CVs can dock to CVs. The way I use to defeat a shielded POI is to cycle between two small combat CVs so that the POI shields don't start recovering. Make sure you clear the landing zone of any ground combatants. You can do this with one CV if you can find a terrain location that blocks the POIs turrets but still let you hit a piece of the POI - like a tall tower or antenna.
You mean my point about everyone being responsible for their own fun in a sandbox game, the one about how slavish devotion to optimization for the sake of social acceptance makes that impossible, or the one about POIs mainly existing to provide you a good fight?
You're giving a good resume here when playing multiplayer, but in single player attacking a POI is not quite that fun: If you are within 200 m away you can take coverage of a mountain or obstacle and pound the turrets with rocket launchers otherwise you need an armored cockpit to deal with it, suicide approaches with motorbikes are hit-or-miss runs and you often need God mode to get to your backpack again, that's where it's no fun anymore. And I was only speaking here about un-shielded POIs. For shielded ones, the underground approach that players have been using for years is purely making usage of a game bug which never was resolved: A shielded POI should have all blocks undestroyable until the generators are out, inclusive blocks in the underground, so this is NOT supposed to work (or you first disable the shield directly) - but it does work indeed; is it fun? That's questionable, it sounds more like a cheap exploit for me. And once the shield or the the turret is destroyed it's more a milk run than a real challenge, except for the traps that POI builders have setup inside the POI for you and just add to the multiple death sequences in the game, again God mode to recover etc. I dunno, the whole combat mechanic could be better done, or it's crazy easy or deadly within seconds, something is missing for me but I cannot tell exactly what it is. As for the picture above (showing an artillery gun on some ship?) this too is NOT supposed to be in the vanilla game where you can only use projectile turrets with a ship planetside. As I already said in my previous answer above, you basically have no other choice than using a HV with artillery against shielded POIs, else you need to go around the game mechanics with mods or other weird playing method which is not in the game as a default setting, again except with suicide-type attacks where you are more busy to be in god mode to correct your mischief. And there is another aspect in the game combat mechanic that is not fun, although totally ok and logical: You need to core the POI as soon as possible if you are there with a SV in the vicinity so you can dock to the POI and avoid the SV being destroyed by some drones while you are inside the POI. Or you need to leave your SV out of render range which is very unpractical for cargo collecting reasons.
What's missing is opportunities for skillful play. Infantry combat is all about attrition, patience, and careful observation. You get the best results from checking out every single room ahead of time to find its turrets and trap, slowly picking them off one by one from the doorway, and creeping from cover to cover to block line of sight from mobs that spawn. Doing this rewards you with one room's worth of progress at minimal cost to materiel. If you try to YOLO your way through, you'll be cut down by sentries on the ceiling and converging fire from mobs, and left with a huge armor repair and medical bill. The tools you have to succeed in infantry combat are, in a word, simplistic. You don't have many verbs. You can shoot your weapons and walk around, and that's about it. Your jetpack doesn't do much in most POIs without large rooms and high ceilings. The F5 drone is a handy scout, but is of no help once the shooting starts. There's no much opportunity to do more than basic pie slicing. Every fight means damaging hundreds of thousands of credits worth of armor, weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies. Recovering enough optronics and other loot to cover the cost is a tall order. However much you take from the wreckage, the net gain will be dwarfed by the profits you could make trading instead.
I still think that POI's shields protecting EVERY SINGLE BLOCK was a less than ideal way to implement shields. Having a POI-cracking HV, SV or even CV pounding away at a shield until it falls, then breaking through blocks is a perfectly valid method on its own. However, what we're missing is the on-foot POI assault, sneaking (if we could sneak) past the defences then breaking through a Door. I'd have all "device" class blocks not covered by a shield, so an on-foot infiltration in viable. However, this leads to another issues... Once upon a time, it was pretty easy to clear even the hardest POI's on foot as you simply had to shoot out the spawn pads before the enemies spawned. Basically, the spawners didn't trigger until waaaaay too late, allowing us to do this. To counter this, things went excessively in the opposite direction, invisible, invulnerable spawners - zero counter. I get rather frustrated in POI's where you just KNOW that it's been set up so the enemies will pop-in out of thin air right behind you. This alone disincentivises me from assaulting a POI in any "regular" way. Enemies just popping in out of nowhere is a bit lame. Scouting ahead with the Drone? Pointless. Trying to clear out enemies in a tactical manner? Nope. Add to that the wonky hit boxes where it's all too possible to be "hit" by an enemy, but return fire is somehow blocked despite clear LoS on the target. Oh, and big foes walking clean through small gaps. Even once you memorise a POI, so you know exactly when and where a given enemy will pop in, it gets old quickly. Add to that enemies that spawn, run through the player, then proceed to "hit" them while being immune to return fire due to clipping issues. I feel that things still need a substantial amount of refinement in this regard. I look at ways to think outside the box - perfectly valid if the game allows it - just to avoid the frustrating experience of numerous POI's. I've drilled underground and blown a hole in the underside of a POI - fun - and invaded from below. I've remembered where a POI's Core is and just sniped it with a vessel, chipping through blocks until it's dead. I've hovered above POI's letting my CV's turrets chip away while the POI cannot return fire due to elevation. I've even planted down mini Turret POI's, exploiting LoS so my BA can hit the POI, but not the other way around. All these to a degree valid vs. a shielded POI. I think the inability to break into a POI until the shields are down takes away a lot of potential gameplay opportunities. Brute force is still on the table, but a smarter approach is not. Once inside, the "magical" spawning of enemies just plain frustrates. As does the whole who can hit who issue with collision detection. POI's should be more fun that this. Sometimes I'll encounter an older POI, with the old spawners. Now, in the current game, these spawners activate sooner, so it's rare to be able to snipe them before something spawns. However, I can stop reinforcements spawning after the initial group are dealt with. Also, these foes are spawning from more logical locations, perhaps a Barracks type room or somesuch, then they path to the player's location, not teleport on top of them. It's almost like an unofficial set of rules needs to be applied to how a POI can operate in the game Lore. Enemies teleporting in is valid, and we assume that the regular spawners are simple, one-way teleporters for that purpose. However, enemies popping in via invisible methods strikes me as a cheap and cheesy way to increase difficulty, taking away from the POI. What I LIKE to see in a POI is concealed guns surprising me - though I wish the game's positional sound actually worked so I knew where the gunfire was coming from - enemies emerging from a room, where they've spawned off-screen, to ambush me - not magically behind me. I think I've become less tolerant of many of the game's quirks over the years. Rather than battling on in certain situations, I just lose interested. "Infected" by that critter that could in no valid way hit me? Nope! Item Menu and cured. Taking heavy damage from something attacking through a solid block? Nope, didn't happen. Clear LoS yet every shot "hits" another block that's not in the way? Nope. Turrets just deciding not to play ball today during the pre-on-foot assault stage? *sigh* I'm glad we still have access to the console, it's simply vital to work around many of these frustrations. I know death in game has minimal consequences (good, most of my deaths aren't valid) but I still play like it does. I play Solo and I think a lot of POI's are geared towards groups of players, which is fine. It's also often possible to blaze through a POI internally when you have the best armour and weapons, especially in a group it can become trivially easy. However, alone, things just don't work as well. While a stealthy, slow and steady approach, clearing threats as they appear should be a valid tactic, it doesn't really work so well. I'd hope that my (arguably) greater skill having played for ages would give me an edge. I.e. I can invade a "tougher" POI with lower-level gear due to my more methodical approach and better accuracy. I can to a degree, but I still fall foul of magical spawning enemies, where the only realistic option is to tank some damage, not being hit at all (my go to tactic) simply isn't an option as the POI isn't set up that way. Perhaps I'm a little salty today, hence the ramble, but I do think my points are valid. There should be more ways to assault a POI than there are. Perhaps one day. On a more positive note, hope everyone is having a good day. Friday! Weekend inbound! lol.
Which is why I've said in other posts that I think the frequency of hitscan weapons is a bad choice for the way the game plays. It basically guarantees taking damage once enemies spot you. By I won't repeat myself all over again. The other thing is that HVs and SVs are woefully underpowered. Now, I play a lot of PvP, so I have built myself a tank that pushes the absolute limit of what's possible. It's full meta design to the extreme. With it, I can solo any POI or POI group in the game. But the thing is, the sweeping majority of players aren't going to build like that and might never figure it out. (I do plan on putting some good stuff on the workshop). (Also, I did learn from the best of the best, I'm not just boasting here.). My point is, all of the best HVs built in or on the workshop are almost entirely incapable of taking on the stronger POIs. Most players run in until their shields go down and then they either run or they lose the whole HV. Even still, HVs have a hard time breaking shields without losing a lot of parts. Further still it takes a decent amount of sustained fire to start killing turrets on the POI. All this just pushes players to cheese it, or at best, pushes them to break shields and then run back to land Artillery from out of range. Which is boring as hell. Now, I'd definitely like to see players building better HVs. A tank really should be able to tank some hits. But even some of the ones on the workshop should be able to do something, and they mostly don't. The main thing is that HVs have no choice but to tank hits. Most incoming fire is unavoidable for HVs, and HV weapons to relatively little damage. I've played with some configs where HV weapons are boosted heavily, and it basically brings them up to the point of being useful. And none of that even covers taking on player bases in PvP. I think there's only a handful of HVs out there can even break a T2 shield solo. Roughly the same applies to SVs. They still take too long to kill POI turrets. There's a reason a lot of players tend to just park CVs over top and use 15mm turrets to slowly pick away at POI shields and turrets. The most effective methods shouldn't be the most boring. Players should be rewarded for having a good HV or SV. But the problem is that seems to be reserved for only the best of the best in those two vessel types. And that's just no fun for most players.
I recently monkeyed around with my config files to enable CV weapons on planets. I then took my little destroyer with a T2 shield and fixed weapons against some POIs. It was actually fun. On Omicron, I cleared out turrets with rocket strikes and shot up ground troops with capital-grade lasers. The parabolic dish atop the drone base collapsing under fire was a sight to behold. On Sienna, I used this same ship to fight the bombers that spawn as part of the story mission at the wreck of the Titan. For good measure, I also went up against the shielded Shipyard in orbit around Omicron and took it apart in short order. Shield recharged from the trade station proved to be a decisive advantage. Could I have done all this with an SV? Maybe. A shielded SV with rockets and lasers is pleasant Tuesday for most players, and that's essentially what I was using a scaled-up version of. It would've taken a lot more ammo and time. The reduced alpha strike would mean more hits, more shield damage, and more time falling back and recharging. The shipyard wouldn't have been possible at all without finding some little nook to hide in while I chipped the shield away. The nightmare scenario is drone bases on moons. Without atmosphere, turret ranges are maximized, allowing the POI to reach out over a kilometer. At the same time, you're reduced to planetary speeds of 70 m/s for SVs and 60 for CVs, so they're going to get all kinds of free shots on you. You might think this extended range would work both ways, but it only works for turrets. Fixed weapons must still be aimed visually at close range. So the weapons that are the most skillful and fun to use end up being the least useful, along with the SVs that mount them. This leaves HVs, the least interesting combat vessel in the game. About as much fun as being the driver in a turret sequence because that is effectively what you are.
Does that really work against shielded POIs? I always thought that projectile turrets (only ones working planetside in vanilla on a SV / CV) are far too underpowered to break the shields so you can destroy any block on the surface.
It does if you use a ship like the one pictured earlier. Five dozen projectile turrets, a T2 shield, and a big armor stack are enough to slug it out with a drone base. Just don't expect to get away unscarred. This is part of the reason I say CPU limits make block limits obsolete. CPU asks you to make hard creative choices to gain unique and interesting capabilities. Block limits are strictly proscriptive and mash every single design into the same compression mold.
Yeah, sorry, I must have missed your nice ship. And I understand now what you mean with 'end of patience' :=)
I think this post sums up perfectly why I only play for a week or so, get fed up with the cheesiness and find other games to play for months or even a year. I come back all excited to play what should be one of my favorite games, and after a week I'm done again. I don't find taking down the shields and defanging the POI too annoying. I just go in with an SV that's not even maxed out cpu wise (50.6k out of 100k). I'd love to use an HV, but the only thing an HV does better than an SV is chop down trees. With my SV I do have to come back with another craft to loot the POI, but I enjoy building role specific crafts, so for me that is no problem, though I can see how it would annoy others. But once I get inside .... oh boy, the cheesiness starts. I won't go into detail as the quoted post sums up my feelings. Suffice it to say, I no longer feel bad about boring through the POI with my SV's weapons, taking out the core, flying out of render range and coming back with my looting craft. And on the POIs I can't do this with, well I had a list (can't seem to find it now), that told me which ones had enemies that would spawn in behind you. Clear out a room with only one entrance, step out of the room and get shot in the back ...... really? Admin cores ... unless I'm forced to do one in "story mode", I ignore them. Admin cores are a clear indication to me that there are going to be enemies popping in behind me and explosive death traps. A lot of POIs remind me of when I used to play pen and paper games with a bad GM/DM who thought body count made for a good game. I don't mind dying in games, that's part of any game were weapons are involved, I just think there are better ways of doing this.
Yeah, I do this standard now. This restriction made sense(sort of) for a time when the game was in its infancy, but now with more weapons and things to do, let alone Eden and RE, the artificial restrictions around where what weapons can fire needs to be lifted. Probably should have been lifted a year or two ago.
Don't see how, so what do poi's get in return for players to use all types of weapons against it? Not like they can't take out any poi in the game (except admin core) with a bunch of cannon turrets now....
What do POIs get? I don't understand this question. POIs are content. Their whole purpose is to provide a context for players to use their toys in engaging ways. Whether one gets buffed or nerf, directly or indirectly, is entirely a function of the experience they provide. There is no expectation of fairness, only fun. If fairness mattered, we'd be using CV weapons against planetary POIs already. BA weapons are just better versions of CV turrets, after all. My purpose in this tweaking was to feel out the experiential differences using CVs on planets made. A BA is a BA whether in space or planet playfield, armed with the same weapons and protected by the same shields. The main difference are shorter ranges and only half as much sky to fly in. So it wasn't all that surprising when going after a planetary POI didn't prove to be very different from space one. The procedure was the same; knock down shields, duck and knock out turrets, start poking exploratory holes to send the drone into. Find the core, mark it, blast it from the outside with vessel weapons. Sometimes there were drones or ground forces, but combat CVs do not fear these. The main difference was in defense. Being much bigger, CVs are harder than small and hover vessels to fit behind turret blind spots. Neither are they anywhere near as agile. But a CV with a T2 shield can face tank fire that would shred smaller craft in seconds, and be built to survive far more battle damage. So rather than constantly stunting around while my turrets did the shooting, I positioned myself somewhere favorable and used fixed lasers and rockets against POIs. Because I had adequate protection, I was able to be far more aggressive. It's that aggression that I was looking for. You don't get many opportunities in Empyrion to be the wolf among lambs, to just grab the proverbial baseball bat and start cracking heads open. You never have the speed, resilience, or firepower to charge in and overwhelm your opponents without being eviscerated by sentry guns and spawns from nowhere. Combat is almost always a slow, methodical affair, consisting of lots of peaking, sniping, pie slicing, and falling back. Patience is rewarded. Impulsiveness is severely punished. Victory comes not because you were fearless and inventive, but because you patient enough to grind up enough supplies and materiel to survive the slow bleed of ammo expenditure, health replenishment, and armor repair. That's the experience "fairness" creates.
The simple fact is as I've said there's not a poi in the game with a standard core that can withstand a cv with a bunch of cannon turrets, I don't see why it should be made easier by allowing all cv turrets. To put it into perspective allow me to use space poi's to elaborate my position. Unless they have an admin core cvs can very easily take out space poi's by simply targeting the generators, and we all know that is a common way people use to take them out. So why should I make space poi's with a standard core? Why should I go to all that effort of making the insides to try and make it fun for players if they simply target the generators and side step it all? It's not very motivating as a poi builder. And don't just take my word for it, I learnt just the other week that another poi builder feels the same way (for space poi's, planetary poi's wasn't discussed). I have a similar view of planetary poi's. Why should I be motivated to build poi's to submit to Eleon if people just target the generators? Cannon turrets are bad enough and you want all turrets to work?!? Sorry but no, not without poi's getting something to combat it. You want new toys? Fine, but then so do poi's....period.
Escarli, non-admin core POIs aren't supposed to withstand players' attacks. They're supposed to put up a fight, die, and become loot. They're grist for the mill. Live fodder for lions. That's the E part of PvE. POIs' reason for being to provide enjoyable content for players. How they go about engaging that content is the individual player's prerogative because, in a sandbox game, everyone is responsible for their own enjoyment. We tolerate admin cores because they have important admin applications. We need those safe spots to respawn at when things go very wrong. Story POIs have narrative functions that need to be fulfilled before they're destroyed. When it's just a dungeon POI that has an admin core, however, it's asking for the player's trust, saying that they're going to experience something cool if they're willing to go along with it. Go along with it enough times without something cool happening, and admin cores just tell the player they're not in charge, their opinion doesn't matter, and their way is wrong. That is not a good message to send. I've no idea why other people share the stuff they build. I only know I do it because I want people to have fun with it. I've seen people stick warp drives and cargo arrays on my dink interceptors and turrets on my miners. I'm glad they did things I wouldn't do, tried stuff I wouldn't have thought of. If there's one thing they've taught me in return, it's that I definitely do not know the correct way to do anything. For that, I am very grateful.
Yes....I know that, considering I make poi's it's kinda obvious. But you have completely and totally missed the point of what I wrote. Let me just say this, without poi builders you don't have any poi's for people to attack. Now you can try and spin it any way you want but that is the cold hard reality of the situation. So I ask again, why should poi builders be motivated to build elaborate interiors for poi's when people can disable the poi with ease and little effort? Nothing of what you wrote answers this point.
Elaborate or not my point remains the same. Unless players don't want an inside at all in which case we can simply build the outside, leave the insides and put the core in plain sight in the middle. ......no wait, my bad how silly of me. Why put the core on the inside at all? Can place it on the outside.
