#booster thruster buff

42 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

plush solstice
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booster thrusters kinda feel like a waste and need a max thrust increase

plush solstice
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personally I'm thinking 10k kn thrust instead of 9.6 kn

meager nymph
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One thing I really don't like is the fact they have an exclusion zone almost twice the length of a huge thrusters, despite performing far worse outside of boost mode and barely better in boost mode with a measly 1.6k improvement over a huge thruster. I've found them useful for intermittent maneuverability boosts in combat but they fail to live up to their name. They also perform worse than large thrusters outside of boost mode because they weigh more.

spark thunder
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Guess I'll just repeat what I've said on Excelsior. Boosters are already quite powerful when properly used.
Sure they may seem to perform worse on average but that's because they're meant for builds that can utilize their short bursts of high speeds at their fullest.

-jun(0) has a trap which uses boosters to counteract TB railfans at great effect
-GameKnight has a railfan orbiter with boosters which provide that extra thrust in crucial moments
-I have a wall meant to reach 170m/s with boosters to deliver a killing blow in those 10secs of boost

From my experience, boosters don't need a buff

vast lintel
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Requiring a competitive players optimizations to make effective usage of them is kind of a counterpoint to them needing a buff. They didn't see significant usage in any of the recent tournaments either

spark thunder
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Good point, can't argue that.

plush solstice
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the boost off mode also needs a buff cause if I make a ship with boost thrusters instead of large ones it shouldn't be slower most of the time

unique stirrup
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Why not? They are stated to be large thrusters but with additional system for direct nitro plasma injection.

fluid vector
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the power of boosters is the rampup time.

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not the extra speed

wise peak
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Boost thrusters effectively have no ramp up, and are the perfect way do do quick time event turning

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Instead of having the best raw speed, they have the best ramp up

steel spire
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boost thrusters not being good at raw speed when boosting doesnt sound right to me

wise peak
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They are good at raw speed, as mentioned earlier, just not as good as HT, as boost eventually runs out

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But unlike HT, the boost thrusters do very well at turning a ship around at crucial moments

stark dove
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modern alternating boost wall when

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@past patio when modern wall

frigid frost
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The problem with buffing boost thrusters right now is that no matter how strong you make them, they'll just be fighting the rather aggressive drag equation. Even right now you can easily have a single boost thruster powering an entire small/medium ship at a decent speed (also cheaper/smaller than an HT), yet a ton of them on a large ship still isn't much faster than a HT wall; significantly buffing boost strength would make them hilariously overpowered on small ships, but wouldn't significantly affect large yet agile ships.

I wonder if the problem is more that they don't quite fulfil their own niche very well; they're designed to be a short but effective agility improvement, not necessarily something to just speed you up in a single direction (doing so would then invalidate HTs). When actually trying to use them though (at least casually), they don't seem super helpful with anti-kiting, and their exclusion zone makes them too unweildy for a lot of other applications. Shortening the exclusion zone might help a bit, but more than anything I think the main issue right now is how quickly the boost runs out. Active boost thrusters don't even last 9 seconds best-case scenario, with ERs cutting it down even further to just under 6 seconds. Realistically though you're probably not going to get fully-powered boost thrusters often due to crew response time and how frequently boost is necessary to get an edge. It can even get to the point where activating boost hurts thrust overall since they'll just immediately run dry and reset ramp.

With all of that being said, I'd like to propose one or more of the following changes

  • A slight buff to boost force. I know I spent a bunch of time explaining why this isn't a good fix on its own, but it does feel weird that even if it's cheaper/more compact, boost is only 16.6% stronger than full ramp HTs.
  • A 50-100% power storage increase. This would increase maximum boost duration in turn, but wouldn't make them weirdly efficient either. Generally if you're using boost you have a lot of power to spare anyway.
  • Moderately shortening their deadzone. I don't think they should have a short deadzone by any means, but they're definitely super awkward to work around right now. I think reducing it by 6 tiles would be best since it creates this nice progression where small→medium and medium→large add two tiles each, then large→huge and huge→boost add three tiles each.
  • Lessening/removing the power drain when disabling boost. I think crew response time causes enough of a delay on its own, and being punished so hard for accidentally engaging boost early/late seems wrong. Messing with a flat/percentile reduction could also be interesting.
  • Instead of boost running the battery dry, it could automatically disengage at 1-2 batteries and maintain full ramp. This would make running out of boost far less punishing/remove the need for as many supporting thrusters, though it'd slightly lower the maximum boost duration. You could also require there to be additional batteries loaded to reengage boost (such as 4) to discourage spamming it.
plush solstice
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honestly I would love to see the boost off mode have a similar power to weight ratio of the large thrusters

steel spire
steel spire
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the main issue i had is that when i wanted to stop boosting to save power, i ended up wasting more than if i were to fully use them
but if i dont stop it, one thruster runs out before the other and it makes controlling my ship really awkward

fluid vector
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that would make them useful on orbiter ships :D

I wouldn't remove the booster deadzone though, I think it's very interesting to work around it

stark dove
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just use alternating boost? insane thrust at the cost of micro

agile crypt
agile crypt
# stark dove <@663356182056140845> when modern wall

thing is, the only get effective when close to optimal use, and only the paragons and a few experts can get there, so we can't really test their effectiveness outside the highest-level matches; if anything, the routine of 2-3 alternating actually has so small a margin of error vs HT, that you pretty much have to be a spider

inland moat
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yo hear me out

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bring back infinite boost

agile crypt
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:agony:

agile crypt
unique stirrup
# agile crypt there's a catch, right?

Crew cannot replenish batteries of a boosted thruster. However, Engine Room was able to sidestep this issue by directly feeding them. It was balanced out.

stark dove
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"the catch is that it isn't actually brought back"

frigid frost
stark dove
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i think they mean that they used to be able to but that was op so they no longer can

frigid frost
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oh I see, read that backwards

blazing parrot
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Reading this, i wanna add the suggestion cap made to the rebalance mod

agile crypt
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looks like boost avoider's back on the menu

worldly ether
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I already have a mod on the Steam workshop (albeit unlisted) called "Better Boosters" that implements many of these suggestions, as well as at least one novel solution not suggested here (it disables the Engine Room buff while boosting, because going 6% faster for 33% less time is a debuff not a buff, and it kinda makes sense that if a boosting thruster can't receive the battery teleporting then it also shouldn't receive the stat change), though I don't know how to make the boost cancel itself early (if it's even possible). The mod is part of a fairly substantial "Vanilla Plus" modlist containing 10 personal tweak mods that I currently have set to friends-only, because I wanted to playtest it more, but then my friend group stopped playing more than a month ago. I guess I should try to prioritize getting it in a decent state to be unprivated. I have a lurker tendency because I usually have bad experiences interacting with online communities...

plush solstice
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could there be a booster er interaction but there's a cooldown for energy entering the booster via er

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like if a booster uses 0.3 energy per second (while in boost mode) minimum and the cooldown is 1-2 seconds that means it's non sustainable but it is able to be extended