#A critique on the meta

82 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

solid thunder
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Fair warning, I only have about 50 hrs with the game so my understanding of it is only so complete. I feel like I've hit the limit of enjoyment I can squeeze out of the game for the moment, so here's my critique and analysis. From the perspective of someone who studies game design.

Components such as thrusters & especially guns of all kinds have disproportionately high health values. The amount of health they're assigned seems to scale with regards to the number of tiles that given component occupies, but disregards the likelihood that only 2-3 of these tiles are going to be exposed to gunfire.

This leads to oddities like a heavy laser having 6k hp per exposed tile, distributed evenly. Without ablation, this makes guns the best armor by a drastic measure and encourages an unsightly and unthoughtful strategy of unconditionally pointing as many guns at the enemy as possible.

Guns being as tough as they are rarely lends value to any strategy short of concentrating fire on whichever critical system is least defended.

I would solve this by drastically lowering the HP of all guns and likely several other components like thrusters.

Maneuverability is not competitive! Unless a given ship has totally skimped on giving its ship maneuverability, there's little value to specializing in it because of just how easy it is to track another ship by rotating in place to keep them in front of your shields, guns and armor.

It is effectively impossible for most matchups to solo flank an opponent. You can flank an opponent with the help of an assisting ally, but then maneuverability is far from a prerequisite.

I won't pretend to understand how you'd fix this on a technical level, but I would start by making it harder to simply rotate in place. As it stands, I strongly feel that the game suffers in creative diversity for it -- it contributes to the same all-guns-forward meta that I consider a weakness of the game.

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Feel free to comment or discuss; I just came to drop my thoughts off.

slender plover
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Have you been playing exclusively career thus far or have you played a few competitive PvP games, just for reference

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Nothing wrong at all if you have, I'd like to understand where you're coming from

solid thunder
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i've only played career, though i've spent a few hours theorycrafting pvp and analysing videos on it

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i wasn't particularly impressed with the way the results ended up. it seemed to be just like. mostly a rock paper scissors of missileboats, walls of guns & deathstars. with a few odd outliers

slender plover
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I could give you a lengthy explanation on how there's a lot more depth underneath the surface for competitive play if you want, but most people would just skip past it

As for career, its a bit of an issue to balance it (at least on a player solution based end) because the game is pitifully easy. Flanking, rails, or any remotely intermediate strategy evicerates AIs
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To get back to your main post, however: even if guns weren't naturally sturdy parts, there's always a trend towards gun walls because concentrating damage and killing your opponent will always be optimal. I'd be in favor of trying a month of balance or such where they all have much lower part health, but in competitive it would likely result in ships being more glass cannony but not changing. They could be completely dropped and followed by a trend towards non-gunwall ships like missile boats and death stars, but those are already common enough for you to spot a pattern

solid thunder
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if standard guns are dropped in favor of missiles, then it would mean there's a statistical middleground to make where players will have to make a decision between one or the other, which is the ideal to me

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if, by relation, indirect weapons like ions become more powerful or too powerful then that can be adjusted accordingly; i really do think balance starts with gun hp

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that is, of course if the gunwall meta is a problem. i think it is

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the ideal, to me is that people start thinking more about where they position guns on their ship; do they place it sideways so they can position it behind armor, or do they turn their ship into a beam of concentrated firepower? past a certain threshold of fragility, being a glass cannon fails to be a working strategy for an all-purpose brawler

slender plover
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The issue is things start getting really complex because of underlying problems inherent to warfare: why would you have a brawler if you can kill your opponent before they get through your shields? Or past that, how do you incentivize things that aren't dealing damage

Taking a look at two high-level domination ships; if they want more defenses they can just put armor behind their cannons. If they want survivability arguably its just a better investment to equip more guns (which these ships are already perfect examples of) or spawn more of the same to get a higher amount of cannon

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I don't mean to say that it's an unsolvable problem, and your feedback and ideas are exceedingly valued

solid thunder
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i believe the practical role of this ship would change dramatically, as something that's meant to warp in or sneak around the side of an occupied or pinned ship to deal damage

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alternatively, if it were transformed to fill the same (or similar) role, it would develop a nose of armor for the guns to hide behind. it wouldn't have the same full 180 coverage on all of its guns; that's a good thing

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another alternative, of course, is that it could just become a broadside, with the disadvantages that come with having thrust perpendicular to the guns

slender plover
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(Heh, nothing for you to worry about but this would likely get a lot of playerbase resistance if implemented because it ideally invalidates a large amount of of these ships)

solid thunder
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i've definitely thought about that.. these are the least radical solutions that came to my mind, actually

slender plover
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Do actually DM those to me if you're interested, I always like to hear more about balance from different players

solid thunder
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i don't see why not

maiden umbra
# solid thunder Fair warning, I only have about 50 hrs with the game so my understanding of it i...

i really have to disagree with 'Maneuverability is not competitive'

pvp is very much a speed and mobility meta, you need to be fast and at least somewhat agile to have a chance, or you will be outflanked, kited, dodged, etc
Solo flanking an opponent is difficult, yes, though it is possible if you have a large speed advantage, your opponent is slow turning, or you have something like tractor beams (TBs) that hinder your opponent's mobility. agility, however, is actually more useful for dodging, as is seen in the Avoider archetype (saris' Eidolon and ships like it are good examples of Avoiders). it's incredibly difficult to hit a well-piloted avoider with deck cannons or nukes, and exceptional pilots can even dodge things like HE missiles or even mitigate damage from railguns

sacred sentinel
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Maybe nerfing cannon health could be good for dom. But I feel like lasers for example are in the right spot. These weapon walls arent the whole meta in elim or dom and I therefore dont really see a reason to unproportionally punish them. I also like the fact that with smaller ships you have a little buffer when all shields are down.

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Also as Theta said maneuverability is definitely not undervalued. Quite the opposite actually.

mighty path
# maiden umbra i really have to disagree with 'Maneuverability is not competitive' pvp is very...

I agree with theta, speed is absolutely the meta, most of the pvp ships I have made are essentially invalid due to lack of speed, easily being countered by the same ship archetype just with higher speed. Couple that with being a good pilot and you have yourself a lethal combo.
Basically, shields and armour are good but when you can just dodge everything you only need thin layer of armour or shield and your ship is suddenly equivalent to the same ship with much more armour and slower speed.
And from experience at least I feel that guns armour is at a good level aside from maybe cannons.

plucky fable
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The point of high speed is that higher ship speeds give higher degrees of control over the battle, TBs are able to do the same with flexibility in push and pull, but speed is still the primary controller of the way the fights will happen, in domination faster ships are better at flanking slower ones and capturing points, and in elimination most ships are orbiters

slender plover
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Speed and maneuverability are different things and we shouldn't assume they meant speed

jade yacht
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You said that a laser blaster is best armor cause it has 6K hp for each exposed tile. That is true if you attack with energy weapon. But if you are attacked with weapons with penetration, the laser blaster will take an insane amount of damage due to is length and low penetration resistance, while the armor would take much less damage due to is higher penetration resistance.

plucky fable
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Armour even has a better hp density, a 2x1 piece of armour having 8000 hitpoints,

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Although armour is also heavy and does not deal damage

jade yacht
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Yeah, he said that the laser blaster has 6K hp which is more than the armor, but that is assuming that you use it horizontally. You can use it vertically if you want...

sacred sentinel
solid thunder
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for the sake of distinction let's assume by all accounts i described maneuverability i meant to use the word agility

remote mantle
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most pvp ships I run (and I chronically run tanky less maneuverable ships) reach around 90 to 110

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some might dip lower but like 85 minimum

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I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum as a lot of other players who have incredibly maneuverable stuff that they can dance around the arena with

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maneuverability is strong, but not op

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(this is just reminding me more and more that I need to learn how to use strafe)

slender plover
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Manueverability is weak compared to speed if we'ze being honest. There's one archetype that takes significantly more skill and practice to take advantage of manueverability/agility over top speed

remote mantle
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yeah

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i tried an avoider today and got incredibly fustrated

maiden umbra
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would decreasing thruster rampup time improve viability of avoiders?

solid thunder
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it's hard to prescribe a solution because i don't have a strong grasp of why thrusters work like they do, but there's an observable quirk regarding small scale ships with only a single thruster; they can turn in either direction

maiden umbra
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aye, 5% of an engine's thrust can go sideways

solid thunder
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i don't know exactly how much that alone contributes to the problem but i found it noteworthy that i was unable to solo flank a ship with about 3 working components using a fully intact s-model

maiden umbra
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model-s isn't the fastest or most agile, to be fair

solid thunder
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certainly not, but you'd think shooting out thrusters would be worth something, right?

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i think it's part of the same problem and i'd be inclined to find out how the game plays without that sideways thrust. or at least with a considerable reduction in what it can accomplish

maiden umbra
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i do think turning ability is a bit high across the board, but then you can't really reduce that to allow flanking easier without nerfing flanking

solid thunder
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i suspect that lowering the turning bonus on all thrusters would making maneuvering-focused ships better in relation to other builds, at the expense that they'd have to be more specialized to do it

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i don't know this for certain; there may be some internal mechanics to the physics that account for rotating in place being so easy to accomplish with few thrusters

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if only i were in a position to tinker with it

solid thunder
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here's my experiment, a mod that adjusts some of these balancing factors

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i've only played with it a little bit so the results are inconclusive

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i'd be interested in hearing from folks trying it out

sacred sentinel
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So it wont really affect the stuff you have discussed

sacred sentinel
plucky fable
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Gun health only really affects domination, and only weakens what is already in elimination, as domination ships more rarely have shields for defending turrets, mostly out of cost,

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The tiny percentage of side thrust doesn't impact speed much either, just makes turning slightly worse for certain ships,
Personally I won't be touching the mod you provided there

sacred sentinel
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Its a fun feature

plucky fable
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It also helps when your monothrust ship hits a rock

safe yew
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at least from what i've seen

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or maybe an engine type specific to maneuvering would help?
(being better at it beyond no ramp up time)

safe yew
sacred sentinel
safe yew
plucky fable
safe yew
sacred sentinel
safe yew
sacred sentinel
solid thunder
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lateral thrust benefits maneuverability and counterintuitively shuts down maneuverability as a competitive stat; if every ship is maneuverable, no ship is much more maneuverable in relation to others

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i have no doubt the removal of lateral thrust would cause issues with monodirectional-thrust ships. i'm sure there's some workable solution for that, but that's outside the scope of what i know how to do with a mod

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aside from this experiment i like the idea of thrusters that specialize in maneuvering over speed. maybe one that adds lateral thrust at the expense of force?

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i'll see if i can whip up something like that tomorrow

plucky fable
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In battle Turnspeed isn't actually all that beneficial outside Railfans, or the specific archetypes like Avoiders and such that also require turn speed, Rammers are often so fast and ram so much that ships cannot turn once ram-locked, hooks included on designs such as Ion rammers, monothrust depending on how wide a ship is, can still turn,

sacred sentinel