Alpha 7.6 - FEEDBACK: Damage/HP Balancing and Range Settings

Seems like the enemy POIs weapons have gotten a huge increase in range.
The red laser ones can now shoot at ranges greater than 500m, meaning that you cannot even see the POI marker before you are attacked.
Another thing is that the green lasers are now homing, which will curve to hit your ship.
So for starter planets, means that you have a greater chance of losing your ship before taking out the guns.

 

Some highly needed (and realistic) changes here for space (planet) combat. And bravo for increasing turret HP. A+

 

Neverthetheless a welcomed Change!
Now any "Crap Vessel" will have a hard time attacking a POI. Good. These things must be vanished. I'm really welcoming this change.
Any standard POI (with less or equal 6-8 Turrets) should be no problem with adequate vessel and pilot ;-)
And, only to remove this wrong rumor: Homing weapons are NOT Hit-Scan Weapons, that is, they do NOT AUTOMATICALLY HIT you!
Yes, it IS POSSIBLE to dodge these weapon shots!
Join me on Farmland, I can show you there.

But it is a problem, wenn AI Turrets can shoot you and you can't see the shooting Turret. This should deinitively be adjusted (better view distance of Turrets)!
The next ABSOLUTELY NEEDED FIX for 8.0 is the Aiming of (own) turrets. It is extremely frustrating, if you are in a WAR-TANK, already have disabled the first two Turrets, and then your turrets won't shoot anymore, because they are targeting some Sentry down in the Base, below Surface. If it's too difficult to implement Line-of-Sight for Turrets, then please give us the option to disable Sentry-Targeting (like thrusters etc.)
This is now a MUST against upped POI-Targets.

 

Yup, @rucky has it - there is little problem with new ranges, targeting and viewing your target... especially in space with smaller lighter SV

Having option to select/deselect sentry-guns will help good gaming a LOT!
It will be real 'band-aid' solution for next dev. period, until you add line-of-sight one day. Total destruction of POI from distance is not very fun

 

Well, the homing action of something that should be firing in a straight line, is a bit disparaging. Plasma bolts should not curve to hit your ship. I don't mind the changes in HP and distance, and whatnot. But the only thing that should be homing in on my SV is a rocket. Specifically, a homing rocket. Not a plasma bolt.

 

Right you are! Problem is AI does not have Homing ROCKET launchers/turrets... yet...
I do assume, this is a first test run of such a weapon...
Now imagine, AI gets player weapons (and turrets)... or better versions... hola!

 

I hope the devs do not get the impression that everyone approves of all of these major changes just because there hasn't been much feedback or complaints about it. Some of us really do not like how much more difficult these things make POIs. Also, it completely messes up the balance on muliplayer servers that have heavily customized POIs and settings. For example, take how these changes have made taking out POIs on The Wolves Community Server nearly impossible:



I've watched several of his videos and Spanj is a skilled player. And his custom ship is very well designed as this is a PVP server and he is part of the Pirate faction that goes around attacking and looting other factions.

Watch this video and then tell me that weapons are balanced appropriately. Granted, this is a custom server with custom POIs. But it's pretty clear that by making alien turrets have that many more hitpoints and by making projectiles move that fast, you make it insanely difficult.

After the part of the video where he attempts to take on a POI in space by himself, look at how beat up his PVP ship is. The front end is almost entirely gone! All of his rocket launchers are gone. All it has left are 4 lasers. Spanj explains that, since the changes in 7.6, they're forced to work as a large team of multiple ships in order to take out a single POI without heavy losses.

If it's that hard for EGS experts with PVP ships, imagine how hard it is for casual gamers like myself who never plays a game on "Hard" or "Insane" difficulty settings. Making projectiles travel that fast makes it nearly impossible for us to dodge them. And, personally, not being able to dodge enemy fire takes the fun out of combat.

Looking at the Config.ecf, I see that you've more than doubled the hitpoints of the TurretIONCannon2 from 1200 to over 2500. And the TurretIONCannon hitpoints have been increased from 1200 to 1600.

Further, making HV, SV, CV and base weapons more dangerous is really leaving the personal-scale weapons far behind.

Consider, also, that increasing the damage and speed of all weapons is going to tend to make fights shorter. And making fights shorter makes the fun shorter. Rather, I think it makes far more sense to drag out fights so that they last longer.

If the devs are set on keeping these new, incredibly difficult weapon changes, would they at least consider giving us an option in settings to adjust the difficulty?

 

They haven't added in a hit chance algorithm for NPCs yet. That'll significantly change combat and the likelihood of being hit. Since it's a custom server, they're of course welcome to edit the changes back to what they were.

I too would welcome longer, more strategic fights instead of short ones. Using shield facings effectively, rerouting power and balancing weapon use vs engine/thruster use, and so on. Sneaking up on a target, sniping them quickly, and then winning the fight 10-20 seconds later isn't really my idea of fun ship combat. I'd like to see 1, 2, or more minute-long engagements in SVs. For CVs, it would need to last even longer, 5-20 minutes or more to get through shields, armor, and finally take out subsystems or the core.

The range changes seemed worthwhile. Hitpoints on turrets needed to go up, we all knew that. Not sure why damage was increased though - shorter fights are less fun, you're right. I think fire frequency on weapons could go up a little, and have the to-hit algorithm added so it falls off the further you get (and the faster the target is moving).

 

And some players actually like this?! The devs seem to be going in the wrong direction. If anything, the range for POI weapons should have been made shorter, not longer. I'll have to keep editing my Config.ecf just to make the game playable for me, which is sad because I was planning to try playing on a server and they won't been using my changes.

 

I disagree about the new ranges and speeds being an improvement. If 'crap' vessel means 'literally anything that isn't designed to be a bullet sponge', then sure. Right now there's basically no point in building HVs or SVs for speed, because even extremely high-performance vessels can't actually evade these shots long enough to get the work done safely. So now POI raids are potentially just a matter of getting the biggest, tankiest brick possible and sitting it there with the hope of winning the damage race against the base turrets. It has just shifted the balance away from skill and towards resources. I'm not sure that improves gameplay unless the intention of gameplay is to be TurretWars 7.6.



This is my SV after dicing with a small base from a flank where only 2 green-shot turrets and 1 red-shot turret could draw a bead on me. This is an SV that gets 40m/s+ in all directions and could turn on a dime. Notice the now-exposed core. One unlucky hit to the topside would have been the end of that ship. Most SVs I've seen aren't nearly that mobile while still packing a full compliment of weapons. I was still able to take out the base, but I basically have to scrap this SV now and build a new one because manually re-building all those devices and armor plates isn't worth the trouble.

I wish this had waited until we had repair-to-blueprint. If the downtime of having to completely rebuild your ship wasn't so steep, it wouldn't be a problem.

 

They -may- be increasing draw distance in the future, and this is a step in that direction. I don't know for sure, just hypothesizing. If draw distance was 2x/3x/4x what it is now, and POIs could be marked by sensors from your ship, then the ranges they fire on you from would be less of a concern. I'll wait and see before judging the change too harshly myself.

 

While this video does highlight some of the problem, I think it needs to be stressed that the green turrets are another matter entirely, and can't be evaded with conventional maneuvers. If even 4-8 of those turrets had been green, those guys probably would have been decimated.

Now, all this said, I do like the difficulty this presents. I want to start a new playthrough right now so I can fight for those POI resources. But the downtime it potentially forces is too high without better means of repairing our ships.

 

So I attacked that POI, went back to my carrier, made the post about it, then went back to the POI to finish it off and all the turrets had respawned, cored my SV, and destroyed it completely, killing my character in the process.

So super-turrets that also immediately respawn. Not sure if that's intentional, but I guess I'll be waiting for 8.0 now.

 

I've had to use WinMerge to compare, line by line, my old Config.ecf with the new Config_Example.ecf. And I noticed something:
Why on earth did you guys decide to hide the Range for weapons? (Before, the Config had "Range: -, display: true", but now it is set to "false".) What purpose does that serve, aside from forcing players to either refer to the (highly outdated) wiki or forums for weapon range or just guess?

Edit:

Argh! You've actually reduced the range of most player weapons, including personal scale weapons. Even the range of the personal rocket launcher was reduced!! Meanwhile, the range on alien weapons is longer or even increased! (For example, the TurretEnemyLaserWeapon had it's base range increased from 530 to 650 and given a Range in Space of 875.) The devs are definitely changing things in the WRONG direction.

 

Bruh

You're not making a good case here. That custom PoI had like 40 gun turrets or more. He would have won 3 or 4 times over if it had been a vanilla PoI.

And he even lived, flew away, and his ship still had all its guns intact. Looks like a success to me. Disassemble that mess, throw the parts back into the factory, and have a brand new one in like 5 minutes once you add the missing iron and sathium.

That looks like exactly the kind of fun battle I want to have.

 

Like MidasGunhazard pointed out, he would have been toast if even a few of those turrets were the green type. Also, as I said, he's an expert player with a PVP ship on a PVP server. For casual gamers who are used to single-player games and using ships built for looks rather than performance, that's setting the bar rather high.

I think you need to watch the video again because I don't believe we saw the same thing. Yes, he flew away - after almost half his ship and all of his missile launchers were gone. But PVP ships are designed so that vitals like the Core and Fuel Tanks are the last to go. More importantly, he clearly lost that fight. He may have survived, but the POI he was attacking was still intact. He barely scratched it.

If that's the kind of Mission Impossible battle you want to experience, then it sounds like you're a glutton for punishment. Perhaps you're a hardcore gamer who prefers to play on Hard, Expert or Impossible difficulties? Nothing wrong with that, of course. But not all gamers are like that.

 

A custom POI means you don't have a good baseline for comparison. Especially if it's bristling with turrets on a custom server. If the POI was created for a certain challenge level in mind, and the game's assets increase in power, the POI needs to be adjusted, NOT the code the devs are putting out.

Methinks that's not exactly the feedback @Hummel-o-War is looking for in this case.

 

Cleared out the POI a little while ago, and this was my reward after detonating the 'advanced base' switch near the core to reveal the 3 containers:



Totally worth scrapping an SV and a half over.