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Topic: Project6014's new ships (Read 17677 times)
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player1
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I finally found one ship against which primary FonFon beam is useful: Pkunk AI ship.
That thing is just too fast to be hit with dervish thing. On the other hand, if you just keep primary active (and it drains battery veeeery slowly), and turn around a lot, there is change to hit that Pkunk.
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Cedric6014
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Baul is useless, period. First tests showed that we might finally have found the ship that counters Androsynth, but this turned out to be a bit incorrect for now. The ship is a Shofixti with more crew and damage potential as the ship always damages itself when firing, almost without any exceptions. The only matches where Baul can come on top are against some flankers, but Slylandro is still too agile. The ship needs one of these changes to be usable: 1) more crew so it can fight longer. Think of it like the Druuge 2) No self damage so it can actually hide in the bubbles. This makes the ship into a strong Androsynth counter 3) Hold key to increase firing range like Chenjesu and Kohr-Ah to manage with the self-damaging shots. This won't improve the ship on its own though. Gekko: what would be really useful is if you could give some pointers on how we could amend the Baul to actually be a good counter for the Androsynth To counter an Androsynth the ship needs to be able to force the Andro into taking damage with each attack. This can be achieved simply by making Baul immune to its own fire. This will turn the ship into a camper that always surrounds itself in a defensive cloud much like Androsynth does in some rare matches like against Slylandro (Slylandro being the only ship I can use to defeat Androsynth most of the time, excluding 30 point ships). Now, assume that the ship is camping inside its cloud. The Andro will be maneuvering near the danger zone and deploy a barrage of bubbles to drive the ship away from the camp. Baul will flee a bit, but will be still deploy the gas clouds. Andro will be attacking with the comet the instant it has finished deploying bubbles, having used maybe half of its battery for this. It knows the Baul will be in a less dangerous position as it can't destroy the bubbles with anything except blowing up the gas, and this cannot be done as it would neutralize the defensive perimeter. So what follows is a game where Baul is circling much like an escaping Vux, trying to make a grid while avoiding the comet. I believe that the ship will be defeating Andro pretty well with simply this one change. What happens is that Baul is now a pretty defensive ship as it can hide in the danger zone, but this can be easily countered with cheaper ships that have longer range. Right now the ship cannot be played offensively too well as the ship is too slow to catch many ships, and will be damaging itself if it tries to fire forwards. One of my goals for this mod is to introduce ships that rebalance the melee fleet to what it 'should' be. Shiver's Balance Mod for P6014? Should be easier now that bmod is for 0.7.0... Not sure how easy. B-Mod is already a result of hundreds of hours of coding from Shiver's part and a vast quantity of testing. The B-Mod is THE place to begin seeing how to fix the balance. We want ships that are good counters for:
Chmmr, Kohr Ah, Androsynth
Chmmr, not really. I refer to Oldlaptop's comment. Kohr-Ah, why not? It's a bit difficult. Androsynth, hell yes. And ships that are weak against:
Yehat, Mycon, Chenjesu, Ur-Quan
Good picks. I'd like to see those more. The banana boat is already done pretty well in B-Mod, refer to it. Maye its something we address properly when we have all new ships drafted. Come up with interesting ideas in the same manner as you have done so far. #uqm-arena will then hammer down the balance in your face and tell you how the numbers need to be!
Comment from Gekko over at the SCDB which I felt would be useful here
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« Last Edit: December 11, 2011, 09:18:09 pm by Cedric6014 »
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Starcruiser
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We want ships that are good counters for:
Chmmr, Kohr Ah, Androsynth
And ships that are weak against:
Yehat, Mycon, Chenjesu, Ur-Quan
I think Chmmr is in a good place but you would want a medium ship (medium speed, medium damage) that can maneuver out of any gravity beam instagibs with enough firepower to destroy zapsats. Kohr-ah is just overpowered, you need someone that can slice through both blades and FRIED, like Utwig. Androsynth... Slylandro does it by kiting. Iirc #uqm-arena thought Lurg was good against Androsynth? Someone help me remember.
Yehat, make someone who has to get into the enemy ships face. Yehat will always win. Mycon beats slow ships pretty easily. Chenjesu usually beats any medium ship that can't deal with the pets. Anyone slow and without ways to kite fighters will drop to Ur-Quan (Orz hardcounters, ZFP can have some success) the exception being Kohr-Ah which just laugh fighters and anything Dreadnoughts send at them, off.
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Ostro Bothnia
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I have a few things to say, but I'll start with answering the first questions.
1. Should Baul's gas explosion shockwaves damage also the Baul ship itself? Currently they don't. If they did, it'd be required to also increase Baul's primary weapon's range to avoid hurting oneself too easily.
2. Is Baul's turning rate ok? It's a bit slowish, but making it too fast would make it too powerful...
3. Does Foon-foon's spinning blade attack deal too much damage? Should it be nerfed down? Or is it good as it is?
4. Do the ships have enough / too many / too few crew? What about other balance issues?
1. No. As it's been said, if Baul's explosions would hurt itself, it would just make it another Shofixti.
But even now Baul ship needs work. It's either really powerful and dangerous or very much harmless against other ships.
I'm not getting into it's AI programming, I'm sure you see the errors there as I do and fix them.
Personally I think, that if you made the gas bubbles so that other ships can blow them too, that might make the difference it needs.
Also, primary weapon should be more than just a detonator. Even a bit of damage would do. I think it would also make the programming easier.
2. There is absolutely no need to speed Baul up in any way. It's good as it is.
3. The spinning blade is almost instant kill if it hits. With a good AI that ship would be better than Chmmr could be. Yes it's powerful, but it's just a matter of taste do you want to leave it as such. Maybe you should at least increase the energy cost.
4. Difficult to say about crew or other similar issues as long as AI is still what it is. Once the ships have a fine working AI, we can look into that matter more deeply.
Now, I have no great ideas for new ships, but I have to point you to another project, TW-Light, for inspiration. That game is not really my thing, but they do have many interesting ideas for ships abilities, like Kahr ship's boomerang.
http://tw-light.appspot.com/
Also, I had an idea. If possible, it wold be nice if there were some kind of a multiplying ship. Possibly using asteroids as material.
That's all for now. I'll be following.
EDIT: After more thorough exam I take back what I said about foonfoon having the potential to be more powerful than Chmmr. Though it could still be a fine enough ship.
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« Last Edit: December 18, 2011, 01:57:24 pm by Ostro Bothnia »
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Worth dying for. Worth killing for. Worth going to hell for. Amen.
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oldlaptop
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Hey, just because the entire TW codebase is dead and buried doesn't mean living projects can't take ideas/inspiration from it. It's better than letting all that effort go to waste.
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Quinarbre
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Everything indicates Yurand is back in business (as a one-man crew apparently).
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dczanik
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I've been bug testing the upcoming update, and the changes to the Baul are awesome. I love the ship now.
I still don't get where you guys call the Foon-Foon powerful. I guess I'm just not as good as you guys. I can do well against the lower ships, the blade is powerful and one hit can wipe out the smaller enemies but I usually get slaughtered before doing much damage. Maybe decrease the spinning damage but increase battery life so the FF can get away? My battery usually gets drained, I'm disoriented and I just get blown up. 
Down the line, I'd love to see some of the TimeWarp ships make it in the game as an add-on or something. I wish UQM had an easy way to deal with adding new ships without modifying the existing code and AI. What ships were the most fun in TimeWarp? I don't remember being a big fan of any of them. But the fact that we're seeing TimeWarp rise from the dead again just is exciting. I have a feeling that 2012 is going to be a good year for Star Control fans.
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oldlaptop
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My goodness, there actually is a new TW-Light release there! And it's been in the works since June, apparently. Maybe we need to get that better advertized somewhere.
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Megagun
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I loved the Kahr Boomerang and a few of the Tau ships. It's been a while, so I'll have to take a look at TW again. The Kahr Boomerang is definitively the nicest ship in the game, though.
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