Version 5.0 "Fire and Fortune" - Everything I DISLIKED Part 1 - Balance and Stuff

[Dark Chocolate]

I will try my best to be constructive. I love this game, it is nostalgic. I love this community and mod despite it’s flaws. I only want things to improve.

::: Capital Ship balance :::
-Capital ship mobility has been severely NERFed especially the BS/Dreads. They have more mass. Drastically slow turn rate and Nerfed Strafing. Now this won’t be as troublesome on it’s own but then, The weapons systems have been changed in such a way that it’s tiresome to fly caps now. I don’t even know where to begin lol. Anyways I’ll try.

-I don’t know what has been done to the Powercore but I find myself 90 percent of the time with a dead power core while the same thing has happened with the enemy as well. Then both shoot each other with dead Powercore lel.

-On BS/Dreads, all weapons have their range up to 3-3.5k. There is in general removal of Hit and run Weapons and conversion to spam weapons. Primary Turret refire rates have been drastically increased. Sledges are like chainguns now. Mortar fires every 2.5 sec? Damn.

-Strafing Eats thruster like it never ate anything before. Even if you strafe for 2 seconds your thruster will die. Why was this necessary? So that strafing should be used in response to incoming shots? Well, that would have been good if people couldn’t Fire Mortars every 2.5 seconds! If it’s a Cruiser/BC vs a BS/Dread, or a Light BS vs Heavy BS You’d most likely die to Mortar spam. Well, at least cruiser could use their turns, do donuts and what not to avoid getting hit, but that would be very difficult for BCs and Light BS. It’s even worse if your opponent decides to chain fire double mortar and throws shots at you every 1.25ish seconds.

-Cruiser Light Mortar used to be hit and run weapon. You get in position, land a shot, get off before the enemy could grab your neck. Quite a lot of times they would and you’d perish. But now, You just have to stay at range and spam Light mortars. What’s with all the hate for hit and run weapons.
Cruiser heavy weapons now rotate 360 except for Light Mortars, Storms, Shards, Cerberus and Missiles.

-I performed various tests and compared the guns in dps as well as in actual battles in Conn 1v1s and Fleet Battles

Click here for Video - Storms compared to Other BC Guns
As you can see here, Storms were hilariously overpowered when the patch initially came out. Which people did realize and started abusing. Thankfully they got nerfed in a hotfix.

-Shards are chain gun now, just like sledges and don’t seem as good as they used to.

-And out of all the 360 firing heavies, Impacts really are the best overall.

-Cruiser Cerberus + Orthorus on Donau has more or less same dps as double Orthorus, so why would anyone bother putting Cerberus. Infact Double Impacts have better dps than double Orthorus.
Click here for Video - Cruiser Cerberus vs Orthorus vs Impacts vs Cruiser Siege Guns
So Orthorus and Cerberus have shots dispersion which is hard to control with additional worse dps.

-So really why would you even bother with anything but double impacts? (except missiles)

-I also think Cruiser primaries need to be a little bit better to shoo away Gunboats and destroy missiles like Battlecruiser Primaries can. Speaking of missiles,

::: MISSILE LANCER :::
-In earlier patch, the missiles were a serious threat as well. They’d deal huge amounts of damage when hit.

As you can see here, in the previous patch missiles did do quite a lot of damage if not countered.
But even though the missiles could do tremendous amounts of damage, they could be countered very effectively by countermeasures and cruise disrupters.

-In the current patch Missiles now chase you to oblivion. They have highest dps, weather it is Cruisers/BCs or BS/Dreads. Click here for video : DPS comparison Marauder, Impacts, Shards, Tachyons
To make matters worse, we have so very limited number of counter measures. Oh and the counter measures are also very ineffective many a times.
Yes BCs get new flaks that can deshield snubs, but As I fought other BCs with missile spam, they weren’t able to flak them all. Counter Measures are needed and they need to be optimal.

As you can see here, quite a lot of battles victories are decided which side can spam more missiles at the other. Kiting suffers as well, if you have 1 or 2 low numbers now and you decide to kite, you will be missile spammed by everyone and their mother by the chasing side. And why wouldn't they. It's so damn easy. Get in range, and just keep throwing missiles till the enemy dies. Even if it's one guy with Full Missiles on heavy loadout, he can spam missiles with 10 sec delay and you can barely do anything. You can surely dodge a few but he can just keep spamming more and more. Worse if he decides to chainfire. How are we supposed to deal with this?

-Oh and why were the Silo Missiles deleted? They were good. Big Slow payload crawling towards you to ruin your day, Not sure why we needed to delete it. There was this once I was flying a Liberty Insurgency siege cruiser being chased by the 1st Armada and a nightmare hit an asteroid beside me and I took HUGE amount of damage and died. I laughed pretty hard, it was quite epic. And even though Trinity torpedo wasn’t as effective before, may be we could improve it a bit? But that got deleted too. You only got two options on missiles now and that’s bland.

-In the previous update, I had different cruisers with different playstyles. I had one with missiles for missilelancer, shards for close combat, blasters/tachyons for anti-cruiser/kiting setup. No gun was best overall, they were all good for different scenarios.
Now I just have to fit every cruiser with the same double impact + one/two missile and every battlecruiser with double impact + double missiles. Or may be just go full cowabunga and slap 4 missiles on heavy slot. That really kills the diversity.

-I think the other weapons need to be just a bit more better at doing their jobs so that we can actually use them all in different scenarios.
And we need Counter measures ( like the old Heavy Counter Measures) that are actually effective against missiles with ammo capacity comparable to last time coz now a days everyone and their mother equips missiles and spams them in fleet battle.

::: Gunboats :::
-It is nice to see the gunboats getting some love. I like the Ravager mine. But then Gunboats have dps slightly less than cruisers but with the same agility they had before. They are very hard to hit but they will do quite impressive damage. I think that’s somewhat broken and needs to be fixed. Fighting gunboats is obnoxious on anything other than Gunboat.

::: Bombers:::
-Since we’ve been bomber swarmed many times, People might think I’d have liked the heavy bomber nerf that came with the patch. But I actually did not. Bomber swarms were a threat before, and we needed snub support/Gunboats to deal with them. May be they needed a little nerf. But when the update arrived, bombers struggled like never before.

-You can’t fire Double Nova now, coz too many people cried to Lemon slaughters. So It is best to get 1 Scorcher 1 Nova loadout, which again kills the diversity.

-The recent Hotfixed has buffed the bombers, and they may be viable against caps now, But no matter how much the bombers are buffed, I still hate the current Bomber changes due to the following reasons.

-All SNACs are Anti-shield weapons now, moreover you don’t have to hit and run like you used to. Now with the refire rate of every 1 sec, you gotta spam them to get the shield down. Same for the new Railgun. Oh and ASURAS? That is also Anti Shield. Hahaha.! Who comes up with these ideas?

-Ever since the “balance magic” plugin had dropped and added a damage multiplier on SNACs I hated the idea. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. It’s like a rocket launcher is meant to be used against Vehicles, but people are using it against infantry so you gotta nerf the rocket launcher in such a way that a direct hit form a literal rocket wouldn’t kill a human. Lmao. It's so freakin' Stupid.

-And now SNACs are anti shield. All these changes are focused towards making them not insta-kill other snubs. And now they are swatting fighters with hellfires anyways..

-I loved the old SNACs, and various factions having different colored SNAC effects.
Click here for Video - SNAC effects comparison
Even made this video showing all the cool SNAC effects various factions have.

-It was amazing to take dives at the enemy, get that one good SNAC shot and Run away before the enemy can obliterate you. It was High Risk and High Reward. That made it fun.

-Why is there a need to keep making radical changes to SNAC again and again. How about we stop making radical changes to weapons which have been awesome and fun to play since they were developed. Oh the snub killing problem, that’s the issue with SNAC yes.? Well. I have my own opinion about it.
So have you played this game Halo: Combat Evolved?. Well it was one of the coolest games of my childhood, right beside Freelancer. So (Spoiler Alert), After like half the campaign, we fight zombie like creatures called “The Flood”. They are fast, agile, more or less immune to melee damage and basically swarm you to death. You have to adjust your in-game strategy accordingly to fight them. Shotguns are very effective but you gotta get close and personal. But Sometimes, randomly they will spawn with Rocket launchers. They are absolutely reckless with the rocket launchers, they will fire at you the second they notice you. They will not hesitate to blow themselves or their own kind in the process. So, to deal with them you have to adjust your strategy accordingly, watchout for incoming rockets, jump sideways may be and shoot them down first or throw a grenade whatever.

-Similarly, If you are a snub and you charge headfirst towards a SNAC equipped bomber, May be you deserve to get destroyed? Instead of the entire SNAC system being changed radically, may be the snub players should learn to adapt and overcome SNAC bombers.?
If SNACs are still one sided may be nerf them, may be increase their reload time, energy consumption whatever, but why change them so much that they are absolutely unrecognizable from what they were designed to be.

-Even though bombers were quite powerful and overtuned in the previous version of the game, if they still get too close or too reckless they could get blown to pieces by Cap fire. This high risk high reward was the most fun part of flying a bomber, Why was there a need to have it radically changed?

-If there is something that should be balanced in bomber vs Fighters,

How about, Balance This.

::: MISSIONS :::
-Whenever I try to do a mission it spawns 3-4 Cruisers/Battlecruisers with Full Storm loadouts and infinite power core. Even if it spawns 4-6 Gunboats, they will obliterate you with forward guns within seconds.
Moreover since there are no armor upgrades, every NPCs have same health as you flying the same ship.
I find killing a player easier than killing NPCs. Does it need to be this difficult?

-I miss the days when you could just get 2 people and chill doing missions after a busy day at OP RL Lancer
Click here for Video - Old missions with bombers
The Good Old Days. Sadly this can't be done no more. I don't even want to fly bombers anymore.

::: Summary :::
-I think Weapons like Mortar needs to have their refire rates increased, and may be damage increased as well to balance that, So that the "responsive strafing" that people are talking about is actually effective and rewarding. And so that simply spamming mortars won't work on BS/Dreads, You'd actually need to aim, time and fire your shots correctly.

-Missiles can stay fast and dangerous and chase you to oblivion. But again the refire rates need to be increased and damage can be increased to balance that. Along with this we need viable counter measures with reasonable ammunition as Cruise Disrupter ain't gonna work.

-Cruiser guns other than Impacts and Storms need some buff so that they are viable in the scenarios they are designed to be. Cruiser primaries need to be able to slightly more effective against Gunboats and effective counter against Missiles

-Revert the damn SNAC changes and make it awesome again.

::: Conclusion :::
All I want is the game to be FUN to play. These are just my opinions about what the present state of the game is and how I'd like it to be.

Also
-I could not review Fighters coz I am not an expert. If you're a Snub expert/veteran, Please do post what you disliked about the new changes
-Comments/Criticism/Feedback of my opinions as well as your own opinions are most welcome.

-Thank you for listening to me.

[Fab]

::: MISSILE LANCER :::
As you can see here, quite a lot of battles victories are decided which side can spam more missiles at the other. Kiting suffers as well, if you have 1 or 2 low numbers now and you decide to kite, you will be missile spammed by everyone and their mother by the chasing side. Missiles were reworked to be effective kiting weapons - they're literally the answer to "what do I do if my opponent kites me to death?" especially with the new battlecruiser main gun. Missiles are an effective counter to the battlecruiser's back firepower, same with mortars. actually, missiles have low-range DPS compared to the other cruiser weapons. The Marauder has a DPS of 15k, on par with the tachyon.

-Oh and why were the Silo Missiles deleted? They were good. Big Slow payload crawling towards you to ruin your day, Not sure why we needed to delete it. There was this once I was flying a Liberty Insurgency siege cruiser being chased by the 1st Armada and a nightmare hit an asteroid beside me and I took HUGE amount of damage and died. I laughed pretty hard, it was quite epic. And even though Trinity torpedo wasn’t as effective before, may be we could improve it a bit? But that got deleted too. You only got two options on missiles now and that’s bland. Silo missiles needed to be removed because of the new gun+missile approach: higher refire, less desync. a low refire (30s) missile would be a huge outlier. Silo missiles are a very specific solution to a very specific problem (it can only target battleships. if you fight something else, you're pretty much lacking a precious heavy slot) - all loadouts should be able to at least challenge any class. Also, silo missiles need huge ranges (Nightmare needed 10k, another huge outlier nowadays) and huge turn rates (it would need to be as fast as the cruiser missiles) PLUS huge flight times because of their arc. Server would start lagging quickly if a quick refire silo missile was introduced. I too love silo missiles, they're the coolest and the best looking. I tried my best to implement them at patch 5.0, but they simply couldn't work well. They might be re-introduced at later stages.

answers in green.

pre-patch missiles also sucked. it's the reality. The only missile that coincidentally or not that actually worked was the battlecruiser javelin missile. present day marauder is just a javelin that fires only forward.

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ARES / Faction Information / Feedback

[Levenna]

I won't comment on all of this, but I do have some counterpoints and a few agreements.

1) You say that you don't like the snac changes, but then the paragraph after complain about balance magic, the removal of which was what prompted the change to SNACs. Having them oneshot any snub is not a viable alternative; it's not high risk high reward, it's dive in and get one shot in to end someone's participation in a fight outright either through luck or just good players consistently dunking on people who don't know how to fly good. I don't want to roll around oneshotting 98.6% of the server. That's not skill expression, that's not what I find fun gameplay. I seriously doubt it's fun for the people that just die in 10 seconds to someone like me or wesker or chuba or honourwolf either, in a manner not entirely unlike this. It might just let me win the [LN] merit award for a 1v10 though so that's nice I guess.

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2) The cruiser shard isn't and shouldn't be as good as it was last patch. That gun was objectively the best weapon in slot and reworking it was very justified. The way to win a cruiser duel last patch was have a shard, end of story. That is not healthy balance. Cruiser duels were stay on your opponent's side until you won, and the playstyle against larger capitals were strafe in a box being unhittable until you won, end of story. I don't buy that this patch somehow has less variety than that. Impacts are not the objective best, you aren't going to hit a competent BC at max range with them for instance, you need Tachyons for that. Impacts only work when they can hit. Real world, they don't always hit. I sadly didn't record it, but I had a duel against @Haste's battlecruiser and I can promise you I wouldn't have hit impacts against him without eating monstrous amounts of damage in return from his BC heavy.

2.1) If I recall correctly, both Cerberus and Orthrus have more velocity than impacts by a fairly significant percentage, while maintaining similar DPS. That's a pretty solid reason to use them.

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3) Cruisers do not need another tool for dealing with gunboats, it's already the easiest matchup for them, and their prims eat snubs for breakfast already. I will happily go to pew you in conn to prove this, if that's your wish.

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4) Dodging missiles in a cruiser I honestly think is a vital part of their skill expression right now, they don't have as much complexity as battlecruisers in terms of weapon group management, positioning, etc. so their skill expression needs to have a high skill ceiling in terms of raw mechanical movement imo. I don't think they need flaks/other ways to deal with missiles.

4.1) Flaks really are kind of crap right now, at least battleship flaks, I haven't tried BC flaks so I won't comment there. I straight up couldn't flak incoming missiles on the couple fights I had in a libdread. While cruisers I think are fine and don't need flaks, BSs/BCs might need to get looked at in that respect.

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5) I think (well no, I've observed that) a lot of battlecruiser players get trapped into chasing their opponent bow-on, hence many people are struggling with dodging other non-missile weaponry. A broadside battlecruiser can use acceleration to dodge, can use its BC heavy to threaten cruisers/gunboats, and generally has a lot more flexibility I think, along with still having their strafe to avoid high damage shots and/or large salvos.

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6) Fighting gunboats on other classes:

Cruiser: Drive at them. That's.. really all there is to it, tbh. You're faster than them and as long as you take time to back off and recharge once your afterburner runs out, there's not much the gunboat can do.

Battlecruiser: Use your heavy and don't bowchase them (Take notes, @Chuba. Love you buddy.)

Battleship: Whittle down shields with secondaries.

Yes, a good gunboat can take down an inexperienced cruiser or BC, but equal skill they shouldn't win 1v1, again tested with myself pewing @Haste's battlecruiser, I barely got ~400k damage done before kind of just dying. Also gunboats by themselves do not have the same sustained DPS as a cruiser, I can promise you that. I know this from sitting and spending half an hour slowly whittling down two DTR battlecruisers on my Montante sometime last week, and dealing maybe 3-4 million damage total.

As for bombers, they're still being incrementally buffed since gunboats still roll them really hard tbh.

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7) Powercore changes are controversial it's true, however I think a lot of people get trapped into trading blows with dead powercores when the solution to this is kind of similar to what fleet fights on cruisers/BCs have long been actually, dipping out of range to recharge your core while avoiding fire, then go back in range and close distance once you're ready to deal damage again.

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Anyway, I hope at least some of these make sense. This isn't meant as a personal attack in any sort, I think you make some valid points, however I think some others aren't quite on the mark.

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[03.07.2024] LNS-Beast***: we can do this every day but you have to buy bigger stronger ships...and i'll help you

[Lemon]

So far it's been very boring chip + run meta, even worse than last patch, fights taking longer. BS being boring to play.

For the the brights spots are
1) GBs
2) Missiles - I have quad missile on every BC+, the opportunity cost has been lowered by making cores designed to drain on 1-3 guns no matter which ones., missiles were buffed , so were Prims. With the ass gun on BC it doesn't even matter what your loadout is, with some nice codes this will be known as the meme loadout era
3) FWG on cruisers - hey, it grew on me, actually works fine

[Chxlls]

Also
-I could not review Fighters coz I am not an expert. If you're a Snub expert/veteran, Please do post what you disliked about the new changes
-Comments/Criticism/Feedback of my opinions as well as your own opinions are most welcome.

-Thank you for listening to me.

I’m sure more of the snubbers can chip in. But I’ve actually really enjoyed the snub changes. Missles feel viable but not necessary at this point, and the rail guns are super fun to use. There are some question marks around fighters at this point (Wardogs, MRs specifically) but fighter combat feels very satisfying and loadouts can be much more diverse. Arc changes are a bit strange feeling but everyone’s adjusting. There haven’t been any major group fights yet, there was a small one yesterday, but as we set up group fights we will have a better understanding of missle power level currently.

Fighter-bombers are extremely strong right now, but I believe devs are addressing this.

With regards to bombers, they definitely needed to be toned down from the prior patch, although devs have overshot on nerfs, especially with GBs coming into the fold like they have. They are aware of this though and bombers will slowly come back into relevance as numbers are tweaked. Hellfires are also very strong right now. A breath of fresh air from last patch, but they definitely need to be toned down. As for SNAC Lev discussed those pretty succinctly. Nothing to add there. I agree with you on ASURAS.

Just my .02. Don’t fly caps so don’t have opinions on them as of now.

[Nepotu]

After reading the SNAC part I had to check who posted this. For a split second, I thought I got drunk, ranted about it, and forgot.

Jokes aside, it's been 1858 days since the worst patch note that I have read

Snubs/Other

-Added balancemagic FLHook plugin - SNAC, Corona beam now have scaling damage modifiers against hull based on ship class, eg 15% damage vs fighters and 100% to battleships.

It's time to move on as much as I'd like to have it back. I kind of like the way bombers are now. Not a big fan that I have to spent some good seconds to empty my core to do full damage, but it iz what it iz. Nothing that we can do about it

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[Antonio]

After reading the SNAC part I had to check who posted this. For a split second, I thought I got drunk, ranted about it, and forgot.

Jokes aside, it's been 1858 days since the worst patch note that I have read

Snubs/Other

-Added balancemagic FLHook plugin - SNAC, Corona beam now have scaling damage modifiers against hull based on ship class, eg 15% damage vs fighters and 100% to battleships.

It's time to move on as much as I'd like to have it back. I kind of like the way bombers are now. Not a big fan that I have to spent some good seconds to empty my core to do full damage, but it iz what it iz. Nothing that we can do about it

We do not forgive, we do not forget.

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SNAC Montage Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Thruster SNAC

[Firewolfy]

Any possibility to return BS primaries and Heavies to the proj speed they had at launch? I know its not meant to be easy to hit stuff but man what a pain it is with current power core. Just my 2 cents

[Spectre]

Silo missiles needed to be removed because of the new gun+missile approach: higher refire, less desync. a low refire (30s) missile would be a huge outlier. Silo missiles are a very specific solution to a very specific problem (it can only target battleships. if you fight something else, you're pretty much lacking a precious heavy slot) - all loadouts should be able to at least challenge any class. Also, silo missiles need huge ranges (Nightmare needed 10k, another huge outlier nowadays) and huge turn rates (it would need to be as fast as the cruiser missiles) PLUS huge flight times because of their arc. Server would start lagging quickly if a quick refire silo missile was introduced. I too love silo missiles, they're the coolest and the best looking. I tried my best to implement them at patch 5.0, but they simply couldn't work well. They might be re-introduced at later stages.

Maybe I'm just the outlier here, but Silos weren't nearly as much of a gimmick as a lot of people thought they were. You didn't need massive range if you fired the missile angled towards your target, which can help negate a good portion of the arc, and despite their niche I still saw them all over the place.
Used properly, they were also quite effective, depending on the variant, against each flavor of cap. Sure, cruisers would've always been harder to hit thanks to their mobility, but that was always the idea with silos: high risk/very high reward. The splash damage alone is a lot of the payoff, and incentivizes people not to huddle when there are silos in play.

Implemented, I could see them being somewhat akin to what we had before, except with the ranges nerfed to better complement the balance ranges that you guys were clearly going for. Maybe something like 4-5k, to keep in line with that idea of a 'beyond gun range weapon', tweak the refire so it doesn't take as long (although I never personally had much of a problem with it in the first place), maybe the speed as well so they aren't lingering as much, which would be helped by a shorter range so they auto-detonate sooner. Damage is, of course, the hardest thing to calibrate, but I wouldn't be upset seeing silos with a bit lower damage if they work well with the balance and they still pack a punch. You can even shoot missiles down with guns now, so that may even factor in with keeping their damage up while making them combat-capable.
As for lag, this is easily the most stable I've ever seen the server since I started playing the mod almost a decade ago, and I was there for Royal Flush. Sure, latency can still be an issue, but during high time I've almost never seen it have trouble.

Really though, use anything said here as suggestions for how to implement. Even if they stay incredibly niche and somewhat impractical during combat, I'd like to at least have that option.
I frankly didn't know I wanted silos in-game until they were in-game, so if I get to have that feeling again, even diluted somewhat, it'll be amazing.

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#BringBackTheCommonwealth

=CR=------*L|------TFP)
--.-----.-
A plurality is not a majority, and a majority is not everybody.

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Spec's RP Consortium
V-3X | CV-Montu | Fort Murray
Unum pro Omnibus, Omnes pro Uno

Your signature grew too big, I helped downscale it. ~Vex
Your adjustment grew too big, I helped downscale it. ~Spectre

[Dark Chocolate]

The Marauder has a DPS of 15k, on par with the tachyon.

No.



-As per my testing tachyon dps is no where close to marauder. This is evident in the video above. Please check.

-I will add the video to the original post

-The cruiser shard isn't and shouldn't be as good as it was last patch.

I understand that shard needed a nerf. But in the current version, Even though shards is forward fire only and has quite some spread, It's dps is still lower than Impacts which is evident in the above video. So why would anyone bother with shards.

Silo missiles needed to be removed because of the new gun+missile approach: higher refire, less desync.

-This new approach = Missile Spam in every battle. In my opinion, even if they are designed to anti-kite, their refire rate needs to be decreased, damage increased and there needs to be effective counter play.

[color=#00FF40]a low refire (30s) missile would be a huge outlier. Silo missiles are a very specific solution to a very specific problem (it can only target battleships. if you fight something else, you're pretty much lacking a precious heavy slot) - all loadouts should be able to at least challenge any class. Also, silo missiles need huge ranges (Nightmare needed 10k, another huge outlier nowadays) and huge turn rates (it would need to be as fast as the cruiser missiles) PLUS huge flight times because of their arc. Server would start lagging quickly if a quick refire silo missile was introduced. I too love silo missiles, they're the coolest and the best looking. I tried my best to implement them at patch 5.0, but they simply couldn't work well. They might be re-introduced at later stages.

-Why do all loadouts should be able to challenge any class. Silos can remain outliers, what's wrong with that. Silos don't need to fire quickly. They could be the way they were and just be there for a "very specific solution to very specific problem". Atleast could be an option. How about, Let the player decide whether it's good for their playstyle or not.

This isn't meant as a personal attack in any sort, I think you make some valid points, however I think some others aren't quite on the mark.

-Yeah I ain't perfect, but I just wanted to say what I noticed. Thanks for your feedback tho. I will go through what you've written slowly and think about it/check it in game. Thank you

Something off topic :- Fab I like your profile pic. Judge Dredd was really cool