Void charges, artillery strikes, and a pile of other miscellaneous ideas

[Alpha393]

Before anyone rushes at me with pitchforks in hand, I'm just spitballing ideas here for the sake of brainstorming on new gizmos and mechanics and such. Criticism only helps if you explain your reasoning. Okay? Okay. ;D

 

On to the suggestions!

 

Void charges: Like depth charges, but in space. And launched out of a giant confetti cannon. Why? Because you don't have gravity to help throw the explodey murder ball away from your delicate, fragile, heavily fortified and gun toting spaceborne city like you do on the ground. Comes in burst fire, rapid fire, and slow firing varieties, with damage scaling comparable to a cannon and a 'range' of about 2-3 km, but with the charge halting its travel about halfway to max range and persisting there for anywhere from 5 to 50 seconds. I.E the charges will start shooting before the enemy is within their actual range, to have a substantial field built up.

 

Now then, on to the fun part: chain detonations. The actual blast radii of the mines is huge, about .05 to .5 km. Any mines caught in the blast of another will promptly explode with them. You can see how this ends, can't you. However, mines will only detonate by chain reaction or direct contact with an enemy vessel. They simply fizzle out if they run their timer down. They by default deal 10-25% of their damage through shields.

 

Telefragging: last time if checked, an Alcubierre warp drive works by bending spacetime to its will and shrinking space in front and stretching it behind to fling itself and its occupants over ludicrous distances in a literal jiffy. Less, actually. Point is, it goes fast and it probably some crazy side effects if you're standing too close when it goes whoosh. What I propose is dealing damage equal to .1% of the mass of the ship (for balance's sake), blast volume being equal to 75% of the ship volume squared, and the blast shape being equal to that of the ship, kind of like how shields work only much further out and scaling up rapidly. This is more just for the sake of cheap laughs and shenanigans than an actual method of attack. Should probably have a toggle to shut down those people who will make a brick or iron and warp out of the starting sector across the map every half a minute or so, blowing all the new players up. Maybe just a hard cap of 5k damage or less would be good.

 

Damage = ship mass / 1000

Blast volume = 75% of ship volume ^2

Something like that. I don't know the math behind the energy shields.

 

Orion drives: because using nukes as propulsion is totally safe and reasonable. Essentially an omnidirectional force cannon fired from the hot bar for a massive shove forwards, potentially even reaching the Tera-newton range with enough bombs. Should probably deal massive damage to yourself and anything nearby too for the sake of balance.

 

Drop pods: Should planets ever be implemented, not saying they need to be,  they will obviously have a purpose there. In the much less distant/alternate future, boarding. Why this and not a transport ship? Because those things are expensive and fragile. Also, what part of throwing a giant homing wrecking ball out of a cannon to deploy a five to twenty man kill team straight to the enemy bridge doesn't sound badass. Stats should probably be similar to a missile with less damage, a bit more speed, and a big health bar.

 

Sappers: if you've played FTL, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Those little buggers that stick to your hull and jack up your ship systems every now and then. What I'm proposing here is a bit different. Instead of just turning he system on, it just adds a slight delay to that system's response time. .1 to .5 seconds of delay per attached sapper, sappers can be shot down in flight and take .2 to 3 hangar space apiece. After 3-15 seconds, the sapper will return to the hangar. The longer the duration, the smaller the delay effect on average.

 

Shield crackers: they do exactly what it says on the can. No they don't give you +4 vitality each when you eat them, they break energy shields, and in quite a destructive manner at that. For every 10k health of the shield they remove, they spawn a plasma projectile that deals 10-50% of that damage back to whatever it hits, which spawns under the shield and hits the hull if all goes well. Notably the constant shield drain does not cause the shield damage graphic to occur. (please for the sake of frame rate  make it less laggy or localized to the point of contact or something. I fail to see how it'd be too difficult to just make the effect play only when the shield breaks if nothing else.)

 

Artillery: basically a variant of all weapon types with extra long range in the +100 to 400% range, and extremely high accuracy of 97 and up, with two major catches: large size, and they overheat faster from damage. When they take too much damage, they don't die, but instead simply overheat for double the normal overheat cooling period of the weapon. And to stop you guys from using shields too much, these guns will receive 1% of all incoming shield damage as excess heat.

 

Can be mounted on stations and can receive targeting information from a target designator variant of the same faction/player, and fire on designated targets at an additional 150% of their average normal (for the weapon type) range, rather than +100%

 

Target designator: a simple fire and forget beacon that deals no damage, but highlights the marked enemy. And it has an average firing range of 8 km and lasts for 15 to 45 seconds, 20 seconds on average, after which the target can be marked again. Marked targets can be locked onto by any weapons as long as it is within their range plus a 100% bonus to their range and a 1% accuracy buff. The catch? Slow turning speed, and laser or beam based weapons only receive a 50% range buff. A variant of the weapon will force any artillery weapons in range belonging to the faction/player of the weapon to fire on the painted target.

 

Blackout sectors: very dark, far from the nearest star, and sometimes fairly rich in raw materials, as the leftovers of planetary formation pooled far from the local solar system. Sometimes contain small planetoids several dozen to several hundred km across. Rarely civilized as the factions would likely stick to the light closer to the star. Flood lights would likely be needed to explore these areas properly.

 

Xsotan invasion: you know the occasional xsotan attack events? Imagine if there was an even bigger wave based one where the xsotan kept pounding a sector with wave after wave, and the local factions called in heavy reinforcements to help the player defend. I say help the player, but really the player is likely the one helping in this event. Picture the opening scene of a new hope, except after the star destroyer, a mon calamari cruiser arrives, then a star dreadnought, then a whole rebel fleet, and so on. The capital ships of both sides should probably reside somewhere about halfway between bosses and the average frigates and cruisers you fight most of the time, although preferably without adding too much to voxel count where possible.

 

Anything here stand out to you? Please don't hesitate to give feedback or add with your own similar ideas! ;D

 

 

you hesitated.

 

 

 

 

[AURAequine]

Void Charges: Certainly seems interesting, like a depth charge or a bomb, but in space. The only issue I see with this really is the way it could be abused to take down big AI that already move slowly now as it is. I like it, and I could see it in the game, but not any time soon until the AI is improved. The chain detonations thing makes sense and would be good too.

 

Telefragging: Honestly, I don't really see this being a thing. Dealing damage to ship in the vicinity is pretty much useless considering the cooldown timers, especially for the much bigger ships that would actually deal damage this way.

 

Orion Drives: Sooo.. Basically a cannon, with just the recoil, except multiplied? This would certain be interesting, though i can see how it'd be abused with the Void charges you suggested. Being able to drop a mine or two then bursting on out of there. I can see it working like a super charged, single fire force cannon, where it affects your ship and/or others with a burst of kinetic energy rather than a constant stream like the current ones have. I like it ^-^

 

The current force "cannons" in game aren't cannons really, more like force "lasers", these would be the REAL force cannons.

 

Drop pods: If planets were implemented, I could see this as a possibility, though I imagine most players would rather land their ship there and deploy crew than just drop them in there in a little ball of titanium :/ Escape pods on the other hand would be good, being able to save yourself as the player as well as some crew (depending on the amount of pods on your ship), these could function as drop pods as well I suppose, it'd merely be a matter of sending the escape pods towards the planet rather than the nearest safe sector..

 

Sappers: Ehh... I'm not too keen on this one.. Them attaching to your hull means you probably can't shoot them, making any ship that doesn't have a hanger bay and fighters essentially helpless.. But.. then again.. That'd sort of give a reason to encourage players to build ships with them.. But, then it'd seem more like forcing rather than encouraging.. :/ I don't know.. I feel that for delaying and negatively affecting systems, I'd say distortion cannons/lasers would be best for that.

 

Shield Crackers: Using your own shields as a weapon?! Hell yeah! This would be a good tanky weapon, while also leaving that bit of vulnerability considering it does decrease your shields per shot, which is even more notable when your shields are already taking damage from enemy fire. But I still find this idea pretty awesome, I'd love to see it in the game.

 

Artillery: Bigger guns has been suggested sooooo much in these parts of the forums, as for the greater accuracy part, saying ALL the weapons having an extremely high accuracy wouldn't be a good idea, I'd say artillery variants of weapons would have a 50-75% increase in accuracy compared to their non-artillery counterparts.

 

Target designator: Increasing a weapon's effective range because a target is "marked" makes very little sense, increasing accuracy however, does. It would be neat to do this "Turret linking" think you suggested though, where you can hit something with it, and the turrets around start auto firing at it. Would be pretty useful for things like mining too.

 

Blackout sectors: Dark spooky sectors.. Yes!

 

Xsotan Invasion: Something like this would be good, but a lot later on in development, the engine lags enough with just the small faction wars with 12 odd ships fighting another 12, having an invasion with the introduction of more and more ships I think would be too much for the engine to handle at this stage. Later on? Probably..

 

Also I don't see this limited to just the Xsotan, I'm sure there could be the possibility of other factions invading other enemy sectors as well in a full out war.

 

...

 

But yeah, I like a lot of, and have concerns with a few of, your suggestions. Interesting concepts ^-^

[Alpha393]

Thanks for your input. It has been fed to the R&D robot. It has taken the opportunity to clear some stuff up.

 

Telefragging is meant as a parting shot effect, it occurs when you use your hyperdrive while in combat.

 

Orion drives are more of a nuclear bomb on a short fuse than anything else.

 

Drop pods are intended as boarding cannons, and are called drop pods only because of the 'sorry to drop in unannounced' pun, and because they double as drop pods. an escape pod variant would be awesome though.

 

I suppose being able to shoot sappers off yourself or in flight would be reasonable.

 

The shield crackers actually work a bit differently from how you interpreted it. They use the enemy's shields as a weapon against that enemy. Although again your idea is awesome too.

 

Fair enough on the artillery weapons, perhaps if they could only be fired via target designator?

 

My logic behind the target designator range buff is this: in space, the projectile won't slow down nearly as fast, and the game's 'range limit' is more around the idea that you don't know it's speed or relative direction of travel 100% and therefor can't reliably hit it beyond a certain range, at least with projectiles. If you did know those you'd be able to land a bit much more reliably at long range, no?