Weapon Range Rebalance Experiment

[snow schooner]

In general. I think it restricts us too much in the building process. We already gotta fit walkways and heat pipes. Lets not make us fit sensors too. And then we would have to worry about symmetry and the fact that we're off by 1 tile. Like, I envision it to feel a bit like fiddling with Heat Exchangers. And that is (one of) the most annoying part of the Meltdown update to me.
Please let it just be a ship wide effect. Can be gradual, as I suggested in ideas and feedback.

[frozen silo]

I think this range change would make walls have a comeback- I rarely use disruptors lategame due to their range, though now it becomes viable. Whether that’s wanted or not is a whole can of worms

[tribal crypt]

That would work too. I could see that working nicely. Not everything has to be complex.

[delicate ember]

TBH I am inclined to agree as it was implemented this time since the radius was so wide, it really didn't matter until very late game (~lvl16?). However, I could see some value in shortening it greatly to give options: either you have a good kite with huge range but way more crew needed AND complex ship or you have a traditional ship with the same crew used to man more weapons or just thrust.

[rough bolt]

in early meltdown preview those overclocked were the only viable wall weapon (50 penetration with decent damage is no laughing matter), though that was not at all intended

[delicate ember]

If sensors gave always ship-wide boost, they'd basically become a required thing on every single ship above... around lvl 12. I don't think we need another pretty much mandatory thing. To compare, OCs require a lot of extra weak spots and added walking distance for the crew in general for some extra damage and utility so they are very much a meaningful choice.

[snow schooner]

Shortening the sensor buff? No, that's the opposite of what I would want. If there is gonna be a thing called sensor buff (which Walt has just said we should not assume), it should be ship wide. It would impose the same cost to overcoming the downsides of "short range weapons". Say each sensor reduces the debuff "short range weapons" suffer by 16,67%. Then you would have to place 6 sensors anywhere on your ship to make a laser fire 100% effecitveness at 600m. I think that sounds fine.

[delicate ember]

How about.... making sensors give ship-wide boost but also increase the command point cost?

Actually, nevermind, that just means you need a cocpit+sensors then, still no meaningful choice there.

[rough bolt]

sensors being next to or 2 tiles away from weapons would also mean building around tall stuff would be more of a thing for tall parts

[delicate ember]

Alright, but the fun part is meaningful choices. What is there meaningful with a part that uses 4 crew to give the whole 100+ crew ship a noticable boost without any other downsides?

[tribal crypt]

That would also make targeting sensors a viable strategy.

[delicate ember]

TBH targeting a control room is even more effective and a single sensor would probably be well protected.

[tribal crypt]

True.

[delicate ember]

Ok, I see I have misunderstood Yaddah's description. Multiple sensors, infinite range?

In other words crew cost in exchange for range?

[snow schooner]

Well, Walt just said we should not assume that sensors would be part of this update at all. So, that means the path the devs are currently working with also doesn't come with any meaningful choices and they think that's fine. Judging by the early voting results it also seems like most people are fine with that.
Not everything has to be complex. There's already plenty of meaningful choices to make in Cosmoteer. And in the end there still is a meaningful choice to make, even if it is a ship wide effect. Do want to fully negate the range debuff of "short range weapons" or just partially? If it's the latter, how much? Do you place 2 sensors? 4 sensors? 5?

[delicate ember]

I think that'd need to scale with the number of weapons to not be a cookie cutter solution. Much like thermal lance.

[snow schooner]

And in career that matters at a certain point in the game. Not the late game though. But pretty much nothing matters late late game anyway.

[snow schooner]

yes

[snow schooner]

And processors. They are quite expensive in the early game.

[delicate ember]

I think I'm starting to like your idea, but I'd still make it kind of like thermal lance and its boosting parts so that the more weapons you have, the higher the cost per weapon is to negate the debuff.

It is true that extra logistics complexity is not really needed. I am advocating for it not being just a "regardless of anything, just slap X of this on a ship of cost Y".

[snow schooner]

Sure, that might make sense. If sensors reduce the range penalty of "short range weapons", then the devs could come up with a formula that means placing a single sensor for 100 lasers would be severely insufficient.

But then again, do we need that?

[rough bolt]

most io ships would already be well built for sensors behind wall weapons not blocking roof weapons, at least front-on

[snow schooner]

Would it not just be fine if all of the largest ships have 6 or so sensors as standard?

[delicate ember]

I think it'd be boring due to lack of variety. I'd rather have some ships that are a menace if they catch you close due to more weapons instead of sensors and other ships being better against longer ranged weapons by sacrificing some firepower for more sensors.

[sinful schooner]

What if drag was relative to distance from the sun and system jump points? Less the further away from the sun and even less near the gates. Say, just past the gates [radius from sun] would be 0 added from the sun and near the gates would go from 1k at -1 to something higher right up close? That way current drag number gets influenced by this.

[snow schooner]

But you would already get that with the suggestion I made. (for reference here: #1412558696596377712 message) Every sensor placed means budget and crew not going to thrust or weapons and it also means additional weight and (slightly) larger surface area to protect. Plenty of factors to play around with here.

[delicate ember]

Yeah, I agree with every sensor's crew not being used for e.g. thrust. But at the same time I am looking at scaling with ship size. If you have bigger ship and want 20% bigger speed, you use more extra crew than on a smaller ship. In your solution, there would be a hard cap on when scaling does not matter anymore... except if that cap was so big that, say, even for Orion it'd be a large cost.

[snow schooner]

Yes, it would be a bit like the scaling of command points. With smaller ship sizes the command point limit matters, because you have to pay significant costs to increase it by 50 or 250. But for large ships command points are almost a non-issue, because you get so many by just placing a single bridge and if you have to place a second bridge, then that's almost no cost for such a large vessel. And that's fine.

[delicate ember]

I think your solution might work, but with around... 10-20 sensors required for full effect. I think 40-80 crew would not be insignificant even for a ship like orion. (plus some for batteries)

[snow schooner]

10-20 sensors??? Nobody is ever going to place that many. At that point, I would just not want sensors to be a part of the update and have just all weapon ranges be equalized.

[delicate ember]

Well, how many sensors do you think would have to give full penalty removal then?

[snow schooner]

6. Like in the suggestion thread. At most. Maybe at most at most at most 8 for the largest of large vessels. But like, it'd just be a hassle.
   Why? Why do we have to have that?

[delicate ember]

So that there is any difference between the game version with sensors required for the buff and without except for like... 1-2 maps in career at the edge of that cap.

[snow schooner]

4-6 sensors already matter for small ships, medium ships and even some large ships. You seem to be thinking of the largest of large ships. Sure, for them it doesn't matter. But for them nothing matters anyway.

[main juniper]

Separate from this range experiment, we are actively prototyping solar wind "nebulas".

[delicate ember]

Ok, I think I overdid it with 10-20. 6-8 would matter til around... the point at which you have ships of cost 1M-1.5M around... level 14 i think.

I'm not sure why you are disregarding the very late game, though. If it is unsatisfactory, it is something to fix by adding even bigger ships and other things, not assume nothing matters then.

[snow schooner]

For a 1,5mil ship even a single sensor matters. That's why pvp ships typically don't have any sensors at all, because they want that budget elsewhere.

[snow schooner]

Because nothing matters in the very late game. You can have the worst of the worst logistics and it doesn't matter because you're big.

[delicate ember]

I think range boosts might change that, for for this we'd need actual data. I can't really discuss it as I don't pvp yet.

[delicate ember]

Isn't that true only because the biggest ships are just around 3M with some extra space still available? While the player can grow without $ limit.

[snow schooner]

My point is that the introduction of decreasing the range debuff via sensors would already make sensors matter for pvp. Say each sensor decreases the debuff by 25%, you would still have some ships that wouldn't bother with sensors at all, because of how optimized competitive pvp ships have to be. While others would want to have the full 4 sensors, because their strategy benefits from having full effectiveness at 600m. You don't need to make it a hassle for it to have an effect.

[rough bolt]

suppose those would work better in controlled areas anyway, being a constant everywhere would just make anchors that much more necessary

[snow schooner]

No. Even if there were 6mil Flag ships as the "final boss" of a faction, the player could still just come to the fight with two 6mil ships. That's fine.

[delicate ember]

I think you have convinced me.

[snow schooner]

cool, doesn't happen often. 🙂

[delicate ember]

Now I want to brainstorm how to make late game more interesting, but I guess that is very much out of scope for this thread.

[gray jackal]

What about reusing the hyperdrive effectiveness system for range efficiency buffs, with a couple different sizes of sensors allowing for a balance of setups (efficiency of weapons placement vs. more expensive sensor arrangement). This would also make it drastically easier for large ships to be fully boosted while making sure it remains a challenge (but possible) for smaller vessels. The different sensor sizes should probably scale significantly crew-wise and cost wise, encouraging efficient use in early-mid game while allowing for the freedom to ignore that at the cost of cost/crew efficiency.

[snow schooner]

That would mainly come from mission variety I would assume and as many others have said.

[snow schooner]

That could work. However, maybe it is good that small ships don't have a way to shoot every weapon efficiently at 600m and just have to build around each weapon's optimal range.

Gives new players a feel for the weapons.

And then opens up design once their ship is big enough for a sensor.

[gray jackal]

Yeah that's the intention. By making the even the smaller sensors a significant burden (idk like maybe 2-3 crew, .25+ energy, 3x3 room), then small ships would have to build around it, medium ships integrate it (or just eat the cost of larger ones) and large ships wouldn't have much trouble at all

[snow schooner]

"idk like maybe 2-3 crew, .25+ energy, 3x3 room"
That's already what the normal sensor is right now. Just 4 crew instead of 2-3.

[gray jackal]

and it is a significant burden for starting ships to carry

[snow schooner]

Yes, so why introduce smaller versions?

[gray jackal]

I meant larger version(s)

mainly to avoid making it tedious to deal with in the late game

[snow schooner]

I see.

Sure, like hyperdrives

[gray jackal]

but without the small ones

[delicate ember]

So... about the poll. If every single large enough weapon to be a midgame+ one had equal range... How would that not completely eliminate kiting?

By introducing kiting via slightly better results with the falloff?

[gray jackal]

I think the idea is to allow short ranged weapons to scratch the paint (or shields) of kites at long range, which inherently focus on low defense and maximum movement. However, the short ranged weapons would still be far less effective at long range

[delicate ember]

but equalizing all ranges in this context means that rails, DC, ion and probably large blasters would all have the same range, right?

[midnight bolt]

maximum range

not optimal range

very important distinction

[delicate ember]

oh, so... same maximum but the falloff mechanic between optimal and max?

[midnight bolt]

yes

[delicate ember]

tbh that's not in the poll, but then i'd be for it.

[karmic glacier]

Meow

Hot topic

Ion is just a better laser

[modern sierra]

It would be basically a removing of per weapon max ranges, and more just a ‘cosmoteer projectiles go this far’

[delicate ember]

Here is an example of me kiting extinguisher with my puny ship in the experimental build using the inability of AI to target beyond max range. Having hard cap on range equal to AI targetting would probably fix that.

[modern sierra]

Weapon ranges would be implemented via falloff and inaccuracy instead of just disappearing

[shell flame]

That's basically what this is about

Ywah

[rose shard]

The last bullet point is a lifesaver. If you don't mind, do you have a more comprehensive list of all the balance suggestions that are in consideration?

[karmic glacier]

I see 28 yes. Weird.

Didn’t think that would be more

[pine swift]

A question... Will mining lasers also receive increase in range? It seems like MLs are the only weapon with no range increase?

(if we don't count flak and PD as weapons, but defense systems, especially considering that OC flak would be OP with such range increase)

[eager gull]

What will be the performance impacts of having that many projectiles?

[hybrid vector]

Not much, the projectiles who got a range buff are like fairly short lived.

[main juniper]

Currently no plans to increase ML range.

[marsh sail]

Yes,But to be honest, personally, I think we should prioritize developing the content of Career 2.0 or 3.0. Make the career mode more substantial before considering this.I think a is SUPER SUPER important.A full career mode can retain more players,However, this change(equalizing weapon ranges) requires a huge amount of balancing and is difficult to attract and retain new players.....

[main juniper]

We think that fixing kiting is a pretty crucial part of Career 2.0.

[marsh sail]

I roughly understand it, but I still think substantive content like missons,space environment might be more attractive than something like this that leans more towards balance?

[proven ruin]

i dont think this is the way to do it though

well elements of it sound pretty good

[snow schooner]

alternative suggestions?

[proven ruin]

i think range normalisation is a terrible idea but i like range/damage falloff

buffing range with sensors also seems like a terrible idea as it would just make the problem of kiting even worse

i liked greenshicken's idea of a very heavy and expensive part to buff a ships range

[snow schooner]

If that is the route, it should be tied to sensors or a certain number of them. The part is nearly useless otherwise. Give it something to do. Sensor cost can also be adjusted to fit this additional role.

[snow schooner]

Wouldn't any range normalisation automatically come with falloff for "traditionally short range weapons"?

[proven ruin]

nah it serves a role

[snow schooner]

very very minor one

nearly useless

[snow schooner]

How would it make kiting worse?

[proven ruin]

giving sensors that role would be incredibly abusable

[proven ruin]

you get double range

[snow schooner]

how?

[proven ruin]

thingy

[snow schooner]

Is that what is being discussed? From what I understand, initially in the preview sensors enabled "short range" weapons to shoot beyond 300m. Then people like GreenX, me and others discussed how it could be a ship wide effect that is either gradual or not. Haven't heard about double range so far.

like 1200m missile range???

that would be worse

but I don't think that's on the table.

[proven ruin]

oh i misread the original post

mb

only applies to shorter range weapons

[snow schooner]

Yes. So, since tying it to sensors wouldn't make kiting worse, would enable "short range" weapons to shoot back and would impose a cost of doing so via some number of sensors present on the ship, does that change your view on it?

[proven ruin]

eh a little

but it would have to require a huge number of sensors to reach the same range or putting a sensor on ships would become pretty much mandatory

i think a lot more testing and ways to extend range to prevent kiting need to be presented before anything is decided on

[snow schooner]

How do you view the idea that every "short range weapon" (Ions, Lasers, Cannons, CGs...) gets a massive debuff (accuracy, fire rate, dmg falloff,...) when shot beyond their "optimal range" (current range) and each sensor decreases that debuff by X%? Say it's 16,67%, that would mean after investing in 6 sensors, you completely negate any problems Lasers have while shooting at 600m. Or maybe, as someone has suggested, the effectiveness of the decrease could scale with the number of weapons present.

[proven ruin]

ions are short range???

[snow schooner]

in the context of 600m, yes.

currently (i think) in the preview build they're 300m range.

as are lasers and cannons and so on

[proven ruin]

idk

not a huge fan of that

[snow schooner]

But, Ions would, in that model, be an exception, because they already have dmg falloff naturally. So just introduce something similar to other weapons.

[snow schooner]

And tying it to a new and expensive singular ship part would be better? What are the advantages?

[proven ruin]

that would extend all ranges so that big ships can fight from further away

[snow schooner]

I agree. I'm holding off on building any new ships until I know the outcome of this discussion.

[proven ruin]

short range weapons would all have an extended "damage/accuracy reduction" range

[snow schooner]

Yes, but sensors would do the same with the model I suggested, wouldn't they?

[snow schooner]

Also present with the multiple sensors model

[proven ruin]

yeah but you need to lock them behind something heavy to prevent people just making sensor kites

[snow schooner]

The sensors would just do what this new ship part would do, but it would let us be gradual

[proven ruin]

this way you dont need to invest heavily in sensors to fight kites

[snow schooner]

I mean, if you want to invest in at least 4 sensors to make a cannon kite, then wouldn't that be fine?

[dull night]

I'm not a developer, but I'm quite sure that it is easier to rebalance weapon range that to introduce new mechanic such as faction conflicts for career 2.0. Also, range affects a lot to carrier, cause stations are too weak to attacks out of their weapon range.

Also, the faster we get this, the less mods will need to get a rebalance 🤣

[snow schooner]

The new ship part wouldn't and couldn't be that much more expensive than 4-6 sensors, right?

[proven ruin]

it could be quite expensive but the main thing is weight

it restricts it to heavier and more expensive ships so only they can have the range buff

[snow schooner]

placing 6 sensors in the back of your ship that don't do anything beyond allowing your weapons to fire at long range is also quite heavy, if you're trying to kite.

[proven ruin]

it could also be integrated into existing built-ins with much less difficulty

[snow schooner]

Placing x sensors or 1 new ship part sounds about equal difficulty to me.

The main thing I favor is for the players to be able to gradually get rid of the long range debuff.

[proven ruin]

a say single 3x3 part vs 4-6 sensors sounds equal?

[snow schooner]

I think that would be more interesting than just tying it to 1 all or nothing ship part

[proven ruin]

it could be tiered

e.g medium range extender

[snow schooner]

It should at least be as big as a TB, if it's just gonna be 1 ship part.

[proven ruin]

that could be for the maximum range i guess

[snow schooner]

Hm, so like hyperdrive sizes? Less gradual tho, but ok. But why not give that functionality to a ship part that has barely any use and is already tied to increasing (visual) range? It would fit so well.

[proven ruin]

it needs to be made really heavy

so again, it cant be abused on lightweight kites

anyway im going to go to bed now

[last mica]

is this to discourage their use as a weapon, or to encourage players to use separate mining ships, or both?

[last mica]

making more content is throwing time & resources to the wind if new players are just encouraged to cheese past it

[vestal hamlet]

Is weapon range standardization (300m and 600m) still planned? To cast my vote, I like different weapons having slight deviations in range, because those different ranges add strategy.

Cannons pierce ships and start fires, but trade off range. You could use HE missiles instead of EMP for more damage, but HE missiles have less range.

If all weapons within the same range category have the exact same range, those weapons have less trade offs, which leads to less interesting ship designs.

Just my thoughts! 🙂👍

[sour flame]

optimal range is not changed(i also don't understood that at first)

[tame tendon]

TBH, reminding me about just how much my solution to stations is "sit at sensors-only range and plink until it falls apart" is a stronger argument for me than the general question of kiting. Stations don't chase you, so there are very few considerations as far as cheesing them.

[main juniper]

Mostly because it feels weird to mine from so far away.

[main juniper]

The idea is to add new tradeoffs in the form of debuffs at long range. (Such as lower damage, lower penetration, and lower accuracy.) I believe these will be more interesting and lead to more emergent strategy and gameplay than the current hard range limits.

[nova geode]

i think the qol would be worth, and there's not too much problem of it as a weapon due to the forced wiggle and low dps

it would still be ok vs minables bc of high dps

[delicate ember]

Also, current mining range is so low that when I click with my max sized ship on a large asteroid, it often doesn't even get in the range to mine it all with the miner around its center

[neat summit]

lower penetration for physical doesn't make sense for me because of physics. I think lower accuracy would make more sense. Maybe if we have lock-on times introduced for turret ships? We could have deck cannons have lock-on time at further ranges before shooting

[sour flame]

if we make everything like in real life,kinetic weapons will be travelling infinietly cuz its vacuum

[proven ruin]

no drag

ships moving at a billion m/s

[rose shard]

replicate the sol incident by ramming into the sun at a significant fraction of the speed of light

[eager gull]

That's ftl which is not possible by simply accelerating, even with no drag

[proven ruin]

yeah ik

[eager gull]

And irl ships have to consume reaction mass to move

[snow schooner]

I think you misunderstand what is planned. I had a similar reaction upon trying the preview, but when I read the intent and what the planned effects are that it will have on the game, I'm for it. It doesn't make combat less interesting, because "short range" weapons will have significant debuffs when used at long range - meaning you preserve the tradeoffs you're used to. The difference is that now you CAN shoot back at kites, even if you won't be very effective with your dmg and you might want to find interesting ways to work around those debuffs - debuffs which will all be different for different weapons and will make you play differently at long range.

Meanwhile the tradeoffs you mention aren't really tradeoffs. The question between EMP and HE missiles is not "more or less dmg" it's "some dmg" vs "no dmg but emp effect", which means if you want emp you will include it anyway. And the tradeoff between cannons being able to pierce and start fires vs them having short range, is just not very interesting when you think about it, because in many cases it will just mean you don't get to do any dmg at all and sit there while being slowly destroyed.

[uneven folio]

missiles could definitely use a max time, nothing like hyperjumping 10km away and having the missles chase you down 2 minutes later

[snow schooner]

2 Minutes? I never experienced that. To me it feels like missiles already run out reasonably quickly - all it takes is flying 2 orbits around the Imperial endgame missile spam boat and they already despawn.

[midnight bolt]

yeah missiles do have a fairly short lifespan

[karmic glacier]

wtf. How? Last I remember the missiles have a lifespan directly related to their range

[summer finch]

Or if they have a target but even then it not much longer

[signal tundra]

Missiles have a 30s lifespan

[uneven folio]

sorry for my exaggeration, 30s seems like an eternity and gives them a massive effective range

[snow schooner]

good. i like that.

[snow schooner]

So that means we will now get some form of equalized range for all weapons?
It's hard to know what kind of ships I should be building now, if I don't want them all to be invalidated in a month or 2.

[slow ether]

To me this whole scheme's just removing a layer of interesting complexity from the game's combat in form of weapon range.

boo hoo, kiting too good in career, literally just give the AI a way to counter it by spawning reinforcements at your tail or something similar, how hard is it to design career-specific features to make certain strategies less prominent IN career instead of changing the entire game and all its facets for career alone?

This is only a good idea IF the different weapons still perform completely differently at various ranges and just don't have an inherent limitation of disintegrating at a certain point, and even then it's a ton of extra effort for something that can be fixed with a different and less comprehensive solution.

The Cosmoteer range mechanic is tried and tested through 14 years of trial by fire, why should it be now that it's somehow more worth addressing? If anything the overclocks have added a ton of good measures at countering kiting, such as the pull mode of the overclocked TB pulse wave.

The only positive effect this may have is combat at hyper long ranges sounds super exciting.

I've always found it awkward how high grade space battleships have to get this up close and personal to even exchange fire from their LONGER ranged weapons, but this can be done by simply doubling the range of every weapon, instead of... uh... EQUALIZING it all?

[snow schooner]

This is exactly what the poll proposed, I think. And, from my understanding, the reason why this is being considered is not just because kiting is boring in career, but also because it's not very interesting in pvp. I can see the effect of the changes being that kites will have to include a minimum of a certain level of defense, while non-kites will have ways to make their ships at least semi-effective at long range. And that push and pull between the archetypes seems a lot more interesting to me than just "Oh I'm out of range and can't catch up? Time to hide behind a rock till ring of death. Or, oh I can get in range? Guess I obliterate them." This is just a pretty dull dynamic when you think about it.

Add to that the fact how dumb it looks when your cannon and disruptor shots vanish after reaching about 1,5 times the length of your ship.

And add to that the design space that will be opened up through these changes.

It's just cooler... potentially.
...potentially

[snow schooner]

I too find it a little late to make these changes. But that doesn't mean that there can be no good reason to do it.

And what you call "tested through trial by fire" is mostly just "we got used to it".

[snow schooner]

If it was the other way around and Cosmoteer started out with equilized ranges + debuffs for weapons outside their optimal range and now the devs would be experimenting with adding max range limitation equal to that optimal range, you would say the same thing: "Equal range is tried and tested through years of trial by fire, why should it now be that it's somehow worth addressing?"

[snow schooner]

If they were to just proportionally increase the range of all weapons, then the different weapon ranges would interact with each other way less if at all. I proposed that years ago. But now I don't think that'd be such a good idea.

[coral estuary]

Sorry to interject here, but this is because the main focus of Cosmoteer was and always has been the single-player sandboxy career; that you can take this to the extreme and play against other players under different rules still under the game's discretion should not take away from its own 'soul'. Adding career-specific mechanics is detrimental thus to the multiplayer experience as it further disconnects the "intended" focus of the game to... whatever can be achieved in multiplayer alone with organization and modding.

[jovial stratus]

wouldnt want the game becoming... "soulless".... am i right

[nova geode]

https://tenor.com/view/staringsoldiercatok-gif-2130370366885478984

[tribal crypt]

Oh, let's not bring that thread back up.

[marsh gazelle]

i have it stored in a memes folder

wait why is it consitered a gif

thats weird

[heavy rock]

i dont think making the enemies
smarter in career really falls under this
like if im being kited in multiplayer i can also be smarter to counter it

[nova geode]

so you can star it

[nova geode]

it's not equal

[rose shard]

good way to test reading comprehension

[hybrid vector]

because gif is a picture format and you can make a static gif

[marsh gazelle]

interesting

[frozen silo]

Bro you’re commenting on everyone’s opinions over the past weeks, it’s ok to let others have differing thoughts. We hear you. Let’s have more people rally for Nick if they wish, and not bury his opinion under 3 long replies. Your ideals have a lot of visibility already

For an analogy on range, let’s take a medieval game for example. Warriors’ swords go up close for high and rapid damage, Rangers’ bows go long range for medium and average-pace damage, while Mages’ fireball attacks go medium range for high and slow-pace damage. A new update drops, and all of a sudden fireball and swords are now at the same range, because someone spec’d archers to be agile/fast kiters. Moreover, swords and fireballs can permanently reach as far as archers’ bows do if they equip an eyepiece. All is done to break the agile-archer meta, which is perceived as boring to some players through (very valid) feedback.

Canonically, upending the roles of swords and fireballs feels off to some people, hence why people say the range is part of the core gameplay. In parallel to Cosmoteer, we don’t just have swords and fireballs; we also have daggers, throwing knives, fencing foils, maces, spears, and javelins. All of them are now as medium-range as fireballs, and can reach archers’ range with an eyepiece.

(I also noticed the irony in my post length. Apologies Yaddah, I also mean no offense in my earlier comment 🫶)

[gritty galleon]

The tricky part of that analogy is whether the “off” feeling comes from balance/weapon variety, or from lore expectations. I expect a sword to hit close and an arrow to fly far. But I don’t expect a cannon shot in space to vanish after a certain distance.

An opposing analogy I'm curious about: all weapons are guns/bullets, each with different effectiveness at various ranges involving spray, recoil, and bullet drop. Then, a change is made to replace varying effectiveness with bullets that disappear past a point. Would this be a good change?

[frozen silo]

Totally understandable that ranges are tied in with lore. I kinda intentionally went with more melee-based weapon ranges to highlight the existing differences (which, when we look at it from that wiki weapon-range chart/graph someone did, does look pretty drastic as range differences). We can perhaps expect that cannons lose accuracy after flying many space-miles, to a point where it misses our double-decker-pancake spaceship. And lasers pass through too much space ether (lol), and drops power below threshold for damage after some distance.

I’m careful with your analogy, as I’m not sure if I’m engaging with future balance tweaks. My own personal opinion (being fond of edge cases and all) is that stripping away dimensionalities would always lead to some reduction of past mechanics. The edge cases I can think of that get disproportionately affected by the “proposed change” in that gun game would include: grenade launchers (dropoff and hitting behind structures), high-caliber pistols (recoil), sniper rifles (recoil and bullet drop), shotguns (spray), SMGs (spray and recoil). Basically if bullet disappearance was different for each gun type, the only archetypes that don’t get super affected would potentially be the “bread and butter” average caliber rifle and pistols, which imo coooould potentially be the only recipients of a change somehow.

Small side tangent: I think simplifying logistics down to heuristics could be really neat for droneships in the future; autotest full throttle, full throttle plus full fire, and full-fire mode in a separate window, then use those “efficiency” values instead of simulating every action that a mini-droneship takes per second.

[dull night]

Maybe, instead of Short and Long range, this update should have Short, Medium and Long range to bring a bit more variety?

Short range (180m): generally, ammo weapons fall in this category.

• Standard Cannon, Large Cannon, Deck Cannon, Discharger, Mines.
  Medium range (240m): generally, energy shots fall in this category.
• Small Laser Blaster, Large Laser Blaster, Nukes, Chaingun.
  Long range (300m): generally, missiles and beams fall in this category.
• Ion Beam, Railgun (before accelerators), Thermal Resonance Beam, HE Missile, EMP Missile, Thermal Cannister

The number in the range is just an example, no idea how much it should be.

[midnight bolt]

those numbers are very small imo but i did actually propose something similar

short range with ~250m, medium with ~400, long with ~600

or maybe like, 450 and 650 or 700

[frozen silo]

yeah I was going to mention flattening out the ranges; 400 500 600. still something that would majorly affect the game and might be revisited, but yeah it does make things look a bit more long-ranged than stubby. I’m all for longer range on battlestations though, whatever longest range is +100 sounds pretty reasonable to me

that being said, the range adjustments still don’t seem to overly address the kiting situation, to which I have a lot less answers for

still a speed-check, hope y’alls saved the game before the attrition started

[gritty galleon]

what would these ranges be when buffed?

[gritty galleon]

Do you have a save of kiting not being address with equalized ranges? In my testing I've found kiting to be a lot more balanced out and dependent on the individual ships themselves, and no longer dependent on the speed check.

[frozen silo]

bad phrasing on my part; I mesnt 400 500 600 range doesn’t address kiting issue

[gritty galleon]

ohhhh makes sense

We considered doing different range variations for non buffed weapons (180, 240, 300) but it felt like it would add more complexity, and very little gameplay change. We were not considering different ranges of buffed weapons out of fear of not addressing kiting

[dull night]

Twice as much? So Longest is 600m

[eager gull]

Does this patch make it easier for rail kites to deal with shields?

Now railkite ships can pair their railguns with TRLs

[plush nimbus]

I find it quite unfortunate though that ranges doesn't scale with weight or ships size

A small ship would be so perfect using maximal 300 meter range while larger ships would fight each other from further away

But gosh, as to balance that....

[marsh gazelle]

What if the different controll rooms added some extra range? Typically the larger your ship is the more command points it uses

[snow schooner]

But making the enemies smarter wouldn't be enough to address the issues outlined by the devs.

[snow schooner]

I'm not commenting on every opinion. What? If I have something to say about a specific post, I will. Discussion good.

[snow schooner]

I also say that range is part of the core of Cosmoteer and the identity of the different weapons. But that analogy is still lacking. We don't have swords in Cosmo. I hope we do get a sawblade or something eventually and when we do I do hope it will have 0 range. I also don't mind PD guns and Flak having their traditional 150m range. But it's good for the offensive weapons to be able to shoot further than 1,5x the size of the ship and it's also good to make kiting interactions more interesting than "haha you can't reach, go hide behind a rock". I think the "core of Cosmoteer" with the ranges we are used to should stay in the form of "optimal range", which is something that Walt said he has nothing against in principle.
So let's not argue against strawmen. Short range weapons will remain feeling short range, even if they can be shot at long range with reduced effectiveness.

[snow schooner]

np. discussion good

[snow schooner]

This specific example you gave sounds like there would be no weapons that can shoot past 300m. Numbers like the ones THETA proposed (my ideal would be 200m, 400m, 600m) would be better.
But I like the idea of normalizing weapon ranges with downsides when shooting above optimal range. I like being able to principally shoot back at kites with shorter range weapons via making some kind of extra investment. It would be a) interesting to play around with different strategies, b) force kites to invest in defense up to at least a point, c) get rid of the weird vanishing projectiles and the weird feeling about cannons somehow not being able to target ships that are more than 180m away.

[snow schooner]

Yeah. And also, the ability to make a 450m or 600m range small ship should still be there.
But I get what you mean. In space games tradition makes us expect that small ships have shorter range than big ships. Maybe this idea could be implemented via giving cockpits/CRs/Bridges different "max targeting range". Cockpits have an inherent max targeting range of say 300, CRs get 450, while Bridges get 600. And then you get to somehow modify those with Sensor amounts or something...
(Oh Grant already said that #1408582870137569350 message)

But no idea if that would actually be good for the game.

[plush nimbus]

I'm not advocating to follow traditional gameplay, simply that combats of same size ships looks cooler when the range is proportional

[arctic bough]

just a thought, what if we added some flavour to the falloffs instead of just %

e.g. cannons already have accuracy penalty
lasers could become wider and spread the damage over a bigger area
missiles may lose guidance

[shell flame]

cannons losing damage at distance make some sense considering space drag i guess

[dull night]

Losing damage + spread seems too much punishment

[gritty galleon]

this could be pretty cool.

[tribal crypt]

So would the cannons fire less accurately at long-range targets, or would the existing inaccuracy just be compounded by the distance? I'm fine with the latter, but the former would feel a bit weird.

[dull night]

Currently, I think they have 2.5d spread, so the further is the target the worst it becomes without having to change anything else

[karmic glacier]

Ca confirm. I play with 1337 range

[eager gull]

What will happen to nukes? 600 range nukes sounds really scary

[karmic glacier]

Just dodge xd

[narrow island]

honestly i think cannons should also lose penetration

at a certain point nukes should start "running out of fuel" and slow down

[remote mesa]

isnt this one of their most defining traits that make the weapon fun and balanced

why the hell would you remove it

[midnight bolt]

i assume she means losing penetration when past optimal range

[narrow island]

to reword it, cannon penetration should lower after optimal range

[remote mesa]

oh thats better

i can understand that tbh

[eager gull]

I think this could be too frustruating for casual career players

Maybe they should lose speed past optimal range

I know projectiles losing speed will mess up targeting, but this is acceptable for nukes, as they shouldn't be able to reliably hit targets moving sideways anyway

Good news is that most built-in nuke ships don't have sensors

[karmic glacier]

Hot topic: just install a mod into vanilla there’s a “nuke direction indicator” mod from @shell flame that shows the direction of nukes when they launch. I’d say this would help

[tribal crypt]

That's what I was thinking; I was just interpreting some of the messages as saying the spread angle should increase when targeting things out of the normal range.

[frail grove]

This is really cool, just a small question what is Kite and kited?

[midnight bolt]

kiting is a common tactic in various games

essentially backing away from an enemy faster than they can catch up, while hitting them with longer-ranged weapons

so they can't fire back

this update allows shorter-ranged weapons to fire back, requiring kites to have some amount of defence

but those short-ranged weapons have downsides, meaning long-range weapons still have advantages at that long range

[frail grove]

Ok thanka, got it, not familiar with cosmoteer terms.

[kindred zinc]

i've been playing on this experimental branch for quite a while in Creative, making ships that integrate the range changes, and i gotta say i like it so far, it's quite nice
haven't played career or PVP but have been testing ships in creative mode's battle helper
i dont have any specific opinions on some other details so far but if nothing else i really want the sensor functionality of increasing nearby weapon range to be retained
it makes ship design a lot more interesting as you can use many more different kiting weapons, must consider sensor positioning, have an actual reason to use more than one sensor on a ship (besides symmetry), and makes kites far less impressive because you can slap sensors on a DC brick or ion brawler to try and deal with them. At the same time, though, the kites aren't invalidated because they can still be quite durable on top of their speed, and most of the builtin ones pull that off

[gritty galleon]

Thank you for the thorough testing and feedback!

[marsh gazelle]

I have a bit of an idea,
Sensors should stay in the category of increasing sight, and we should have a new part that boosts the guns,
Basically; FCS; fire control system, it's a 2x2 room that requires 2 crew to man. It increases the range of weapons that can swivel, so Basically everything except rail guns,, ions, all missile things . By perhaps 100 meters (or more it depends), but it also makes the weapons it effects fire slower, if the ship has a Sensor that last part Is excluded,

Some kind of amplifier/booster could also be a thing to add, but I don't know if that could help

Another thing could be that if it's out of range it slowly ramps up its range, )while geing slower since it has to aim , calculations and stuff(

[kindred zinc]

but it also makes the weapons it effects fire slower
how would this work with ions and TRLs?

[marsh gazelle]

Ions can't swivel, and with the Lance I'd say that it's efect probably would get weaker with range due to it cooling down

Honestly not too sure with those 2, but there's got to be a way to do something that would work

There both a midrange weapon Wright?

[kindred zinc]

This would have absolutely 0 penalty for ioncores which won't have the ions rotating anyways
and with the lance that already exists with the current implementation i think

[kindred zinc]

keep in mind that on this branch, there is no such thing as midrange, there is only 300 and 600 (only missiles and railguns have 600 by default)

[marsh gazelle]

Interesting, timee for me to sleep after info dumping this shower thought

[midnight bolt]

nukes and mines are short range iirc

[eager gull]

How would a range buff on mines work

[marsh gazelle]

anything the missile laucher uses does not get buffed

and mines do not benifit from haveing a range upgrade

if it increased how far they could get launched then yes that would help

i'ma figure out a better way to word the idea

[marsh gazelle]

better rewording

Sensors increase the visual sight range your ships have

The FCS; Fire Control System slowly ramps up the range your guns can fire at
it is a 2x2 room that uses 2 crew, 10 cp? and will increase the range of low range guns like;
Pd, Laser, Cannon, Disrupter, Mining laser, Heavy laser, Large cannon, Flak, Deck cannon, Chaingun, Tractor beam

The weapons it does not buff are; Ion, Railgun, Missile, EMP, Nuke, Thermal canister, Thermal lance

Mines are an exception with it increasing the range, launch distance and speed instead

if you are out of range the system will ramp the range up by [placeholder] 50 meters, if it is still out of range it will continue till it is in range, every time it ramps up it uses more and more power while also increasing the time it takes for the guns to charge and aim, this can partly be averted by also having sensors on your ship as that will reduce the charge and aim debuff, what it cant help with will be the damage falloff of the guns

potently an extra thing that could also be part of it would be a server room, most likely it would increase the speed at which the FCS locks on. it also could serve as a booster for other computing systems should we get anything like that

[snow schooner]

What do you think about the cases where your sensors won't quite be able to reach, being 1 or 2 tiles off? Can you see that being pretty frustrating when you're trying to optimize ships? Or do you think that would not be an issue?

[kindred zinc]

its not much of an issue for me at least

[midnight bolt]

yeah i don't mind it

[eager gull]

I think mines should not get any buff from sensors

If they need a buff, I think duration fits best, or maybe projectile hp

[arctic bough]

I played a good bit of lazy career (just pasting in my usual ships) and I feel a bit silly saying this but honestly
it pretty much felt the same, except that candlewicks weren't annoying

[snow schooner]

Well, of course it felt the same, if you used the same ships that didn't take advantage of the new capabilities.

[dire violet]

meh? unless your ship relies on the concept probably not

it's just nice to have longer range guns.

[snow schooner]

Sure, but if that longer range depends on you having to place sensors everywhere you have guns, then that's just a hassle. Would be much more elegant, if the sensor(s) had a ship wide effect.

[dire violet]

It could also be overpowered and make having >1 sensor worthless again.

the current system encourages unique designs, like I had to move around my sensor to the middle to make sure it hit all my guns evenly. It worked, and it's pretty cool!

[snow schooner]

I do want us having to place more than 1 sensor. I just want it to be a ship wide effect, because we already gotta fit heat pipes and corridors and crew and energy - having to worry about sensor placement too now is too much. It restricts design freedom too much. Just make it so each placed sensor incrementally increases the range of short range weapons or lessens their debuff at long range.

I do hope we will soon know where this is going and in what way the range changes will be implemented. I so wanna get back to building cosmoteer ships, but as long as this is in limbo I feel like anything I build now will be invalidated soon anyway.

[low glen]

bruh

only made it to tier 12 so far but so far the reason why i do kiting at all is to avoid being flanked, kiting imo is one of the best way to engage a group of enemies that outnumber you

[obsidian anvil]

The best way imo is to outnumber the enemy / bring a broadsider

Kiting is lazy

[snow schooner]

but effective. And that's a combination that people tend to gravitate towards.

[still verge]

Seeing all the "I shot x ship in the back" messages in #ships , it's definitely the easy way out.

[arctic bough]

I think that most built in career ships are not designed to fight multiple enemies on all sides, they're optimised for 1v1, and as a result bringing multiple ships is quite a trivial way to beat any encounter, as I just played recently, taking a few OC cannons and hitting anything in the back will at very least cripple it incredibly easily

outnumbering enemies is not super engaging for me personally
although I'll try a broadsider for it

The split between multi and career will always make balancing tricky

[frozen silo]

I’d like more brawlers to be what we face in career, as well as super fast anti-kite designs (rammers and the likes)

enemies that want to be up in your face, than to kite ad infinitum

encourages explosions

broadsider designs also sound fun

reminds me of the Hammerhead from cosmoteer alpha version

can’t find hammerhead but I think this twincruiser was inbuilt

nvm it looks to be modified from original twincruiser, close enough though

[tame tendon]

TBF, this cuts both ways. Part of the reason to kite is so that you know all the enemies are on the same side, since it's easier to manage one ship than several. (It also feeds back, with rail fanning requiring extra micro and also caring a lot more about pointing in a specific direction.)

[glass monolith]

For facing down multiple enemies and keeping them on one side, you don't necessarily need to outrange them, but you do need very strong reverse thrust. But going faster in reverse than them and outranging them is of course better

A relevant note on that is this makes a lot of career built ins a very bad idea for the player to use. Many only have good forward thrust and get defeated very quickly when flanked

I think adding OCs actually made multi ship brawling worse. Pre OC i had a DC ship that was an armor block and could take a fair amount of damage on all sides. But the heat exchangers mean i need true openings, and my oc brawlers can no longer shrug off an enemy behind them. I've been able to pull off still having brawlers like this through heavy crew optimization and the raw DPS increase of OC weapons (I defeat the opponents before they have a chance to flank), but i think it's something worth noting

[arctic bough]

that's very true that any OC ship with a bunch of radiators is much worse in a brawl with all of the holes - not so much early on, but later game when firepower is much better, having one small shield covering the radiators wont cut it

[snow schooner]

I always felt like, while kites were quite annoying, there were way too many rammer types in career. Felt like 70% of all encounters wanted to get in your face with cannons/nukes/CGs/disruptors, forcing you to either invest in equal reverse speed (making you a kite) or orbit them.

Trying to outbrawl the brawlers/rammers never felt as good to me, because you end up with a big repair bill after many fights.

And that last part has to do with the fact that, after a certain ship size, you can't really make your defenses stronger. Sure, you can stack a ton of shields in your center, but your sides will never be well defended enough to not break off when facing the firepower of your typical career ship. And so kiting/orbiting is simply always the most efficient answer.

[nova geode]

that's basically all the ai can do

[snow schooner]

Sure, the AI is very limited, but there could also be more mid range ships in the game. Instead it feels like the majority of them is set to try to ram you.

[kindred zinc]

are you fighting Mono ships? they have the largest amount of rammers

[snow schooner]

Yes, I'm thinking of Monolith as I write this. But many Fringe ships behave the same and with how many Imperium ships use nukes, they too incentivize you to kite or orbit instead of brawl.

[kindred zinc]

a year ago i did a count of each faction's kites, orbiters, and rammers, and Monolith had 35 (the other factions had 23, 20, and 19)

i should probably do a recount

[snow schooner]

The thing is, even if it's no longer the majority of ships that try to ram (maybe it still is, maybe not), it will be the case that a significant amount of them do, which drives you to kite/orbit instead of brawl. And even if you enter a period where you end up facing a lot of non-rammers, you're not gonna disassemble your kite that you've been driven to use so far.

[kindred zinc]

true

[snow schooner]

Kiting and orbiting are just too useful in general

That's part of why I welcome the range change. Only thing I really dislike is the limited tile-range of the sensor buff. But I've said that plenty of times already.

[kindred zinc]

i like it, because it makes sensors more interesting than "place it down once and forget about it"

while at the same time still allowing you to use em that way

you just dont get the range buff

[snow schooner]

What about this?
#1412558696596377712 message

[nova geode]

being able to execute piloting maneuvers is usually better than not being able to, and all tjje ai can do is ram and orbit badly

[obsidian anvil]

Yeah, from the pov of the architects it's much better for the ship to do something rather than just stand still and trade damage

[snow schooner]

Well, it can also sit at mid range and trade dmg, if the ships allows that. But yes, this severely limited AI is the AI we're stuck with until the AI update. I just wish we had more ships in career that don't try to kiss you when firing their guns.

[arctic bough]

I wonder if the majority of the playerbase are actually any better at piloting than the current ai, I suspect that a lot of players just leave the normal defaults and focus on aiming in combat - the players that actually participate in pvp are probably a minority of the playerbase, compared to a large number of players that never even join the discord

[kindred zinc]

depends on the sort of AI but probably any player that uses direct control at all is better than it simply because of common sense

[arctic bough]

I don't know, a lot of the ships on the subreddit from newer players, and from my friends newer to the game, would often not even put armour on all sides of a ship, let alone use manual control

losing a fight usually means just putting more armour or reloading save and hoping for a better outcome

[kindred zinc]

putting armour on all sides of a ship isn't related to how you're controlling that ship

chances are the average player is worse at piloting a ship than the AI is, but thats due to inexperience i reckon

[arctic bough]

I'm using indirect evidence to make an inference about general competence, if most players do not know to do something easy, it's doubtful that they know to do something more advanced

[kindred zinc]

thing is, armouring a ship is not necessarily easy, and piloting is not necessarily advanced

its more that the game doesnt really do anything at all that would make someone use direct control unless they either a) deliberately sought it out b) did pvp c) got irritated by the AI shitting itself

[arctic bough]

but yes this is the gist of what I'm saying

[kindred zinc]

ah

[arctic bough]

being trash and being inexperienced are pretty much interchangeable terms for what it's worth, one is just nicer than the other

[kindred zinc]

i do think, if the game had a tutorial that made you manually pilot a ship, even just once with no follow up, that every player would be better at manually piloting than the AI

[arctic bough]

I was moving towards this, I think that the tutorials could be a lot better. A popup telling you the controls doesn't teach you the value of piloting that you'll find on discord

[kindred zinc]

this is true

[arctic bough]

there is no introduction to types of ships or their uses or counters

[kindred zinc]

the tutorials, i think, are one of cosmoteer's weakpoints, and at the same time the sort of game it is makes it very hard to do tutorials for

[arctic bough]

would it be difficult to load a save with some demo ships, with some popups telling you some useful tricks?

[kindred zinc]

that would be pretty good but also a bit intrusive

ofc the other issue is that devs are currently working on other things

and the question of what exactly should be taught to the player is always hard to answer

[arctic bough]

doesn't have to be if it's optional and not forced

[kindred zinc]

thats true
then you run into the other end, which is people ignoring the tutorial and then getting mad when they don't understand things

i swear, the number of people that put large shields behind blocks because they couldn't even be arsed to read the description...

[arctic bough]

that's very true, and you'll always get that subset of players, but hear me out

I think that the game suffers from a split in the playerbase

in career, pretty much every built in is extremely good built by an architect/master of design that has been playing for 6 years with 4000 hours

and they're optimised to drive up close and fight brawling - which is where most new players will end up on default settings

the issue is that creating a challenge for the veteran playerbase while keeping it fair for the new players - well there is just a big rift

if you were to give good ai to the builtins, they would have better piloting AND better ships than new players, and a lot of them get slaughtered as is

you can always lower the difficulty, but that can be very unsatisfying

I wonder if that for a lot of players, kiting would be reduced if the architects put in some worse built ins

think of it like this

most video game enemies have an obvious glowing weakpoint, or easy to exploit weakness

in my experience, most builtins on cosmoteer just.. don't

outside of kite them or maybe try to ram them - which new players will struggle with

[kindred zinc]

they kind of do
it's called either the reactor, the cockpit, or the weapons, and it is not very hard to figure out which of the three it is

[arctic bough]

and it's behind layers of armour and shields, I'm not saying the built ins are invulnerable, but that they lack real, decently exploitable weaknesses

[kindred zinc]

people outside the discord definitely don't think about the piloting aspect of things, which i don't think is a big issue, because you can always compensate for piloting with brute design force

[arctic bough]

by the time you break through all of the armour, they're practically dead and you have won anyway

there are very very few epic kills where you disable them before you have a long drawn out fight

[kindred zinc]

there are - flanks or OC rail oneshots exist

[arctic bough]

remember that this is in the context of new players

[kindred zinc]

also, while there may or may not be issues with the current system, i do think it is better than most other vehicle builder games' systems i've seen

[kindred zinc]

"get more than one ship" is not especially hard to figure out as a new player

[arctic bough]

get more than one ship is the circle in the square hole meme

I think that you're misunderstanding me, I'll try to clarify

[kindred zinc]

please do

[kindred zinc]

off the top of my head, Nimbatus is just directly asymmetric and enemies are just blobs of hitpoint that shoot at you, and Terratech's completely community-provided enemies suffer from sucking absolute ass because there's no quality control - even as a new player, I remember never struggling with enemies in that game at all, because 90% of them were the same quality as my vehicle except driven more badly

[arctic bough]

new players are drawn to kiting as the only viable strategy because they will pretty much always lose against an architect's ship

the built ins have no real weakpoints, they're expertly built to cover as many weaknesses as possible to challenge veteran players, but new players have much more vulnerable weakpoints, and are vulnerable to a KO

I'll post an image to illustrate this

[kindred zinc]

ah, i see
just one thing: very few builtins are actually like what you're describing

[arctic bough]

they're all like that and I'll post it to elaborate in a moment

except for the legendary

unforgettable

fanged fighter

here is a fairly generic new player type ship

if you go through the shield, you destroy the guns and then the reactor blows

targeting this weakness results in a very fast kill

here is a conciliator

let's count the hp to each weakpoint

there are 45k hitpoints worth of shields to hit the edge chaingun, or 60k to hit the closer ones

or 88k armour to break through the shell

a regenerating 45k is very comparable to 88k armour health

in terms of 'exploitable weakness' for a new player, there really aren't any

to kill this ship, you just have to dps through the frontal armour and hope you kill it first

[kindred zinc]

and Cantiloupe, and Nusketir, and Ballista (it's a slow railkite like cmon), and Brave One (it deliberately has a single unarmoured bridge), and Baelor Reaper, and the list of ships that all have no armour and no rear thrust (Eltanin, Aegis, Aspis, Thyreos, to name a few of many), and the two Cabal ships that are 90% disruptors, and the builtins that have aesthetic gaps in their armour that weaken them (desecrator comes to mind, but it isn't the only one)

[tribal crypt]

This is actually a bit better than the usual new player ship, at least going based off of my friends; the engine room is connected to three reasonably-sized engines. In my experience, people often try to either
a) add as many engine rooms connected to each engine as possible,
b) add an engine room per engine,
c) use engine rooms on things like small thrusters, or
d) any combination of the above.

[tribal crypt]

Okay, the Cabal ships that are all-disruptor are brutal against early-game ships that rely on shields and energy weapons.

[kindred zinc]

i could really keep going on

[arctic bough]

right you could but can you please try to work with me here?

[kindred zinc]

not really, because your argument relies on all the inconvenient builtins not existing

its not that im trying to be argumentative, its that your point only holds true when you only look at the things supporting it

[arctic bough]

what I'm saying is that new players on default attack settings that don't know better about piloting are pushed towards kiting as an easy way to win, since they'll always lose a headon fight

[kindred zinc]

and what i'm saying is that no, they won't always lose a headon fight

also keep in mind that 90% of the time, the player's ship is much bigger than the AI's - even if it's much worse, they can almost always fit a firepower advantage from sheer scale

a career mode starter - any of them - is a t2 ship by cost, and you start out fighting t1s
by the time a new player starts fighting t2s, they will have built up their ship a bit, so now it might be closer to t3. and when they reach t3, their ship is t4-sized. et cetera

[arctic bough]

odd list by the way

no armour and no rear thrust?

[kindred zinc]

sorry, when i said "no rear thrust" i was specifically thinking of ships that can't kite you
Eltanin has rear thrust, but isn't super fast (from memory) and more importantly can't actually outrange anything

[tribal crypt]

That's true in a sense, but I've usually seen my friends rely on comically large amounts of armor and massive repair costs instead of kiting.

[tribal crypt]

Wait, what about cannons?

Don't those have a lower range?

[kindred zinc]

it uses disruptors - one of the shortest-range weapons in the game - so even if it had all the reverse thrust in the world it wouldn't be able to kite

[arctic bough]

yeah and a lot of players run those but it's besides the point

[kindred zinc]

it's not besides the point
you keep saying things are beside the point or not relevant because they disprove what you say

[tribal crypt]

Like, seriously massive repair costs; I had to fully devote my attention to mining to keep up with the attrition of repairs, replacements, and reinforcements by the third system.

[arctic bough]

I was actually agreeing with you bud, saying it can outrange some cannons but that's besides the point

please be nice

[kindred zinc]

oh

[arctic bough]

that is very confrontational

[tribal crypt]

Being nice is a good idea! I approve of being nice.

[kindred zinc]

in a similar vein, when i first played this game, i did not think about kiting at all lol, i just brute-forced my way through things with firepower

[arctic bough]

also in this example you misread a keyword
i said in a headon fight like this example, on default settings, as I said a new player would use

[kindred zinc]

im not sure how i misread that? i was also talking about that sort of fight, where you sit there and shoot at them until they die

[arctic bough]

a lot of new players if they lose this fight, their first instinct isn't "I should flank" it's "something is wrong with my ship, they're not trying to flank me"

[tribal crypt]

Yeah. Kiting is definitely "overpowered" in that it's almost always an optimal choice, but it isn't necessarily obvious or intuitive to beginners.

[kindred zinc]

thats true
also, more dangerously, it's boring

[tribal crypt]

That is definitely also true.

[kindred zinc]

at least architects are currently trying to address that - a bunch of builtins are very scary to kites but not scary at all to non-kites

Thyreos is the best example of that

[arctic bough]

now I posted the list before the keyword so the timeline was a bit wonky here, but I meant that a majority of the ships you listed, you suggested flanking them, which isn't a headon fight

[kindred zinc]

the flanking point was both before and separate from that list
the ships i listed were specifically ones that can be bullied by a player sitting in front of them with one ship going pew pew

[tribal crypt]

There isn't much fun in "Engines full reverse, arm forward phasers".

[kindred zinc]

exactly

[arctic bough]

according to some in the chat it's extremely skillful actually, you just need to adapt

[kindred zinc]

really? who?

[arctic bough]

but it's worth looking into the reasons why so many players are drawn to kiting in the first place - and I think a part of it is that the built in brawlers are just very strong

[tribal crypt]

Interesting, I don't remember hearing about that.

[arctic bough]

not naming names, I was just joking a bit

[tribal crypt]

From what I remember hearing, kiting was generally considered a boring and unimaginative strategy that required much less skill in piloting (sans asteroid fields) and ship design. That could be confirmation bias, though, so I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what I missed!

[arctic bough]

a lot of games make the player feel like an ace by giving enemies an easy disadvantage to exploit, like headshotting grunts in halo, but a lot of the ships on cosmoteer feel more like killing a fleshmob in helldivers where you just have to deplete the whole hp pool before it dies

[kindred zinc]

a reasonable conclusion, but i think that
a) players aren't drawn to kiting that much
b) the builtin brawlers aren't that strong, even compared to new player ships
c) a bigger reason is just that it's easy
d) this is all kind of moot anyways because both the developers and architects are actively trying to address kites

[arctic bough]

well, that's a lot of fair points, but it's moot until the player that relied on kites end up trying to brawl

[kindred zinc]

hard to say for sure, given that this is a bit more of a subjective aspect, but i always quite liked fighting builtins because it felt quite strategic
a lot like FTL, really, you find the most dangerous room and use your weapons in the best way you can to shut it down

[tribal crypt]

I would say that some of the builtin brawlers, in a pure exchange-of-DPS fight without real piloting, are strong enough to not be reasonably defeated by a novice's ship.

[kindred zinc]

that may also be a reason why the devs are trying to dissuade kiting, because it's a cheese strategy that doesn't teach good ship design

[kindred zinc]

oh, definitely, absolutely so
practically every Imperial ship, for starters
but at the same time, career is stacked in the novice's favour and the super-strong brawlers are rare enough to be avoidable and predictable

[arctic bough]

rare? what do you mean rare

the ai can't handle much so most ships are brawlerish

[kindred zinc]

the key word there is super-strong
most builtins are brawlers that do nothing but move up and attack
but not many of them are brawlers of the sort that absolutely beat the shit out of anything not hyper-optimized or deliberately made to counter them

[tribal crypt]

For instance, I remember having a decent amount of trouble (embarassingly enough) with Sprocket when I first encountered it. Furthermore, trying to facetank just about any Imperium ship will end with the radioactive remnants of your erstwhile ship scattered across the system.

[kindred zinc]

nah, Sprocket's fair

That thing is, as far as I'm concerned, an introduction to actually very scary enemies

[kindred zinc]

actually, to see how right i am on that, what im gonna do is look at tier 7 and 8 combat ships from Cabal and Monolith (every tier 7 and 8 from those two) and see how scary they are

Cabal and Mono specifically because Fringe is intentionally weaker and Imperium and Io are intentionally stronger

[arctic bough]

I know this might be controversial, but I don't think that this ship (as one example) is particularly interesting to fight

in a head on fight, you pretty much just have to deplete the healthbar until it dies

[kindred zinc]

i am kind of inclined to agree though it does at least have some interest in the chainguns being spread out instead of all inside one barrel

[arctic bough]

but that just makes them pointless to target

it's a very optimised ship, a very well made one

but not very fun as a videogame ai enemy

the reality is that if you're both brawler type ships, you both just fire at each other and both lose half of your healthbar until one of you dies

the weakness is to uh

[tribal crypt]

What about missiles?

[arctic bough]

fire through the frontal armour

[tribal crypt]

You can use missiles to cut out its engines, I think, since they're practically defenseless.

[arctic bough]

you could, but you would need a fair number of launchers to do so

to do so before the fight is practically over anyway

and with low missile counts you might end up scratching everything except the engines - especially as a newer player

and that's if the new player considers the possibility of curving missiles around

and actually unlocked and took them

[tribal crypt]

Oh, is that something people usually don't figure out? It was one of the first things I tried.

[arctic bough]

some players will even complain that their missiles are missing lol

the role of the missiles isn't really written on the launcher - you don't get a "these missiles are great for hitting the sides and rear of enemies"

[tribal crypt]

Now, if the ship had a few overclocked point defenses along the rear armor (with a radiator and battery), it would be nigh-invulnerable save to chipping through the armor.

[kindred zinc]

this is the list of t7 and 8 Mono ships in the game files
Onset is not super scary, because while it is well armoured and dangerous, its armament is solely missiles, and PD's not exactly hard to get
Silencer is very weak, as it has only a single railgun and nothing else for offense
Bastion is pretty fun, as while it hits very hard it also has almost nothing in the way of defenses - definitely a ship where targeting matters a lot
Quickdraw is a dickhead, it's Sprocket with DLCs
Suppressor is a boring shielded cannonwall.
Attractor is the smallest enemy in the game that uses a tractor beam, which is very interesting in my opinion
Swiftwing falls under the "has no armour and can't kite" category
Bulwark is a flakwall, just like Bastion it's hard-hitting but not durable
Intercessor is smaller Conciliator and I dislike it.
Echo has no armour in front of its reactors and its railgun is a very obvious target
Sentry is a ship that directly counters headon fights and directly loses to literally anything else
Successor is Suppressor but bigger
that's 4 ships out of 11 that I would never expect a new player to realistically find easy to brawl with

tl;dr: sample 8 of a population of 500 (stratified sampling used), result showed that less than half of sampled ships fell into "unbeatable brawler" category

[arctic bough]

I like onset, that has some clear weaknesses, with exposed thrusters and a middle weakness

[kindred zinc]

i actually completely forgot about that weakness in the middle lmao

[kindred zinc]

can do more tests if requested

but this does conform to my own personal experience, which is that, while every faction has some real dickhead ships that even veterans struggle to match in a fair fight, they are a minority (exception being Imperium, which is Imperium, and is also hardcoded to never spawn as close to the starting system as the other factions specifically for the sake of not bullying new players)

[tribal crypt]

That one was expensive to beat but honestly not that hard, when I first encountered it; I was running an ion core as my main only weapon, so I just stared Onset to death and ignored the attrition on the rest of the ship. I quickly invested in point defense afterward.

[kindred zinc]

as a random sidenote about this missile conversation between you two

my first ever encounter with missiles in this game was approaching an enemy with missiles too fast and immediately losing half my engines to the missiles flying behind me and back towards me

despite that i was turned off by the ammo requirement so i never used them, but did pretty quickly understand both how they could be used and how they could be countered (PD)

[tribal crypt]

I'm in the same situation; I almost always tend to run pure-energy.

[kindred zinc]

i do reckon Ionian ships might suffer from the issue of being too opaque, as heat is a complex system, but (to my knowledge) Io is, like Imperium, coded to spawn further from the starting system, which does mitigate this

probably also helping that is that a few of the first Ionian ships have front-facing radiators and an obvious pipe connection between the radiator and an attached part

that said, if you really want brawlers with absolutely no weaknesses that no one will beat, Io has you covered lol

anyways this discussion has been nice

but it is also 1am here

so goodnight

[arctic bough]

gn bud

[hoary osprey]

And what are these superstrong brawlers?

[remote mesa]

are these superstrong brawlers in the room with us right now?

[glass monolith]

With ships like this, the way I counter them in career is often flanking, which requires a fleet of ships.

That's why I brought up earlier in the thread that we should be careful letting nukes reach 600m, because it forces direct control (cause rts piloting is too terrible to reliably dodge nukes). Imo it's not a good decision to force players to direct control cause I think the fleet gamestyle should be allowed and it's very difficult to direct control while you have a fleet (you have to pause a LOT to make sure your non direct control ships don't get flanked)

Imo allowing fleet gameplay is good because it lets you build in more weapon variety. A lot of weapons work best if you spam just that weapon (maybe plus TRL and plus something anti shield), so fleets let you experiment with more design types than making 1 mega ship

[tame tendon]

I know I'm necroing this from yesterday, but... what percentage of players do you think actually use direct control? Speaking for myself, I saw that and thought, "That sounds too hard; I'm going to be terrible at it," and ignored its existence from there on.

[kindred zinc]

hard to say but almost certainly less than half

chances are that any specific group of players except this server would either use DC all the time or never

[tame tendon]

Yeah, probably, now that you mention it, because this is the only unified-purpose Discord for this.

And the game plays wildly differently depending on the two ways, too. Or at least, I imagine it does.

[snow schooner]

Anything new on range rebalance front?

[nova geode]

i'd be surprised if it was >10% of all current players

[frozen silo]

Speaking as someone with ~200 hours on modern non-beta, ~100 hours in beta, and an unknown smidge more in alpha, I used direct control probably a handful of times, didn’t like it, and use AI drag-and-click almost exclusively so. Most of my time is spent building ships though so there’s that. No PvP experience

[glass monolith]

Mentioning again we should be careful thinking about 600m nukes due to the lack of using direct control in career. Most weapons have multiple weaknesses, so I think it's fair if nukes are weak to dodging and kiting

If 600m nukes are added we'll get a lot of people who aren't using DC getting wiped out by nukes in career and being frustrated

[nova geode]

or even just using the attack handles

[snow schooner]

The devs will surely think of a downside of using them at 600m. After all, they were floating the idea of giving downsides to all "short range" weapons when using them beyond their optimal range.

[kindred zinc]

tbh they do have a significant downside in that nukes can't hit for shit at 600m

[arctic bough]

the ai usually misses with a lot of nukes even at 200m let alone 600, you could dodge with the tiniest effort
if they really want the nukes to miss then just make them slow down past 300m so only the chunkiest ships are unable to dodge

[karmic glacier]

Ababababababababababababababababavababavavavava

[karmic glacier]

The AI. Update in three years from now: BOLD WORDS FOR SOMEONE IN MOVING RANGE

[karmic glacier]

Hi. Half twit Baka here with about 666 hours worth of modded cosmteer nonsense and 420 hours of DEAD ASLEEP AFK ON GAME experience and 69 hours of actual 🅱️anilla cosmodeer experience, I use direct control sometimes.

It’s okay.

I will admit it’s usually when I want to shell the enemy out of normal visual range

[arctic bough]

is there any update on fixing the audio pop when firing nukes in preview?

[proven ruin]

it happens even when the game is muted

its really weird

[arctic bough]

after many hours of playing in the preview now - creative and career- I think that the current implementation of sensors could be better. It doesn't feel like "wow I have so much range with sensors" it feels like "oh damn it I cant shoot back without sensors"

the current radius system to apply range feels quite bad in my opinion, and makes it extremely difficult for most older ships to be fitted with sensors to work

In my opinion, sensors would be less frustrating if they gave "intel points" similar to command points, and you could apply them to specific weapons, allowing you to pick and choose what you want range on, rather than awkwardly forcing sensors into the middle of a ship (and just barely missing the weapons you actually want the boost on)

and given that sensors are required for those slower ships to fight against kites, yeah I don't know, I think that I would just rather every ship have the same range on weapons with damage falloff, rather than having to fit a mandatory module on everything

..sensors are also deck mounted which restricts them even more
especially bigger ships which needs many sensors, it feels like playing sudoku trying to use a deck/trl/mining laser without it hitting one of the many sensors

really on ships with a lot of deck cannons, it becomes sudokou hell, as you have more and more surface area filled with cannons and sensors, and you cant fire them anywhere - it disproportionately affects big and massive ships, while smaller ships can put sensors without much worry
(and big ships are the slowest and easiest to kite anyway)

note that being deck mounted doesn't even matter for railgun kites

overall, I think it would be better if sensors were reworked to give points instead of radius, or range buff outright removed and applied to everything by default. Or if the OC would at least extend the number of weapons that the buff applies to

[tribal crypt]

You don't have to place sensors in front of weapons; you can place them in the rear of the ship, too.
Never mind, might have misunderstood.

[proven ruin]

Is this planned to go through? I'm really against it because while it prevents an annoying element of the game this is at the cost of something which makes cosmoteer interesting

i really don't think its worth it, as much as i loathe kites

[hybrid vector]

I'm totally for weapons having falloff ranges but it would be better if they would be weapon-specific

and I really like sensors increasing the falloff range a lot allowing massive ships to shoot very far away without dealing so much damage that it becomes op

[coral estuary]

Mmmmmmmh petition to keep this "experiment" as a toggle setting before starting a session of any kind (including creative)

Ooooooooorrrrrrrr... making it an official mod and highlighting the "MODS" button in Main Menu

[proven ruin]

I think it's too abusable

Idk how range could be increased without something like that though

I guess it could scale incrementally by proce

[marsh sail]

I really agree

We can just keep this as a offical mod

If the goal is simply to counter kiting tactics,Ensure that poorly defended kiting ships no longer appear. I think the ship spawning mechanism should be modified to ensure that every enemy team has at least some fast ships or long-range ships.

That will make the game much more intersitng and realistic and don't need many time to balance since it's won't influence pvp

https://discord.com/channels/314103695568666625/1421839484466761820

And also,I think this will be not that hard on code?(I don't know how the code works,just I think)

[snow schooner]

Please don't make it a mod. I hate using mods, as they split the community into two different rule sets. Either commit to it or drop it.
We had a petition where Walt pinged everyone on the server and something like 75% of the community said they would welcome this change. So I say do it and do it well.

I've held off of playing Cosmoteer since for a long while now because I don't want everything I build now to be invalidated. Either do it as the majority of the community seems to want or don't do it, but let us know now please.

[tribal crypt]

I for one like the sound of the changes! I don't think it harms weapon uniqueness.

[snow schooner]

Nah, mods split the community into two different rule sets. In the end almost nobody will use this, if it's only a mod. Nobody in tournaments that at least. If the devs have thought this through and want to make it so, then it needs to be the new vanilla.

[snow schooner]

It seems like you're missing the intent. It's not just about weakening kites. It's also about getting rid of the weirdly short weapon ranges that are barely longer than your own ship size, it's about creating more interaction between weapons and it's about making shots not just vanish after hitting an arbitrary distance. The full intent can be read towards the beginning.

I like the change, if it's done correctly. It shouldn't be just a rough equalizing of all ranges. In my suggested version weapons would still have their old "optimal range" we're used to - so the current feeling of how weapon ranges relate to each other stays the same - but you CAN shoot them at 600m range too with significant drawbacks specific to each weapon and how long beyond their optimal range you're trying to shoot. (lasers would have falloff, cannons would have increasing inaccuracy and so on...) And then we're given a new block or a new sensor function or some kind of way to pay some kind of crew/resource cost to gradually decrease this long range debuff. I specifically would like it, if every placed sensor would decrease the debuff by 16,67%.

This solution is elegant, preserves the "identity" weapons currently have with their range and solves all the issues outlined by the devs as they have initially described them. And on top of that it just makes everything more interesting.

I say go ahead with it, but do it right.
Again, we've already had a vote on this and the vast majority of the community was for it in one way or another.

This pussyfooting around should stop.

I wanna get back to building ships.

I just checked. It was 75% of those who voted (but everyone was pinged) who support this change.
#1408582870137569350 message

So please go ahead and give us a new preview build that is closer to what you have in mind. Then everyone can test it and see how it feels.

[midnight bolt]

it's also about making more than 1 sensor useful, in addition to what you listed

[tribal crypt]

That would be awesome on its own!

[frozen silo]

this was buried deep within a post that was specific to dev updates channel. I don’t think it’s reflective of the community at large, that 70+ subscribers on a post about the subject wants that particular item. Not to mention the vast majority of players would likely not even be on discord

[frozen silo]

Just build ships with the idea that new changes would break power balances, and adjust as necessary. My pre-meltdown ships need a change, but it’s a welcome change since things happen and we have new metas. If you like to keep creative juices flowing, just flow them and worry about changes another day.

[midnight bolt]

it was an @ everyone ping, so everyone in this server got that ping, regardless of whether or not they were following this

and although not everyone is on discord, enough people are that it's likely to be a good enough cross-section of the playerbase to figure out whether people like it or not

[frozen silo]

yes this vote was pinged to everyone, but it wasn’t done on the announcement thread. there would be bias, from the thread it’s posted in or from the community representation. I’m sure some people got overwhelmed trying to find where the ping was amidst the messages here, and the survey wasn’t up for a super long period of time either

[frozen silo]

fair, though I do still think there’d be bias if hypothetically we had a thread named “changing the logo green” and the survey options in that thread were “change it green” or “keep it as is”

[frozen silo]

I don’t like sensor spam. I don’t think it’s very elegant in practice, sorry

[marsh sail]

I know,but I really think that's not big deal.As a player that play this game 6000h+,The short weapon ranges and the fact that projectiles disappear after reaching an arbitrary distance have never been an issue to me. These are inherently part of Cosmoteer's unique gameplay style. Personally, I'm reluctant to discuss too much about scientific realism in this game, as it has always prioritized gameplay over realism. If we were to make the game more scientifically accurate, would we have to redesign the entire physics engine? After all, in this universe, there isn't even drag, and your ship can translate in any direction as long as it has thrusters in one direction.And Ireally worried that this relatively less important update will delay the update of the more significant career content.About the vote,I think that's just people love new things,if we make a vote that-----Do you want new career content, smarter AI, or this range update? I think the voting results would look very different.

Regarding your point about "increasing interaction between different weapons," I actually agree with that. However, since the range differences between weapons in this game aren't particularly significant to begin with, I don't think it's all that important.

As a moderator of the Chinese community and a deeply passionate player of this game, I consistently see players complain about the lack of career content before they fade from the community and never return. It truly pains me to see this.
While the range update does have some impact on new players, that impact is quite limited. I think even lee than add a new weapon.Ultimately, the biggest adjustment for them might just be needing a few extra shields when using kiting tactics. However, this could also be addressed by optimizing the generation of career-mode ships or adding new career missions.
What truly retains new players is rich career content—or at least the perception that it's gradually being expanded. For veteran players, the range update might indeed be a novel experience, but please consider the massive amount of time required to balance it —especially when we haven't even fully addressed the balance issues from the last update.

[obsidian anvil]

Just curious, did ai write this or do you interact with ai written text often? The message has "not just, but also", ndashes (not mdashes but still) and lists of three. But the message does seem to contain info only a human would know through context of cosmoteer.

But on topic, I think while the different weapon ranges are interesting, I don't think they're good. They can (and should) also be preserved in the optimal ranges, but projectiles just disappearing after and arbitrary distance has always been weird

[marsh sail]

That's too bad. My school taught me to write English like that lmao.

[obsidian anvil]

It's not bad on its own, but ai unfortunately copied the texts containing those and started mass using them. If you see those three together, it's highly likely ai wrote the text

[marsh sail]

ah, it's very hard for me to tell them apart because my English is really bad

[dull night]

Too many messages since the beginning of this thread 🤣 . Is there any progress in the idea of this re-balance?

[tribal crypt]

As did mine.

[arctic bough]

go go gadget developer reply

[snow schooner]

If they went ahead with tieing it to sensors, then yes, but I didn't want to just assume that this will be the route. Though I would like it to be tied to sensors.

[snow schooner]

You can extrapolate. If 75% of the people who care enough to be in the discord want it, then it's safe to assume that a majority (though maybe a somewhat smaller majority... or maybe a larger one) of all players would welcome it too.

[snow schooner]

Elegant as in it enacts the desired changes without upsetting what we are used to too much. It makes it so it's only viable on larger ships. It makes it so it's easily gradable. It doesn't interfere with the basic way we build our weapon setups (the version where each weapon has to be within 16 tiles of a sensor is rather un-elegant in that regard). And it preserves the identity weapons get from their inherent optimal range which is currently their max range. And these last two points seem to be important to the critics of the range change.
So that's why it's elegant.

[snow schooner]

None of my arguments build on realism. So yes, let's prioritize gameplay: It sucks that kites are boring to play as and boring to play against - this preview changes this. It sucks that you can't have your deck cannons in the back, because their range is shorter than your flagship is big - this preview changes this. It sucks that, just as an example - there are many weapon relationships like that, a weapon with 260m range doesn't interact at all with a weapon that has just 70m less range - this preview changes this. And yes, it also sucks for me personally that weapon shots just disappear upon reaching their max range - I've played this game since before ion prisms were a thing and I've always hated this aspect about the game, which you call "Cosmoteer's unique style". It would be more fun, if the shots continued and you had to dodge the dumb projectiles, even if you outrange the targeting systems of your opponent.

We don't have to vote on "do you want smarter AI", because obviously the result will be 99% yes. But we do have to have votes on things that are more complex and have up- and downsides. That's why Walt pinged everyone on the server and 75% of the people that partook voted yes. That is a significantly high number and it's not just becaue "people like new things". Honestly, that sentence is not even true. People don't like new things that change everything they're used to, which is why even the Meltdown update, which was mostly just a bunch of new and exciting stuff to play around with, was met with some resistance in certain regards. Actually, I would've expected the vote to be much closer to 50% yes 50% no, maybe even in the negative because of how weird the preview seems at first glance and how deeply it would change how we build and how we think about the weapons we're used to.

[snow schooner]

How can you say that when entire archetypes like laser kites rely on the relatively small difference between 260m & 190m? Or when Ion kites were a thing even when they still had 300m range. And it's not just about these ranges that are relatively close, but about increasing the interactivity between a rail ship and a laser ship.

[snow schooner]

I agree that the content updates are also super important. But I understand why, if changes to the range system are to be made, they have to be made before the more sophisticated content updates that rely upon the balance of those basic range systems.

[snow schooner]

I hate AI. I never use it. It is a demonic technology that will destroy humanity's ability to think.
So no, AI did not write this.
Also, I've seen the video you're probably referencing here. That video made sure to point out that just because a text has one or a few of the telling AI signs, doesn't mean it's always AI. Keep that in mind, otherwise you're behaving like a bot yourself that falsely flags content. After all, AI steals its way of writing from what humans write. So maybe it took it style from people who write like me...

[marsh sail]

I mainly think it's not that important. After all, it's just that there seems to be interaction.** In fact, you can't defeat it if you don't get close enough (if the balance is right).**

And because the range difference is not that big, as long as you have enough speed, you can approach quickly, rather than having a range difference several times over so that even if you have enough speed, it still takes a long time to get close.

[snow schooner]

And that forces short range ships to build speed. It limits what players can build and have it be viable.

Would be more fun, if the matchups between weapons were more dynamic than "do you have enough speed to catch? If not, better hide behind a rock".

[marsh sail]

,

[snow schooner]

I have read that message. I do not quite understand what you mean by it. Probably a translation issue.

[marsh sail]

Or the balance becomes very poor, and now short-range weapons can also easily defeat long-range weapons

[snow schooner]

You mean to say that, if the devs implemented their ideas, you fear that short range weapons would be too powerful against long ranged ones?

But that's where the debuffs come into play which apply when you're trying to shoot a weapon beyond it's optimal range. And then you can pay a cost (maybe in the form of extra sensors) to gradually negate that debuff. It seems like an idea that can be balanced.

[marsh sail]

I want to emphasize that if the balance is reasonable, even though all weapons have a range of 600m, by using mechanisms such as damage drop-off to replace the range mechanism, long-range weapons will still maintain a significant advantage at longer distances. Close-range weapons must still close the distance to overcome long-range weapons.

The only effect might be reflected in the fact that short-range large ships can suppress long-range small ships and Short-range ships can also cause negligible damage to long-range ships

However, this can also be achieved through the reasonable generation of ship teams.Or, to be more precise, achieve a similar effect

I mean like if all the ship team have some fast ships or long range ship

And this can also give rise to more ship designs

@snow schooner

[shy scaffold]

dom1vs1

[frozen silo]

this assumes a randomized non-biased population, which I’ve mentioned is likely not the case. 75 possibly-biased people speaking for 25k people in the cosmoteer discord (not to mention many more players who don’t use discord) feels iffy to me

[frozen silo]

and I can see the rise of box-walls again with a centercore of sensor spam, which walt likely would want to steer away from. Instead of building kites, people would just focus on the next “meta” that they can use, like the 2017-era Cosmoteer. OCLC everywhere on a brawler, and the reviews grow with complaints on how even their most powerful alpha-strike build can’t beat in-game ships. All of these are possible concerns, yes, but I do think it’s very real and completely tied in with a range-equalizing update. “What do we do when single cannon does less damage at long range? Use more cannon” kinda philosophy. I cannot describe that as too elegant of a game change due to its implications, and how plonking 4 sensors down a core doesn’t feel like it’s solved much other than create an additional space I’d allocate for ships. So in attempting to break the kite meta, we intuitively re-favor wall meta for new players, and they’ll likely get destroyed because brawlers don’t fare super well in multiple battles unless they’re properly protected. And yes we also break the current balance, which is already broken from OC components. The broken balance from OC feels fine to me, the kite meta-breaking just feels too extra imo, unless we can preserve weapon “flavors” in some additional way.

If you look at a similar-but-different game, Starsector as a space-battle game has weapons of all ranges, as well as boosters for range on capital ships etc. It works for them possibly because multiple tactics can be used when there’s multiple ships on a battlefield, but regardless it does work. There’s kiting and dodging that happens occasionally, even stealth as an option. They have weapons of all ranges, not just equalized amounts. All adds identity to the game, with occasional balance tweaks to make them fit better into their role. I feel the fix should bring out more flavor rather than unifying aspects of the game

[snow schooner]

Yes, as it should be. Weapons would always have an advantage in their optimal range. But the increased interactivity would still make the matchups more interesting. Say you have a match between a DC ship and a rail ship, the DC ship will be at a disadvantage because most of its shots will miss, but the kite will have to have more protection than it can get away with now, because it needs to be able to tank those shots that do not miss. And that means it will be heavier and have somewhat less thrust, which means the DC ship will have a better chance of catching up by exploiting certain maneuvers, clouds and general situations. This scenario is already more interesting than the one we would have now. And on top of that, maybe the budget of the ships allows the DC ship to be not only great at close range but also at least decent at long range, because it could afford to negate the long range debuff at least in part or completely - that will open up a new avenue of tactics. And the power of these avenues can be somewhat easily fine tuned by the devs by changing how costly it is to negate the long range debuff.

Why would this not work? Where are the problems remaining with this approach?

[frozen silo]

see if Career puts this in a tooltip and makes it so that AI attempts to go around our asteroid at less-than-max-range, it’d make playing against kites that much more dynamic

I feel like a huge part of this is tied to player experience at the career levels, and pvp’s figured their thing out already. solving the AI issue can help, and if in the vast emptiness of career-space we can’t find an asteroid then 🤷🏻‍♂️

[snow schooner]

But so far it has not. So far the status-quo has resulted in a meta where it is very often advantageous as a short range ship to hide behind ansteroid until the ROD closes in. At least in pvp. And in career we have a situation where most players are drawn to play kites, because it is the safest and sadly the most boring way to play.

[marsh sail]

I agree that it would make matches more engaging. Regarding your later point, I actually believe most rail kites already require exceptionally well-designed protection to defeat enemies. Especially with the current version's overclocked railguns, the importance of defense has been further elevated.

[frozen silo]

oh and yeah also pvp would be a completely revamped scene from this update, I’m surprised I forgot to talk about them as much. everything changes, and usually sensors are considered extraneous so now they’re gonna need to be retrofitted on a lot of ships. on top of the meta kinda really shifting from this too

come to think of it, what does the competitive scene players think of this change? any takers? Z_THETA_Z or other peeps, maybe other balance council?

[frozen silo]

what’s also been your experience in pvp, did you notice new shifts in strategy perhaps

[marsh sail]

Don't got it

What does it have to do with what I said before~~，sorry for my bad english~~

[marsh sail]

My main concern isn't that it's bad, but rather that it's unnecessary compared to other content requiring updates. It would consume a massive amount of time while delivering relatively insignificant changes to the gameplay experience—assuming proper balance is achieved.

[marsh sail]

In fact, directly completing the career content can largely solve the problems it aims to address

[frozen silo]

oh he’s talking about how ship teams have not given rise to new archetypes/playstyles. he says that shorter range ships hug an asteroid until the red circle forces battles to be closer in pvp, and kites dominate in career

[snow schooner]

I would love to see how 1v1 dom matches would develop with these changes actually. It is already a very dynamic and stressful match type. Having to worry a little less about the exact ranges at which you can kite or get kited might be nice.

[marsh sail]

In the elimination mode, aren't the ships 1v1 in most time?

[marsh sail]

About this

You can check this

#1408749867551162469 message

[snow schooner]

No, it does not assume this. I said that the result would probably be more negative, however it might as well be even more positive. We just don't know, but it is somewhat safe to assume that a majority of the non-discord player base would also enjoy it, even if it is a fair bit more or less than the current result. And cosmoteer does not realistically have 25k people who can be considered "the game's players". The number of real players (and not just people who have played a few times or have never played but are interested) is much much smaller.

I would say, the number of players that is "useful" for this conversation is probably somewhere in the several hundred.

[frozen silo]

yeah the steamdb numbers say our trough is around 895 concurrent players in a month, with recent meltdown update bringing our numbers to 2800. I would still say that the survey question was leading, and could reflect different thoughts if it wasn’t in a biased thread and asked in a biased way

[snow schooner]

I would not mind a central sensor core just how I don't mind a central barracks core where all the operators are. Large ships just work like that and honestly I think that's cool, that they get to benefit from scale like that, rather than them having to build in a way that is reminiscent of several individual smaller ships but just "fused together".
So what, if that would "dumb down" the process of negating the long range debuff? The game is already complex enough with so many moving parts that even ships before the meltdown update were hard to mix-max completely. And keep in mind that when we're talking about a complete negation of long range weaknesses, we're talking about only the very biggest ships that will be able to afford this - not the medium sized traditional 1,5mil ships. Medium ships will still have to make meaningful design choices, maybe even more so than now. Because they might want to include just one or two sensors to get a precise amount of edge in specific matchups without punishing their other matchups too much. Or maybe it will turn out that 1,5mil pvp ships will remain mostly unaffected because they can't afford even just including 1 sensor, in which case t´hings stay the same in pvp but we gain better experiences outside of pvp...

[snow schooner]

I dunno about the bias of this thread. Seems like most of the contributing voices actually dislike the update. And in what way was the phrasing of the question misleading? It was kept deliberately open and vague, because the goal was to get a rough reflection of the general sentiment. There might not even exist a concrete and precise version of what the devs will end up implementing.

[snow schooner]

Accross all my contributions to this discussion you will never see me advocating for a very crude equalization of all weapon ranges without any other aspects beyond that.

[snow schooner]

I don't think you fully realize what you're wishing for here. If the AI did that it would be miserable.

Just like how quite a few tournament matches end up being boring with both players waiting for ROD or until one player makes a mistake 4 minutes into the match.

[snow schooner]

Looking through the competitive designs on Excelsior, it seems like rail & missile ships look pretty much the same. One possible development that can be counted as a meltdown related innovation might be the inclusion of OC-Flak into some rail designs. But that particular inclusion might be best described as part of the general cancerous power of OC-Flak, which is not necessarily a good thing.

[marsh sail]

actully ion ship are slimar to chaingun ship

that's cleary not a big problem

[snow schooner]

I am not an active pvp player myself, but I enjoy watching a lot of tournaments and fight clubs. I might be wrong, but so far the biggest change since meltdown seems to have been the power of OC-Flak. I would like to see how the pvp meta evolves with a good and balanced implementation of this range change.

[marsh sail]

And

I have to say I don't suggest to add OC flak to Railgun kiter

[snow schooner]

I do not understand how you link this statement to this discussion. :/

Why would all the considerations above be irrelevant, just because Ion and CG layout look vaguely similar?

[marsh sail]

I mean this not a problem

[snow schooner]

You said that, how things are currently might also give rise to new designs. But I don't think that's true, because we haven't seen any of these new designs you speak of in years. Instead, it seems like the meta has settled for quite a while now so that against kites short range ships often want to just hide behind a rock.

[marsh sail]

Oh I got what you want to say

[snow schooner]

Again, I agree that other content updates are very important. But we also have to recognize that, if the devs want to make changes to how ranges interact, they kinda have to make those changes before career 2.0. Because a lot of how career 2.0 is built relies upon the much more basic system of how range works in Cosmoteer. And I believe that the devs have said this themselves too - that they feel it's important to have this discussion about range now, before they release career 2.0 or any AI changes.

Does that not make sense?

[snow schooner]

Only partially, because the issues the change aims to address go beyond career.

[marsh sail]

Let me give some examples. For instance, ships that focus more on flanking or pursuit, short-range vessels designed to suppress smaller ships while minimizing damage taken, or long-range ships that don't heavily rely on extensive reverse thrust. I'm not saying such ships don't appear in the current career—it's just that they often underperform due to lack of coordinated support from other ships or not spawning in specific scenarios. Moreover, the campaign mode repeatedly spawns identical ship types and fails to generate fleets with synergistic compositions. As a result, even if we have some ships designed to counter kiting strategies, they rarely prove effective in practice.

[marsh sail]

Oh I agree if they have to do this,but I think it's unncessary

[snow schooner]

I have read this thread back when you created it and I have upvoted it, because I remember agreeing with a large part of your concerns and maybe even some of your solution. I have then made my own suggestion thread about how I would like to see the range change implemented and I have recited it roughly here too.

[marsh sail]

To be honest, I didn't read the subsequent discussion after that because it was a bit too long for my English proficiency

[snow schooner]

Well yes, the meta is "fine" how it is now. It's fine. It's not great. It's often kinda dumb when a short range ship meets a long range ship. The matches consist often of just dancing around each other until the lesser experienced player makes a mistake. It's not that these types of matches are completely shit. It's just that they're not very interesting and I would like that, among other things this update aims to do, changed.

[marsh sail]

It won't change

[snow schooner]

It is true that the way career currently functions is partially to blame for the dominance of kites. But it is not just that. The way the different ranges work out in cosmoteer also inherently gives rise to kite dominance. And the issues go beyond career.

[marsh sail]

Short-range ships still can't defeat long-range ones.Just failed and The other party suffered a minor injury

So,is kiter very powerful in elim?

Kiter is important in dom but hard to say its powerful that even become a problem

[snow schooner]

It might. I know you'll say that short range weapons will always be at a disadvantage no matter what, but I think that fails to really consider the complexities of how even just slight balance changes or qualitative changes such as what is proposed in this update can have large effects upon how ship types interact. For example, giving short range weapons a bit more of a chance to fight back against long range ships, might force long range ships to include a little bit more defense, and that in turn might give short range ships a little bit more wiggle room with how they play the matchup. And then maybe some short range ships will decide to include some sensors to improve their long range matches at the cost of some of their short range matches and that in turn might change the exact balance how medium range ships are built and so on and so on...

blablabla. tldr cosmoteer = complex. Don't underestimate that.

[snow schooner]

I undrestand.

[marsh sail]

I hard to say.I cannot say responsibly that this is impossible to happen

But that's why I think this need much time

Hard to say what will happend in the future

It takes a long time in itself to determine whether it is beneficial to the gaming environment

[snow schooner]

Even if kites are not superstrong in elim (which I can't say they are or they aren't), it remains the case that the matches with kites don't tend to be very interesting. If you think the issue is not important enough to dedicate developer time to right now, ok, I can understand that. However, if the devs have reason to want to do it eventually, I understand that they kinda have to do it now. It's a now or never situation, no matter how important or unimportant the matter is.

[marsh sail]

I think we can agree that the main point of disagreement lies in whether it's worth spending this much time to resolve the issue. On this matter, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

And this is decided by the dev

[snow schooner]

Yes. But there is always one opinion that is closer to the truth and some that are fruther apart from the truth. The point of this discussion is to get our collective opinions as close to the truth as possible and that helps the devs decide where to go from here.

I will emphasize one thing again: If the devs don't do the range change now, but only after career 2.0 or after better AI, then they will have to rewrite a bunch of stuff that is already finished just to make sure it all works together with the range change. And in the end it will take more time than if they do it now.

[marsh sail]

My view is that this has limited impact on new players, and since new players determine the future of this game, it's not worth the effort. Your perspective is that from a game design standpoint, this issue should be resolved as early as possible, as it could affect subsequent updates and make future changes more complicated. Both perspectives hold valid points.

[snow schooner]

Yes. Both are to be considered.
But then there is also a third point, namely that some changes might not even be possible later. I think it's basically almost too late to make these changes even now, because of how established the current range interactions and systems built on those interactions already are. It would've been better to make these changes when or a little while after the steam version came out.

[marsh sail]

Oh I agree is too late

It's a basic funtion

[snow schooner]

We would not be having such a controversial discussion, if it had been done years ago. But I want cosmoteer to be as good as it can be. If that means delays for other content, so be it. We'll survive it and then we'll have a better game overall.

[shy scaffold]

i think i think

No matter what， just make a big change

rather than like the last beta

Finally have new something to play

but it is weakened now

this DC is spends money to reduce DPS

over load dc

[shy scaffold]

（use kamikaze plane）

[shy scaffold]

yes，but have not player to play dom，you need make Chinese community have more dom player

the noob dont care whether your kite is strong or not，they only know this is a build battleships game

so just follow them

I also enjoy use my battleships massive battle with they battleships

[last mica]

Correct me if I’m missing something, but to address kiting, why not just increase tractor beam range to 700? Tb Repulsion could loose effectiveness past 300m to discourage kites from using them too

[shy scaffold]

i think just need to weaken the long range weapons DPS，like bpsr

but I dont think the kite is strong

[last mica]

From my experience, kites are very strong

[shy scaffold]

you can use emp missile，he missile to attack the kite plane，and now，have overload rail and DC and kamikaze LCplane ，cheap DC will attack the kite plane from all directions，

[last mica]

I mean, with the amount of distance that kites maintain, they are usually given ample time to shoot down missiles if they have pd or flack.

[eager gull]

PDs and flaks don't have that much range tho

[last mica]

Yeah, but my point was just that they couldn’t be bypassed by ramming

[jovial stratus]

have we considered making overclocked weapons generally perform worse at longer ranges and better at closer ranges than their unoverclocked counterparts as opposed to the current balance trend of overclocked weapons having vastly increased effective ranges

[proven ruin]

i think its only really much of an issue with oc rails

which is why i made this post

https://discord.com/channels/314103695568666625/1430376160260259871

[jovial stratus]

ions, sl, sc, lc, dc, cg all become vastly more effective at higher ranges when overclocked

[proven ruin]

oh true

[proven ruin]

it might be more of an issue in domination but for elimination sl, sc and lc are generally pretty bad and the inaccuracy of small and large cannons renders them pretty useless at range

[marsh sail]

I maintain my old stance: we haven't properly balanced the overclocked version yet, so we shouldn't rush into such updates. And frankly, for a small-scale game like Cosmoteer, avoiding overly complex mechanics would make managing game balance much more straightforward.

[shy scaffold]

the people is have brain， will not use junk blocks，so is balanced anyway，just some people don't want to see their old ships become weaker

[marsh sail]

I don't deny that repeated power creep may be an effective balancing method for some online games, but this game is clearly not that type of game.

[ashen anvil]

Is it possible to have stations be able to rotate around their gravity anchor? Or are they intended to be able to rotate around their center point?

[ashen anvil]

You'll balance OC modules only to ruin the balance by doing an update that objectively MUST be done. Better to do this now, then fix OC balance.

[marsh sail]

I mainly think that such an update has a limited impact on the game and it's not worth spending a lot of time balancing it

[ashen anvil]

On the contrary, this is absolutely what the game needs and it'll have a profound influence on game balance.

I would actually be worried about orbiters becoming (even more) overpowered, not sure how founded that concern is.

[marsh sail]

I think it can only make the old players happy and is completely unable to attract and retain new players

most players play this game is for the career mode

My point is that a more complete career mode is more important than anything else and can better retain players

[shy scaffold]

（reduce the game price）

to free

[proven ruin]

?????

[marsh sail]

First,very weid to mention this here

Secondly, I think for most players who might lack sufficient funds (at least from what I know, most Chinese players fall into this category), if they are interested in a game, they might first try a pirated version or demo even classical. If they find the game content sufficient and truly enjoy it, they will purchase the game when they have the means to do so.Ultimately, it all boils down to whether the game content is substantial enough.

Third, I understand that you want to make the game free to encourage a large number of players from your Bsiege community to join. However, this is a one-time, limited measure. Compared to improving the career mode content, the number of players attracted and retained through free access is nowhere near comparable. I'm not sure if this is the case with Bsiege, but this game is not one whose core gameplay revolves around PvP. Therefore, it should not—and does not need to—frequently reset in-game equipment data, as seen in games that launch new seasons.
I’ve emphasized repeatedly that for most players who come across this game on Steam, they are here primarily for the career mode. The reason you might think more PvP players are staying is that you come from a community with a strong PvP atmosphere, surrounded by like-minded players. Additionally, the career content in this game is severely lacking—frankly, I don’t even feel motivated to play it myself, let alone expect other players to stay long-term and support the game for that reason. This creates the illusion that more PvP players are sticking around.

As I've stressed to you before in the Chinese community, if you genuinely hope to attract more PvP players to this game, the practical approach should be straightforward: regularly engage in the PvP gameplay yourself. When others in the community see active participation, they’ll be more inclined to join and try it out.
As I previously informed your friend, there is a "Fight Club" dominant community that organizes regular sessions for the domination mode at fixed times. I frequently share their event announcements in the Chinese community, but I haven’t seen you or your friends actively participating in these activities.

All I've seen is that some of you are mocking normal players by saying things like, "Are you too scared to play PvP?" and stirring up topics that have nothing to do with ship strength or gameplay operational skills. Instead of reasoning logically, you resort to saying, "Let's fight it out. Whoever wins is right."

[wide spear]

id pay $500 for the devs to finally ignore the 12 PvP players the command all balance around the game so we can actually focus on the 95% of the players

[rough bolt]

hmm wait a minute...what if i made drag do its thing by an exponent of 1 rather than 2 (then) or 3 (now)?

[amber grove]

drag is actually 4th exponent right now

[rough bolt]

oo

[jovial stratus]

son 😭 😭 🥀 😔

yknow i really damn wish we could actually command the meta rn since pvp is basically unplayable and dead as a direct consequence of bad balance

[marsh sail]

My main complaint is actually about some people who don't even ususally play the game but dictate how it should be run.

[jovial stratus]

there is literally 0 real consequence to balancing the game around pvp as balance will trickle down to career and result in an ultimately more balanced and well designed experience at every level.

[obsidian anvil]

The thing is people play career when they don't want to play pvp

Career is casual and as such should not be balanced around pvp which is competitive and gives every piece an optimal use

That way you'd remove the architect part of the game in career, as there would only be a correct and incorrect way to build a ship

Career is about what works for you, pvp is about what works period

[marsh sail]

Personally, I support balancing pvp as much as possible without affecting the career mode

I think only when something like overclocking railgun has a significant impact on the career mode should we reduce our consideration of pvp

[obsidian anvil]

One debated solution (I understand why it is) is adding two sets of balance, one for career and one for pvp. I know it would make designs inconsistent between them, but take elden ring as an example. There the pvp sucked, and when they fixed that singleplayer sucked. Splitting the two worked wonders there

[marsh sail]

I don't like this. Mainly since the balance of a few weapons can have a huge impact on the career mode

It should be acceptable to make less compromise with a few weapons

As for some other weapons, such as nukes, the generation of enemy nuke ships should actually be optimized to minimize their generation, rather than modifying the weapons themselves

[remote mesa]

ok this is because oc railgun was genuinely broken

someone in there thought i was wrong and that they were fine, just wanna add that 💀

no actually the basically hitscan projectile that at a base gains double damage and scales harder is totally fine

i know a lot regarding balancing but competitive players thinking they know how to balance a game is a very common occurrence. if it is actually a competitive game then maybe, but this isnt

[green tinsel]

Dw PvP is dead let it die (tonie was right?)

[glass monolith]

This is what happens when the game is unbalanced in general. For example, the optimal ship rn is an oc rail ship.

I agree with j_yuuki that the game can be balanced around pvp and let that trickle to career. For example, all the hitscan weapons that they've been saying make evasive manuevers ineffective in pvp rn would also do the same in career. I think career players should have the option to choose between simple face offs and more advanced maneuvering to make a ship more effective

The only pvp balance thing I don't like in career is weapons that require direct and attentive piloting to evade (nukes). Imo they should have other counters. Both to make the game more beginner friendly, but also to not punish using a fleet in career

[jovial stratus]

what? thats absurd

the weapons actually being balanced well wont make ship design less interesting, it will make ship design more interesting at every level

[obsidian anvil]

If a weapon is balanced around pvp it is balanced around its very optimized placement and use

[glass monolith]

That applies to career too. Once people figure out how to optimize it they'll also start doing so, people will start posting about it on reddit, etc. We can't have weapons that are broken when used optimally

[obsidian anvil]

no, but they need to be adequate even when not placed most optimally

[karmic glacier]

Ima nuke pvp players with one simple game

Star Sector

[karmic glacier]

you would pay 500. I would dare to drain 5K from my reserve bank account for this. We are not the aame people. Mostly because your actually a holy crab Priest and I’m just some weird ice fairy

[karmic glacier]

….Nah. It’ll just result in more “game balance fixing” mods.

The consequence for balancing around pvp is the fact that you don’t have pvp involving actual fleet resource management.

Yes I’m that one guy who decided it was a good idea to repair mid fight. Why do you ask?

-# besides. The last time a game tried to truely balance around pvp, it slowly drained itself until it was so sterilized that it got boring. I miss good StarCraft II.

[glass monolith]

I think there are considerations when balancing via pvp, but I don't think any of the recent issues mentioned by pvp players are also issues in career.

What I've seen from them recently:
The rate of hitscan weapons and increase in drag at high speed have negated usages for manuevering, rendering battles a point at eachother and see who wins

OC weapons dramatisized the rock paper scissors dynamic between weapons, making matchups predetermined, with player actions having little effect on the outcome.

Both of these are scenarios that also make career worse. I think people should be able to use maneuvering to gain an advantage, in both career and pvp. I also don't want battles to be predetermined. It's very annoying running into unwinnable battles in career

There are cases where we need to be careful. I brought up earlier, I don't think there should be weapons where attentive direct control is required to counter them, since fleet gameplay shouldn't be punished in career. Pvp also doesn't care about damage, only about winning, so we eg should limit or not balance around/buff alpha or other self destructive ships

However, all the criticisms I've read from the pvp community lately are also degrading the career experience. I haven't seen them advocating for removing counters for weapons to force maneuvering, or requesting more self destructive ship tactics. If anything, I've seen the opposite. Eg requests nerf the alpha cannon small thruster monstrosities I've seen people post

[main juniper]

Please limit this discussion to specifically the range rebalance experiment, thanks. Feel free to start a balance discussion thread in #1019739575683399840.

[shy scaffold]

no，Im different from those pvp player，because i think

I'll retire my old ships，and use new strong weapons，I'm not will because my old ships is become weaker then go to complain

[karmic glacier]

~~the joke is that people will just mod in old cosmoteer anyways because new cosmoteer sucks. Also your English smells funny ~~ so if I remember right, what’s being discussed about with ranges again.

[shy scaffold]

because have some player dont support the range changes

[karmic glacier]

honestly I’d love to have far out reaching ranges… but the game doesn’t really support that with how it’s built I think.

Because it always felt stupid that funny bullet has WORSE RANGE THEN A LASER.

[rough bolt]

Thinking about it, ion beams having the kinda range it does now seems bonkers compared to classic, especially when a single ion beam prism outranges nearly every weapon in the earlygame

[karmic glacier]

I’d expect funny bullets to go until they don’t go

[karmic glacier]

EXACTLY. WTF.

[shy scaffold]

I think this is good for career mode，will also give pvp new experience

i support the change

[rough bolt]

I think PvP will still default to close-quarters shootoffs with the current drag situation, but range rebalance could in theory affect career engagements, with a Stargazer no longer being the apex of threat 1-3

[karmic glacier]

inb4 broadsiding ships with large cannons just constently firing walls of dedth

[rough bolt]

just also has to be done right

maaybe a railgun will still outrange a prism, but no chance there's gonna be an overclocked deck cannon that early

iirc I think I read something about ion prisms getting more range, but mining lasers maintaining the same medium-short range

[shy scaffold]

make PVP mining lasers no drops

[rough bolt]

think it already is by default (scraps generally lag pvp)

[shy scaffold]

yes

[south vector]

when will we get a new iteration of this experiment?

[summer finch]

Walt said soonish somewhere else

[slow ether]

Out of all the languages you could've spoken you decided on ragebaitese 😭

Ml dropping things is unnecessary but super fun and I've actually used it several times in not so competitive games.

[arctic bough]

has it been considered to just add an I hate kites career option?

tbh career would benefit in general if ships had some basic class descriptions, so when you take a mission you understand you're coming up against a nukeboat or armour brick and can plan accordingly because rn only experienced players will recognise the ship type by name, and i think new players probably just drive into it, die and reload to find out what they're fighting

[slow ether]

Maybe in easy and default modes, it stays hidden in admiral difficulty.

Speaking of which could we please add something more than just damage modifier to those difficulties, it's a really bad way to design a diff setting like Terraria Master Mode

[kindred zinc]

agreed
I reckon you could at least partially set combat difficulty settings by changing galaxy generation (this would also necessitate preventing the player from changing combat difficulty mid-game), so on Grand Admiral you'll start deep in Imperial and Ionian territory while on Captain you have the standard Fringe start

[supple bobcat]

I do think these changes are nesscary for balancing career mode and can lead to more interesting gameplay depth, however, I can't help but feel like ships are once again being punished for being small? Maybe it's just me but the only use I could feasiably find for 'fighters' is making them into kiters or orbiters, and even then larger ships of course have the advantage of being able to use much better engines albeit with more ramp up time. Those are my immediate first thoughts.

[eager gull]

Good balance for high skilled play doesn't imply the game is balanced and fun for casual players

[jovial stratus]

how is this so. please explain to me an example of when this happened in a game like cosmoteer

[eager gull]

Nukes are designed to be countered by either dodging or outranging. Dodging is not viable for casual career players so kiting is the way to go.

[jovial stratus]

why is it not viable for casual career players to strafe

its not complex spot dodging, lateral movement alone avoids nukes reliably when launched by ai

[eager gull]

Most career players never use direct control

[jovial stratus]

you can move laterally with rts

[eager gull]

I know about that technique, but I believe most career players don't know about that

[jovial stratus]

you dont even have to move laterally. nukes are very dodgable with normal forward movement using rts

newer career players will obviously struggle to dodge nukes because its something they havent encountered, but thats not an example of a fundamental issue just a technique they have to learn to win fights

as for kiting being the path of least resistance for career thats a completely seperate issue that stems from how career is designed as a game mode

its not just nukes that suffer from that

[tribal crypt]

That's how I usually do it; I usually orbit.

I go into direct control mode usually, though, just because I think it's a lot of fun to dodge missiles and nukes in direct control mode!

[glass monolith]

It might be that I haven't trial and errored enough, but I find the RTS is kinda dumb and will typically do things in the wrong order from what I want (it tends to take too long to pivot before making any forward movement). Probably a skill issue, but just saying it's not intuitive to use

I typically use direct control to dodge things and spread damage, but this is especially annoying in career when you have multiple ships and have to keep pausing and issuing new commands to your other ships

I do think this hits career harder, as to my knowledge piloting multiple ships is rare in pvp and considered a difficult skill when it is done, but I assume it's common in career

So i mentioned this earlier but I think nukes should remain kiteable after weapon range rebalancing. They're the only weapon without a built in design counter (no amount of shields, reasonable amount of armor, flak, or pd can negate a Voluntas volley), so I think it's fair if they have two movement based counters

[jovial stratus]

also, the "pvp balance has ruined nukes" doesnt hold up when you, well, consider that nukes were one of the most unbalanced and overpowered weapons in the game in pvp too

maybe theyre just well

not great balanced in general

[glass monolith]

Oh yeah I'm not saying pvp oriented balance has actively made nukes worse for career. Just that like they're a bigger problem in career than pvp

[jovial stratus]

yeah i was responding to lingluo's argument

[jovial stratus]

i very much doubt they were a bigger problem in career than pvp, at least until meltdown released; nukes were unfair and unbalanced on ultralight nukes, not to mention almost 80% of meta ships had at least nukes as a secondary weapon in some form

the only reason nukes are less prevalent now (and theyre still very strong bar still overpowered) is because theyve been powercrept by oc weapons which are even worse

[proven ruin]

Highly skilled players can utilise strategies which might be super op but difficult to perform

Speed meta ultralights for example

Most career players would combust trying to play those ships

[summer finch]

Yes if the ai follows the Strafe movement command in ahhhh wait 0/10 cases

[glass monolith]

Yeah I think there are specific situations where pvp oriented balance might cause career problems, but I haven't seen any in Cosmoteer and don't think it's an issue right now. And I agree balancing based on pvp optimal weapon usage/modules is usually good, because people will discover those tactics and use them in career

Also some of the architects hate us and have been throwing pvp esk 1.5 mil ships in career
(Sarcasm about the hate us part)

So anyways I think pvp can drive balance changes like range rebalancing, as long as said changes are also checked quickly in career and confirmed to not cause any career specific problems

[jovial stratus]

ok yes but thats completely unrelated to my question of how this actually has impacted the career game balance

[remote mesa]

the architects usually pull breaks, but ive seen very little for IO. they put on their tinfoil hats and transmuted brain waves of "how can we make this as evil as possible" and then suddenly we got that fucking automatic rail splitter

im deathly afraid to see what htye do for the range rebalance

infinite small cannon death

[midnight bolt]

yeah saris has absolutely gone all out on io

[remote mesa]

saris was told this was a late game faction and held nothing back

puts imperium to shame

well somewhat

id definitely consider io easier early on but its difficulty is so much more exponential vs imperium

back on topic, im curious to see how this range experiment changes this

io might actually be knocked down a peg as they might not use sensors near their weapons while imperium does, which will add more difference between the two factions

[glass monolith]

Iirc Walt said there was an update to this in the works to lesson the sensor requirement. I'm imagining the proximity to sensor modules part will be relaxed

I'm betting this will be a big buff to DC, missiles, sls, and ions, and other weapons might not see big changes

Assuming kites have some defenses I don't imagine inaccurate long range cannons, chainguns, and hls doing much

I could be wrong though

Though 600m oc flak... Could maybe be a good loki counter at least lol

[snow schooner]

Any news?

[shy scaffold]

i think first to update map editor，make dom have big map，then to update the long range weapon

dom map is small now

（numerical inflation）

[sick hare]

Custom maps

[vernal hawk]

equalization is the key word to make the game feel flat and make building feel pointless.

[snow schooner]

Now there's a take that doesn't deal with nuance, if you've ever seen one.

[snow schooner]

Equalization is not even what this update does, as every weapon behaves differently at long range. You can come try out the changes for yourself and then discuss about them after you've made some experiences here: https://discord.com/channels/314103695568666625/1438358636266262608