A Better fundamental approach to Combat, Energy, and cores.

[SpiceRub]

Combat needs a different roots approach into how it works. Currently how combat technically performs, is just like peeling an onion. You just gotta keep shooting and shooting until you strip away the layers you need to get to the core. The difficulty between creating a ship that will get destroyed in either 100 hits, or 10,000 hits, is NOT hard at all.
 

THERE IS NO CUBE META.

Cube meta isn’t anything special in itself, it simply makes most effective use of how combat works. There is no cube meta, just shallow and undefined DU combat.
 

Regardless of their differences, and other very strange differences, weapons themselves all do pretty much the same thing, just at a different scale.

I don’t know what the NQ team imagines will ‘fix’ their problems, but you guys really need to be careful not to tip the scales. Any drastic changes need to consider both ends of the spectrum, being, weak cheap ships, to heavily armoured ships. As things are now, weak ships take about an hour to kill, and heavily armoured ships are immortal ammo eaters.
There is a MASSIVE disparity between ships on either end of the spectrum. Coupled with the fact that people can farm as they please and build what they want very safely, ships will always be at the top of their game, and the top of their strength. Ship designs won’t be out of necessity or purpose, but solely out of attrition.
 

WHAT IS MORE DIVERSE COMBAT?

Anything that isn’t DU combat as it currently is.
Do away with unrealistic arcadey damage types. No one really cares about resistances or ammo types.
Weapons need a purpose. Ammo, needs a purpose. The fact that things are separated by damage type and resistances, is pretty shallow and meaningless.
Weapons need a REAL purpose, a REAL function. Not a DPS count.

Ships in DU do not have set HP values like in other games where constructs cannot be handmade.
A dynamic system needs dynamic mechanics!

SUGGESTIONS PROPOSED TO MAKE COMBAT QUICKER, EFFECTIVE, FUN, AND CHALLENGING.

Halve the total HP of every voxel.Ship death on core destruction? I think not. Make Cores Impervious to weapon damage. (Explained further down)

Change what weapons actually do. Introduce penetration damage models!
Laser blasts and missiles may do the same thing, creating devastating explosions on impact, but the best way through armour, is through it. Cannons need to pepper ships, railguns need to be actual railguns, and create big holes from entry point to exit point, though lacking obvious things like tracking, rate of fire, huge ammo space. Armour itself doesn’t have to be useless, it needs purpose. Enough armour can still stop certain penetrations like cannons, but to a point where the armour needs be quite impractically thick where designers may opt for only certain parts of heavy protective armour. Though this doesn’t negate the need for armour entirely in which a ship would be incredibly vulnerable to blast attacks from lasers or missiles.

ENERGY MANAGEMENT.
 

I believe we all have a pretty good idea of what NQ may do for energy management.

Give ships an energy cap, and each element will take up a certain amount of energy until there may be no more that the system can energize.

I am suggestion a slightly different alternative. Lore around the fact that dynamic cores are a technologically advanced whatever, with unique power systems that can power ships or whatever.

The technical details of proposed core energy management:

Cores produce a certain amount of energy on their own. Enough to comfortably power a battleship if need be.

Cores are impervious to weapon damage.

Cores cannot function if they are generating too much energy. (If you have too much unused energy)

Cores will become disabled by prolonged use with too much energy unused.

In other words, to safely operate a core unit, you need to be using the energy it provides, else it can become unstable and explode.

HOW DO WE USE THE ENERGY?

As with the simple system, each element will provide its own energy cost. HOWEVER, a core unit will provide an energy cap that will easily supplement the biggest ships.
IF you are building a smaller ship, on a core that requires a high energy usage, you can use a new element, ENERGY  DAMPENERS. These elements will have different energy cost depending on size, and will do nothing other than REDUCE YOUR UNUSED ENERGY TO AVOID CORE DESTRUCTION.

So the whole deal behind this is that a ship can be destroyed if it has too much unused energy. How does this work in combat? Simple. Elements that are destroyed will stop using energy. Freeing up a cores energy capacity, and causing it to become more and more unstable, to the point there is too much unused energy, and the core explodes.
Energy dampeners don’t have to be expensive, giant, or cumbersome for builders, they just need to BE there. This way a ship will be destroyed from being disabled. Not after a 10 hour missile excavation expedition to the core.

This however presents another problem, adding or subtracting elements during combat. I believe NQ can work their way around that.

NQ could indeed also switch ammo types for every from what they are now to just, explosive, or armour piercing. others may be imagined up but these are the basics of what weapons actually do, and it makes SENSE.
 

Ontop of this, considering fleet battles. A typical strategy is for an entire fleet to target 1 ship at a time, and the fleet battle becomes a race against the other fleet, in which DPS is particularly dominant.

Getting destroyed within seconds because you're being targeted by an entire fleet is not fun. Without the ability for this to happen, a fleet battle flows more like an actual battle, rather than eve alpha DPS strategy.
My opinion of this comes from the latest battle feature many large core ships. We were unable to target individual ships correctly as a group due to ship names being all the same. This appeared as something that needed to be fixed by NQ at first, but after thinking about it, I actually had fun. Definitely more so than targeting one ship at a time with the entire fleet.

[Physics]

Rail guns actually acting like rail guns is a must imo. We definitely need some kind of penetrating ammo / weapons. I like the new take on energy system. Only thing I also would love to see in DU is a role / place for solo and smaller pvp fighters.

[le_souriceau]

Yep, I super want to have meaningful actual 1-seat fighters/ 2-seat torpedo bombers, to actualy difersify combat in rock-papper-scissors style.

 

XS almost impossible to hit with larger weapons. So some point-defence will be needed.

 

Torpedos can only hit larger targets (but very hard against voxels) and have short range. For smaller ships they can be installed as single or pair of 1-shot tubes (so fit in XS size, hit-and-run), for larger ships as actual batteries (S, M, L), that can be used as sort of point-blank shotgun of devastating anti-armor effect to reward more agressive/skillful piloting.

 

 

 

 

 

[blazemonger]

I'd really like to see proper power management in the game but I fear it will be not much more than an arbitrary number which mostly will act as a buff and not be an actual mechanic that matters much. See also this post on a power management suggestion...

[Fembot68]

This is just my opinion but I think they need to do something with the fuel / ammo usage more than anything.    At the current time  I have not had a PVP battle that lasted more than about 8 minutes.  then  one or both sides have to go back to safe zone to get re- stocked.      This is stupid!!   

The fixes:

1. better fuel usage 

2. ammo takes up less space 

 

Power management. 

Okay so the way things have gone so far I am almost afraid of whatever NQ is going to do with power management.   I can just hear JC saying how much he hates walls of engines.  and he is right in one respect.  we need XL atmo engines plain and simple.   scaled the same way the space ones are  having to put in 22 or more  engines in something is dumb.  Just like the brakes engines need to be redone doing away with the lowest tire and shifting the rest of them down.    example   if i am building a S core ship there is no way in hell i would use M brakes or engines  they are far too weak and seem to be getting weaker. 

 

[SpiceRub]

Agree with fuel usage, its a bit much. However with ammo taking up a lot of space, I don't particularly mind, it just needs to be much more effective.