PVP Feedback + Suggestions

[SpiceRub]

Hello there. 

I've just noticed that Naunet has rebooted the forums, so I feel that posting feedback and suggestions would be worth it, since I couldn't go into deeper detail on the round table.

The theme of this topic will be Constructs being too difficult to destroy.

As it stands now, the main thing that governs how long a ship can survive being shot at is voxel mass and surface area. The current cube meta plays off of this.

Consider this, everyone is currently using L weapons, weapons that are supposed to be fitting for battleships, yet people still struggle to destroy a cube, even worse a medium warship, and ultimately completely unable to destroy a large ship within reasonable means. Once the new updates fix weapon sizes to core sizes, people using smaller ships will struggle even more. Furthermore, large core ships will become more desirable, being reasonably indestructible and more potent in terms of damage output. If now we can predict that a large core vs large core battle will take several hours, a silly amount of resources and effort, to simply reach a stalemate, imagine what will happen when everyone has a large core battleship. It will simply become a waste of time, and completely only a war of attrition. Whoever can be bothered the most, whoever has the most time, whoever has the most voxel armour, scrap ammo and fuel. Paired with the already uninteresting gameplay, endless fights with large cores will be IMO the death of pvp, because at the moment people only pvp for fun, hell even if there were currently objectives I probably wouldn't bother spending hours for frustration.

I do have a suggestion however, of which I believe many people are of the same mind.

PENETRATION!

Instead of nerfing and buffing things left and right, creating a confusion of balance, a different fundamental approach to combat should be used.
Currently whatever weapon you may use, when hitting, creates a sphere of damage  on whatever exterior location the RNG decides. With the currently used system, it is necessary to go through as much armour as the builder has implemented to cause any real damage to a ship.  

How does penetration work?
Simple, when one shell loves another ship it'll do anything to get inside.

 

instead of a sphere of damage, the damage model can be changed to a thin rod/cylinder. The goal of penetration is to deal damage to critical internal systems, throwing rocks at armour is a cavemans tactic. 

This will shift the balance of building a ship. Plating a ship with silly amounts of armour will no longer dictate how long a ship survives. 
Ship design will finally become important (ship design is not important ATM, slap on those voxels jimmy). Placement of elements will finally matter, internal design of the ship for easy access repairs will finally matter. 

However, this system can completely nullify the use of armour, balancing penetration will also be a struggle no doubt, but more depth and quicker more effective combat in DU is sorely needed.

Use of armour can still be viable in such a way that the lack of it will be very disadvantageous for things such as missiles.

A small bonus of armour penetration instead of mass exterior explosions is that, penetrations will leave less of a mark on the ships voxels. When you core a ship, you wont get something that has 0 voxels because you've had to literally destroy every block, and ships can keep retain their looks for longer which I'm sure some builders can appreciate.

Indeed, much more is needed to introduce substance to combat. Like other things in DU, we lack tools to pvp.
Fuel tanks, ammo tanks creating a hell of an explosion when destroyed, leading to more thoughtful placement of elements, more substance in combat. Emptying their contents when destroyed. Your ammo went off m8, GG.

While penetration leaves less of a mark on voxels, it also leaves the surface area mostly intact in which RNG will have to pick from. Fights can still take a long time waiting for a luck shot on a core. The introduction of special ordinance, ship killing tools, will bring more tactics, less time however more involvement into combat.

On that topic, lets suggest a basic ship to ship torpedo. Expensive, large, dangerous to carry (if exploded in your ship you get it's juicy effects), dangerous for the enemy, yet easy to counter. Torpedo's would only be viable when an enemy ship is down on its energy generators, that can no longer supply to its counter measures which prevent torpedo's from locking on. Torpedo's would have their own ammo racks, and own dispenser elements, perhaps one that looks like a turret, or one that looks like an inbuilt tube, to provide options for both aesthetics.

I apologise for the bad organisation of information. I'm sure we can all agree that combat needs more substance,  needs be more effective. We need more tools! And I hope that NQ can decide on a better fundamental approach to the mechanics. Sure their physics based damaged model is cool, but no one wants to be stuck in a 10 hour fight resulting in nothing. We need to use tools to pvp, not all of our time and resources.