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496

Suggestions / Re: Poll added. We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.

« on: September 30, 2019, 10:24:45 AM »

I imagine players will stall combat to repair ships for free with any repair system.

Players will always exploit free healing unless there is no difference between mid-combat repair and post-combat repair. For example one talent provides up to 50% healing of armor damage taken during combat. That kind of talent might work as a mid-combat repair.

Let's take a ship which has 1000 armor, and suffers 500 armor damage during battle. The talent allows them to restore 250 armor, half of the suffered damage. The amount of healing is already decided. The ship can either recover it over time during battle, or heal the remainder as a lump sum after battle.

There are still ways to game the system. You might suffer 500 armor damage, then sit back and recover 200 out of 250 total from your armor talent. Now you have 700 armor and take another 200 damage. You fall back down to 500 armor, with the previous 50 healing in reserve, and gain another 100 healing from the damage. The ship lost 700 armor total, and can heal back up to 650 after battle, for a total loss of 350 armor. Actually... that math checks out okay, no big exploits there.

The big combat bonus for that example, is that the second wave of damage was against 700 armor, instead of the much softer 500 armor. It's not a trivial gain in survivability and will dramatically change balance. Maybe someone else can work the armor formula from there.

497

Suggestions / Re: View PPT on Ship Selection in Combat

« on: September 30, 2019, 09:44:10 AM »

If you are trying to maximize the combat output of your fleet, you want to know CR so you can retreat the ship as it starts to lose combat effectiveness.

You're essentially using CR an extension of a ship's PPT. The CR is being used as a timer, tracking until the ship is no longer fit to stay in battle. That doesn't contradict what I'm saying, and does seem to be in support of it.

Outside of the "doom clock" situation, are you really concerned about a ship's exact CR as long as it's some value higher than "currently falling apart"? There are minor bonuses and penalties to enjoy, but there is no dire situation until a ship's CR goes into the red, which typically doesn't happen until after PPT is exhausted.

498

Suggestions / Re: Let bounty targets be the fleets of other players (asynchronous multiplayer)

« on: September 30, 2019, 04:49:44 AM »

Saying mods make this idea unworkable seems pretty silly to me.

The game's autofit algorithm can already replace weapon mounts with suitable substitutes if you lack such weapons. Likewise, mod ships can be either ignored or replaced by vanilla variants easily.

Aha. So it's a system that tracks and uploads player loadouts, but completely ignores the data and does whatever it wants.

499

Suggestions / Re: View PPT on Ship Selection in Combat

« on: September 29, 2019, 02:36:44 PM »

CR is also information that you know and choose before going into battle. It doesn't guide any changes in player actions as long as PPT is on the field. But let me illustrate:
- Your ship enters battle with 50% CR.
- Some time later in battle, your ship now has 50% CR.
Will you consider a change in tactics? Probably not. If your ship enters battle with 20% CR you're probably panicking right away, just the same as when it's still 20% later in the battle. Aside from a having a very generic grasp of "it's good/it's bad", you don't really need to know a ship's CR.

Now consider the same ship, except its main display shows PPT.
- Your ship enters the battle with 180 PPT.
- Some time later, your ship now has 20 PPT.
Will you consider a change in tactics? It might be time to consider withdrawing the ship. A ship with very low PPT has very clear problems incoming, and your choices will change compared to a ship with lots of PPT in reserve. Having a clear indicator of a ship's PPT turns out to be very important.

Now consider the current scenario, which is what players typically experience:
- Your ship enters the battle with 50% CR.
- Some time later, your ship has 20% CR.
Will you consider a change in tactics? Chances are, profanity has already been spilled. The information that you needed came too late, and the ship is already in serious trouble. You probably didn't even know it happened at all, because CR rating is a static number until some arbitrary point in battle, after PPT is exhausted. Will players spend all battle staring at a number that doesn't change? Probably not. The information isn't there, and when it is there the player was already trained to not pay attention in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, there are times that CR is important. But the main stats on a ship should be the most important stats. Knowing if a ship is thumbsup/thumbsdown is handy, but the exact CR is not more important than clearly knowing PPT. At least, CR isn't important until it becomes your ship's remaining time.

500

Suggestions / Re: Let bounty targets be the fleets of other players (asynchronous multiplayer)

« on: September 29, 2019, 02:16:20 PM »

For a vanilla game, taking a screenshot of the player's fleet and weapons seems like a perfectly doable thing. As soon as mods jump into the picture, all bets are off. There will be ships and weapons the game has no understanding of, and a fancy mod might include new types of mechanics that the core game can't grasp. Tracking all the possible variables across all the possible combinations of mods and keeping them coherent against each other? That sounds very hard.

501

Suggestions / Re: View PPT on Ship Selection in Combat

« on: September 29, 2019, 01:28:26 PM »

CR is just as important though because low CR ships still have the same PPT.

Wouldn't that make CR less important? If the PPT behavior is the same either way, then CR isn't providing any vital information to the player.

CR has secondary importance to know if a ship is generically good or bad for this battle. PPT - at least the way I first experienced it - is essentially the remaining time until your ship starts to self destruct. I think the latter is much more vital information than the former, at least until it switches over to CR being the actual doom clock. But the only way that you can know when the doom clock starts ticking is by knowing the PPT.

502

Suggestions / Re: View PPT on Ship Selection in Combat

« on: September 29, 2019, 01:13:09 PM »

I notice that all ships list their CR value as part of their main stat display. This information is not very important, because CR doesn't change until a ship's PPT runs out. CR only really becomes useful as a "decaying performance time" when PPT is exhausted. It might be better to replace the "CR: __% " label with a "PPT: __" label, and only switch to a direly highlighted CR label when PPT runs out.

That way the more important combat number is directly in front of the player at all times.

503

General Discussion / Re: Take a rep hit for too much cargo!

« on: September 27, 2019, 01:47:27 PM »

Being pulled over with a truck full of brand new DVD's without a receipt

Presumption of guilt works great in a dystopian future, but it's probably not too fun in terms of gameplay. Simply getting scanned is dangerous enough because a player is likely going to have some kind of illegal goods (such as AI cores) if they plan on making money.

504

Suggestions / Re: U.D. We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.

« on: September 27, 2019, 09:47:53 AM »

It is always effective at 5% of max, regardless or the armor state on the location hit.

Well, something more like  5% + 150 *1.5x armor with armor talents, in whatever order the talents work.

The big thing about armor is that 1 point of very low armor has much less value than 1 point of extremely hard armor. An armor regeneration system would end up heavily favoring ships that stay near max armor and mostly receive scratch damage. Armor regen would do very little for ships that already have heavy armor damage, since wounded armor takes much more damage from hits.

505

Suggestions / Re: We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.

« on: September 27, 2019, 04:41:45 AM »

The armor system gives extreme damage mitigation at high values, and loses all its defense after being worn down. Armor repair would only be meaningful as long as armor stays close to perfect health, since patching up 1495 => 1500 is a much more powerful restoration than patching up 195=>200.

506

General Discussion / Re: Percentages Question

« on: September 26, 2019, 06:40:58 PM »

Ah yes, I am becoming somewhat familiar with the "no danger in 1000 range, shields up!" maneuver. No AI is perfect, and I'm sure there's a good story reason why perfect AI isn't a smart idea.

DS3 definitely sounds like a niche perk. Paying a heavy vent tax for the ideal "well, first you need to be almost dead" scenario doesn't sound very attractive. There is definitely more clear utility in the -25% shield upkeep and -20% shield ratio of the previous talents, but maybe I'm just missing the numbers and experience to appreciate it more.

507

General Discussion / Re: disable supplies

« on: September 26, 2019, 04:05:18 PM »

My first time in a corona was an absolute surprise. I stayed in the light, because nothing looked obviously wrong from a newbie's point of view. Before I knew it half of my CR was gone and supplies were getting devoured. It's not that the punishment is bad, the problem is that everything looks normal when your fleet is getting baked to a crisp.

issuing a retreat order does not require a command point.

This also would make a lot of sense. The command point basically represents the difficulty of establishing clear and private comms in battle, right? Issuing a retreat isn't trying to to establish a secure comm link for a secret maneuver. It's screaming at the ship to get out of there, so it doesn't matter if the enemy fleet can hear the message.

508

General Discussion / Re: Percentages Question

« on: September 26, 2019, 03:47:53 PM »

only comes into play when ... you have no soft flux

Oh man. It sounds like the talent only comes into play when your ship is deliberately wasting 90% of its vent potential. I imagine not too many players would be keen keeping their shields up, yet doing absolutely nothing so the talent has an opportunity to kick in.

 I was hoping it would be an always-active skill, I.E. your shield's hard flux gets "softened" at a rate equal to 10% of the ship's vent value. Over a long engagement that can end up being a full shield bar which is certainly not trivial, but turning the shields off will always be superior.

509

Suggestions / Re: We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.

« on: September 26, 2019, 02:11:17 PM »

It may be an exploit, but unless ships get much longer PPT or fights get shorter, PPT resetting between rounds is good.  PPT times were set during 0.6.x, when endgame fights were much shorter.

PPT resetting doesn't sound like a feature worth designing combat around. PPT serves a very important purpose of pacing out the battles and inflicting a time limit on the player to encourage aggressive fun action. If the battle takes too long then either
A) The player screwed up by picking a fight way bigger than themselves, or
B) The game is creating individual battles that are too large or too slow paced.

I do like that battles are mostly short and sweet. Anything that evolves into a larger scale battle (multiple deployments/waves/etc.) might be better served by being broken up into more individual battles.

510

Suggestions / Re: We need some repairing modules for armor and hull.

« on: September 26, 2019, 01:34:06 PM »

whan combat resource, peak performance time run out, you can make full retreat and re engage into battle,

When the clock runs out on a ship, its CR falls like a rock. Paying a flat 15-20%'ish CR to get a full recharge sounds like an exploit. At the very least it is slanted in favor of shield style ships (and maybe torpedo boats?), since their losses are superficial.

Peak performance does not tick down if no enemies are present.

Field Combat repairs definitely sounds like something that demands peak performance. It's a hostile and high stress environment, even if no enemies are immediately shooting at them.