News: Combat Update

[koonschi]

 

Combat Update

 

Now that the Economy Update is on the stable branch, we are concentrating our efforts on the Combat Update. We want to make combat more engaging through a combination of reworking and re-balancing some of the existing combat mechanisms and adding some new ones while we’re at it. Here are some of the features you can look forward to:

 

Re-balancing of Weapons

 

We want weapons to be more specialized so every weapon has its very own purpose with accompanying strengths and weaknesses.

 

Specialized Enemies

 

Along with specialized weapons comes the AI’s use of those weapons. We’re making enemies more interesting by giving them different characteristics in their fighting style. Some will use lots of fighters, others will be strong against shields or on long range, while others are especially good at defending against fighters. You'll have to know your enemy and adjust your fighting style to keep the upper hand!

 

Torpedoes

 

We're excited to announce that we'll be introducing torpedoes as a new weapon type! Torpedoes will be very strong long range weapons, but they will also be more costly and won't have endless ammunition with these. Oh, and the enemy will have them, too, so better prepare some weaponry to shoot them down.

 

Defense Weaponry

 

With fighters and torpedoes threatening your ship, you need viable defense mechanisms. Chainguns will be a possibility but we’re with this update we're also adding anti-air weaponry that is specifically made for defense against fighters.

 

That's all for now, we'll be releasing more details next week!

 

Have fun!

[Hammelpilaw]

Im excited to see this. Please do not forget to increase strength of endgame enemies and difficulty at all inside the barrier :)

When you start in a new galaxy, the difficulty is very high. Thats good and should not be changed. But this update should increase difficulty in endgame.

[shadetheartist]

Im excited to see this. Please do not forget to increase strength of endgame enemies and difficulty at all inside the barrier :)

When you start in a new galaxy, the difficulty is very high. Thats good and should not be changed. But this update should increase difficulty in endgame.

 

I agree, i'd like to see a near-impossible end-game that you can only even imagine defeating if you have a really big ship. But that's just me.

[_OMAR_]

I am very amazed. I stopped playing games because of university and now when I checked what's new i was suprised! I am literally starting to learn German "I hope devs are from Germany" just because I want to visit the devs of Avorion! Yes I do such stuff  ;D.

[shadetheartist]

The torpedoes look like they might be designed by the user. Hmm, new torpedo building ?!?!

[JosephKobra]

Очень грустно, что отправляя корабли под управлением AI добывать руду или обломки, они используют пушки чтобы обстрелять астероид или те же самые обломки и не используют их для обороны. Надеюсь это исправят...

[Romual]

So no coax weapons in this update? Shame. This with cloacking are my top awaited features.

 

But still - nice to see weapon diversity. Before this I was sad that I basicaly had to take best turrets by stats and they all looked different, with different attack types and my ship looked like a carnival was on it, when it was shooting.

 

I mean I LOVE gattling guns, but they had low purpose, aside of shooting fighters. Now I will have actual reason to make a full-gattling ship.

[Ravien]

Looking forward to it!

[Perq]

 

With fighters and torpedoes threatening your ship, you need viable defense mechanisms. Chainguns will be a possibility but we’re with this update we're also adding anti-air weaponry that is specifically made for defense against fighters.

 

Annnd this is a very bad idea. As I said in other thread (and I've seen other people suggest it too), small size chainguns should be this kind of weapon. And these should also drop at the very end game (size 0,3 Avorion Chain guns with high tracking speed and matching DPS, but not as high as those 1 size ones, obviously).

Adding a separate class of anti-air weapons will simply polarize the usage of fighters/torpedoes and those said turrets.

It also makes absolutely no sense to have a turret that shoots only fighters and missiles. Why not shoot the enemy ship while there are no fighters/missiles to shoot down? And if you can, why add new class of weapons when they are exactly what chainguns are? For the record, there are real life systems like that which are quite literally chain guns with precision aiming. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Phalanx_CIWS_test_fire_-_081107-N-5416W-003.jpg/1024px-Phalanx_CIWS_test_fire_-_081107-N-5416W-003.jpg

Sure as hell these will shoot down missiles. But I'm pretty sure they'd decimate anything else.

 

I've seen it done in other games, and it never works. It always turns into everyone has defenses, anything that can be shot down with those defenses is absolutely pointless. Also, if nothing changes regarding fighters time to produce and their cost, they will be absolutely and completely pointless.

[Ravien]

Avorion lets you build gigantic ships. Gigantic ships *should* have guns of varying types, including point defense.

Point defense systems are a major feature in many sci-fi. From the flak cannons of the Galactica, to the PDC chainguns of the MCRN Donnager, to the turbolasers of a Star Destroyer, big ships need a means of defending themselves from smaller ships and torpedoes.

 

Plus it will look really cool!

[Rinart73]

Can we expect changes in the collision mechanics soon? Since ramming other ships is a part of battle for some players.

Currently there is no logic about taking damage, you can collide on a high speed, even spin after this for a while but take no damage. Or easilly crash from a slight hit.

[Morbo513]

Yo I'm stoked

[Kamo]

My thoughts on the new update phase :). The main reason why fighters are so overpowered is not because of point defense (that's what chainguns and worse, lasers are), but because of the availability of point defense, as in, turret slots.

On the "new weapon type" solutions that come to my mind: Mini-turrets could be an improvement: turrets that would take 1 slot every 5 placed (so, 4 free), with ultra-reduced DPS (10% of normal, for exemple) and range (25% of normal ?), and spray fighters (and eventually every enemy that could come close to the ship) to no end :).

For "full-slot" anti-air weapons, one could imagine the flak cannons a la Freespace 2 (inspired by way older, non-sci-fi designs ::)), doing splash damage but exploding somewhat randomly, so enemy non-fighters could be still damaged but much more rarely unless firing at point-blank so the shells would explode on impact.

 

Of course another thing to do could also be balancing the turret slot economy, with arbitrary free turrets depending on size, volume and some other factors (to avoid bigger-is-better quandaries and allow small flak ships).

Especially as, right now, stations should be defensive powerhouses, defending themselves and the space they're in, but are limited to 2 weapons (not even enough to "cover all fronts") by total lack of system module installability :(.

 

Mini-turrets and more turret slots would increase the amount of turrets however, so damage reduction or hp increases would be on order too :P.

 

Torpedoes need to be special as, they wouldn't need to do massive damage but break blocks to cripple ships. A basic torpedo would override integrity fields and penetrate blocks in a probably-conic explosion, although payload may vary (a la From The Depths ?).

 

Can we expect changes in the collision mechanics soon? Since ramming other ships is a part of battle for some players.

Currently there is no logic about taking damage, you can collide on a high speed, even spin after this for a while but take no damage. Or easilly crash from a slight hit.

It seems that NPCs get a staggering amount of collision damage reduction (probably ~80%), to account for blundering at times. I've seen ultra heavy (mass-wise) corvettes of mine crashing at very high speeds and exploding around barely thicker stations that would display damage amounts barely over my ships' health point amounts :-[.

So ramming is a very non-viable tactic at this point. Density calculations would be easy, deriving from volume and mass, and maximum health loss from ramming should be reduced to something like 2 or so times the concerned blocks' health, with varying factors such as acceleration and angle (ships boosting to get out of the way of a collision should have much more "bounce" and survivability than ships boosting towards collision).

[Ravien]

+1 to the idea of overhauling the turret limit mechanics!

This would also open up the possibility of having fewer, but larger, turrets on your ship. Having a ship with a few larger anti-capital weapons and then multiple smaller point defense turrets would be awesome. With the current turret system, that's not exactly feasible.

[Romual]

Agreed. Right now it is best to have all turrets in on section of your ship, facing the same direction, so you can maximize firepower, reazon being low turret count. If we can have Mini-Turrets - ship can get almost full-sphere coverage and still have some concentrated firepower. Maybe make their size to be random and take different amount of slots? Like ship has 40 slots, smallest take 1 slot, biggest around 10-20. This way we can have capital firepower with PD added on top.

[Fenrir]

Can we expect changes in the collision mechanics soon? Since ramming other ships is a part of battle for some players.

Currently there is no logic about taking damage, you can collide on a high speed, even spin after this for a while but take no damage. Or easilly crash from a slight hit.

 

I would suggest the following:

Sepperate Collision to 3 categories:

Environment (Asteroids & small Ship Debris )

Ships

Stations

 

And then two options per category:

dmg scale (current option)

max dmg % (example: @50% setting = A ship with 500 Live can only take 250 dmg in one collision (based on max live))

 

Maybe one extra option: Only destroy unconnected blocks (that means like in the safe mode of building the founders block can only be destroyed last)

[Rinart73]

Sepperate Collision to 3 categories:

It's not about categories of entities that you collide, it's about calculations. Current collision damage detection is not good. Slight touch can destroy the ship, but on the same time sometimes you collide on a full speed with no damage.

 

I can imagine that detecting and calculating power of two complex 3d shapes collision is hard. I just saying that it would be good to see more steps done in this direction.

[Morbo513]

I agree that changes to turret mechanics would be nice. You're already plenty limited by how many crew you can accommodate imo.

[enthnal]

My requests, less about balance more about appearance.

• Make combat blocks, turrets can go inside them in the menu and are limited by size of the block. the weapon would then fire from the block's location. ie Laser weapons could look like phasers coming from the hull of a ship instead of from a small barnacle.
  
• Make turrets be able to be customized like how fighters are now, one design for the base and one design for the moving arm.
  

[Sir Charles]

A question came in my mind just now:

Will the boarding of ships be implemented with the combat update? It would be so cool to take enemy ships and get those ressources...

 

Torpedoes sound like the perfect oppuortunity to implement this since boarding torpedoes would be a realistic way of getting your crewmen to the other ship...

[Alanthier]

Agreed. Right now it is best to have all turrets in on section of your ship, facing the same direction, so you can maximize firepower, reazon being low turret count. If we can have Mini-Turrets - ship can get almost full-sphere coverage and still have some concentrated firepower. Maybe make their size to be random and take different amount of slots? Like ship has 40 slots, smallest take 1 slot, biggest around 10-20. This way we can have capital firepower with PD added on top.

 

what we need, is more system slots and/or specialized slots to allow multiple turret modules per rank of ship size(as opposed to 1 slot = 1 ship rank processing size), otherwise you'll never have enough fire power.

[Romual]

Well, if I understand you correctly - you're mistaken. Only the most basic turret modules give you 1 turret slot. Most of them quickly get to 2-3 turrets per module. If you get your hands on quest loot you can get to 4-5 turret slots per module, and that is FAR above 1 turret per ship rank processing size.

[AikawaKizuna]

Any news about this update? Been long when this posted. ::)

[Charless]

Agreed. Right now it is best to have all turrets in on section of your ship, facing the same direction, so you can maximize firepower, reazon being low turret count. If we can have Mini-Turrets - ship can get almost full-sphere coverage and still have some concentrated firepower. Maybe make their size to be random and take different amount of slots? Like ship has 40 slots, smallest take 1 slot, biggest around 10-20. This way we can have capital firepower with PD added on top.

 

what we need, is more system slots and/or specialized slots to allow multiple turret modules per rank of ship size(as opposed to 1 slot = 1 ship rank processing size), otherwise you'll never have enough fire power.

 

I'd say PD weapons should be able to fit say for Chain guns, with very low damage, four per turret slot. Missile CIWS 1 per slot and flack: two per slot

[Wanderer]

I dont think that the big issue is the turret usage/slot, but how pd is going to handle with the 3+ dodges/min. If it negotiates that, they should use at least 1 turret slot but if it doesnt, then you should be able to fit 2 or 3/turret slot. Honestly i dont think new weapons need to be added, but that you should be able to have ind. Targ. Weapons with the order "attack fighters" or make it a stat just like ind. Targ. Is, but why make completely new weapons? Its a lot of work i imagine but the difference in what's added isn't that big.