PVP IMBA / Circular Economy (PVP) / DMG (PVE/PVP)

[Police]

Strong Opinion.

 

tldr; pvp weapon dmg is absurd(wake up NQ), my ship elements take absurd amount of collision dmg when i land, make elements permanently destroyed.

 

 

PVP IMBA 

1.) There is a dramatically disproportionate imbalance between xs/small weapon damage and voxel HP/resistances. A 28x16 block of gold that is then covered by an 8 voxel deep shell of steel shouldn't be evaporated by 2 volleys from an Xs and 1 volley from a small weapon. Noting, this is the block that shielded the core, not even mentioning the amount of exterior ship shell and elements that that the damage also went through to get to the core's interior block. PVP fights shouldnt ideally be who got the first two shots wins... unless one of the players is sitting on top of gas tank, with no actually enclosed cockpit.. just free balling it.

 

DMG (PVE/PVP)

2.) Not only is weapon damage to voxel absurd, There are times when i land.. even super smooth at 32 kmh, with Medium landing gear, and a random 1-3 large adjustors or a random medium wing will "pop" (take full damage). Sure.. most times i land and that doesnt happen, but absolutely its super easy to have several elements just pop from the most trivial landings. This really needs to be adjusted. Either doubling the amount of element health, which would rightly so carry over to pvp, or reduce collision damage by 70%

 

 

Circular Economy (PVP)

3.) I have lots of comments about game loops that are great in spirit, "ok" in execution, and mediocre in terms of how quickly they are being addressed/revisited/tweaked. I think the biggest oversight is that people are taking from the earth, fabricating stuff like crazy, and everything that is being fabricated and going into the economy, isn't coming back out. If the items aren't exiting the economy, consumers aren't spending or acquiring and the market stagnates and suffers. If someone blows up my ship and takes possession, I  might need to go farm and make another.. but the original Ship I lost, technically stays in the economy, and fails to leave, and fails to cause further consumerism. Elements need to be destroyed fully, to where they are either then removed by player and deleted, or the game itself removes elements once they are reduced to zero health. Alternatively.. a thing they had back in Ultima Online, which was awesome.. a persons crafting level would impact how many times the crafted item could be repaired. So example.. the elements could have a special use count.. wherein each time they are repaired they lose one increment of that repair/use. Once they hit zero, they are gone foor good. And maybe crafting incorporates something where if the person who crafted is a tier 4 crafter/t4 proficiency, the item gets an additional 2-5 repairs or something along those lines.  Something along these lines has to occur, its only been a couple of weeks and everyone I know is already hoarding oooooodles of containers full of rubbish because nothing is exiting the economy.

Thanks for your time to read.

[Megaddd]

Agreed, voxels need to 'break' differently depending on the weapon/ammo type and the voxel type. e.g.: kinetic cannon ammo makes longer narrow holes, thermal/laser ammo does little deformations over a much larger area, missiles can stay a big round bang we have now, and railguns could be a combination of laser/kinetic deformation.

 

Voxels should not only have more 'health' or resistance to damage overall, but also be categorized by their main material property which defines how they take damage from the different weapon/ammo types, e.g.: soft, heat conductive metal | hard, heat resistive metal | brittle | fibre.

The following are example material qualities that would form a 4-way PvP "triangle" for the existing damage types with a little lore backing (may not be 100% scientifically accurate):

 

Soft, conductive metals do not get deformed as much by railguns, but act more of a cushion to slow them down - this leaves a tiny surgical hole and decreases the area of effect, good electrical conductivity spreads out electrical damage over a much larger area making them very effective at negating EM damage, however get absolutely shredded by slower HEAT impacts (think playdoh catching a steel bearing), and have only an average resistance to explosions.

Hard, more heat resistive metals simply mushroom under lower yield kinetic impacts from cannons - absorbing them easily, and have very good explosion resistance spreading out the damage over a large area and negating most of it, however railguns leave large exit holes or damage voxels in a quickly expanding cone, and the worse thermal performance only gives them average EM resistance.

 

Brittle materials, ceramics or carbon fibre for example, crack instead of deform upon high velocity impacts, absorbing them almost completely without much voxel damage, however they mass-shatter and get blown away easily by explosions, and only have average heat/em performance.

 

Fibres have generally the least health, because they're the lightest materials, however have excellent stopping power against lower-velocity HEAT rounds, but burn like kindling in the presence of lasers/EM damage, showing only average high-speed kinetic and explosion resistance.


I fully agree that elements damaged to 'red' in PvP need to be simply removed. Only in crashes should they be 'restored' by scrap. I thought this was already the case, however if not then we have some bell-ringing to do for the economist at NQ.

Voxel damage/resistance mspaint for reference:
 

[ZarTaen]

"A 28x16 block of gold that is then covered by an 8 voxel deep shell of steel"
I think you mean 28x16x6 gold with a 1 voxel layer thick hull of steel, which makes sense.

 

Well, I'm gonna go with that as measurements in voxels, not meters, so here we go:

 

At 28x16x6 gold we have a volume of 42m³, which totals at an effective health of worst case, antimatter, 648.480 eHP (the point representing thousand, not decimals), and the hull of steel around it at 30x18x8 minus the goldblock inside is 25,5m³ with 145.962 eHP in the worst case, kinetic. As reference: The total weight of this alone would be 8106kg of gold, translating to 8,106t and 2025,75kg of steel, or 2,026~t, totaling at around 10,1~ish tons with 794.442 total effective HP. Doesnt sound too shabby.

Now, you arent gonna shoot every voxel around it, only a portion, and that you ideally do from one direction. So lets go with the worst case of the shallow side, which is around 3 voxel layers of gold and 1 voxel layer of steel till it hits the core. Okay, so we can already straight up ignore half the volume if we ignore the spread range of the damage. Now, lets take a spread of, say, 10x10, which is awfully small generally and probably on the pessimistic side, and the enemy coincidently also somehow has heavy ammo.

So for the math you roughly have a gold block of 10x10x3voxels per side, + 1 10x10x1 layer of steel at the front, with a fully skilled enemy with the worst case ammo for your armor, as well as worst case ammo type of heavy, with the worst case of every shot hitting exactly center and erasing all 10x10 voxels per layer (in actuality the radius is more like 15x15, but less total erasure, but youd also have spread, etc). Im also gonna choose the weapon with the most damage per volley, so its the worst of every conceivable worst case.
This means you have 72.375 eHP of Gold, and 8943,75 eHP for Steel totalling at 81.318,75 eHP.

Okay, so xs cannons can at least be in a group of 3 simultanously, so for simplicities sake im gonna go with 3. One cannon does 60k damage in 1 minute unskilled with 1 magazine, in the best case scenario. So 180k as base, for one full magazine of each cannon in this scenario with all skills and stars aligned: 556.875 damage. So yes, from the shallow side, the armor is gone in a moment, and the total armor is gone in around 2ish minutes for that block, if stars align of course. Stars aligning include being in sufficient range, and not being an xs core, both would otherwise be detrimental to cannons. For that you need to be at around 5000ish meters, with skills you can be further away, but the neighborhood for *xs* cannons is around that.

But in reality, you have a hull of unknown size and material around that, you have elements that could soak up damage, you arent hit straight up from one direction with one shot on top of each other, you arent always in perfect range or at a perfect angle for the weapon, you arent always aligned with all weapons equally.

While I went in to see whether you have a point or not, I realised that, realistically speaking, 10 tons of armor is nothing, but the measurements it takes up is quite something for so little effect. What defeats xs weapons is cross section, the bigger the better. Because of the low initial damage per xs weapon, regardless of type, and the nature of randomness, xs weapons are notoriously poor at "drilling" into enemy ships, minus some very skilled specific circumstances.

 

NQ was aiming for armored ships to be really heavy, and 10 tons is microfighter territory armor, you know, those variations of it that have enough armor to last a few shots but are thrown away because they are so cheap. Of course I know you had more armor than that, but the hull would probably have lasted around 4-8 times as long, unless you got really unlucky, and coincidently, had a few shots that drilled in.
 

In the end its the following tradeoff for voxel balance: Do you want 10 minute+ constant fire and constant hits required in a 30 min dogfight between microfighters, and have bigger size ships take many hours of constant fire to take down? Or do you rather want to have bigger thips that can actually be taken down in a reasonable timeframe, and require a lot more armor for smaller ships to feel armored. Remember how volume and cross section relate to each other if the size increases, essentially you cant balance it to one side and have the other side not be totally broken to hell and back.
This is what I hope shields are for. While it doesnt sound like I agree with you, I actually do, but I also see weight as being a huge factor in all of this, as well as the randomness of the shots actually landing at a similar spot and think that what is off is the balance of health to volume, not weight. If focused fire ever becomes a thing, it needs to be balanced around small vs big weapons and the health of voxels need to be adjusted accordingly. (I imagine small weapons becoming better at drilling and bigger weapons being a bit less precise would be neat and give small weapons some purpose against well armored big ships)

-------------------

Now to the wear and tear. Yes, we need it, we need it badly. I disagree with it being a fixed count of repairs, but I agree with it losing performance and it being a "soft" loss.
My idea is as follows:
Light damage would reduce performance almost to no degree but more than everyday usage without damage would. Usage would wear the elements very very lightly, think weeks of 24/7 use to see some effect on its performance. Being destroyed completely would more drastically reduce the performance, think 1-3% of the original total per total destruction, at some point the engine would barely work at full throttle, but this would happen regardless of pvp or impact damage. You could even make a maintenance minigame, that restores some max performance for the elements, up to a limit and with according material usage.

This way you have a few effects: One, you wouldn't be immediately punished for being shot at a few times (its not always easy to place some engines exactly the same way), but over time you would feel the effects, and at some point think of replacing it. Two, you would have wear without being reliant on PvP. Three, you would end up with a "used ship" market with drastically reduced values, vastly easing the entrance for new players to get a ship that may be much more capable, albeit not like new.

-----------------------

What Megaddd brought up is something that I think needs to come as well at some point, it would vastly increase the depth of how damage feels for each side, but it would also need to be *very* carefully balanced, otherwise railguns would oneshot everything. Essentially, every change of a fundamental mechanic like this needs complete rebalancing, so realistically it wont happen anytime soon, and if, then it happens with other changes at the same time.


 

[Koawhkaine]

I think maybe somewhere in between. A large/xlarge(when its there) core doesn't necessarily have to mean an hour to destroy, but other more common interactions shouldn't be single volley death sentences. Even if you get shot 4 times in the course of 3 minutes, and in that 3 min time frame you weren't able to "effectively" counterattack or engage in countermeasure, it would at least have some semblance of an actual engagement wherein both parties participated.