Here's my thoughts on some of the most recent changes:
Shields - excellent. Just what was needed. The important thing is that transports and trains can no longer mount battleship shields. Not sure if you meant to allow the Armored Transport to mount a bs shield though - but it seems logical as it should be well protected.
Pilot/Nomad drops - also excellent, very impressive. This allows fighters to make more money from missions and a reason for Nomad hunting, although I would've liked Nomad battleships to drop more.
Codename guns - great, a server where the codenames are worth using! Another good boost for fighters against capital ships. I notice though that some codenames got more of a boost than others, meaning some are now obviously better (e.g. Cerberus obviously better than Diamondback) and some won't get used. This wasn't the case before, apart from one unusual case, Wild Fire, where I think the programmers got the energy usage wrong. If you look at a table of gun damage you'll see what I mean - I think Wild Fire was meant to have the same stats as Onyx and Guardian. (If you want me to send you a table of what I mean, please let me know).
Energy Usage for cap ship guns - this is one change which I don't think has had much impact, I think because cap ships recharge too fast for it to make a difference. For example, I have a Nomad gunboat with 5 battleship missile turrets on it and no energy problems because the power plant recharges so fast. Maybe slow down the recharge. It looks silly but it very powerful, but as Wrath said, silly isn't fun for long.
Features still unbalanced - there are now less unbalanced features. The two main unbalancing features remaining involve mounting special gunboat/cruiser forward guns on battleships (and any other turret mount) and the ability to mount battleship turrets on non-battleships (see my previous example). Also, some ships like the Osiris are only worth buying for it's guns as other ships have more mounts which they can be tranferred to. I also think missile turrets do too much damage.
Possible suggestions - 1. can Ioncross cheat detection be set up to detect abusive weapon load-outs (e.g. cruiser forward gun on a non-cruiser?) This might be easier than doing it in game.
2. Decrease the power recharge on cap ships.
3. This one might surprise - remove forward thrusters from all cap ships. The thruster allows a gunboat and cruiser to fly like a fighter and this is what makes putting battleships turrets on them so attractive. I personally don't see any reason why gunboats and cruisers (and even trains and transports) should have forward thrusters, it doesn't feel right to me. It should be an advantage only for the smaller ships.
4. Make all battleship turrets do the same damage. Those with less turrets like the Osiris then have more armour / cargo to make up for less firepower. Otherwise players then just mix ship/turrets to get the best combination (rheinland bs with Osiris guns I think).
5. Missile turrets are too effective, especially against ships which are vulnerable to them and can't dodge them easily, like trains and gunboats/cruisers. The fact that missiles do so much damage gives battleships with missile immunity too much of an advantage. (I don't have a problem with the 'dead zones' as such, it can be considered part of the natural defence of a bs).
6. I suggest giving cap ship turrets a class rating, making gunboat and cruiser turrets class 9 and bs turrets class 10. This would prevent bs turrets being mounted on anything other than a battleship (and possibly a class 10 fighter, if that's still possible!). I can't think of a way to prevent a bs mounting cruiser forward guns... leave that to you Igiss!
7. There's a one-way New York jumphole in New York that doesn't serve much purpose. Moving this to the empty Unknown would be cool.
8. One other thing - I recently checked out the Crossfire mod before the server went down, and although it looked messy, one thing that did impress me was the way they've disabled the F1 options (other than Resume Game) when the ship is in space. I would fully support that.
I hope there'll be a 4.77, even if only minor changes, as with each new release new interest is generated.
Role-played characters:
daedalus - Liberty Navy
bandersnatch - Ruthless criminal possessed by a (huge) alien
Shredder - Small-time Kusari pirate, looking to join the Blood Dragons
"Bounty Hunters. We don't need that scum." - Admiral Piett
Quote:1. can Ioncross cheat detection be set up to detect abusive weapon load-outs (e.g. cruiser forward gun on a non-cruiser?)
No it cannot. They fire so slowly... I wonder how players adopted to use them efficiently.
Quote:2. Decrease the power recharge on cap ships.
Confirmed (if no one has another opinion).
Quote:3. This one might surprise - remove forward thrusters from all cap ships.
No I won't do that. Thusters for cruisers and trains are anyway much slower than for a fighter. But I may consider reducing speed even more.
Quote:Make all battleship turrets do the same damage.
This will make Osiris and ships alike practically useless. Whatever armor you have, you get beaten if your attack power is 3 times less (compare - 21 turret for Rheinland battleship and 8 turrets for Osiris).
This problem should be solved if energy usage of more powerful turrets will be increased, and power recharge decreased.
Quote:Missile turrets are too effective
Ok I've already done this before but lots of people started complaining about how useless missiles are now. So this is for your consideration. I'm not sure what to do about it, but IMHO the power should be reduced... so yes, I agree with you on this point.
Quote:I suggest giving cap ship turrets a class rating
They have no rating at all. They just use different amounts of energy. Again increasing recharge time should solve this once and for all.
Quote:There's a one-way New York jumphole in New York that doesn't serve much purpose. Moving this to the empty Unknown would be cool.
It's much more difficult than you might think. But if someone could help me with the code...
Quote:they've disabled the F1 options (other than Resume Game) when the ship is in space.
This is arguable. Sometimes people use it to escape difficult situations - well, whatever. If you really roleplay, you'll never do that (or do that only if really needed).
I know that F1 is like cheating - but this option was left by Digital Anvil guys intentionally.
Besides this feature requres exe editing and there's no information about that from legal sources.
Quote:I hope there'll be a 4.77
I hope too. If nothing unexpected happens, 4.77 will be released in 1-2 weeks, though I'm really busy with Oblivion stuff right now.
sounds liike you'd prefer a fighter to a cap ship lol.
remember that cap ships are ment to be powerful and have their own reactors.. they will have way more energy because of that reason alone.
i have to say, if cap ships suffered from lack of energy, there wouldn't be much point in owning one. if we're going to try and level them out with fighters, we might as well all forget the cap ships and buy some heavy fighter thing instead.
also, if i can put some input on the F1 options.
i think it would be a good idea to keep this open. remember we're running a cap ship mod here, and many people get stuck in various bases after launching or docking so F1 is the only option available to the players to free themselves with. because, lets face it. no F1 = players stuck on or in bases for eternity lol.
anyone else aggree?
(Sorry for the extra spacing/ characters, but my wireless set is on the blink lol)
Igiss,Sep 19 2005, 12:55 PM Wrote:No it cannot. They fire so slowly... I wonder how players adopted to use them efficiently.
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They are *very* effective when used against another battleship, when it doesn't matter so much that they fire slowly. I know this from being beaten by Lancer!
I suggest making the special forward guns consume enourmous amounts of energy. Give gunboats and cruisers less total power but faster recharge time, that might work.
Thanks for replying Igiss, good to hear there'll be a 4.77!
Role-played characters:
daedalus - Liberty Navy
bandersnatch - Ruthless criminal possessed by a (huge) alien
Shredder - Small-time Kusari pirate, looking to join the Blood Dragons
"Bounty Hunters. We don't need that scum." - Admiral Piett
Fire-Fly,Sep 19 2005, 01:44 PM Wrote:sounds liike you'd prefer a fighter to a cap ship lol.
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I do, and that was the original spirit of Freelancer. I've found flying cap ships to be a novelty, but ultimately less interesting. But I do like the idea of going against another player who's in a larger ship, like a gunboat, or train.
Quote:if we're going to try and level them out with fighters, we might as well all forget the cap ships and buy some heavy fighter thing instead.
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting that cap ships should be comparable to fighters. Where did you get that impression? But they did need a boost and that's why we have things like Inferno, Nova and tougher Codenames.
Quote:i think it would be a good idea to keep this open. remember we're running a cap ship mod here, and many people get stuck in various bases after launching or docking so F1 is the only option available to the players to free themselves with. because, lets face it. no F1 = players stuck on or in bases for eternity lol.
Well that does happen, but not very often. I'd be happy to shut down Freelancer and reload to correct it. To be fair I've only encountered one player on this server who continually F1'd out of PvP danger, but I'm sure loads of people do it when in a sticky npc situation. It's not that big an issue and that's why I left it until the end. If I felt that strongly about it I wouldn't be on the Discovery server.
Role-played characters:
daedalus - Liberty Navy
bandersnatch - Ruthless criminal possessed by a (huge) alien
Shredder - Small-time Kusari pirate, looking to join the Blood Dragons
"Bounty Hunters. We don't need that scum." - Admiral Piett
i do aggree its a tad unfair when someone F1's out as you're kicking their a## lol. as i've had it done to me a few times too.
as for the cap ships, i just got the idea from most of the complaints from various players about things lol.
maybe the energy could be reduced a slight bit but ii think that may be pushing it as i've explained below.
i was messing about on the server the other day with my new dreadnaught and found that the energy levels are about right. if you constantly fire the main guns, its fine, you don't run out of energy, but if you add missiles to this constant firing (and i mean everygun you have together) then you run out of energy very quickly which is why i posted against the idea a second ago.
About F1 - Fire-Fly is right, it's much faster to reselect character than to launch the game one more time.
Quote:They are *very* effective when used against another battleship,
Two ways to fix it - mess with energy (which seems unappropriate because battleships have greater energy sources) and reduce power of those weapons. For now I'd prefer the second option.
About codenames... I'll check them, I was increasing their power to a similar extent, but there should be some differences.
Battleships will be more powerful than fighters, whatever equipment fighter has. No one doubts that.
Igiss,Sep 19 2005, 02:15 PM Wrote:About codenames... I'll check them, I was increasing their power to a similar extent, but there should be some differences.
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Igiss, ignore my earlier post, I have just revisited the list.
Originally the codenames had different energy/damage, but many had the same stats, e.g. Archangel had the same stats as Dark Blossom.... but some *were* better than others. e.g. Blue Blaze obviously better than Thor's Hammer. So everything's fine as it is. I was confusing the original stats with another mod in which damage was balanced with energy usage.
Role-played characters:
daedalus - Liberty Navy
bandersnatch - Ruthless criminal possessed by a (huge) alien
Shredder - Small-time Kusari pirate, looking to join the Blood Dragons
"Bounty Hunters. We don't need that scum." - Admiral Piett
Well i for one haven never used F1 to escape an npc battle and only 2 times at pvp and thats when i dueled some1 we stopped the some stupid cruisers attacked me when my shield was down the other was when 3 people attacked me at once and this was right after i got my 1st battleship, which was a while ago, beccuase they were mad at me.
The codename guns: the harder to find guns have better power levels and dmg than easy to find ones.
Dont change the New York to New york jump hole becuase it is a key jump hole in the buffalo FP2 trade route and is also good at getting to buffalo base and avoiding navy and police/bounmty hunters. Though a cool thing would be to add a jump hole to unknown but it could a danger for beginners who might ind it...
You might wanna talk to the maker of evolutions on how he made guns unmountable and also trhe osiris guns should do at least the same dmg as the kusari destroyer, so reduce the destroyers or higher the battleships becuase osiris should be able to take down a RH BS witthout dieing.
I will add more to this post soon but i got to go.
Well, i must say i agree on the idea that there must not be allowed gun/turret mounting to everything. I even think that the BS or crusers and other cap ships should stuck only to their original weapons and not be able to mount others, i mean Lib. BS should mount only Lib. BS weapons, and nothing else 'cause thats what makes the ships unique for each fraction.I should say that it is more than easy to make the most devastating bship ever just by mounting everything good on it! I think the best formulae for this ship is Lib. Dreadnought-most armor,good manuvarability for a BS ,especially compared to Kuasri and Rheiland BS! And that thing equipped with Osiris turrets and at least one cruser forward gun! Well i tihk we agree thats not right! And i should confess that my bretonia bship has Osiris turrets and cruser gun,and my cruser has bretonia bship turrets. I just think thats not right.
I'm just giving my opinion. I think there might be a new set of guns especially for cap ships made. And only mountable by the appropriate class ship!
Of course things r good staying this way, but a little change always might be for good! And of course there should be a carefull approach to this matter, I presume 'cause it can easily turn to a very unbalanced thing.
The proposal goes for trade ships too!Specially made guns for them too!
Of course,i don't know if my vision for the gameplay like that is possible to make , but i'll be glad to have helped even a little!
STILL I THINK THE MOD IS O.K.!!! I like the game, i like the mod , i like the server on which i am playing! Thank you for your time.See 'ya in space... ;)
P.S. And by offering to keep the unique features for each fraction we might consider wars and fights between the fractions too...only thinking though...
"Comm. Adama:
-Starbuck whadda 'ya hear?
Starbuck:
-Nothing but the rain sir!
Comm. Adama:
-Then grab your gun and bring in the cat!
Starbuck:
-Boom , boom , boom!"
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My characters: - =BSG=Starbuck ; Maj. Kara Thrace(fighter pilot)
- =BSG=Galactica ; Commander Lee Adama(Battlestar)
- =BSG=Helo ; Lt. Karl Agathon (bomber)
- Colonial 795 (trader)
![[Image: DFinal.png]](http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b328/Luciaden/DFinal.png)
