Discussion about Turrets

[Shynras]

This is more of a "how to make it work" thread instead of "there are automated turrets?" or "can we control them with lua?" threads that we already discussed in the past. NQ probably didn't work much on the fighting aspect already, so any kind of information/assumption I make here, may be subject to change. 

 

A turret is an element that can be mounted both on mobile or static constructs. Its role is to damage other constructs or players, eventually destrying/killing them, by shooting projectiles or something able to deal damage, depending on its damage type (thermal, kinetic, missiles, and so on). We know that there'll be different tiers/types of turrets that can be researched, they'll have maintenance costs (either energy, ammo or both). We know also that there may be automated turrets, a lot less efficient than players controlled ones.

 

That said, what's your pov? Should we have automated turrets? How would you balance them? There should be a limit to the amount of turrets you can mount on a construct depending on the core unit size (core units have tiers)? Feel free to discuss.

 

My point of view: 

 

- I don't think we need automated turrets for mobile constructs, maybe just for static constructs to defend territories, this depends on how the territory system will work.

-I don't like much the idea of automated turrets stacking. If you add more and more turrets you'd become eventually really hard to attack, and it's not immersive. I don't like the idea of limiting the amount of automated turrets you can place with a standard number depending on the core unit tier. So the idea is to make automated turrets extremely expensive on the energy side, so that you have to make choice on how to distribute power (no hard cap) but at the same time you can't do a wall of turrets. 

-I'd like some kind of camera element or control element that let's a player switch between turrets to take control of them, I mean it's sci fi, i can easily imagine a control room where all the turrets get managed without the need of a physical guy inside the turret. The reason is that it gives some space to skilled player to make the difference: imagine a fight between 2 similar ships, one with 10 turrets and 1 player in each turret, one with 12 turret and 4 players controlling 3 turrets each. As you may know, you don't usually shoot with all the turrets at the same time, since they can't rotate 360° in any direction, so having 1 player per turrets is kinda overdoing it. The group of 4 players would have a chance to win, if they manage to control those 12 turrets efficiently enough. The alternative is that those 4 players would run a 4 turret ship with zero chance of winning (still talking about ships of the same size). This makes the turret guy job a little more dynamic, hard and if you want, fun. Ships with more players would still have an advantage, especially if 10 vs 4, but at least you can manage to win a 5 vs 7 or close matches like this one. 

-Turrets controlled from distance still have the advantage of not requiring position, so the "management system" should consume energy or have some kind of cons (alternatively a manned turret should have some kind of benefit), to avoid everyone controlling turrets from the same room just because it's the best way. I think that should both be possible approaches. So the idea is: high energy automated turret, medium energy distance controlled turret and low energy physically manned turret. Ofc "energy" doesn't need to be the only difference, to balance those there are many parameters that could be changed. 

-There may be a turret that generates ammo by itself, so it's very efficient and creates gameplay for ships aiming towards a sustain fight (or fatigue fight), but loses a lot of power or consume a lot of energy. For any other turret ammo are required: a player would have the role of refilling not just one turret but a group of turrets, running around the ship with ammo, he need to physically reach each turret. An automated ammo refilling system is also an option, this hovewer has heavy cons, like being expensive in the first place and having mantainance costs like weight, energy and so on (if it comes in a physical form (tubes, conveyors and so on) it would become a weak point of your ship too)

 

I can't think about anything else right know, I may edit this for more in the future.  

[vylqun]

i'm all for turrets.

As for limiting their effectiveness it'd be a logical approach to limit their accuracy by the energy supplied and damage potency, the more energy provided, the better the targeting computers can calculate the aim and the more powerful a weapon is the higher is the influence of recoil/ thermal deformation etc. on the targeting.

That would allow big capital ships to have a lot of rather accurate turrets with low dmg, high energy consumption and a good aim for destroying annoying flys, but for high dmg turrets they still would have to chose between several very inaccurate ones for barrages or single medium to highly accurate ones.

(Or they stick a hundred absolutely inaccurate low damage turrets to their hull and call themselves hedgehog )

[wizardoftrash]

This is a fun one.

 

For mobile constructs, I could see not having auto-turrets... up to a certain size. A very very large mobile construct will reach the point where it will behave more like a static construct, and as such it should have access to auto turrets (assuming some form of auto turret end up in the game). I think that preventing auto-turret spam is a good goal, and it will be one of the balancing factors for PVP that will take quite a bit of work.

 

In addition to constructs managing fuel/power and possibly heat, Constructs should have to manage computing power. Automated processes and possibly scripts ought to consume this Computing Power resource.

 

However, Computing Power is provided by the core unit. This would give us a hard cap on how much computing a construct can do at any given time based on its size.

 

A normal sized ship would use all of its computing power with flight scripts, and even the manual point-and-fire weapons would consume this computing power. This means a very large ship with simplistic flight scripts could have an array of auto turrets just like a large base would have.

 

The fact that an auto-turret would consume a great deal of computing power means that there would be a limit to how many could be active at a time, and that auto turrets would be competing with direct-fire weapons for that computing power. This means a base with 12 auto turrets might only have enough computing power for 3 or 4 of them to fire at the same time, making it nearly impossible for one player to attack solo but easy to overtake with 3 players.

 

A medium sized ship built for 1 player (that would normally accomodate two) might be able to support a single heavy direct fire weapon, and a single auto-turret as a tailgun. The ship would be unable to support them simultaneously, so that if the player is engaged in combat, the tailgun would not turn on and fire unless the direct fire weapon was not in use for an extended time. Depending on the other computing needs of the ship, the auto turret may only be able to fire with the ship parked.

 

Does the proposed Computing Power mechanic pose enough balance for auto-turrets?

 

On the topic on 1-player 1-gun which is something the devs have discussed, there would still be ways for a small team to operate several weapons. Imagine a ship with 5 weapons arrays but only 2 players. Those 2 players will not be able to use all 5 weapons simultaneously, and the ship should not have enough computing power for all of those weapons to operate at once (unless it was built for 5 players). Those 2 players though would be able to switch between those weapons to maximize their individual strengths and weaknesses.

 

With 5 weapons systems, you could have 2 heavy and slow long-cooldown cannons, 2 rapid-firing machine guns, and 1 flak-style anti missile system. With 2 players, each could "main" the slow fire cannons, but switch to the machine guns during the cooldown periods of the cannons. If the ship and target ship are each maneuvering rapidly in a way where the cannons are impossible to aim, then each player might operate machine guns only until their target starts to flee. If the ship is locked for missiles, one player might want to switch to the flak gun. This team would only lose the DPS of the machine guns while aiming and firing the cannons or flakk, nearly as efficient as a 5 man crew.

 

Should switching between slow and fast weapons be a viable option?

 

As far as managing ammunition goes, there should be no reason to have to do this manually, but manning a gun might give you the option to change ammunition types on the fly (where having a script manage your ammunition might feed the same ammo type from the ship's cargo). Carrying ammo for the weapons could be an advantage in an ugly battle where you cargohold where your ammunition is stored could be damaged or destroyed.

[Anaximander]

Unless your ship design is "BOX SHIP OF DOOM" , your turrets will be able to rotate just fine.

You assume 1 ship with 10 people, one on each turret, and a smarter ship of 1 player on 3 turrets...

why would Shp A be so stupid to not follow the cheese tactic of "1 guys 3 turrets". They can have 30 turrets under their control like that. Ship B just lost cause of overwhelming firepower.

Make Ship A a toaster shape, overlapping CoF, just obliterate Ship B.

Now, gimbaling (the grouping and control of many guns at once) is not an alien concept. The idea is used on current day attack choppers for controling their machineguns.

But you guys have to stop thinking "lolz, I playz Star Citishen, I knows realisticz space combats are nose to nose dogfigting frigates".  Any fight in space, is gonna be more or less space jousting, with pilots trying to keep a transversal approach to the target to maximise avoiding shots (the system DU follwos is the same more or less with EVE's, which is based on statistics, like "how fast is the proejctile of this weapon, is the ship turnign when the shot was fired, how fast is the turret turning around " and puts all those statistics down to a solid number. IF the gun's nubmer, is MORE than the value the enemy ship has, it's a hit, if the value the attacker has it's twice the value of the avoidance the defender has, it's a perfect hit. That's the math behind it.

Now, when it comes to long range engagements, if you try to play it like a slugfest, you'll lose. You'll run out of ammo fast.So, having 10 peole, controlling 10 turrets, is NOT a good idea. Cause Johhny Malarkey, may decide "lolz, I playz space engineers, I haz dis" and start firing away, draining your ammo, or even worse, possibly alerting the enemy before you are within range. But having 1 person, controlling up to a maximum of , ;et's say , 5 turrets, given the strength of a Control Unit (ala EVE Online's Drone rules of bandwidth) then you have ship's like Destroyers or Frigates, being treated more like Tanks, having 1 driver (yes, ships have drivers, deal with it) 1 person scanning (yes, surprsie, scanning is a thing you have to be good at, there's no magical star trek detection) and then you got the gunner and the engineer - and of course, the captain, the guy who's the leader. So, one gunner, trained for controlling all 5 turrets, with possibly an avatar armor that provides better "firing solutions" may be able to oeprate 5 long range rainguns on board a frigate. As you see, Frigates, follow the MMORPG tradition of a party, only ther'es no "power fantasy". You guys work together.

But let's watch the fight from the perspective of a "I swear to me mom, I'll break your face" kind of frigate, that uses close range blasters to turn the enemy into swiss cheese.


Let's say your frigate has the same basic crew. Driver, Scanner, Engineer, Gunner and Captain. Now, you have blasters, short-range plasma cannons, similar to machineguns. Now, you fly a very VERY fast frigate, that has a device that can jam the enemy's targeting computers for 14 seconds but the same frigate, has on it 25 blasters, all located on the top and bottom of the frigate, with the pilot having to fly in a "spin of death" helciopter motino around a target and unleashing all hell on the target. As you see, automated turrets WOULD be useful on this... but here's a problem. It's not fair, it's cheesy. What this frigate COULD have, is 5 gunners. Same basic crew, possibly two engineers, which makes the frigate into a Destroyer class ship - as the ship class name implies, it's there to kick ass and not feel sorry, and the lbaster/ Jam combo is a good example.

And you see where it comes down to. Having automation, makes the notion of "I am a Destroyer Captain" feel hollow. Usually people would think "oh the guy is top-notch destroyer Captain, he and his guys have killed battleships". Why? Casue everyone can be a Destroyer Captain. If everyone can be  Destroyer Captain by having 25 automated turrets, the game becomes about "bigger is better", which is a  thing we'll come back to later.

Once, in WoW, there were 10-man raids that held challenge equal to 25-man raids. People were 10-man Hardcore Raiders and they were taken seriously. And the same CAN be done in DU, having smaller groups feel useful. You are a good destroyer (10man "raid" ) or an excellent frigate group (5man party) ? You can now JOIN an alliance together and you guys earn reputation and infamy TOGETHER, similar to the Firefly crew.

You see, NOT having automation, FAVORS small groups. It means that, yes, you don't have a battleship, but you guys know each other well, and can work as a team. If you add automated ANYTHING, the game becomes EVE with Voxels. And most EVE players on this forum, are tired of "Automated everything" EVE has. Even a Titan pilot in the fan-made community Discord is tired of the EVE "automated everything" shitshow. It made the game into a joke.

People want automation cause they think "battleship = where it's at". In EVE, we got certain "cardinal rules". One of them is the infamous "Don't fly what you can't afford to lose", which in another thread, I paraphrased as "Don't fly what you can't afford to crew".

But there's a another very VERY important cardinal rule about EVE, people may not hear often. "Bigger DOES NOT mean better". 





Oh, and yeah, let's keep the automated turrets LIMITED to a static Core Unit's CPU and make them eat up energy while being online. You wanna run automated defenses? They run ALL the time and eat up fuel. 



P.S. : The example of the 10 people on 10 turrets does hold merit, if NQ was to add some giant gun that takes 1 Control Unit's whole CPU to operate, thus limiting the gun on one person / one gun, like a 50000mm Mass Driver. That's something that would need one whole CPU on a compuiter to figure out its firing solution. And yes, Star Citizen is a piece of shit WW2 in Space Simulator. Actual space navy will need people who know math, not have twitch-reflexes. You know, like the ACTUAL navy.


P.S. 2 : You may find the example of "figuring geometries" intimidating for combat, but you should not worry, the ship's driver is the one who is to worry about that. Good ship drivers can make a name for themselves, like a good tank would make a name for themsleves in Vanilla woW (back when threat was actually a real thing Tanks had to be good to generate), or a Healer that didn't run out of mana, would be the equivalent of a DU Engineer than can keep a ship going. And if you plan on flying a starfighter, you are fighting at distances that you can smell the enemy, you won't have to figure out transversals, just have the mental clarity and coolness to not attack the thing your buddies are not attacking.

[Shynras]

I don't like the "computing power" idea tbh, it's like in robocraft, and feels rather limiting. I think there are better solutions to that.

 

@Twerk I'm not a fan of SC, actually i don't think I'll ever play it xD

[Anaximander]

I don't like the "computing power" idea tbh, it's like in robocraft, and feels rather limiting. I think there are better solutions to that.

 

@Twerk I'm not a fan of SC, actually i don't think I'll ever play it xD

Thing is, guns take firing solutions, and those firing solutions are solutions to mathematical problems.

 

Fun fact, the word problem means "before the artillery shell is shot" in greek. Yeah, Greeks invented complex math so they can catapult with precision... kinda takes away from the charm of "ancient greece, the land of philosophers". Sons of bitches figured math to fling rocks further.

 

However, in WW2, ships fought at 30Km ranges. They had to do math on the fly to make their shots count. In space, at distances of 100 km and beyond, you need to have a very strong computer to calculate the precise trajectory of the shell itself. Long Range Guns in EVE, take more CPU out of the ship itself to fit on it. And it makes absolute sense. The less further a gun is able to shoot, the less CPU it needs in EVE, because, let's face it, if your gun has an effective range of 10 kilometers, and you are at 5 km fro mthe target, you'll hit them  head on with little not no real problem.

 

 

And given Control Units in DU are more or less, computers (they are the things that host scripts as well) I can see why it would make sense for them to have a "CPU" stat on them, like a reactor would have a "Power" stat on it. It's balance on the gameplay, but it's balance that's organic.

[Shynras]

Thing is, guns take firing solutions, and those firing solutions are solutions to mathematical problems.

 

Fun fact, the word problem means "before the artillery shell is shot" in greek. Yeah, Greeks invented complex math so they can catapult with precision... kinda takes away from the charm of "ancient greece, the land of philosophers". Sons of bitches figured math to fling rocks further.

 

However, in WW2, ships fought at 30Km ranges. They had to do math on the fly to make their shots count. In space, at distances of 100 km and beyond, you need to have a very strong computer to calculate the precise trajectory of the shell itself. Long Range Guns in EVE, take more CPU out of the ship itself to fit on it. And it makes absolute sense. The less further a gun is able to shoot, the less CPU it needs in EVE, because, let's face it, if your gun has an effective range of 10 kilometers, and you are at 5 km fro mthe target, you'll hit them  head on with little not no real problem.

 

 

And given Control Units in DU are more or less, computers (they are the things that host scripts as well) I can see why it would make sense for them to have a "CPU" stat on them, like a reactor would have a "Power" stat on it. It's balance on the gameplay, but it's balance that's organic.

You call it computing power, i call it energy, we're talking about the same thing. The only thing i do not agree on, is that i don't want a fixed number of turrets on a given core unit tier, but let the computing power (aka energy) limit that. You can't use infinite turrets anyway since they require a lot of energy when active, like eve. If there's a fixed number, like 5 turrets on tier3 core unit, the best ship for that specific core unit will always mount 5 turrets, while if you use computing power (energy) to indirectly limit the amount of turrets someone can use, maybe you'll encounter ships with 6 turrets that gave up his shield system to get that energy they needed to make it work. Or maybe you'll find someone with 4 turrets because he wanted to make his ship sturdier and he needed a better repair unit. Eve works the same way, there are slot indeed, but you still can't activate all your modules if they consume too much energy, that's enough to balance the game. Fixed caps are good only in games where devs need to control the balance, while in Du balance comes naturally from the players through the quality/price equilibrium. 

[wizardoftrash]

You call it computing power, i call it energy, we're talking about the same thing. The only thing i do not agree on, is that i don't want a fixed number of turrets on a given core unit tier, but let the computing power (aka energy) limit that. You can't use infinite turrets anyway since they require a lot of energy when active, like eve. If there's a fixed number, like 5 turrets on tier3 core unit, the best ship for that specific core unit will always mount 5 turrets, while if you use computing power (energy) to indirectly limit the amount of turrets someone can use, maybe you'll encounter ships with 6 turrets that gave up his shield system to get that energy they needed to make it work. Or maybe you'll find someone with 4 turrets because he wanted to make his ship sturdier and he needed a better repair unit. Eve works the same way, there are slot indeed, but you still can't activate all your modules if they consume too much energy, that's enough to balance the game. Fixed caps are good only in games where devs need to control the balance, while in Du balance comes naturally from the players through the quality/price equilibrium. 

 

Without any hard caps, you end up with a little something we call BLOAT in SE and SM. You slap more reactors onto your ship, slap more thrusters onto it, and slap more guns on it. when your ship gets destroyed and you are back at the designing table, you keep slapping on more stuff until your ship looks like its full of tumors.

 

Not limiting how many systems can be stacked onto a ship based on core tier is exactly how you get cubes of doom where the player packs as much stuff into their build area as possible. Some static limitation (be it CPU or Ram or whatever) apart from power regeneration makes PVP much easier to balance and allows the devs to include more actual variety in terms of systems and accessories. Having a "6 gun max" won't mean each ship of that class will use 6 guns, especially if we end up with a 1-man 1-gun system (as the Devs have already stated they would implement). If there is a gun that uses the same CPU requirement as 3 guns and has the firepower of 2.5 guns, any player who struggles to get a full crew of 6 is going to want to use it (resulting in either only 4 guns or only 2 instead of 6).

 

Relying on market forces to balance inherently unbalanced mechanics isn't going to work out. Anyone that plays a collectible card game has had experience with this: Situationally better cards end up costing more money on the secondary market. This power difference is not directly proportionate to the increased cost, it is grossely disproportionate (a 0.3% win rate increase results in a 600% price increase or more). Having an unbalanced system that relies on market forces only raises the bar for how much you must invest to compete. This crushes diversity instead of promoting it and creates a chilling effect on innovation.

 

If you have the power to create a more balanced set of weapon mechanics, the metagame will shape the secondary market and vise versa, but it can only do so in a healthy way if it starts from a balanced place.

[Anaximander]

You call it computing power, i call it energy, we're talking about the same thing. The only thing i do not agree on, is that i don't want a fixed number of turrets on a given core unit tier, but let the computing power (aka energy) limit that. You can't use infinite turrets anyway since they require a lot of energy when active, like eve. If there's a fixed number, like 5 turrets on tier3 core unit, the best ship for that specific core unit will always mount 5 turrets, while if you use computing power (energy) to indirectly limit the amount of turrets someone can use, maybe you'll encounter ships with 6 turrets that gave up his shield system to get that energy they needed to make it work. Or maybe you'll find someone with 4 turrets because he wanted to make his ship sturdier and he needed a better repair unit. Eve works the same way, there are slot indeed, but you still can't activate all your modules if they consume too much energy, that's enough to balance the game. Fixed caps are good only in games where devs need to control the balance, while in Du balance comes naturally from the players through the quality/price equilibrium. 

TERAFLOPS and Wattage are not the same thing. Computing Prowess and Power Generation are NOT the same thing.

 

Energy is the rate of power transferred, or the volume of it carried inside a circuit's flow. Computing prowess is down to frequency of parsed executables. Energy is NOT Power.

 

You confuse Core Unit with Control Unit. Cores in DU are morel ike processors,  Control Units are like its "RAM" or in our case, more like its memory cache. You can have a 7.5 GHz 16-thread 8-core CPU, if you have 512 KB Cache, you'll not have the same TeraFlops of processing prowess as a person with 3.5 GHz 8-core 16-thread 16 MB Cache.

 

A Core Unit should have only a "maximum processing rate" meant for the kind of vessel you want to build. Sure, yo ucan build with the smallest Core Unit and build a Starfighter that has a Torpedo Launcher on it. Sure, the actio nof launching the Torpedo will TANK the CPU of your starfighter, forcing you to fly away while the "cache" clears, but then again. that's called "being dressed for the occasion".

 

You COULD build a super-jacked up starfighter with a Cruiser-sized Core Unit, but you would be limited by the memory cache bonus the Cockpit gives as you fly a singleseater from a cockpit.

 

You see the issue here? Control Units (like cockpits and screens) are extensions of memory (RAM) on your Construct. The Core Unit, can be a quantum processor, but no matter what, data has to be lined up and formated before its injected into a processor (they are caleld procesors fora reason, otherwise they would be called wizards). Your Control Unit is the limitation of that RAM (or even bandwidth, the rate of data transmitted).

 

 

in EVE Turrets have 3 requirements :

 

1) CPU 

 

2) Powergrid (Wattage)

 

3) Energy consumtion (Joules out of the capacitor)

 

You can't mount infinite turrets in DU due to those 2 first conditions (which is logical, it's a game based in realistic physics). If you don't got the Wattage to support them, you can't. The third condition just makes it clear how big is your window of engagemetn before oyu run out of mana - sorry, GigaJoules, I keep forgeting that EVE is totally not a fantasy MMO with a sci-fi skin.

 

More turrets? Add more Wattage by adding more Power Generators / Reactors, which means more energy demand from those modules that have a high Wattage demand you put on to require more Wattage (more wattage, more electrons needed for the whole thing to "tick"), which  means you need more voltage (volume of energy trasnferered) which means more conduits, which means more Control Units, which means a Good Ship takes THOUGHT to be built.

 

As I said in another post, "bigger doesn't mean better" and as we say in EVE, "don't fly what you can't afford to lose". 

 

Unless what you are saying is, a BMW and a Toyota are the same quality cars, meant for the same thing. You know, the market is to decide what ships get bought more. If you don't add these kinds of in-depth detailed things in the game, building ships becomes "Who can make the best rip-off from X franchise" instead of "let's make a frigging good ship, for the kind of gameplay the community goes for".

 

Does the community steer close to long range railguns? Make a ship with a lot of sensors for targeting range, a lot of Tracking Computers for better hit chance and the such. Fine tune it.

 

NQ said the game will have challenge on building ships. If they can't make the process more challenging or as equal as EVE's PREMADE SHIPS, then I can see anyone with a high count of IQ getting into building cool ships. 

 

 

Simplicity is the main reason why MMOs fail. And hopefully NQ won't fall into the trap "make the game easy, cause people are dull idiots". People are smart and inventive creatures, especially when they get to figure out a game in-depth. The reason WoW lost so many players? It became more and more simplistic.