Computing Power - Balance for Auto-Turrets

[wizardoftrash]

I’m not trying to trigger anyone, it’s just important to keep discussing these matters, to find a good balance for everyone.

 

Thanks for pointing that out, I haven’t thought of that problem...

Obviously this feature was not intended to be used that way. Maybe ship turrets could be limited to be activated only inside the sphere of influence of the territory unit of the organization that owns the ships, or Stargates should have a no automation-zone.

Furthermore automated turrets could have a boot up time, e.g. only become active after the ship is parked for 1 hour. They could also consume huge amounts of energy while active, so it’s impossible to keep them running 24/7.

Others have made more suggestions to limit automation, but I’m not repeating everything again. And it would be great if we can come up with more constructive suggestions to balance that mechanic!

 

Just to put into perspective: If we would abolish automation altogether players would be forced to stay in the game as long as possible, as they would be in constant fear that someone blew up their stuff. For people that are only able to play on weekends, this would "kill the game"! (this is especially valid for smaller orgs.)

Of course organizations with a very active playerbase would still be advantageous, but others will be able keep their place in the game.

What Twerkmotor brought up here is a valid concern, if the number of automated turrets on a construct is either hard-capped at a certain number (for big multi-core constructs) or has a steep diminishing return (what I would suggest instead), there needs to be a way to mitigate placing several constructs in an area with auto-turrets to make a dense defense grid.

 

First of all, these automated defenses will probably require ammo. If you "set it and forget it", even if it works brilliantly for a week it will eventually run out of bullets and be a sitting duck, regardless of size.

 

Here is my solution (I'll edit the base post to reflect these restrictions).

There are two environmental limiting factors on automated systems, mainly automated defensive weapons.

 

Each Sector of Space, and each Territory on a Planet has a maximum number of entities (using a max of 3 for examples) that can have automated defenses "turned on" same time across all players (including logged-off, this removes the incentive to multibox or have alts set up stations next to yours). The server decides which entities' turrets get turned on based solely on the entity's type and size.

-Mobile and Immobile entities are counted separately, but a parked ship could be counted as an immobile construct for this count.

-The constructs with the largest core are counted first, ties in core size are then determined by which entity has the most cores, followed by who entered the sector/territory first.

-Once an area has "counted" all of the entities that will be able to use their auto-turrets, anyone else that attempts to turn their auto turrets on will get a "too much interferance" error and they will not activate (nor will they use up computing power).

-If a player owns a TU, they can unilaterally give out permissions as to which immobile constructs can turn on turrets. Even if they give out permission, the "max entities per territory" cap will kick in as it normally would. Again, parked ships could count as immobile constructs for this count (to prevent players from designing "ships" meant only to park and supplement a base's defenses).

So what will this mean for fleet combat? for defending territories?

 

Defending territories will be pretty simple with this system, you will be aware of what the entity cap is for a territory, and can build your defenses to best utilize that cap. When building defensive lines in space, it will encourage you to set up "layers" of defense across multiple sectors, which would quickly become impractical from a resource-consumption standpoint. If you have a TU set up, there will be efficient patterns and groupings that you'll want to utilize to better protect your territory, but even if you max out the defenses for a base it will not be invincible. The cap would be set in such a way that a single player, or small group of players might struggle to overtake a single "maxed out" territory, but a coordinated attack would certainly succeed unless the territory is well manned. Cities will have citizens to protect it, so territories will be able to rely on a mix of automated weapons and manned weapons to defend against attackers.

 

"hey, doesn't that mean that a group of adjacent territories could concentrate their firepower at their borders, effectively stacking their defenses?"

-Yes, to a point. This will be one of the many advantages of controlling several adjacent territories. The downsides to "chunking" your defenses is that they are more likely to have blind spots.

 

This system has huge implications for fleet combat, and would serve as a strong deterrent for players "relying" on auto-turrets as an offense rather than as a defensive system. Apart form the efficiency loss I've already described, most multi-ship battles will turn on this auto-turret cap. The hierarchy I described as to which ships get the privilege to use auto turrets is set so that the ships that should be using them can do so effectively, mainly the bigger ships that also have crew. Here is a sample scenario of how that would pan out.

 

I've got a fleet of a Large ship and a 6 of small bombers. My faction is attakcking your fleet of 1 Large ship and 3 cruisers. If the sector cap is 3 entities, then both of our large ships have auto-turrets, and the first of your cruisers to enter the sector does, but the other two don't. The large ships NEED auto turrets to defend against groups of bombers, so theirs rightfully turn on first. The cruisers want their turrets on as well, but they should be effective enough if they can manually fire a lower-class weapon at the bombers. Faction A has an incentive to keep all of the fighting in one sector (since a bomber won't have the Computing power to auto-fire anything bigger than a small machine gun, completely ineffective against cruisers and large ships), Faction B has an incentive to split up their fleet into two sectors (Large ship and a cruiser in sector 1, cruiser cruiser in sector 2, that way all of their auto weapons will work when the fighting starts). This creates some intriguing tactical fleet-command situations and makes coordinating large ships more complex. This also encourages players to design specialty ships for fleet combat, mainly small and medium ships with no auto-fire weapons whatsoever (since they are likely to be too small to have access to auto-weapons in fleet engagements). It is still Possible to multi-box with this system to a point, in theory i could build a Large ship decked only with auto-guns, and have make it follow around my Medium sized ship (that I control manually), but it will be ineffective against any equally matched ships that aren't multi-boxed and entirely ineffective in large engagements.

 

Another key factor here is the weapon classes that can be effectively operated by auto-fire modules. Up until this point I've described how a ship could auto-fire a Machine Gun while flying, but would need to park in order to auto-fire a cannon. Machine Gun is what I'm using to describe a gun built to be effective against smaller ships and players, for example Large Ship machine guns will be effective agiainst Medium and Small ships, but not other Large ships. Cannons are built to take on a ship of equal size, and can't be efficiently set up to auto-fire. Torpedoes are built to take on ships of a larger class in a group (hence group of bombers above) but Torpedoes would be impractical or impossible to automate. If two Large Ships went head to head, one with a Manned Cannon turret and the other with auto-fire machine guns, the Cannon ship would crush it every time, but would struggle to fight off a group of fighters. A Large ship with auto-fire machine guns is built to defeat small fighters, but would struggle against medium ships equipped with Torpedoes.

 

Automated weapons will be key to balancing groups of small ships against (even well manned) larger ships.

[Anaximander]

Thats all fine and good, but we are basing this discussion off of what the Devs have already stated they will be putting limitations on. This isn't even a "wouldn't it be nice if..." scenario, this is about the kind of game that the Devs want to make. They want the higher levels of play to require teamwork, so they plan to place limitations on automation.

 

Beyond the Devs making the game that they actually want to make, beyond the negative impact that masses of automated defenses would have on the game, limits are what make sandbox games possible. The scifi sandbox games out there now don't try to limit these kinds of things, ans a server can support at the very most lole 25 people doind menial tasks? 5 or 6 people in combat tops?

 

Picking your battles on limitation is what will make single-shard possible.

And that's the issue really. People think like this game is Empyrion or Space Engineers and they can\t stop but thinking "it WOULD be nice to have automated defenses". And sure, in those games, it IS, but DU is not a multiplayer shooter where you are FFA combat.. It's an MMO. You are not gonna pllay with 50 others on a server, but with thousand others. Empyrion is not an RPG, DU is. And playing "security" as your role in an alliance, IS part of the RPG.

 

The more things players have to do manually, the more money float around in the market-base (in-game buyers), the easier it is to buy a DAC (as the money per-capita decreases and the market price adjusts to meet the fluctuating numbers), the more people play the game (as it's easiey to farm the money if you invest time), the more money NQ makes, the better the support for the game is.

 

That's how I see it. And I think that's how NQ sees it, as many of its Devs (as well as JC the CEO of NQ) are old EVE players. They seen how shit EVE's economy is due to the lack of player actions that are not supr high-end "gears", like margin trading and manufacturing and tweaking of cost fuel for a large marketshare. Yeah, those things require you to know math, Excel (or your favourite software of spreadsheet porn) and havee actual market knowledge.

 

Mining in EVE? Dullest, most boring thing you can ever do. But in DU? It's actually chellenging and manual, you have to find the ore wuith an interesting mechanic of triangulating it. People can rig a container to pay members on the moment they dump ore into it - or even better, have some weirdo space-socialism going on in your org and having the proletariate  miners share on a fraction of the mining company's profits when selling ore. 

 

See? I just made incentive for people to sign up and go for minng operations with org-mates. Easy way to "Grind" for money. And it's getting there. If we allow "automated turrets" people will start asking for automated mining - cuase it's the hottest exploit in Empyrion, having autominers, so in DU, it would be the same right? (No people, it's a rhetorical question, it won't be ).

 

If EVE had these things, so the average Joe can have things to do, it would have more players, but since EVE's Devs are stuck up their rear for the last... what, 14 years, it won't happen any time soon.EVE has a lot of jobs players can do, but not many of them are engagning, unless you are burning brain cells on Excel.

 

And that's where it boils down to really. Having automated defenses on ships, makes the NEED for space stations more and more obsolete. Heck, if a small org can manage to build a huge space station - assuming Static Cores can be placed and they provide the ability to deploy Defenses on a CPU / Power demand behind them - for certain sizes of mining barges, on a transit system, they COULD make a profit, by providing a safe haven for miners to log out their barges, while possibly being repaired and refuelled as part of the agreement between them (which goes into the politics of the game and the such).

 

I don't have an issue for one person to get access to controlling a GROUP of weapons at once (or however is the max the in-game technology can allow for on one control unit). I am against on those weapons having automation though.

 

And to reiterate, your idea has been fleshed out in many formats, as well as the real world. Processing Power in calculations is what FLOPS are on a processing grid. The more FLOPS a system has, the more power it needs. You lack FLOPS (aka CPU power) to do your calculations ? Guess what, Distributed Processing Units exist IRL. It's what the Cloud is for. Or as it was used to be done, hook your machine in a LAN and connect it to a "CPU farm", where your data will be processed a lot faster.

 

I can't see why DU can't be like that. You have your Core Unit that's a processor with limited memory cache, with the Control Units providing a memory cache boost ( a number modifier for the Core Unit's CPU power) and DPUs adding MORE "speed" on the processor, thus actiing as "CPU requirement reduction" on a module. But since DPUs are machine, the ship needs more power. It's a very organic way of building a ship. it takes BRAIN to build a very high-end ship.

 

And let's face it, if 7 years of Hardcore Raiding in WoW taught me anything, it's one person figures out a setup for doing something very well, and the masses copy it. most people won't have to figure out how to build a ship efficiently, there will be a guide telling them how many DPUs, Control Units, power cores and guns you need to make a certain type of ship. Give it 3 months tops, sites will pop up post launch dedicated on the art of cheesing the game for newbros.

 

 

 

 

I’m not trying to trigger anyone, it’s just important to keep discussing these matters, to find a good balance for everyone.

 

Thanks for pointing that out, I haven’t thought of that problem...

Obviously this feature was not intended to be used that way. Maybe ship turrets could be limited to be activated only inside the sphere of influence of the territory unit of the organization that owns the ships, or Stargates should have a no automation-zone.

Furthermore automated turrets could have a boot up time, e.g. only become active after the ship is parked for 1 hour. They could also consume huge amounts of energy while active, so it’s impossible to keep them running 24/7.

Others have made more suggestions to limit automation, but I’m not repeating everything again. And it would be great if we can come up with more constructive suggestions to balance that mechanic!

 

Just to put into perspective: If we would abolish automation altogether players would be forced to stay in the game as long as possible, as they would be in constant fear that someone blew up their stuff. For people that are only able to play on weekends, this would "kill the game"! (this is especially valid for smaller orgs.)

Of course organizations with a very active playerbase would still be advantageous, but others will be able keep their place in the game.

Dammit Crunch it's not about you. There are more "peaceful miners" than you

[Shynras]

A single player should not be able to control more than 1 turret at the same time, or the "1 player manned titan" would become a "2 players manned titan", not a big difference, the problem persists. It would be cool and balanced if you could switch between turrets from distance with some sort of cost

[Anaximander]

A single player should not be able to control more than 1 turret at the same time, or the "1 player manned titan" would become a "2 players manned titan", not a big difference, the problem persists. It would be cool and balanced if you could switch between turrets from distance with some sort of cost

Well, it's why I did suggest the Control Unit limit. 

 

Example.

 

A Cockpit has 5 Terabytes RAM (just go with the number, it's futurespace ). So, it can control up to 5 small caliber, high-trakcing, short-range guns or 1,  high caliber, slow rate of fire, slow tracking, loing range gun.

 

The Cotnrol Unit limits how many guns a person uses. The "no automation" ensures one person won't go and "tap into one Control Unit, fire, let the ship fire on tis own, go to a new control Unit, set it to fire".

 

A Titan would follow the same logic, only its Control Units are rigged for different things. 

 

Example.

 

One person operating shields with the Shield Screens following the same "RAM usage" out of a Control Unit. The same person could have 2 Consoles in front of them, one for power management and one for shields, thus becoming the "Engineering Watch" on a bridge.

 

Then you have the person flyng te ship, their Control Unit, needs to control thrusters. The DPUs attached to the thrusters reduce their CPU need, so a Titan Driver (yes as we said in the past, ships have drivers) has the ability to control all the Thrusters involved, with the possiblity of having two screens liek the engineer, or three if they feel lucky., one Control Unit for flying the ship, one for the Warp Drive oeprations and one for the Starmap. Although the Starmap is just not the driver's job - that's the navigator's job.

 

It will still be a many people job, it's just that it's way more hardcore - and Titans are hardcore ships, they are in no way shape or form, a casual palyer's thing. Heck, if DPUs don't actually reduce the CPU requirements of modules but they just act as a connector unit for Lua, it means many ships may have multiple people flying the ship.

 

It's not a case of "you can control as many turrets as you want". There is a limitation of how many turrets you CAN control at one time, just as long as there's no automation involved, it will be just a specialised skill training for ship gunners.

[Shynras]

That doesn't work, actually it makes things even worse. If a player can control 5 turrets at the same time, everyone would do that. This means that a turret would be 5x less effective than a turret you'd have in a 1 guy 1 turret scenario, for balance reasons. Other than that, more lag, small groups able to control giants ships (or gunbeds) with dozens of turrets and less skill related to turrets positioning (ship design) and crew positioning (crew management)

[Eclipse913]

Reading through this, i had an idea,

 

Using all the mechanical features of DU, a player 'could" in fact script an auto turret, but it isnt something you can just build.

 

This way, it would require real skill and would stop the p-2-w issue,

 

However this solution brings up another flaw, if you make a blueprint and sell it, well... God there just isnt any winning is there?

[Lethys]

Reading through this, i had an idea,

 

Using all the mechanical features of DU, a player 'could" in fact script an auto turret, but it isnt something you can just build.

This way, it would require real skill and would stop the p-2-w issue,

However this solution brings up another flaw, if you make a blueprint and sell it, well... God there just isnt any winning is there?

 

P2W ? This never was a P2W issue. This isn't at all about P2W, this is about balance as many peple pointed out.

People will sell their RL skills for ingame money (scripting your ship, painting it, making it cosy, program you something for easier comms, design your ship, ...) - this is just using the economy.

[Anaximander]

That doesn't work, actually it makes things even worse. If a player can control 5 turrets at the same time, everyone would do that. This means that a turret would be 5x less effective than a turret you'd have in a 1 guy 1 turret scenario, for balance reasons. Other than that, more lag, small groups able to control giants ships (or gunbeds) with dozens of turrets and less skill related to turrets positioning (ship design) and crew positioning (crew management)

You missed the point. 5 Turrets, still needs Wattage for 5 turrets. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you can afford it. It's like saying "I can go to space, thus I will". No you won't, you don't - probably - got 40 million USD to spend on a glorified cruise-liner

 

Plus, the 5-turret grouping is based for DIFFERENT caliber turrets. A Large laser cannon (long range), would take up all the CPU of a Control Unit while 5 Large Pulse Lasers (close range) would take the same amount but combined. More or less, the longer the effective distance of a weapon, the less of them a person can control - not to mention, the slower that gun attacks, tracks and reloads.

 

And before you say "but hey, that's still broken, I can have 5 guns and run up to a guy and beat them". That implies yor ship got speed, more speed == less armor.. See, the "close range" ships, are the equivalent of a rogue in the traditional MMO. They can deal a lot of damage, they are agile and fast, but if they get hit, they DO hurt. That's called "risk & reward".

 

Again, it's not about IF you can do something, but if it fits your ship's role.

 

Here's a quote by someone who plays the role of a "rogue ninja" in EVE, flying a very specific ship for that "speed is key, balls to the walls and praise Bob" kind of little warship.

 

"There's a reason the blaster Taranis is flown by mental cases. Fear is a handicap when you're travelling at 4km/s in a metal death tube with thin walls and three small nuclear devices strapped to the outside. Should you survive for more than two seconds inside web range, the poor sap you fire those blasters at is seriously going to regret not having a web/tank/neut/whatever as you rip his face off at a close enough range to go through his pockets as you do it. The other outcome is that you wake up covered in slime wondering where the bus that hit you went. The Taranis is a ship for angry men or people who prefer to deal in absolutes. None of that cissy boy, "we danced around a bit, shot some ammo then ran away LOL", or, "I couldn't break his tank so I left", crap. It goes like this: You fly Taranis. A fight starts. Someone dies. There is no other possibility."

 

 

If Taranis was a DU built ship, it could forfeit those 3 small blasters, for a medium long range Gauss Gun (powerful railgun type). The problem with that though? That's where DU's combat system comes in. The faster YOU go, the less the chance of hitting is, if you don't got tracking speed on your turrets or your computers on-board the ship. You may move at 4 km/s but if your target moves at 4 km/s as well, that's a combined velocity of 8 km/s - that's a lot of speed to compensate for on a shot, and why I think Star Citizen is a joke of space combat. DU's probabilistic, mathematical model is closer to the real space combat of the future than SC.

[Shynras]

That doesn't really solves the problems i mentioned. Anyway there' s a case in which this could work, and is when it gives some kind of disadvantage to make using 1 turret only a viable choice. But i wouldn't like it anyway, since if you can shoot from different turrets at the same time from different position, there's less skill required from the driver to keep up your turret fov and the enemy skill to outmanuvre you is less important too. This would make this game an even more "stats win you the fight" game, and i don't see the need for that, it would even kill a lot ship diversity.

[Anaximander]

That doesn't really solves the problems i mentioned. Anyway there' s a case in which this could work, and is when it gives some kind of disadvantage to make using 1 turret only a viable choice. But i wouldn't like it anyway, since if you can shoot from different turrets at the same time from different position, there's less skill required from the driver to keep up your turret fov and the enemy skill to outmanuvre you is less important too. This would make this game an even more "stats win you the fight" game, and i don't see the need for that, it would even kill a lot ship diversity.

Uhm.... what?

 

The myth in EVE is that "in solo combat you cannot maneuver". You can... you can move.

 

I can't sit down an explain transversals. It's EVE's system of combat (the mathematical, geometrical model). It's something you adapt into if you are not good at math.

 

If your ship's guns are slow tracking, it means the ship needs to be at a certain distance o be able to "keep" a target on the Cone of Fire of its gun. There's a reason Battleships IRL have frigates as their escort ships. Capital ships, are meant ot fight capital ships. A Battleship can only engage a frigate at a very far distance in relation to it. if the frigate gets TOO close, the Battleshio's guns cannot keep up with the frigate's superior speed.

 

Same goes with pilots though. If your target's tranversal is higher than gun's tracking at the distance (tracking == degrees lapsed per second ) then your gun wil lhave a chance to miss OR deal reduced, glancing damage.

 

If your tracking speed is higher, it means your gun has a chance to hit OR deal crashing or full damage.

 

The pilot's job is to keep the enemy's tranversal speed reduced, by cosntantly shifting the ship around, and trying to keep the enemy's ship at "rest" in rellation to the ship's guns, while keepign the spped goinf  fast enough to avoid shots.

 

It's a very, VERY complex system, that sets apart GOOD ship drivers from TERRIBLE ship drivers.

 

Flying a single-seater starfighter? Same mechanics. You need to jeep up your speed, while cosntantly keeping your enemies tranvseral in oregards to what your weapons can do. Which is what SCRIPTS are for. You can have scripts ONLY let you fire when the enemy is in your effective envelope of range. You could have mind-blowing manevuers scritped, to throw off a ship's aim (spinnign a ship arond = confuseds the computer of the enemy, as your vectors constantly change, turns out, barrel rolls DO make a differece).

[Shynras]

Uhm.... what?

 

The myth in EVE is that "in solo combat you cannot maneuver". You can... you can move.

 

I can't sit down an explain transversals. It's EVE's system of combat (the mathematical, geometrical model). It's something you adapt into if you are not good at math.

 

If your ship's guns are slow tracking, it means the ship needs to be at a certain distance o be able to "keep" a target on the Cone of Fire of its gun. There's a reason Battleships IRL have frigates as their escort ships. Capital ships, are meant ot fight capital ships. A Battleship can only engage a frigate at a very far distance in relation to it. if the frigate gets TOO close, the Battleshio's guns cannot keep up with the frigate's superior speed.

 

Same goes with pilots though. If your target's tranversal is higher than gun's tracking at the distance (tracking == degrees lapsed per second ) then your gun wil lhave a chance to miss OR deal reduced, glancing damage.

 

If your tracking speed is higher, it means your gun has a chance to hit OR deal crashing or full damage.

 

The pilot's job is to keep the enemy's tranversal speed reduced, by cosntantly shifting the ship around, and trying to keep the enemy's ship at "rest" in rellation to the ship's guns, while keepign the spped goinf  fast enough to avoid shots.

 

It's a very, VERY complex system, that sets apart GOOD ship drivers from TERRIBLE ship drivers.

 

Flying a single-seater starfighter? Same mechanics. You need to jeep up your speed, while cosntantly keeping your enemies tranvseral in oregards to what your weapons can do. Which is what SCRIPTS are for. You can have scripts ONLY let you fire when the enemy is in your effective envelope of range. You could have mind-blowing manevuers scritped, to throw off a ship's aim (spinnign a ship arond = confuseds the computer of the enemy, as your vectors constantly change, turns out, barrel rolls DO make a differece).

Ye i know and i agree with that, but if you just let 1 player to control a single turret at any given time, i think it could even be better (your arguments would work anyway).

The reason is that combat is not going to be exactly like eve, so there's space for that:

-in Du ships are going to be way smaller than eve ones (because it's not that easy to build one at that scale) aswell as ranges (because the server update rate frequency tech and because if you're playing small ships you don't even get a chance to see your opponent if you're fighting at kilometers). 

-Ships are customizable, it's not like eve where you have cannons everywhere to always have the same amount of cannons shooting (so no fov gameplay)

 

This makes it that you may have to choose between having 3 turret on top, 1 each on the sides and none below, or some other configurations, so it's not guaranteed you have all the turrets available to shoot at the same time. If you have 1 guy controlling 5 turrets, with 3 players you already have 15 turrets in your ships, this makes it that fov obscuration is way less likely  and requires less skill for the pilot to move the ship accordingly to turrets fov (both allied and enemy). A good example is planetside 2 where multiple people fly on the same ship, and the pilot need to fly in a certain way to give fov to 3 turrets, and if he doesn't only 1 or 2 turret may be able to shoot.

[Anaximander]

Ye i know and i agree with that, but if you just let 1 player to control a single turret at any given time, i think it could even be better (your arguments would work anyway).

The reason is that combat is not going to be exactly like eve, so there's space for that:

-in Du ships are going to be way smaller than eve ones (because it's not that easy to build one at that scale) aswell as ranges (because the server update rate frequency tech and because if you're playing small ships you don't even get a chance to see your opponent if you're fighting at kilometers). 

-Ships are customizable, it's not like eve where you have cannons everywhere to always have the same amount of cannons shooting (so no fov gameplay)

 

This makes it that you may have to choose between having 3 turret on top, 1 each on the sides and none below, or some other configurations, so it's not guaranteed you have all the turrets available to shoot at the same time. If you have 1 guy controlling 5 turrets, with 3 players you already have 15 turrets in your ships, this makes it that fov obscuration is way less likely  and requires less skill for the pilot to move the ship accordingly to turrets fov (both allied and enemy). A good example is planetside 2 where multiple people fly on the same ship, and the pilot need to fly in a certain way to give fov to 3 turrets, and if he doesn't only 1 or 2 turret may be able to shoot.

Oh, no, nobody said combat should be like EVE's. I have said many times in the past, EVE's PvP is like texting and driving. It's not the smartest thing out there as far as MMO combat goes.

 

And to be honest, I tihnk NQ should add grouping of weapons under one player at least six motnhs post launch. Why? To avoid people building battleships with 10 people. Yeah, it would suck balls

 

As far as the turret placement, yeah, that's true, but then again, you forget something ,you can "tie" those turrets on a signle player. One player may be operating the top battery, one the belly battery, one the port and one the starbird side. 

 

However, let's say a person is building a ship that works by having a lot of speed and shooting missiles. Those people, have to worry about two things, 1) their relative distance to the target and 2) the missiles' maximum range.

 

If the target is going at 1.5 km/s and your ship goes at 1.4 km/s, with your missiles going at 1 km/s for 10 seconds, it means that in the next ten seconds, the target will have elapsed 15 kilometers, you being 1 kilometer behind them and the missile going blank cause it never caught up to the target. But this scenario is ideal, in real combat, there would be trasnversals and relative distances. If the other ship tries to battle you, as a missile boat, you only have to rely on good old speed-taking. You are not a brawler, you are the equivalent of a fantasy MMO archer or ranger. Call me cheap, but I love myself some long-range missiles while I cruise at 3 km/s.

 

And in the end that's what I am talking about. Just because a person may be able to control 5 turrets after investing in skill training, that may not mean it's actually something that's objectively better. Like the Taranis quote, it should have its pros and cons.

 

You can have 5 people on the same ship controlling 5 turrets, it may yield less of a CPU strain on the Core Unit (as Core Units are more or less CPUs) leaving more room for things like more scripts or the pilot having better control of the ship on his input. I never said it should be an all around de facto option. I said it just should be one. 

 

If a battleship that has 50 guns, but only 10 gunners, ends up not working very effectively on its shield strength redirection "cycle" (how long it takes for the command to be parsed, more or less, the ship's processors lagging), or thruster control, because those 10 people take 50% of the Core Unit's CPU to group control guns than what 50 people would take for control those 50 turrets, then it would be a good idea for those 10 people to be reduced to 5, with the rest 25 guns remaining being crewed by people independantly.

 

I think that should be the defining factor. A fleet may favor the 10 gunners / 50 guns ships, because they operate a "sniper" fleet of long range battleships, that just "parks" on a location and acts like tanks in war, while another may favor close-range, thus needing a ship of more gunners, so the ship can "react" faster, as the pilot is doing all the job of keeping the thing avoiding shots, or the engineer redirecting shields on cue.

 

And if ANY Automation was to be introduced, it should take 5 times more CPU to operate than a person would take up when grouping a number of turrets. If a player was to take 10% of the ship's Core Unit's CPU for controlling 5 Turrets, it should take 50% out of the ship's CPU to run them automated and even then, only when a player is on the ship's helm, with the V.I.  gunner taking up more energy out of the ship, thus needing fuel more frequently.

 

That's my opinion. No solo players should have it easy crewing a battleship - and not cheap either when it comes to fuel.