Balance - Buff weapons and armour

[Morbo513]

You may have caught an earlier thread of mine - the subject there is the same here, but this is a different approach.

So, the complaint is that currently, there is no reason not to use a shield on your ship when you have the resources available. There's also little reason to armour your ship at the expense of a more powerful shield. I find this to be backwards.

 

Let's go over some key differences between armour and shield health:

Damage to shields is regenerated quickly

Shields degrade in a linear fashion under fire

 

Damage to hull is repaired very slowly

Hull damage can impair the function of your ship (Weapon/component loss)

 

In other words, you are unable to recover from hull damage for as long as you're in combat, and can suffer degraded performance when it occurs. Those components that can be destroyed by hull damage are invulnerable so long as the shields have more than 0 hit-points. So, there's no reason to prioritise armour/hull HP to the same degree as shields. This means in PvP combat, as well as 1v1 against an AI ship, it's a game of whose shields go down first.

 

The suggestion is to make armour much more valuable. This can come in several forms, the first being to simply increase armour blocks' health by several factors. If one is to be incentivised to choose strong, but irrecoverable hull health over weaker, but easily recoverable shield health, the gap between what they offer in those terms must be much wider. The protection - weight ratio is also currently skewed in shields' favour so armour (particularly trinium) ought to be made lighter.

 

To compensate for these changes, weapons' damage output should be increased. The end result means shields will go down quicker allowing those performance-degrading shots to get through more often, while armour underneath will compensate for an otherwise weaker hull's durability.

 

 

[koonschi]

Buffs to armor are incoming.

[Kane Hart]

I hope the buffs are for players and not AI.

 

Right now the game is a bitch when it comes to fighting AI. You always fight them out gunned and massive ships or a fleet of cavemen AI.

 

I also find weapons kind of weak. I feel like the player should be slightly more op then the AI when it comes to fights. I'm sure I'm not the only one but I end up going towards the center then watching AI/pirates go at it and loot them and then head backwards again to actually fight something I can handle always like one version material below me and it's kind of sad hehe.

[amimai]

You my friend need more guns... shredding AI is easy, and im playing on hard mode.

 

buffing armour, hull, and weapons would be pretty cool and make internal systems feel more like internals.

[Morbo513]

Buffs to armor are incoming.

Nice

 

You my friend need more guns... shredding AI is easy, and im playing on hard mode.

 

buffing armour, hull, and weapons would be pretty cool and make internal systems feel more like internals.

I've no idea what difficulty the server I'm on is at. I wonder if it's a STALKER situation where both the players and AI do/take more damage as the difficulty increases? That would explain some things,

[Morbo513]

I hope the buffs are for players and not AI.

 

Right now the game is a bitch when it comes to fighting AI. You always fight them out gunned and massive ships or a fleet of cavemen AI.

 

I also find weapons kind of weak. I feel like the player should be slightly more op then the AI when it comes to fights.

Most AI ships of equivalent tech to me are carrying 1/3rd of the firepower. Players are already powerful enough

[amimai]

Buffs to armor are incoming.

Nice

 

You my friend need more guns... shredding AI is easy, and im playing on hard mode.

 

buffing armour, hull, and weapons would be pretty cool and make internal systems feel more like internals.

I've no idea what difficulty the server I'm on is at. I wonder if it's a STALKER situation where both the players and AI do/take more damage as the difficulty increases? That would explain some things,

 

even on easy this dosen't change much, just make sure your guns are upgraded to blue/gold and the AI melts like chocolate under a flamethrower.

 

I think a lot of people struggle because they do not make a point of using upgraded weapons and sell off red iron in favour of white naonite. In my solo campaign I already had legendary iron chain guns by the time I hit xanion deposits.

[Tsunamik]

I have usually problems with those stupid super long NPC ships... even from 200m and standing still 70% of my firepower just straight misses. And when I hit them, they start rotating uncotrollably, so they are even harder to hit :D