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Thor Wotansen

Alpha Tester
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Everything posted by Thor Wotansen

  1. What's interesting here is that you only took umbrage with the use of gold, and had nothing to say about possible higher tier product materials. There are many things in this game that don't make sense from a "well in real life" perspective, however, they make sense within the rules set out by the game. In this case, if you want oodles of hitpoints, you have to take on some serious mass. This is balance. I expect any future high tier product materials to have really good resistances against specific damage types, and have a huge resistance hole with another type of damage. We already see this with steel, with it's 50% damage reduction of incoming EM damage, which is the best EM damage reduction of any honeycomb in the game, including T5 pures. But to get back on track, you are proposing a massive damage nerf, which will do only one thing, and that is to force everyone to use only missiles and to build giant cubes of gold to counter incoming damage. Instead of solving it, you just create a new meta. True balance comes from changing all things, not just one.
  2. The "railgun sled" is wholly dependent on locking me with radar to get shots off, and a L radar locks a XS core at 40km base, and takes a good while to do it. I can get to lock range with a small ship, lock and fire a volley or two, and skedaddle out of the L radar lock range before he can lock me, if I have good gunners. As for hitpoints of various materials, they are basing it off mass per cubic meter, and basing the resistances off the tier of the material, and weather or not it's a product material or a pure. If you want to argue for more realistic armor types, then campaign for better product honeycombs, like Stainless Steel, Inconel, or Maraging Steel. I believe there are also CU/AL alloys that could make for compelling light weight high resistance materials, as well as using some of the higher tier plastics, since UHDPE is used as body armor IRL. I would personally be quite happy with greater choices of product honeycomb, especially if they provided interesting resistance options.
  3. Okay, you need to get out there and actually get in fights before coming here and suggesting sweeping changes. First off, large sized weapons have to be linked to large weapons seats, and they need large radars, which have some pretty long lock times. If I fly a little XS core fighter right, I can completely avoid getting target locked by a L radar, while easily putting damage on whatever is trying to lock me with it. Secondly, reducing damage on all weapons is going to make any armored target almost impossible to destroy. Gold has absolutely ridiculous hitpoints, as well it should, and trying to dig through a few meters of gold with the kind of weapon damage you're suggesting will be impossible. As for variation in design, there is incredible variation in what works, and the cubes are just one way of doing that.
  4. As someone who has been engaging in PVP for the last week and a half, I can assure you that PVP is currently quite balanced. I would even hazard that the "balance" is heavily tilted in favor of the party that want's to nope out of there. Safe zones are quite large, and radars can spot potential adversaries at 2SU (400km). The biggest issue the poor innocent non-PVP industrialist types have is that they have put no thought whatsoever into designing their ships with PVP in mind, and are consequently unable to meaningfully effect the outcome of a confrontation once the "PVPer" has initiated it. I have killed quite a few cargo ships that were quite adequate for carrying cargo off of planets and through space to Alioth or wherever, (and a few that were barely even capable of that) but to a ship, they have been built out of the cheapest materials, with no consideration to armoring anything. It is entirely possible to haul kilotons of ore from place to place in a transport ship, even through blockades, but you need to design your ship to handle it and at least have an escort through dangerous areas. tl;d if you want to do your peaceful industry on Sanctuary, and just make pretty ships, you have to pay to protect your incoming shipments. The alternative is to develop a contract with an org that is willing to supply you with stuff from PVP areas. If you are a solo player or small group, consider signing on with a larger org for protection. Just about every big org needs miners and industrialists, and they will happily let you do that while they go off and fight bad guys for you. Being in a big org in DU is not like other games.
  5. There is in fact a repair unit that will fix damaged voxels and elements, you just have to load a snapshot of the construct into the repair unit and it will replace and repair everything that is missing from the damaged construct that is in the snapshot.
  6. There's usually not much left but the elements when we get there, but we did kill one ship that was hauling about 150kl of Acanthite, among other things, and it had less than a G of thrust after I applied my level 4 space engine handling to the engines. A lot of these ships seem to be built to use the magical powers of logging out to stop effectively at the destination.
  7. Right now, PVP is limited to shooting at people who want a fight (there are very few of those) and shooting at people who are either idiots or clueless. I have personally killed 12 ships, and the blockades I've been a part of have killed over 30 in the last week alone. In that time, I was absolutely flabbergasted by the incredibly poor designs people were flying. PVP is entirely avoidable in DU right now, if you get killed, it is 100% because you chose to fly a poorly built ship in a dangerous area. Enjoy the thrill and the fear of getting caught, it makes what you're doing exciting and when you get away, you will experience an amazing rush that very few games can give you.
  8. Agreed, the people who are the most vocal here are the types who spent 4 weeks building an intricate ship out of aluminum, with fancy greebling, forgot to blueprint it, and then flew off to Ion, or Jago, or some other remote planet, and got themselves blown up. The old Eve adage of "Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose" still rings true in DU. The other alternative is to join a Nation type org and pay taxes to ensure your safety.
  9. I can tell by your response that you have never tried chasing down and killing a well designed cargo ship. In general, blockading ships are sitting still outside the planetary safe zone, waiting for radar contacts. It can be quite a challenge to fly an intercept course that brings the target ship under your guns for long enough to kill it, and to do so quickly and without overshooting the target. This kind of flying burns quite a bit of fuel as well, and fuel is not found in large quantities on most things we kill. This means we have to supply our own fuel, and supply a pretty sizable amount to boot.
  10. Okay, a few things. Any game without risk will become boring once you get past the challenge of building a bunch of interesting ships and a big factory. Since DU has no NPCs to shoot you in the far reaches of space, it relies on players to make the risk. Thankfully, there are a few of us that have happily stepped up and provided some risk in a few places. As to PVP being a poor sink for resources, nothing could be further from the truth. A PVP ship is a purpose built ship with no concessions to doing anything but filling it's combat role. Slapping some guns on a cargo ship does not make it a PVP ship, it makes it an expensive cargo ship that can shoot things that don't move. Building a fleet is an expensive endeavor, one that will only get more expensive as the meta progresses. Supplying ammo and fuel to a fleet is also quite expensive, military engines in particular are quite thirsty. It's also not trivial to haul all the juicy loot back to your base, especially when you get those transport ships that someone has been filling with days worth of T3 mining.
  11. To have a functioning economy, DU will need to have faucets and sinks. I am personally of the opinion that NPC buy orders for ore are probably the worst faucet, and that market fees paid to the arkship during market transactions are probably the best sink. The reason I dislike ore buy orders so much is that ore is inherently valuable by itself, regardless of the value of quanta. In fact, with some time and effort, that ore can be increased in value by orders of magnitude. I would rather see a faucet that requires high end manufacturing and effective resource management. One idea I liked was for territory claim units to generate a small amount of quanta per hour, like maybe one or two. This would give concrete benefits to claiming land, and also make for an easy way for NQ to regulate the economy. Since anyone can acquire and place a TU, it democratizes the faucet somewhat, while still rewarding those that do the work necessary to turn ore into TUs. In the end, the economy is still built on the harvesting and transport of ore, however, it allows manufacturing to be more than just a necessary parasite to making money, rather than the vehicle by which ore is turned into money. As far as having a finite amount of money in the game, that would rapidly evolve into a barter economy using various ores as commodity trade items, and clogging up everyone's inventories with random crap.
  12. One thing I would like to see is an ingame design space that lets you make a blueprint without building in actuality. This could bu used during long travel times where you would otherwise not be able to build, or to be able to plan a build with all the trial and error involved without wasting resources on stuff you ultimately end up not using. This would be a build space entirely ingame and require you to be logged on to use, perhaps even a special element that can simulate the build space in VR or whatever technomumble you want to use to explain it. This would also respect any skills you have ingame, dis-allowing you from making BPs you don't have the skills to deploy.
  13. Another factor is that newbros in DU can be more effective than newbros in Eve, since I don't think there's a limit on what you can fly in DU. Also I believe that weapons will require crew, at least on alarger vessel, and manning a gun on a battleship or flying a small fighter or gunship from a carrier to target specific weapons systems on an enemy battleship or dreadnought would be a great and helpful activity for newbros joining an established group once the game is in full swing.
  14. I think it would be great to have pharmaceuticals/stims in the game. I'm not sure how you would make it illegal, since there won't be NPCs, and having debuffs to other skills aside from what you're buffing won't really make most orgs outlaw them. I think the way to make them worth fighting over is to put them behind a large skill requirement and make them use very small quantities of a lot of rare resources, as well as potentially requiring the cultivation of exotic plants or animals that could be found about the verse. Perhaps adding a way to water down the pure stuff for more, weaker stuff would add to the possibilities. This would make the first people to get the skill requirements and materials necessary quite wealthy, but also paint a pretty big target on their bases. Perhaps make a requirement for some plants needed for different stims to be grown only on their native planets, and require multiple such plants from different planets to make any particular stim. This would require either specialization in farming a certain plant on a particular planet, or having a base on each planet to grow stuff. Either way it becomes logistically complicated and prone to pirate raids or competing organizations blockading your base, thus creating a reason to smuggle the cargo out.
  15. Even a mag lock landing gear that you can stick your ship to another with would be cool. If people are trying to build massive carriers and are worried that their fighters might become pinballs in the worlds most expensive pinball machine, such a thing might help them.
  16. I like the idea of a certain level of randomness to the elements stats, but I think the best way of implementing it would be through researching various stats specifically, for instance, if I research fuel efficiency I can make progressively more fuel efficient engine schematics as I spend time researching it, the same with other stats. Therefore if I spend a great amount of game time researching all the things, I will be able to create an engine schematic that is pretty awesome. The amount of improvement from base to totally sick can easily be tailored by NQ, but effectively, you would have certain schematics that are sought after for different applications, and the system could be designed where you can only change three of five stats from whatever the default base stats are (just spitballing on the number of stats here). This would allow a player who's dedicated their game time to being an engine manufacturer a viable source of steady customers, as well as recognition as a good engine supplier, much like GE or Rocketdyne in today's world.
  17. discordauth:IuXNmABvEpMqVGLfms4iZhuWnXoTwnApjiKOTdyVsCw=

  18. Is Novaquark open to suggestions for the names that are not yet finalized?
  19. I posted something without realizing that it was already covered by the NQ backstory
  20. I've been playing Vendetta Online for about 2 years now, it's a tiny indie game that's been online since 2002 and has the best twitch combat for spaceships in any game I've ever played. It's available on every conceivable platform but IOS and has full VR support.
  21. Someone needs to make a track with a huge version of one of those mini-golf windmills that you have to get through. Think Speed Racer and pod racing with perhaps a slice of rallycross. I'd like to see jokers too, like they have in rallycross.
  22. I like the "IKEA" idea, however I think you will have to have access to the right kind of machinery to make larger ships. One could conceivably offer this as a service on a market hub, for a fee of course, but that might be problematic when it comes to pirates and other unsavory types hoping to jump you and take your stuff after scouting who's building what in the public shipyard thing.
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