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Topics - Gabrybbo

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1
General Discussion / Firing missiles while overloaded?
« on: September 18, 2013, 04:42:47 AM »
I just noticed this: I was fighting a hammerhead with my enforcer and got overloaded when i was about to shoot a volley of rockets in its face... and the ship launched them. I was curious and went to the simulator to try it out and it seems i can actually fire missiles while my ship is overloaded.  :D
Have we always been able to do that and i never noticed? Or is it a new feature i didn't know about?

2
Suggestions / Fighter refit
« on: March 27, 2013, 01:34:21 PM »
Before you start screaming at me, i do know that this has been suggested ten thousand times, but i just want to discuss an idea i've had.
Basically, instead of being able to refit a fighter wing just like the other ships, each wing could have a certain number of predefined variants from which you can choose.

For example:
The Piranha bomber wing could have a setup with the current bombs, one with cluster bombs (perfect against pd weapons that deal a lot of damage to a single target like burst lasers) and one with frag bombs (ideal to do a massive amount of damage to a ship that has nearly no armor left but a ton of hull).
The Broadsword could have one that uses a single mg and two swarmers for additional anti-fighter capability at the expense of effectiveness against bigger ships.
The Warthog could have a loadout with a rocket launcher and two double autocannons, to have better alpha strike and range at the expense of sustained fire.

Obviously, the variants would need to be balanced to avoid having one which is simply better, but the idea is to give each fighter different ways to carry out their role depending on the situation. :)

So, what do you think? :)

3
Suggestions / Fleet stances
« on: December 24, 2012, 06:08:19 AM »
I remember seeing a discussion, not much time ago, where it was stated by alex that it's not easy for the AI to decide whether the use of an extremely aggressive tactic may be useful, so it is better to have a more conservative AI as it makes the effects of an error less devastating and frustrating for the player.

So, what about the ability to set a stance for your fleet while in battle?
A "defensive" stance makes ships much more cautious and forces a more conservative use of flux. Less losses overall, but on the flip side your fleet takes more time to kill an opponent and you run the risk of losing capture points as your ships may prefer to retreat or wait for reinforcements instead of risking a confrontation. Can be dangerous to use if your ships are overpowered by the enemy, but allows you to preserve your forces until your Dominator arrives at the frontline to lead a full-scale assault.
A "balanced" stance is basically what we have now: the AI tries his best to kill the enemy, but doesn't try to charge alone in a swarm of bullets to blow up a single damaged Talon. This is also the default stance.
An "aggressive" stance makes your ships stay in combat a lot more, even when taking hits, and forces a much more free use of all their weaponry and systems. You get to destroy weakened enemies in a very small amount of time and you slow down a lot your opponent, but if the stance is mantained for too long the damage report could be really severe (assuming you manage to win with damaged and nearly overloaded ships).

Obviously as Officers will be released their personalities will severely impact how your fleet acts in every stance: a suicidal commander during a defensive stance might still chase after ships and if you select the aggressive stance he may try and burndrive into enemies.  :)

Usually i like having an option like this when i'm playing any game that involves strategy without micromanagement, as my general approach is to rush out to take a lot of vantage points denying them to the enemy and then slowly retreat while I assemble my forces. This translates in an aggressive stance followed by a defensive one and finally by a balanced or aggressive one.

4
Bug Reports & Support / Piloted ship-only perks not working when not piloting your flagship first
« on: December 23, 2012, 02:37:23 PM »
I know, i'm terrible at titles.  :P

I just noticed that I won't get the various skill perks if I do as follows:
1 - I deploy any ship other than my flagship;
2 - I transfer command to a deployed ship;
3 - I deploy my flagship and transfer command back to her;

It happened using Uomoz's Corvus, but I guess it happens with vanilla too, here's a screenshot:
Spoiler
[close]
In this case I should have 20% hard flux dissipation, flux speed boost up to 25% flux, flux speed boost +25su/s, but I have none of those.  :)

5
Suggestions / A few UI suggestions
« on: December 18, 2012, 11:34:26 AM »
Hi everybody!  :)

When venting flux, it would be nice to see not only the seconds remaining until it finishes venting, but also the tenths of a second. It's not really needed, but it'd fit with the fast pace of the battles and could actually be more useful than it is now.

Also, i'd love to see a countdown when using ship systems that have a cooldown, maybe shown at the right of where we have the system's status.

Speaking of system statuses i'd add (to the current "active" and "ready") "charging" and "inactive", the latter written in red as it means that the system is out of uses. I'm convinced there's a better word than inactive, but I can't come up with one.  :P

6
Suggestions / Suggestion about alternating groups
« on: December 04, 2012, 09:54:41 AM »
Right now pressing the key bound to an alternating weapon group cycles the weapons in it, but sometimes i'd really like the possibility to automatically switch to another weapon. How and why?

First, why?
Let's observe this Medusa (through a mirror possibly, as Perseus taught us):

Spoiler
[close]

As you can see i'm using the left AM blaster, so if i'm forced to engage a ship on the right i have 2 choices:
1. turn the ship until i'm able to fire the blaster
2. press the key again to switch to the other blaster

The first can be done easily with a medusa (she's agile and has an omni shield protecting her back) but can be very risky with other ships.
The second is unintuitive and "slow" (at least for me: I hate pausing the game for anything other than giving orders :P) and if i happen to have more than 2 weapons i have to hope that the next one is the right one.

What I really miss here is a way to swith instantly my active weapon.
So, how do I do that?
Simple, when i move the cursor outside the firing arc of my selected weapon it switches to the first weapon in the group that covers the new position.
So if i just move the mouse to the right of the Medusa my current selected weapon switches to the second amblaster, allowing me to fire it without turning the whole ship or mashing keys.


Of course, there are issues with my idea:
- What if i just wanted to turn the ship (you know, the turn-to-cursor thingy) but not actually wanted to use another weapon? That can be "solved" by changing the condition needed to switch weapons:
Instead of being "is the cursor outside of the weapon arc?" it is "is the weapon outside the weapon arc +X degrees?". X is some sort of adjustable sensibility for this feature (yay for more sliders!), so that it can satisfy everyone. :)
- another problem comes out when you have to shoot with an alternating group while operating an omni shield. If you move the mouse away from the weapon arc you would change the active weapon, but you may not go back to the original weapon if you have some overlapping arcs. Annoying, but the issue can be sorted out by having a key that makes the current weapon "fixed", so that even when moving the mouse it won't make it switch to another one. If I know that i need to keep that weapon selected no matter what, i can just press that key and everything will be good. It will still cycle through all the weapons as soon as i fire, but moving the mouse won't do anything.

So, what do you think?  :)

7
Suggestions / Alternate sprites for small weapons in medium slots
« on: November 20, 2012, 12:36:07 AM »
Right now when we put a small weapon in a medium slot (or a medium weapon in a large slot) we can clearly see that the weapon wasn't designed to fit in it, it's too small and looks "wierd".
So i thought "Why don't we have a way to define alternate sprites for each weapon when it's used in a larger slot?", and it looked like a good idea.  :)

What do you think?  :D

8
Modding / Explosive projectile?
« on: November 08, 2012, 04:44:04 AM »
Hi everyone, i'm trying to modify the light mortar into a aoe weapon with a small radius (15-20) and low damage. :)

Right now i can do it using "proximity_fuse" in the behaviour_spec field, but there are 2 issues:
First, the projectile explodes once it reaches its max range. While it looks good on a flak cannon, it doesn't fit what i'm trying to do.
Then, it seems that the projectile explodes when it is close to the collision radius of the ship, not the ship bounduaries. This, combined with a small explosion radius, means that sometimes the shot will detonate before being capable of damaging the ship. :)

So, is there any way to make a projectile "explosive" without using the proximity_fuse?

9
Suggestions / Manual crew assignement
« on: September 07, 2012, 11:54:10 AM »
Today i came up with a little idea: allow the player to "force" a certain crew level on a ship, given that you have enough experienced crew to do it, without having to adjust the ship order 1000 times in the Fleet screen.

Let's proceed with an example:

If i have a ship that will probably be heavily damaged during almost every fight (this is just a random motivation) i may want to use regular crew, easier to replace, instead of veteran or elite crew. The problem is that if i have enough veteran crew in my fleet my ship's crew will include some of those and i can't do anything about it.
In this case i can "push a button" (or whatever) and a menu appears allowing me to choose what type of crew i want on my ship. The rest of my ships will be assigned their crew normally.

I don't know if i explained my idea well enough to make it understandable, but i hope so.  :)

10
Bug Reports & Support / Buffalo Mk2 not firing its swarmers
« on: September 01, 2012, 03:14:19 AM »
Today I made a custom loadout for the Bmk2:
Spoiler
Loadout:
Weapon groups:
[close]

I tried it in battle against some fighters, it did well, but it almost never used its swarmers unless an enemy fighter went right in front of the launcher. I mean, it's not that much of a problem, usually fighters tend to circle the target so they still eat some swarmers, but i wanted to report this "bug" in case it's something easy to fix (if there actually IS something to fix, of course).  :)

11
Bug Reports & Support / Ship system on fighters. AI doesn't use it.
« on: August 19, 2012, 02:59:51 AM »
I tried to put a ship system on the warthog fighter, it works (if i take control of the fighter i can use the ship system and the other fighters in the wing will use it as well), but the AI seems unable to use it.
I tried with burn drive, maneuvering jets and another system i made, but those fighters never took advantage of their system, like it wasn't there.  :(

Maybe the "role" (the field we define in wing_data.csv: ASSAULT, FIGHTER, BOMBER or SUPPORT) doesn't take ship systems into consideration? Just a thought.  :)

12
General Discussion / The mining blaster
« on: August 11, 2012, 05:20:12 AM »
What do you think of this weapon? Do you use it?
I love it on the Venture, simply because that weapon plus the pilums can keep at bay most of the frigates and some destroyers with no problems whatsoever, but i also use 2 of them on my Hyperion just because they have a much higher per-shot damage than the heavy blaster (600 vs 400, iirc) and they don't have a very long chargedown like the am blaster does, so i can teleport in, shoot the blasters, teleport out, vent and repeat all of the above at a quick pace.  :)

13
Suggestions / Phase missiles
« on: July 14, 2012, 04:54:56 AM »
Today I was derping around with Sins of a Solar Empire and I noticed that the Vasari use "phase missiles" which can phase to phase space before colliding with the shields and dephase (which is a real word, of course) into the shield, hitting directly the ship.
As we are about to see phase technology in Starfarer, wouldn't it be cool to see such weapon in our game?

How would it work?
1. you launch the missile
2. it goes near the targeted ship
3. it enters phase space
4. it moves to the ship bypassing the shields
5. it dephases
6. BOOM!
7. profit!

My thoughts about it:
They use a technology similar to phase ships which allows a small object to enter phase space for a few seconds before dephasing and requires less energy and, more importantly, less credits to build (meaning it can be used on missiles). BUT, as this technology is "weaker" than the one used on phase ships, only a small amount of matter can be phased, so it is an atropos-like torpedo, able to cripple cruisers and capitals but more vulnerable to point defense weapons due to its low speed (as it has a powerful warhead but a smaller engine).

In the moment when the missile phases to attack, it estimates the time needed to reach the target's current position and begins a countdown from that time. Passed that time OR 5-10 seconds (remember what I said about the technology) it dephases and behaves like a normal missile, exploding when touched.

Also it won't track the target while phased, so it's possible to evade it completely or just move enough to make it dephase out of your ship.

Obviously, it should be balanced not to allow people just to fire 10 of these missiles every five seconds. Maybe using a medium-sized launcher with 2 missiles (which have a low range, like 1200-1500) and a large-sized launcher with 6 missiles, maybe each one brought to the target via a MIRV, allowing a longer range and making it a useful fire support weapon against shielded targets.

I don't have any idea how hard implementing this can be, it looks simple but it could be a coding nightmare, so I'll obviously let Alex decide.  ;D

What do you guys think?  :D

14
Suggestions / New simulation mode mechanic
« on: May 16, 2012, 09:49:21 AM »
Hello everyone, as my first post and suggestion i thought of something that may be interesting:
I've noticed a lack of high-tech ships in the simulation mode, so why not have that when you encounter a ship you get that variant in the sim?
For example, when you fight an Elite Onslaught you get that variant so you can improve your tactics for the next encounter.

And, taking this a little bit further, why not make that some stations can sell you a "scan" of a particular ship that allows you to access that ship variant in the sim mode?
We could see an Egemony station sell scans of an Aurora or Apogee, so that you could try different setups without the risk of being destroyed for real, before you try to face a Tri-Tachyon fleet. This would make some sense in the final campaign, where you want to be prepared before going against an opponent you don't know, especially if you didn't play the game before.


Hopefully I didn't kill too many grammar nazis with my english (guess what, this is not my first language! :D) and... What do you guys think?

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