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Now on an important topic. Battle cubes! When will we see the death of them?


LouHodo

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I think at least as far as atmo combat will be concerned, we will see a bit less of it. As weight has more impact on say a planet like alioth then it does out in space with 0 G.  Plus there is cross section.  There will still be armor and to what degree who knows, but would highly doubt we will see big straight up cubes in atmosphere.  Thats just my guess.  And as for space i think no matter what they do you are gonna see people stack voxels as its the main armor.  Sure there are talks of possible shields, then you can reduce voxel HP overall to compensate but beyond that I would say we are still aways away for any major changes to cube meta.

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Shields would be a great answer -- make voxel-based armor almost irrelevant because if voxels work as armor that'll always encourage ugly abomination craft. HP / Shields (and probably firepower) need hard limits based on core size -- PvP shouldn't be a contest of who can slap the most crap onto a construct or it will always feel lopsided and encourage ugly ships. 

 

It's really frustrating that 2 months after launch they still don't even have ideas on how to balance and improve PvP, never mind timelines.

 

I'd agree with JohnnyTazer -- changes are probably months and months away. 

 

 

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Theres been a lot of interesting discussion on options, and I hope they picked up a lot of the good suggestions. And Im thinking a good mesh of options is gonna be the way to go. My favorites:

- Power budget tied to core size. 
   + All elements that affect combat should draw from this, with a reasonable pool to allow for ships to function well balanced, but also allow for specialisation by trading off. ie. Cant plaster with brakes&engines and still field large weapons on a XS core. So you choose, slow with big weapons, fast with smaller etc.
- Rework on radar mechanics
  + dont know all suggestions here, but untie lock on range from core size, but rather move it to a formula based on Mass*power usage. Tie in some defensive systems that can reduce it (with the above tradeoff mechanic.
  + one sugestion I saw was to make radar size influence radar characteristics: Small radar has shorter lock on range, but is a lot faster locking on. Large radar has huge lock range but takes longer to lock. This encourages specialization again.
- Hit chance being influenced by relative speeds, influenced by ship rotation and distance and cross section. Shoot a small ship at high speed far away? big chance to miss. This mechanic should be the replacement for core size bias (ie. the need to not have L cores nuke XS cores with no chance at long range) 
- Weapons need to check for collision on receiving and firing end. Now they fire through other cores. If atmo combat comes, ground needs to collide weapons too. Else no use for closed carriers.

There was more but this is what was on my mind. Oh and remove magical brakes :P They need a trade-off

There will always be some Meta, we just want it to be one that is fluid.

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3 minutes ago, Samlow said:

Theres been a lot of interesting discussion on options, and I hope they picked up a lot of the good suggestions. And Im thinking a good mesh of options is gonna be the way to go. My favorites:

- Power budget tied to core size. 
   + All elements that affect combat should draw from this, with a reasonable pool to allow for ships to function well balanced, but also allow for specialisation by trading off. ie. Cant plaster with brakes&engines and still field large weapons on a XS core. So you choose, slow with big weapons, fast with smaller etc.
- Rework on radar mechanics
  + dont know all suggestions here, but untie lock on range from core size, but rather move it to a formula based on Mass*power usage. Tie in some defensive systems that can reduce it (with the above tradeoff mechanic.
  + one sugestion I saw was to make radar size influence radar characteristics: Small radar has shorter lock on range, but is a lot faster locking on. Large radar has huge lock range but takes longer to lock. This encourages specialization again.
- Hit chance being influenced by relative speeds, influenced by ship rotation and distance and cross section. Shoot a small ship at high speed far away? big chance to miss. This mechanic should be the replacement for core size bias (ie. the need to not have L cores nuke XS cores with no chance at long range) 
- Weapons need to check for collision on receiving and firing end. Now they fire through other cores. If atmo combat comes, ground needs to collide weapons too. Else no use for closed carriers.

There was more but this is what was on my mind. Oh and remove magical brakes :P They need a trade-off

There will always be some Meta, we just want it to be one that is fluid.

Any or all of this would be good and go a long way to improve the current situation.

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11 hours ago, JohnnyTazer said:

I think at least as far as atmo combat will be concerned, we will see a bit less of it. As weight has more impact on say a planet like alioth then it does out in space with 0 G.  Plus there is cross section.  There will still be armor and to what degree who knows, but would highly doubt we will see big straight up cubes in atmosphere.  Thats just my guess.  And as for space i think no matter what they do you are gonna see people stack voxels as its the main armor.  Sure there are talks of possible shields, then you can reduce voxel HP overall to compensate but beyond that I would say we are still aways away for any major changes to cube meta.

I'm pretty sure we will see dedicated atmo ships and dedicated space ships.  Flying a hybrid will be death against a dedicated ship.  So, yes atmo ships will look nicer.  I dont mind the cubes.  The reason I dont mind them is they are the most logical shape ...... even in the real world (if we had capable tech).   With no air or gravity to worry about a cube or a sheet with all thrusters on one side and all guns on the other is the logical shape.  I can see 2 ways they can change this:

1)  Change the laws of space which will suck (pun intended) IMO.  

2)  Make the angle of honeycombe important.  Those who have played "world of tanks"  will know exactly what I am talking about.  So, if there is a high chance for a ricochet against angled honeycombe or its much harder to penetrate and angled block (just like in real life) then we would start to see angled designs appear.  Also PvP would require more pilot skills as you would need to keep your angles pointing at the target.  We might even see cargo ships with angled rear for protection.  Problem is,  it might be too much information and slow the game too much. 

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This is a tricky one to solve regardless of your opinion of the devs. PvP no matter the game is always tricky to bring to a point where its balanced. Even games with decades under the belt I.E starcraft, wow, D&D warhammer you name it. They have had things broken and take YEARS to get right. And to add onto that woe is the fact we get to build out our own ships and the devs want to incentivise pretty ships. This means that IMO the MAIN problems boil down to three main areas as i see it. Armor, weapons, Power.

 

In this case we are in a situation where armor is basicly free. There is very little downside to more. Weight is really not a concern, there is no power draw, no structural integrity and it takes a metric butt ton of armor to actully protect anything or a huge pile of rare materials or both. Ergo cubes make sense. 

 

This is further exasperated by weapons as they stand now. A pretty ship is a vulnerable ship because it has less armor, less surface area for weapons and is far more likely to get 1 shotted as stuff will be more clustered. Right now to protect against a L railgun takes a CRAPLOAD of armor and missile splash can damage/destroy multiple elements at once. That pretty engine bay will likely go poof from a single rocket depending on how big it is. So to protect things you need to spread them out. Once again ergo cubes make sense here.

 

and then we get to power. Right now you can stack moronic numbers of weapons and armor on an XS core and have near solid cubes and it only takes an extra engine or two to push you. The cost in fuel is laughable and there is no downside at all worth considering. Plus a bigger footprint means you can fit more elements in to further offset the one or two extra engines and fuel tank you need. So once again cubes make sense.

 

Problem is there are a lot of ways to fix them and all of them have downsides. Let me give you a few out of my ass very basic examples.

 

First lets look at armor. There are a few things we can do here.

 

Increase mass to a point that cubes are no longer practical and armor strips become the norm for example. Good idea on the surface. In practice it just means hollow cubes with armor strips inside. All the other advantages hold true.

Shields. No go here either, Even if size adds power draw or gives less shields it just means cubes with more power systems or smaller cubes with higher tier materials and/or floating light elements that can eat shots.

 

Weapons? reduce damage? means armor is even more important. Increase damage? same as reduceing damage. Larger splash? cube is the answer to spread elements more smaller splash? Cube is still the way to go as your elements can be packed more densely and more of them.

 

Power? higher weight means more fuel? who cares fuel is cheap and this punishes cargo ships. Engines have power draw? cubes give more interior space for generators with minimal armor loss. Reduced engine power? Just add more engines requireing a bigger cube. Generators have a core size cap on how many/how much power you get? smaller cubes or hollow cubes with armor strips.

 

And these are only the very very basic problems given as food for thought. The only way to balance things and encourage actual shipbuilding is to detach PvP damage caculations from the ship entirely. Armor? add armor plates you can only have X number of per ship size with voxels being more decoration or adding laughable amounts of HP i.E pretty ship 8k HP. solid cube? 12K HP, armor plate? 100k HP. Throw in a mass debuff I.E larger more massive ships are easier to hit and small agile ships become the meta.

 

Weapons? Size requirments i.e 1 L gun on an XS core with no others and/or a pentalty for reload and accuracy (sorry but a ship firing a cannon half its own size should have moronic levels of recoil. This is why we dont see jeeps toating 120MM cannons irl). Again it changes the meta forceing small agile ships which will have an advantage over huge lumbering cubes.

 

Power? power restrictions. Generator on XS ship can only power 1 large railgun if you want full engine speed. More guns = less speed or no shields.

 

The above again is a VERY basic example and should not be considered a fleshed out idea. Ill say again i used those as EXAMPLES and food for thought. Not as a "DO THIS". But this is all just my opinion.

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18 hours ago, LouHodo said:

NQ it has been 2 months since launch of beta and the meta battle cube has been the combat ship dejour.  When will we see the death of these abominations?  

Before talking about how to kill this meta, can you explain why it should be killed?

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They might do something when PvP is actually updated and becomes part of the game, personally I am not bothered about a 'meta' in something which is going to completely change and is completely avoidable at this stage.

 

If pirates want to run around shooting each other (and the occasional noob that gets lost) in cube that could well not be viable when pvp is actually relevant that is up to them, they dont actually effect the game.  When they DO, I will worry about it.

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4 hours ago, Ater Omen said:

Before talking about how to kill this meta, can you explain why it should be killed?

I think in this case its because non cubes are heavily punished via the current meta. While you can build a viable non cube ship. It will always have a nasty handicap as opposed to a cube. This makes pretty or intersting ships pointless or sub optimal and you end up with ugly cubes everywhere. Additionally theres very little incentive to do anything else I.E fast strike fighters vs heavy bombers. This means you end up with a monostyle of gameplay that gets dry and dull in short order.

 

Killing cubes will in theroy encourage diffrent and more varied playstyles then "cube with more guns and more engines"

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7 hours ago, Ater Omen said:

Before talking about how to kill this meta, can you explain why it should be killed?

Pretty much what artic_fox said.

 

The cube is currently a race to see who can slap the most densely packed voxels and still manage to clip a player into it.  With no thought to how to get in or out.  The most engines and guns as you can get.  It is not good, fun or diverse.

 

It doesn't lead to individual design styles or thought 

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Why do you insist on killing cubes instead of elevating other designs to their level? Do you want everything to hit like a wet noodle and get exploded in one shot? Cubes are high risk high reward, parenting will enable cubelike ships even if you gut actual cube ships because you hate fun.

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Noone (apart from OP) is talking about killing cubes, we are all talking about options that encourage other builds ,and as a result that kills cube meta into another (hopefully more diverse) meta. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, dumpeet said:

Why do you insist on killing cubes instead of elevating other designs to their level? Do you want everything to hit like a wet noodle and get exploded in one shot? Cubes are high risk high reward, parenting will enable cubelike ships even if you gut actual cube ships because you hate fun.

I would be fine with other design options.  But currently there is zero benefits to anything other than a cube.

 

Even the sphere is less useful than the cube.  

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On 10/24/2020 at 1:46 PM, carijay766 said:

"Remove hit points from voxels.  Simple."

And ruin the purpose of materials

 

"other designs should do as well as cubes" 

 

But then you would need to have smart devs putting up smart systems and incentives. 

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Not necessarily.  There's still mass, "quality", appearance, rarity and price, etc.

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