying to find a core earlier, finally just turned my hv turrent on and it was just "hey, it's right there, you blind fool").
I don't use energy weapons but for ballisitc guns: I love the new scopes. - Not every model has its own but they look much better then everything we had so far. Also, the freez when scoping in the first time seems gone. Gun sounds are good too but they are not in sync with the fired bullets eg assault and puls rifle. No biggy but that would make em real good. Range is a still bit short especially for the rocket launcher. Range in space is pointless against ship weapons and on the planet it doesnt feel like an anti air weapon because you're already in melee combat with the drones when it reaches effective range. The Shotgun may need an aimpoint instead of scope because of the range you usually use it. @Poi range: Well if you increase the range then pls add a way to spot em. Since res scarcity after wipe forced me to mine with a glass canon i got shot down multiple times. No radar contact and no base popped in the visible range. Very annoying. It almost feels like a way to bring the shoot through terrain feature back in @CV Rocket launcher: I have them covered with side armor but sometimes thes crash against it while flying and shooting. It would be great to avoid it my own FF and enjoy a bit protection for my main guns. p.s. its been a while since there've been flaks and stuff for bases and cv's but when u made the update i had shittons of BA ammo in my cv boxes. So for future changes like that it would be great to get the right ammo or at least the res back for already produced bullets.
The weapons balancing is the worst part of this game in multi-player. When a faction sets up a small tower and adds 12 turrets, it is impossible to take that tower down without 20 death cubes. The turrets should not target the core. They should random hit. If 12 turrets all target the same area of a ship, one hit and its all over. And that's what happens every time. There is no point to PVP. There is no balance. I can't understand why there is no weapons grouping. This is pretty standard in most games today. You can never tell if you have hit your target from a distance. Or what damage you have done. Range is not a constant. You can not have variable range on weapons in games since there is no way of telling how close or far you can approach a target or how far your weapons or your enemies will shoot. I love this game but at its current development it is just not balanced at all for PVP. Even the server I play on, most people just build. There is hardly any battles. I voted for this game as Indie game of the year. Congrats on getting 4th place. I hope the future of PVP will balance as time goes on. Sincerely, Grand
After some time to think about this, I think actually that it would be better to add "Structures" to the list in the turret configs, then I can still have them shoot automatically at everything except buildings. I would also be handy to tell my turrets to target enemy turrets instead of the core. The Rebel Galaxy turret configs come to mind here. Primary target for this turret is "capitol ships", primary target for that one is "fighters", and so on.
The weapons balancing is the worst part of this game in multi-player especially actual for PVP. The main problem I see is CVs are not balanced. Autominers are always placed on planets so each faction needs to protect their autominers on planets and the most PVP battles are planetary. There is a great amount of awesome weapon already in the game but many turrets are 'only functional in space'. I dont understand why there is a great limitation of PVP content like this. CVs are useless because of every SV can easily destroy it in planetary fight even if SV costs 30 times less than CV. Now there is a bug that allows bases to use 'space only' turrets on planets. And they are really strong enough as they need to be to protect themselves from SVs but bases still can be raided by heavy armored SVs if they cost a lot. If you want to raid a base you need to build a thing with amount of resources compared to amount of resource needed to build a base. CVs are hard to build consumes a lot of fuel so I expect this expensive things to be strong. If their 'space turrets' will be allowed to use in atmosphere it will bring a great PVP content improvement that allows players to use CVs in siege fights with bases if CV cost is compared to base cost and to use CV in other types of battles and bring a good COST/USABILITY proportion in Empyrion PVP. I advice to remove this serious content limitation. The only things that really needs to be disabled in planetary battles are CVs manual weapons. All turrets are well balanced already. I really want to see battle CV frighters in Empyrion that can resist SVs easily if my CV costs 30 times more than SV. Allowing space turrets everywhere will make big expensive ships strong against small cheap ships if small ships are not specially designed to fight big ships. My 'suggestions' thread: http://empyriononline.com/threads/pvp-content-improvement-is-needed.8794/ Proof of 'Bases are allowed to use space turrets': Proof of 'Space weapons are not so overpowered in atmosphere': Proof #1 of 'CVs are useless in planetary combat': Proof #2 of 'CVs are useless in planetary combat': Base with space turrets can protect itself easily from cheap SV: If devs will disable space turrets for bases it will make them vulnurable again like it was before rebalance when cheap SV could destroy heavy armored and strong armed base without any problems. So the best way to bring balance to PVP is to remove 'only space' option from turrets. It will make expencive things (CVs/Bases) strong enough to resist cheaper ones. Balance based on economics. Do not forget: 1) Bases will always be strongest structure in game because everyone is allowed to place an unlimited amount of fully armed bases in one place and cover them with unlimited amount of fully armed hovers and CVs. But only 1 CV/SV/HV might be under each players control when attacking others. 2) Planetary battles are more various because of HVs are planetary only and there are points of interest like minerals and water and players are always hanging on planets 90% of their time. So its good idea to improve planetary PVP but not to limit it or force players to fight in space if they want to use different weapon. Removing 'only space' option will bring many new ways of enjoying PVP and many new styles of fighting. 3) There will be always a way to avoid fight with stronger CVs for SVs because of they are faster and consumes much less fuel.
Last I heard the Devs were pondering a dynamic of making CVs the Kings of Space, but vulnerable on Planets on purpose. Also it's not unfair for Planetary Bases to be very strong on purpose considering one of their Prices for it is they are completely immobile & have ZERO Evasion Stat. Also, HV Artillery Turrets can be useful vs Bases, & now for non-Underground Planetary Bases, Mining HVs & 'Sapping Tactics' can now be a thing as well... Also i'd like for there to be more good reason to make Space Bases considering Space Bases have to face the FULL power of CVs in Combat.
Thank you for review. I see Devs are going to make CVs space kings and SVs planet kings but its very bad idea! One of the game main features is customisation. It means you can do whatever you want but not "what Devs want you to do". Its wrong decision to force players to fight in space but right decisio is to allow players to fight in space if they want. Its wrong decision to make planetary bases bad and space bases good but right decision is to allow players to build strong bases (if you like space - build in space. If I like planets I will build on planets). Its bad idea to make ships specialisations like this ships are for space and this ships are for planets but good idea is to allow players customise ships for their needs. Let players decide what kinds of enjoying game they like. More different ways of enjoying are in the game more players will like it. And there is already an easy way to add at least 3 new types of combat (CV vs SV, CV vs BA, CV vs HV especially. It can never happened in space because of HVs are planetary) with new strategies and tactics.
I thought so too. But for a while now my standard CV has ~60 turrets. So the fire on turrets command might not work in these dimensions - or at least it wont be very precise/satisfying. So it prolly would be better to have something like extra control blocks eg for weapon groups. And you may target these blocks. - Also not very satisfying but with 10 or more turrets the selection of em as single target becomes pointless.
