I already know how the armor system works, and this is fully possible to do, Unless you are unable to manually set armor values via triggers, in which case its a bit harder.
I suppose I will have to make another test map demonstrating it them.
edit: Uploaded a demonstration map. Type "-armor XXX" to apply that many armor points. Using the standard 6% constant, but could be replaced with pretty much any value.
Basically, you would send the armor amount to a function like that, and then apply the returned armor count to the unit. This system would not work correctly if you had any damage amplification or reduction effects, unless they modify and refresh the armor. (which shield boost will need to do) It is also dependent on 1 point of armor reducing damage by 1%, but I think you already did that.
I had to use behavior stacks, but since maximum size is 99, I don't think that will cause massive performance issues.
Ah, you wanted me to do it like that. But it's not very precise tho as the behavior stacks only give decimal bonuses so the armor values are rounded up in the process. Still, it could work...
EDIT: Actually, thinking about it again, i may have another idea for another armor system that might make armor items more worth it, but i need to refine it first.
What do you mean by decimal bonuses? Wouldnt that be Bininary bonuses, In the case you were using values that were lower than 1, where it would use mulitples, of, I think, 0.015625, or somthing like that. Im not sure what you mean.
Or would that be integer bounses, which makes them most sense. That I understand. It is a nessisary loss of precision to not stack hundreds on hundreds of buffs on every single unit, even with binary minimization. (using things like 0.01, 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.16, etc on to 81.92 maximum, which makes a very small count of buffs on each unit, with high presision, but requires a ton of behaviors, which I am far to lazy to make.
And I thought I rounded down, Becuase conversion of a real to int always rounds down in my experience (if I rounded up, at high enough values it would hit 100 stacks)
In any case, +-0.5% isn't a huge problem (albiet larger the larger the reduction already is), unless it actually happens to bring it from 99% to 100%, which is impossible with this system.
The new movement speed equation... Well, I think I see why it gives division by zero errors.
I cant actually remember what it was now, but I came up with a new one, that probably would be usable. It is (of course) using an adaptation of the armor equation, with the slight difference of multiplying the base speed by it. This causes engines to give a proportional boost in speed to the ship's base speed, but also become less effective as you add more (the limit being twice the base speed)
-Semilogical explination, Is that ships all apperently use the same type of engine, and only their mass differs. this means that, given equally powerful engines, they will get proportially identicle speed boosts. Also, to avoid the Friggin massive speed you could potentially get with engine stacking, using the standard diminishing returns equation gives a cap of 2x normal max speed. (could be changed to make it approach 3x, but that might be a bit extreme)
Also, Values of 1,2,3,4 for the engines, with a constant of 0.06, would give approximately the same old speed boost for the first engine, as they used to.
(actually, thinking on this, it isnt really that much different, aside from more engines being less effective rather than more effective)
Also, I think that for armor, Using a different constant dependent on ship size (sizes being the sizes you split into, I think it was fleet, small starship, starship, massive starship, not sure tho, so Im going to use tiers)
Logical explanation is that the larger ships have more surface area, and hence armor has to be spread thinner and thinner on the biggest ones, making it less effective, and making heavier armor required.
T1: 0.1 (10% hp boost per armor point, Because fleet ships, unless you changed them to share shield armor/split shield points, have very little in the way of slots, and hence armor comes at a high space cost, and so should be more effective.)
T2: 0.6 (6%, because it can equipt heavy armor boosts, and it has more slots available)
T3: 0.5 (5%, more slots available, as well as more health
T4: 0.4 (4%, massive number of slots, as well as health, requireing the lowest constant)
just as a helpful tip rockets do not lock on and missiles do
so what if you made two versions of all the missile based projectiles ones that can lock on and ones that can,t
the ones that lock on will obviously cost more
and just as a thought I noticed that the upper end weapons from the heavy and light weapons nearly cost the same
True, the rockets do not have homing in their stats, and hence are more cost effective. They also are mainly as anti-capital hull weapons, rather than anti-fighter like most homing missiles.
And yep, the heavy and light weapons at the higher end cost about the same, but the heavy ones are rather more cost effective, due to being limited to heavy ships and one direction firing.
You know, About the music, I really think the old music, Which I had forgotten about until I found a video, Is far more epic than the current star-wars theme (which is against TOS I think, but you know that), and unless it is also copyrighted, I think it would be better at least as a placeholder, if not permanently.
In any case, Can you tell me what is is called? I would like to be able to listen to it, while muting the ingame music :p
Fighter Squadron and Corvette exploits leads to innovated thinking about weapon systems in general.
Fist off, I want to talk about the exploit. The trick is to leave your name beacon at the Mothership and open up the inventory and the item shop. This enables buying weapons and equipping weapons anywhere on the map. I think buying weapons when your not near the Mothership is a cheat; However, exchanging weapons from your cargo is legit with some thought. One questions came to my mind when playing and I thought up an answer.
How would you change weapons to another with out all the clicking on the inventory screen while moving your unit around fighting and dodging?
There would be another ship build options in the inventory screen where you would customize your second ship build and to the ships power functions you can have a button setup operating the ships secondary weapons setup from build 1 to 2 enabling the equipment of weapons. It would be cool to switch weapons in the middle of the battle.
Customizing the ships what is good and what is bad. technically its not that bad only in high quantity.
This is what good buy a weapon and focus on its attack speed and range. This is what bad focusing on the amount of weapons you have and your ship speed, shields, and armor. The ship with a 5 siege cannons in front firing with the 150% attack speed bonus from 15 command crew on the ship can crush any ship like a soda can. Putting plate is denying weapons on your ship and is just adding more time for the ship with the soda can crusher to come in and crush it.
Better ship equipment and improvements.
Light equipment definitely needs help across the board. There should be a light equipment item that increases your attack speed could be some type of computer weapons systems that is only for fighters. For the upgrades for the shields and health need some working on. really no benefits other than extra time to get shots off. There is two shield types in the equipment the small to planetary Shields that focus on the health and the Regen and the deflector shields focus on armor and hit rate, this is brilliant and should be explored more. The shield battery gives a little shield armor but has no added effects it looks like a blank slate and should have some effect. For the shield and the health of the ship I would explore the armor impact on total damage you take as you go up tier in the armor route. This way the ship can Stim of some of the damage a better than the regular ship designed. The gravitic boosters need to be better than +1 and the engine should be separate for fighters and capital ships so that engines for fighters are not expensive. The supplementary crew why is it 20% and not +# crew same with engineer crew, unlike the command module and the marine crew. The percent is not that big any ways unless you got a lot of crew.
What is awesome about the game is the dodgeable projectiles. It has the makes of classic flight shooter game. The way you can customize your ship is simple and fast. Power controls put you in front controlling a star ship make for a better phantasy of being a ship commander. The individual ship abilities each ship has is very well thought out and brings a lot of perspective on how to use the ship. Good variety of weapons and types some can be overpowering if used properly but has a weakness. I have watched weapon be extremely effective in one game and then in another game are ineffective. I reflect on one game when I was with a player that just decimate the other team with flack cannon 27 kills total! and in the next game that was the weapon to get and almost everybody got it and it was not very effective against the opponent's ships' which some of them brought there own setup one of them had flack cannons.
Random Ideas
Repair drone as a dispensable item
Upgrading a ships inventory slots.
Buying stats for the ship Health, Energy, Speed, Crew, that is set t
The use of customizable slow moving platforms (0.01 move speed) that can be controlled by the person who bought it.
Robots that invade the ship and kill the crew as a buy able ship ability.
Shield bombs, damage shields but not ships
worm hole that you can deploy and last for 60 seconds and any ship that goes through it will end up to a selectable area. you could deploy this in front of the mob and have them appear some where else.
Equipment that can increase attack range for short range weapons.
Bottom line this is a great game to play. I recommend this game to everybody.
Fighter Squadron and Corvette exploits leads to innovated thinking about weapon systems in general.
Fist off, I want to talk about the exploit. The trick is to leave your name beacon at the Mothership and open up the inventory and the item shop. This enables buying weapons and equipping weapons anywhere on the map. I think buying weapons when your not near the Mothership is a cheat; However, exchanging weapons from your cargo is legit with some thought. One questions came to my mind when playing and I thought up an answer. How would you change weapons to another with out all the clicking on the inventory screen while moving your unit around fighting and dodging? There would be another ship build options in the inventory screen where you would customize your second ship build and to the ships power functions you can have a button setup operating the ships secondary weapons setup from build 1 to 2 enabling the equipment of weapons. It would be cool to switch weapons in the middle of the battle.
Customizing the ships what is good and what is bad. technically its not that bad only in high quantity.
You are not supposed to be able to leave the beacon back at base. In my experience, I was unable to deselect the beacon like that in any way, as any time I issued a command, it reselected the fighters as well as the beacon. However, if you can tell the exact steps to reproduce this bug, that would be appreciated.
As for changing equipment away from mothership, I think that ought not be possible, although being able to manipulate it, with the effects only refreshing when you go back to the mothership would be reasonable.
This is what good buy a weapon and focus on its attack speed and range. This is what bad focusing on the amount of weapons you have and your ship speed, shields, and armor. The ship with a 5 siege cannons in front firing with the 150% attack speed bonus from 15 command crew on the ship can crush any ship like a soda can. Putting plate is denying weapons on your ship and is just adding more time for the ship with the soda can crusher to come in and crush it.
Debatable. If you do not get any extra durability, then your ship will certainly die quickly, although It may be able to deal more damage before that occurs. I personally find extra speed to be required for any large ship, simply because they move so darn slow, meaning that while waiting on warp cooldown, you have to limp along, or effectively immobilize yourself when fighting. oh, and speed on smaller ships lets you easily dodge most weapons.
Light equipment definitely needs help across the board. There should be a light equipment item that increases your attack speed could be some type of computer weapons systems that is only for fighters. For the upgrades for the shields and health need some working on. really no benefits other than extra time to get shots off. There is two shield types in the equipment the small to planetary Shields that focus on the health and the Regen and the deflector shields focus on armor and hit rate, this is brilliant and should be explored more. The shield battery gives a little shield armor but has no added effects it looks like a blank slate and should have some effect. For the shield and the health of the ship I would explore the armor impact on total damage you take as you go up tier in the armor route. This way the ship can Stim of some of the damage a better than the regular ship designed. The gravitic boosters need to be better than +1 and the engine should be separate for fighters and capital ships so that engines for fighters are not expensive. The supplementary crew why is it 20% and not +# crew same with engineer crew, unlike the command module and the marine crew. The percent is not that big any ways unless you got a lot of crew.
About the squad ship's speed, attack speed, w.e., I have felt that this would be fair, Only if the effect of the engines were spread to all three/six ships. This would make engines a reasonable investment for fighters/corvets.
I agree with the crew percentage boosts being mostly a bad idea, although making it something like +x and y%, so like 10 crew and 10% crew, so that larger ships benifit more, might work as well.
As for the shield/armor stuff, I cannot figure out what you mean, can you clarify?
What is awesome about the game is the dodgeable projectiles. It has the makes of classic flight shooter game. The way you can customize your ship is simple and fast. Power controls put you in front controlling a star ship make for a better phantasy of being a ship commander. The individual ship abilities each ship has is very well thought out and brings a lot of perspective on how to use the ship. Good variety of weapons and types some can be overpowering if used properly but has a weakness. I have watched weapon be extremely effective in one game and then in another game are ineffective. I reflect on one game when I was with a player that just decimate the other team with flack cannon 27 kills total! and in the next game that was the weapon to get and almost everybody got it and it was not very effective against the opponent's ships' which some of them brought there own setup one of them had flack cannons.
I like the game for those reasons as well. Certain weapons have counters, like any missiles die to Point defences, especially point defence platforms, and your instant weapons like flack (which also deals little damage to shielded fighters) or siege cannon take a significant damage penalty for their damage output.
Buying stats for the ship Health, Energy, Speed, Crew, that is set t
How about you get some crew modules, engines, Armor, Or reactors?
I suppose that prevents you from making the "Teh ULTIMATRON 5000 super-efficient, no-risk, never-cooldown-ned, breeding-integrated, never-hungry Reactor" (Wait,wrong game, I suppose I should just say, Ship which can do everything and has no weakness)
The use of customizable slow moving platforms (0.01 move speed) that can be controlled by the person who bought it.
Customizable platforms would be interesting, although the movement speed would make them rather useless, unless you could pick them up with your ship and redeply them, or they could use warp. (or acted like siege tanks)
Robots that invade the ship and kill the crew as a buy able ship ability.
Uhm, No, That is far too close to the old boarding system, which was insanely OP.
Beast missiles, spore cannon (I think), and boarding parties all would work to destroy enemy crew. Personally, I think the system has a few issues, but a flat+percent boost from those equipment would fix some of those.
Well, aside from the Photon cannons, Photon missiles, EMP bombs, EMP cannons, Plasma coils, Ion beam (or w.e. its called), Plenty of anti-shield wepaons that deal little damage to hull already exist. Why would you want zero damage to hull anyway?
worm hole that you can deploy and last for 60 seconds and any ship that goes through it will end up to a selectable area. you could deploy this in front of the mob and have them appear some where else.
Would screw with AI, but interesting as an idea, if possible.
Equipment that can increase attack range for short range weapons.
No, Short range weapons are short ranged weapons. Their short range gives them emmence damage output/cost. What would be interesting (but possibly OP) would be higher level types of those short range weapons,
Also, there is no method to do this anyhow in the SC2 engine. You can only globally increase attack range for all weapons on a ship, and not by a percent, which would be required.
You are not supposed to be able to leave the beacon back at base. In my experience, I was unable to deselect the beacon like that in any way, as any time I issued a command, it reselected the fighters as well as the beacon. However, if you can tell the exact steps to reproduce this bug, that would be appreciated.
Actually, there is a way to deselect fighters or select individual units.
Quote:
Fist off, I want to talk about the exploit. The trick is to leave your name beacon at the Mothership and open up the inventory and the item shop. This enables buying weapons and equipping weapons anywhere on the map. I think buying weapons when your not near the Mothership is a cheat;
Thanks for reporting this, i didn't even think of that. ;D
Quote:
However, exchanging weapons from your cargo is legit with some thought. One questions came to my mind when playing and I thought up an answer. How would you change weapons to another with out all the clicking on the inventory screen while moving your unit around fighting and dodging? There would be another ship build options in the inventory screen where you would customize your second ship build and to the ships power functions you can have a button setup operating the ships secondary weapons setup from build 1 to 2 enabling the equipment of weapons. It would be cool to switch weapons in the middle of the battle.
I can't/won't implement this for two reasons:
1) The game is already complicated enough as it is, it'll make things worse if i add some even more complex inventory system that'll just throw newbies off-balance further.
2) I'm running out of map script space, can't afford to add unnecessary functions/triggers.
Quote:
This is what good buy a weapon and focus on its attack speed and range. This is what bad focusing on the amount of weapons you have and your ship speed, shields, and armor. The ship with a 5 siege cannons in front firing with the 150% attack speed bonus from 15 command crew on the ship can crush any ship like a soda can. Putting plate is denying weapons on your ship and is just adding more time for the ship with the soda can crusher to come in and crush it.
I disagree. I play multiple shields and still crush mass-command crew builds 1v1 all the time. It all depends on team combination and overall combat strategy. My current Dreadnought build is so far still unbeatable in a 1v1 basis(it has its own weakness tho).
Quote:
Light equipment definitely needs help across the board. There should be a light equipment item that increases your attack speed could be some type of computer weapons systems that is only for fighters. For the upgrades for the shields and health need some working on. really no benefits other than extra time to get shots off. There is two shield types in the equipment the small to planetary Shields that focus on the health and the Regen and the deflector shields focus on armor and hit rate, this is brilliant and should be explored more. The shield battery gives a little shield armor but has no added effects it looks like a blank slate and should have some effect. For the shield and the health of the ship I would explore the armor impact on total damage you take as you go up tier in the armor route. This way the ship can Stim of some of the damage a better than the regular ship designed. The gravitic boosters need to be better than +1 and the engine should be separate for fighters and capital ships so that engines for fighters are not expensive. The supplementary crew why is it 20% and not +# crew same with engineer crew, unlike the command module and the marine crew. The percent is not that big any ways unless you got a lot of crew.
I think you're COMPLETELY misunderstand the armor/shield/engine system here:
1) You underestimate armor values(for both hull/shields). The difference between 1 armor point and 4 armor points is huge. (See armor formula)
2) The +1 speed point does not mean it gives the ship +1 speed. Again, read engine formula.
3) The +% crew is for the benefit of larger ships. It doesn't make sense for 1 supplementary crew to give 100 crew to a Starship.
4) Squadrons are already fast enough as it without having to make it further imbalanced by giving it combined speed upgrades. If you want more speed, you gotta sacrifice that many slots.(Plus it makes it more realistic anyway)
Anyways, thanks for your feedback. Highly appreciated, though i would appreciate it even more if you would post future feedback @ www.fleetassault.com
Actually, there is a way to deselect fighters or select individual units.
I hope you plan to remove this. Because otherwise, I am going to continue to whine about wanting 1/6th or 1/3rd bounty for the fighters/corvets, due to the ability to equip one as a epic tank, and hence always survive,(run away when the other 2/5 die) unless making a huge mistake.(or eating multiple proton bombs due to bad steering)
On the other hand, I would not mind being able to slightly reposition your fleet ships to move the damaged fighters to the back, so the stronger ones take the most punishment instead of losing a fighter.
3) The +% crew is for the benefit of larger ships. It doesn't make sense for 1 supplementary crew to give 100 crew to a Starship.
I agree, however, I still think that giving +x and +y% would be a better idea. So you get 10 crew and 20%, or w.e. That way, it effects small ships (10 crew gets +12, +10 flat and 20% giving 2), but it effects large ships way more(500 gets 110 crew, 10 + 20% or 100) (as opposed to being useless to one or the other, it works for both. This would give small ships larger percent boosts, but large ships smaller percent but larger absolute boosts (after all, move inventory gives more room, so to get the same percent it would take a few more slots))
Anyways, thanks for your feedback. Highly appreciated, though i would appreciate it even more if you would post future feedback @ www.fleetassault.com
I will register there at some point
(and yes, I know only part of this was actually replied to me)
One last thing. (some of this may have been changed, not positive) About the light shields, I feel that the deflection shield is extremely Underpowered. It has the same 250 shield boost, but without 2.5 regen. It also has the same +1 armor (after all, you added +1 armor to all the other shields, which I personally feel was a bad idea) and only gives a 10% damage reflection for a limited set of weapons. So I do not think it is really worth it, unless you are using a massive ship and want to reflect shots from someone who is using mass low-tech energy weapons (after all, photon missile, antimatter missile, proton bomb, so on, all the actual advanced weapons are physical instead of energy, I cant think of any advanced energy weapons)
I hope you plan to remove this. Because otherwise, I am going to continue to whine about wanting 1/6th or 1/3rd bounty for the fighters/corvets, due to the ability to equip one as a epic tank, and hence always survive,(run away when the other 2/5 die) unless making a huge mistake.(or eating multiple proton bombs due to bad steering) On the other hand, I would not mind being able to slightly reposition your fleet ships to move the damaged fighters to the back, so the stronger ones take the most punishment instead of losing a fighter.
Erm you can't do super-tank-fighters like how Rainen used to do it now, since i nerfed light hull armors. And it's still possible to kill tanked up squads. 2-3 hits with Tactical missiles solves the problem =P
Quote:
I agree, however, I still think that giving +x and +y% would be a better idea. So you get 10 crew and 20%, or w.e. That way, it effects small ships (10 crew gets +12, +10 flat and 20% giving 2), but it effects large ships way more(500 gets 110 crew, 10 + 20% or 100) (as opposed to being useless to one or the other, it works for both. This would give small ships larger percent boosts, but large ships smaller percent but larger absolute boosts (after all, move inventory gives more room, so to get the same percent it would take a few more slots))
Done and done.
Quote:
I agree, however, I still think that giving +x and +y% would be a better idea. So you get 10 crew and 20%, or w.e. That way, it effects small ships (10 crew gets +12, +10 flat and 20% giving 2), but it effects large ships way more(500 gets 110 crew, 10 + 20% or 100) (as opposed to being useless to one or the other, it works for both. This would give small ships larger percent boosts, but large ships smaller percent but larger absolute boosts (after all, move inventory gives more room, so to get the same percent it would take a few more slots))
Actually, it gives +2 shield armor, and that is all the reason it needs for squadron players to be buy it.(I know some pro squadies use them)
I realized that I forgot to announce it her so here it is. Fleet Assault has been updated with many changes including new ships, items, revamped ui and mechanics, and much more. Expect more changes over the next few weeks
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@Kildare88: Go
I already know how the armor system works, and this is fully possible to do, Unless you are unable to manually set armor values via triggers, in which case its a bit harder. I suppose I will have to make another test map demonstrating it them.
edit: Uploaded a demonstration map. Type "-armor XXX" to apply that many armor points. Using the standard 6% constant, but could be replaced with pretty much any value.
Basically, you would send the armor amount to a function like that, and then apply the returned armor count to the unit. This system would not work correctly if you had any damage amplification or reduction effects, unless they modify and refresh the armor. (which shield boost will need to do) It is also dependent on 1 point of armor reducing damage by 1%, but I think you already did that.
I had to use behavior stacks, but since maximum size is 99, I don't think that will cause massive performance issues.
Ah, you wanted me to do it like that. But it's not very precise tho as the behavior stacks only give decimal bonuses so the armor values are rounded up in the process. Still, it could work...
EDIT: Actually, thinking about it again, i may have another idea for another armor system that might make armor items more worth it, but i need to refine it first.
What do you mean by decimal bonuses? Wouldnt that be Bininary bonuses, In the case you were using values that were lower than 1, where it would use mulitples, of, I think, 0.015625, or somthing like that. Im not sure what you mean.
Or would that be integer bounses, which makes them most sense. That I understand. It is a nessisary loss of precision to not stack hundreds on hundreds of buffs on every single unit, even with binary minimization. (using things like 0.01, 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.16, etc on to 81.92 maximum, which makes a very small count of buffs on each unit, with high presision, but requires a ton of behaviors, which I am far to lazy to make.
And I thought I rounded down, Becuase conversion of a real to int always rounds down in my experience (if I rounded up, at high enough values it would hit 100 stacks)
In any case, +-0.5% isn't a huge problem (albiet larger the larger the reduction already is), unless it actually happens to bring it from 99% to 100%, which is impossible with this system.
The new movement speed equation... Well, I think I see why it gives division by zero errors.
I cant actually remember what it was now, but I came up with a new one, that probably would be usable. It is (of course) using an adaptation of the armor equation, with the slight difference of multiplying the base speed by it. This causes engines to give a proportional boost in speed to the ship's base speed, but also become less effective as you add more (the limit being twice the base speed)
-Semilogical explination, Is that ships all apperently use the same type of engine, and only their mass differs. this means that, given equally powerful engines, they will get proportially identicle speed boosts. Also, to avoid the Friggin massive speed you could potentially get with engine stacking, using the standard diminishing returns equation gives a cap of 2x normal max speed. (could be changed to make it approach 3x, but that might be a bit extreme) Also, Values of 1,2,3,4 for the engines, with a constant of 0.06, would give approximately the same old speed boost for the first engine, as they used to. (actually, thinking on this, it isnt really that much different, aside from more engines being less effective rather than more effective)
Also, I think that for armor, Using a different constant dependent on ship size (sizes being the sizes you split into, I think it was fleet, small starship, starship, massive starship, not sure tho, so Im going to use tiers) Logical explanation is that the larger ships have more surface area, and hence armor has to be spread thinner and thinner on the biggest ones, making it less effective, and making heavier armor required.
just as a helpful tip rockets do not lock on and missiles do
so what if you made two versions of all the missile based projectiles ones that can lock on and ones that can,t
the ones that lock on will obviously cost more
and just as a thought I noticed that the upper end weapons from the heavy and light weapons nearly cost the same
True, the rockets do not have homing in their stats, and hence are more cost effective. They also are mainly as anti-capital hull weapons, rather than anti-fighter like most homing missiles. And yep, the heavy and light weapons at the higher end cost about the same, but the heavy ones are rather more cost effective, due to being limited to heavy ships and one direction firing.
lol yep as Rana mentioned ^
You know, About the music, I really think the old music, Which I had forgotten about until I found a video, Is far more epic than the current star-wars theme (which is against TOS I think, but you know that), and unless it is also copyrighted, I think it would be better at least as a placeholder, if not permanently.
In any case, Can you tell me what is is called? I would like to be able to listen to it, while muting the ingame music :p
1. Valkyrie Profile - Distortions in the Void of Despair
2. Valkyrie Profile - Mission to Deep Space
3. Tales of Phantasia - Threatening Sky
enjoy. =)
@Kildare88: Go
Thanks :P
Feedback: multiple thoughts and opinions
Fighter Squadron and Corvette exploits leads to innovated thinking about weapon systems in general.
Fist off, I want to talk about the exploit. The trick is to leave your name beacon at the Mothership and open up the inventory and the item shop. This enables buying weapons and equipping weapons anywhere on the map. I think buying weapons when your not near the Mothership is a cheat; However, exchanging weapons from your cargo is legit with some thought. One questions came to my mind when playing and I thought up an answer. How would you change weapons to another with out all the clicking on the inventory screen while moving your unit around fighting and dodging? There would be another ship build options in the inventory screen where you would customize your second ship build and to the ships power functions you can have a button setup operating the ships secondary weapons setup from build 1 to 2 enabling the equipment of weapons. It would be cool to switch weapons in the middle of the battle.
Customizing the ships what is good and what is bad. technically its not that bad only in high quantity.
This is what good buy a weapon and focus on its attack speed and range. This is what bad focusing on the amount of weapons you have and your ship speed, shields, and armor. The ship with a 5 siege cannons in front firing with the 150% attack speed bonus from 15 command crew on the ship can crush any ship like a soda can. Putting plate is denying weapons on your ship and is just adding more time for the ship with the soda can crusher to come in and crush it.
Better ship equipment and improvements.
Light equipment definitely needs help across the board. There should be a light equipment item that increases your attack speed could be some type of computer weapons systems that is only for fighters. For the upgrades for the shields and health need some working on. really no benefits other than extra time to get shots off. There is two shield types in the equipment the small to planetary Shields that focus on the health and the Regen and the deflector shields focus on armor and hit rate, this is brilliant and should be explored more. The shield battery gives a little shield armor but has no added effects it looks like a blank slate and should have some effect. For the shield and the health of the ship I would explore the armor impact on total damage you take as you go up tier in the armor route. This way the ship can Stim of some of the damage a better than the regular ship designed. The gravitic boosters need to be better than +1 and the engine should be separate for fighters and capital ships so that engines for fighters are not expensive. The supplementary crew why is it 20% and not +# crew same with engineer crew, unlike the command module and the marine crew. The percent is not that big any ways unless you got a lot of crew.
What is awesome about the game is the dodgeable projectiles. It has the makes of classic flight shooter game. The way you can customize your ship is simple and fast. Power controls put you in front controlling a star ship make for a better phantasy of being a ship commander. The individual ship abilities each ship has is very well thought out and brings a lot of perspective on how to use the ship. Good variety of weapons and types some can be overpowering if used properly but has a weakness. I have watched weapon be extremely effective in one game and then in another game are ineffective. I reflect on one game when I was with a player that just decimate the other team with flack cannon 27 kills total! and in the next game that was the weapon to get and almost everybody got it and it was not very effective against the opponent's ships' which some of them brought there own setup one of them had flack cannons.
Random Ideas
Bottom line this is a great game to play. I recommend this game to everybody.
While I am not the developer, I do have some responses to this. Although they may not all agree with Kildare.
You are not supposed to be able to leave the beacon back at base. In my experience, I was unable to deselect the beacon like that in any way, as any time I issued a command, it reselected the fighters as well as the beacon. However, if you can tell the exact steps to reproduce this bug, that would be appreciated.
As for changing equipment away from mothership, I think that ought not be possible, although being able to manipulate it, with the effects only refreshing when you go back to the mothership would be reasonable.
Debatable. If you do not get any extra durability, then your ship will certainly die quickly, although It may be able to deal more damage before that occurs. I personally find extra speed to be required for any large ship, simply because they move so darn slow, meaning that while waiting on warp cooldown, you have to limp along, or effectively immobilize yourself when fighting. oh, and speed on smaller ships lets you easily dodge most weapons.
About the squad ship's speed, attack speed, w.e., I have felt that this would be fair, Only if the effect of the engines were spread to all three/six ships. This would make engines a reasonable investment for fighters/corvets. I agree with the crew percentage boosts being mostly a bad idea, although making it something like +x and y%, so like 10 crew and 10% crew, so that larger ships benifit more, might work as well. As for the shield/armor stuff, I cannot figure out what you mean, can you clarify?
I like the game for those reasons as well. Certain weapons have counters, like any missiles die to Point defences, especially point defence platforms, and your instant weapons like flack (which also deals little damage to shielded fighters) or siege cannon take a significant damage penalty for their damage output.
Try support platforms. Pretty dang close.
Probably a bad idea, because aside from the large system rewrite required, it would be nearly impossible to balance.
How about you get some crew modules, engines, Armor, Or reactors? I suppose that prevents you from making the "Teh ULTIMATRON 5000 super-efficient, no-risk, never-cooldown-ned, breeding-integrated, never-hungry Reactor" (Wait,wrong game, I suppose I should just say, Ship which can do everything and has no weakness)
Customizable platforms would be interesting, although the movement speed would make them rather useless, unless you could pick them up with your ship and redeply them, or they could use warp. (or acted like siege tanks)
Uhm, No, That is far too close to the old boarding system, which was insanely OP. Beast missiles, spore cannon (I think), and boarding parties all would work to destroy enemy crew. Personally, I think the system has a few issues, but a flat+percent boost from those equipment would fix some of those.
Well, aside from the Photon cannons, Photon missiles, EMP bombs, EMP cannons, Plasma coils, Ion beam (or w.e. its called), Plenty of anti-shield wepaons that deal little damage to hull already exist. Why would you want zero damage to hull anyway?
Would screw with AI, but interesting as an idea, if possible.
No, Short range weapons are short ranged weapons. Their short range gives them emmence damage output/cost. What would be interesting (but possibly OP) would be higher level types of those short range weapons, Also, there is no method to do this anyhow in the SC2 engine. You can only globally increase attack range for all weapons on a ship, and not by a percent, which would be required.
Ugh, long posts....
Actually, there is a way to deselect fighters or select individual units.
Thanks for reporting this, i didn't even think of that. ;D
I can't/won't implement this for two reasons:
1) The game is already complicated enough as it is, it'll make things worse if i add some even more complex inventory system that'll just throw newbies off-balance further.
2) I'm running out of map script space, can't afford to add unnecessary functions/triggers.
I disagree. I play multiple shields and still crush mass-command crew builds 1v1 all the time. It all depends on team combination and overall combat strategy. My current Dreadnought build is so far still unbeatable in a 1v1 basis(it has its own weakness tho).
I think you're COMPLETELY misunderstand the armor/shield/engine system here:
1) You underestimate armor values(for both hull/shields). The difference between 1 armor point and 4 armor points is huge. (See armor formula)
2) The +1 speed point does not mean it gives the ship +1 speed. Again, read engine formula.
3) The +% crew is for the benefit of larger ships. It doesn't make sense for 1 supplementary crew to give 100 crew to a Starship.
4) Squadrons are already fast enough as it without having to make it further imbalanced by giving it combined speed upgrades. If you want more speed, you gotta sacrifice that many slots.(Plus it makes it more realistic anyway)
Anyways, thanks for your feedback. Highly appreciated, though i would appreciate it even more if you would post future feedback @ www.fleetassault.com
(It is infuriatingly difficult for me to figure out how to quote this properly, so yea...)
I hope you plan to remove this. Because otherwise, I am going to continue to whine about wanting 1/6th or 1/3rd bounty for the fighters/corvets, due to the ability to equip one as a epic tank, and hence always survive,(run away when the other 2/5 die) unless making a huge mistake.(or eating multiple proton bombs due to bad steering) On the other hand, I would not mind being able to slightly reposition your fleet ships to move the damaged fighters to the back, so the stronger ones take the most punishment instead of losing a fighter.
I agree, however, I still think that giving +x and +y% would be a better idea. So you get 10 crew and 20%, or w.e. That way, it effects small ships (10 crew gets +12, +10 flat and 20% giving 2), but it effects large ships way more(500 gets 110 crew, 10 + 20% or 100) (as opposed to being useless to one or the other, it works for both. This would give small ships larger percent boosts, but large ships smaller percent but larger absolute boosts (after all, move inventory gives more room, so to get the same percent it would take a few more slots))
I will register there at some point
(and yes, I know only part of this was actually replied to me)
One last thing. (some of this may have been changed, not positive) About the light shields, I feel that the deflection shield is extremely Underpowered. It has the same 250 shield boost, but without 2.5 regen. It also has the same +1 armor (after all, you added +1 armor to all the other shields, which I personally feel was a bad idea) and only gives a 10% damage reflection for a limited set of weapons. So I do not think it is really worth it, unless you are using a massive ship and want to reflect shots from someone who is using mass low-tech energy weapons (after all, photon missile, antimatter missile, proton bomb, so on, all the actual advanced weapons are physical instead of energy, I cant think of any advanced energy weapons)
Erm you can't do super-tank-fighters like how Rainen used to do it now, since i nerfed light hull armors. And it's still possible to kill tanked up squads. 2-3 hits with Tactical missiles solves the problem =P
Done and done.
Actually, it gives +2 shield armor, and that is all the reason it needs for squadron players to be buy it.(I know some pro squadies use them)
I realized that I forgot to announce it her so here it is. Fleet Assault has been updated with many changes including new ships, items, revamped ui and mechanics, and much more. Expect more changes over the next few weeks