I think my main gripe, as I harped on with the 2 new cruisers, is that some ships have slots they NEVER want a weapon in. Scarab's side slots, for example; it's bad design IMO.
I mean, it says "experimental" right on the tin! (Only about 50% kidding here... more seriously, though, the Scarab is not a great *general purpose* argument here, because it's pretty unique. The obvious "solution" there would just be to remove a few weapon slots, not make systemic changes. Edit: and I suppose likewise for other ships where that's truly the case!)
Well... sure but i have a feeling we weren't talking about phase ships. But even then the vents and caps trade off works. Its just that vents allow a faster recycle time and caps allow a higher burst. Fundamentally your DPS is still hard limited by your vents in a linear fashion. The caps just let you bank it.
Same thing happens for "high mobility ships" but caps also provide immediate tank and so extend the potential engagement duration as well (as well as let you bank your flux dissipation)
As a result the effectiveness of the ship is still a function of the product of vents and caps and absent non-linear scaling as to their value you will still tend to maximize at whichever additional vent/cap has the higher percentage increase.
Gotcha. I just meant that generally ships that control the engagement stand to benefit more from capacitors than ships that don't.
Keep in mind that my position was that "caps are undervalued right now in most peoples fitting paradigm". I think that so is overfluxing (so long as you've range gapped your weapons such that they provide significantly different value/purpose to where you spend the flux) but that situation would still be improved by better AI weapon management
FWIW, the AI *will* have better flux management in the next release, though probably not to that degree.
If you'd want to be quite adventerous here, you could change that and let players develop overload into a state that's part of their tactis. Imagine you, on you max caps ship, approach a target, fire a battery of AM-blasters and max out flux, get overloaded, and now your dissipation is actually higher than it would be if your (non-existing) vents were still responsible for it. You could complement that playstile with hullmods, e.g. one that lets you fire weapons even during overload - at the cost of permanent flux capacity for the duration of the battle.
Or one that makes it so the overload acts like the EMP-effect of the Omen.
Sort of sounds like venting with a twist
This reminds me of the "dump coolant" or whatever feature from mech warrior, where you could dissipate heat rapidly at the cost of a permanent penalty to your mech's heat stats.
In general, though, this kind of stuff - while it could be fun - is I think too much of a change given where things are at right now. It entails a bunch of AI changes, a metric ton of playtesting, and so on. I mean, IF we're aiming to improve capacitors, that feels like a
tiny bit of overkill
I think capacitors are in a pretty reasonable place, by the way! They super don't need to be "as good as" vents. I think there may be a tendency to assume that they should be because they both cost one OP each but design-wise, they're basically a fine-grained dump for ordnance points. There's no reason they need to be equally good - as long as capacitors aren't *entirely useless*, they're fine since they fill their place in the design.
For example, if e.g. there were changes that made overfluxed loadouts better, that'd make capacitors better too, yeah, but that wouldn't be the reason for the changes, that'd just be a consequence.
Spoiler
Personally, I have no issues with empty mounts. And you're still going to run into that in player fleets sometimes simply because they don't have weapons on hand or purchasable to fill them with. Sometimes when you buy that wolf, you've got a pulse laser and no other energy weapons for sale. It is just making a bad situation worse for no good reason.
If you increase flux stats, you'll still have some load outs without all weapon slots filled because players will push their OP into hullmods. Or simply switch to higher flux weapons and still leave some empty. As far as I can tell, one of the design goals of the ship loadout system is flexibility and trade offs. So give an Onslaught double the flux dissipation, and you will still have builds that pump a ton of OP into hullmods and perhaps leave off weapons. Especially if they pile on high flux cost weapons.
The biggest problem with this idea, is we've got huge variation in weapon OP costs and flux usage. For any sane amount of flux you put on an Onslaught, I can always put more weapons on it than flux dissipation allows. All you would be doing is moving the cutoff where empty mounts start showing up. An Onslaught equipped with three Mjolnirs and the built in two TPC hits 2400 flux/second. And that is just on the larges. Throw on high flux mediums and smalls and you can probably hit almost 7,000 flux per second. An Onslaught equipped with 3 Hellbore and 2 TPC hits 1150 flux/second. There's a 1250 flux plus 24 OP difference right there in the larges, and potentially another 4,000 flux/second in the smalls if you just fill them vulcans or something.
If you give all ships tons of flux dissipation, and suddenly the cheap, flux efficient weapons don't have a place. Why use cheap bombers on a Drover or Astral with guns/missiles when you can just use high end bombers and guns?
Unless people are proposing to flatten all weapon OP costs and flux usage, while also making them trivial in OP cost relative to hull mods, I don't see how you can avoid some player builds skipping weapons.
(Makes sense!)
i have to disagree on this. i'm pretty fly the doom constantly (my doom fanaticism is so bad i'm getting bored of the game) and i would never take a cap over a vent on this ship and i'm over capping constantly and only 2-3 of my anti matter blaster totally worth is because thanks to the vent i can even at max flux "instantly" cloak again. even at 100 % it only take a very very short time to vent the ship.
i care about the time it takes to vent caps don't help me here and i rarely vent when i'm even close to 100% i'm venting at 1-30 % all the time.
but i'm personally think the system is currently working pretty good.
To clarify, what I'm saying is that on ships that control the engagement, capacitors are relatively more valuable than capacitors are on ships that don't. Not that capacitors are necessarily better than *vents* on these ships. Also, the Doom, while a phase ship, plays fairly differently than its smaller, faster cousins - it's not so much about hit and run - so, yeah, that doesn't really apply to it; we're on the same page there. I probably shouldn't have blanketly said "phase ships"; how they play changes quite a bit at cruiser level and beyond!
