I understand, but what you asking for can easily make cv's untouchable. It would require a very precise fine tuning to those weapons if you dont want an unbalanced game. CV's are not really a counter for SV's, and that is the reason why almost all the real naval battles without air superiority is lost. We can use a little better targeting, but what we really need is fighter escorts.
the thing is decoys arent a problem, they add depth to pvp ship building and make pvp a lot more interesting. most people who complain about decoys are players who are salty that they got beat up by someone who had decoys also yes the problem with svs dodging is that turrets cant consistently hit them, partly due to the ai just missing, and partly due to the sv dodging any projectiles by moving faster than they can curve no, im not talking about balancing them to be equal or similar to t1 rcs, im talking about balancing t2 rcs to how it actually works in game instead of just going off what you think it should be also i said a 50-75% nerf because on our test server we tried nerfing them by 50% and it makes them feel a lot more reasonable, and going much further past a 75% nerf would just end up being ridiculous
So let me get this straight then what ur saying. Abusing "unintented exploits" is equal to "having depth" just so you can have the upper hand and win, because it's in the current game mechanics. And SV's dodging CV turret fire is "broken" and needs fixing, because you'll loose the upper hand, not because it's in the current mechanics. Yh, pretty deep ...
Well, SVs just don't have weapons with CV-level punch, so it would make sense that most SVs wouldn't be able to do more than harass a well-armed-and-armored CV. To go up against a CV, SVs need one or more substantially more powerful weapons that should usually be fairly useless against an SV (unless the SV doesn't dodge at all), but would be able to track a slower-accelerating CV (some kind of large missile or torpedo, say). Both the launcher and the ordinance would be fairly large and massive, soft-restricting arrays of such weapons to SVs in a dedicated anti-CV/BA role. With the right balance, going up against a CV in one of those anti-CV/BA ships might not end well without support/distractions from other ships, though. Well, right now they exploit a quirk of the turret AI, which isn't great. Better would be some kind of ECM/jamming that disrupted/degraded enemy firing solutions, deployed via the ship's sensor system. So, to put it another way, I think I agree with the high-level concept, but disagree with the current "implementation." It'd be a 25% boost in output and 7 fewer devices; but I'll concede that the boost in output maybe could be higher (50%, say). In any case, the size increase is also important so that it discourages using higher-tier devices on very small ships. It's the largest ships that need the most torque (since the moment of inertia increases with the square of the dimension), and therefore higher-tier RCS should be targeted toward being used by large rather than small CVs. Note that you'll never end up fixing the SV vs CV turning rate issue if you allow CV RCS (regardless of tier) to have vastly higher torque output per unit volume as compared to SV RCS. Also, it's worth noting that RCS on all ships needs to consume substantial power (comparable to or exceeding that of thrusters) when active. That should also put a dent in super-fast-turning CVs.
That is basically how naval air combat works. In fact, this is how any military organization works. Specialized units for certain tasks, copying this at least for some extend would be a good solution for the game. Like you cant have lots of sv weapons when you install an anti cv weapon. That might work.
Or, at least, if you want to pack on a lot of anti-SV weapons in addition to one or more anti-CV weapons, you end up having to make one or more tradeoffs like larger size or less armor or lower acceleration or less ammo capacity. With the right balance, it's an optimization problem with no global optimal configuration .
if the only part you dont like is that its not technically an intended feature then just do what space engineers does and add a block called a decoy that does the exact thing decoys do in empyrion
Would there also be a way to mitigate the effect decoys have on your turrets? If not, then they become mandatory for survival. The reason I suggest doing it through a sensor system is that it gives a lot more flexibility. If you're jamming your opponents, you won't have as much of your sensor array available to cut through their jamming. You can also simply build a massive sensor array and through enough power at the problem to break through jamming (resulting in a very specialized ship); bonus points if the system also allows you to share your findings with factionmates, enabling them to do effective targeting with a smaller sensor array. And, if the sensor system has a distance dependence (as it should), you can improve your ability to lock onto your opponent by getting close to them. Basically, I think the notion of a simple decoy device misses a lot of the depth that one could have with a properly designed system.
ik, strawmans are fun but for actually having decoys it helps if you actually understand what theyre doing and why theyre used so if you think about cv pvp it really comes down to one thing, stopping your enemies turrets from firing before yours stop firing. this is generally done by shooting off their turrets. and to shoot off the enemies turrets before yours get shot off theres 2 things you can do, do more dps, or make your turrets survive for longer the first is the easiest, since dps is capped per ship your only option is to have more ships the second however is more complex, since there isnt just 1 way to make your turrets last for longer to figure out how you can make your turrets last for longer it helps to think about how your turrets can get shot off this can be done by either the enemy's turrets shooting them off or the enemy using manual weapons to snipe them most turret damage is done by rockets, both manual and turret, since they do significantly more damage than cannons and hit much more consistently than plasma/arty for countering manual fire theres really only 2 options, turret placement and piloting. theres nearly infinite ways to do both of those, some being better than others, and it would take far too long to explain all the depth in those 2 aspects. and for making turrets last longer against other turrets of course turret placement and piloting are still important, but theres one much more powerful solution, decoys decoys allow a ship to trade cost and weight in armor to distract enemy turret fire for an amount of time and with various amount of consistency depending on decoy placement they add tremendous depth to building since their effectiveness can be varied by how deep the decoy(s) are, spacing from turrets on the ship, amount of decoys and their relative placement, piloting, armor depth on sides, top/bottom, front, etc etc they also add extra skill to cv duels as manual guns dont care about decoys, so manual rockets can be used to snipe turrets while bypassing the decoys on ships, this makes the manual rockets easily the strongest and most important guns on a cv overall decoys add a significant amount of depth and skill to shipbuilding and piloting before attempting to make baseless arguments about a feature that you dont like attempting to make people think its an exploit at least try to educate yourself a little
decoys effectively add a timer onto turrets depending on how much armor the enemy have, this being how long itll take for your turrets to chew through the enemies armor before they can then target the enemies turrets having this "timer" adds a period of time where basically any size ship is equal and the fight is purely down to piloting skill and the aiming ability of the players fighting, this is why a 30k can stomp a 230k ship if the 30k is piloted by a much better player the advantage of larger ships is that they have a longer "timer" so if you can prevent the enemy from manually shooting off your turrets you're much more likely to win if your ship has a longer "timer" also im not sure why you think having them be "mandatory for survival" is bad thing, since while they arent technically mandatory neither are rocket turrets, but they do add a significant advantage. i think its better to think of decoys instead of being a block you place and then automatically gain an advantage and instead think of them as just one of the variables in ship building such as device placement, acceleration, etc also, although a scanning/jamming system would be cool it would just add another advantage to defense which right now is really not needed, also it sounds like it would scale horribly, encouraging people to build excessively large ships in order to be able to jam most ships while being in no danger of themselves getting jammed if you can think of a way to avoid encouraging larger ships while also making it not to over powered then it might be a nice replacement for the current shield system as shields are very broken right now and really dont work too well in empy
That's fair, it wasn't a good argument on my part. Well, the thing is, every subsystem is going to be better at what it does the larger you make it if it's designed to scale (and subsystems need to be able to scale because they have to work for ships ranging from small SVs to very large CVs). The key is to make it impossible to keep scaling up any particular subsystem without having significant downsides in the process. Ultimately, because of the square-cube law and the R^2 term in the moment of inertia, scaling up your ship to handle a larger sensor array (including the extra generators, CPU nodes, and fuel tanks needed to directly support the sensor array) entails a nonlinear decrease in the maneuverability of your ship. And if the effectiveness of jamming ends up dropping off after you get close enough to a ship (so that the turrets could use optical targeting, say), then growing your sensor array without limit isn't going to be at all optimal (as enemy ships will be able to close quickly with you due to your low acceleration, and render your jamming ineffective by staying right on top of you). Changing thruster and RCS stats will shift around the optimal ship size for a given mass, so that would be a free parameter for the purposes of discouraging too large of ships. In any case, I would envision the sensor system to be a separate subsystem from shields, not a replacement. I will agree that the shield system is definitely not the system I'd have liked to see, particularly because it doesn't scale very well at all (in-place upgrades offer very little in the way of scaling). EDIT: I should also note that the effectiveness of jamming should decrease with increasing range as well, since what you're doing is radiating into an ever-larger sphere. Specifically, your jamming strength goes as 1/r^2 (r is the distance between you and your opponent). So, while your jamming might confuse guided munitions when they get close to you, your opponent's direct-fire turrets might not have any problem precisely targeting you if the turrets have long enough range.
Before attempting putting words in to my mouth twisting their meanings you need to remember first rule in PVP to have fun is Balance. That is far from baseless arguments to me. When abusing the game mechanics in to an exploit is my opinion. What other people think is theirs. People are capable of thinking for themselves and making up their own mind. And there's no need to come of as if i fail at self education. Uncalled for passive aggresive attitude . We obviously have different definitions. If this method is deemed valid for use by the devs, i simply will not further engage in PVP gameplay for this game. If the devs wanted decoys, they would have put it in the game. Like flares perhaps or other methods. As of yet they haven't. I seek good honest fun, with the emphasis on honest. Don't feel the need building 50 layer tasteless damage soak lumps that can fly and shoot. If that is the future vision for CV's, i'll pass.
One of the problems is fire rates. The AI leads its shots, which is good, but because every AI controlled turret has a hard cap of 0.5 ROF it's very to time your strafing. The other problem is projectile speed like you mentioned. I've quadrupled the project speeds of many turrets and even with speeds as high as 650 (on planet) they are still easy to strafe in a ship with relatively poor agility. I agree with the AI targeting being a problem too even for PVE. I haven't taken my ship design as far as the design earlier but the effect is the same. The AI likes to shoot your guns first now so if you spread them out it you take relatively little damage regardless of how you fly because they no longer attack any other part of your ship until they're gone.
This can be fixed in the POI design I believe. You can set guns to target generators instead, though then people would just spread out their generators instead.
This is why I mentioned in another thread that turrets should have their own screen for so that you can prioritise exactly what they shoot at. Each turret type could have a list of 5 (or 10) different items you could prioritise. You could set it different for each battle. This would greatly reduce the use of 'decoys'.
A mechanic that is common in such games, and in real life for that matter, is a Target Lock. I would love to be able to lock up a single target and be able to track it, and gain an advantage in shooting it. Course prediction, better leading the target with direct fire weapons, and thus a much enhanced hit probability would be the result. Those homing missiles in particular should then gain a huge edge, and also every weapon as well. Of course this opens a can of worms, in that with a lock up system I want a hostile lock indicator (Alien Drone Base has a Target Lock on you). Once we have that we then get into counter measures, electronic warfare and so on.
Haven't decoys always been a part of the game and part of build strategy? What is different now when compared to alpha 11? I am not sure I am following the root of the problem. I certainly understand how decoys help avoid being hit. Has there effectiveness at doing so increased somehow?
easy solution, bring back core targeting, try sticking your core out on a limb and see how long you last
For that we'd need a targeting system similar to Elite, where you can target subsystems of a vessel you aim at. True, one can set up turrets in the control panel, but frankly those settings only fit PvE (static), because for PvP vessels are (each) built differently and you might need to change your 'priority' of the turrets.. doing that in the CP = death in PvP (At least if you're in an active fight). Just teasing.. if building a decoy-exploit is deep.... Would having flares (counter rocket things) be an abyss? Would they even be needed, since the rockets do not turn fast enough anyway. I'd be voting for a PLAYER-weapon boost (speed, turnrates (, maybe even range - in space)). Meanwhile make the NPC turrets have more HP for balancing purposes. PvP takes long enough as it is, make it quicker. -- Not that I actualy play PvP 'active', but I give it a try every now and then to test my PvE ship
