Torpedo Balancing Ideas

[Shadowflare]

Right now, the only thing that determines tube capacity is material. This means a 2x2 launcher holds the same as  a 20x20 launcher. There's not a huge point to make them out of better material, as I can quickly flip open the menu and spam 1, 2, 3 to refill my tubes, even mid combat.

 

Torpedos are very powerful, and the devs seem to want to limit them by making them supply dependent. This is fair. Torp reload rates at the moment are very high. (4 seconds across all materials.)

 

Suggestions:

Allow torps to be manufactured on board just like fighters by sacrificing a torp to make a BP. If there's a technical problem with fighters vs torps, make the existing assemblies "Fighter Assemblies" and new assemblies "Torpedo Assemblies". Assign materials to torpedos, which will influence their stats. (perhaps trinium can be the fastest/most agile, but with lower payloads, ogonite can be slow, but have alot of HP and bigger payloads, bad manueverability, etc.)

 

Increase reload rates of torpedos significantly (3-4x). Make reload time scale by material, as well as power useage. (IE: Avorion would reload fastest, but also take the most power)

 

Make volume of tube determine capacity. This is a calculated risk as a large amount of torps could be lost if the block is destroyed.

 

Tubes will automatically begin to refill from storage with the same type of torpedo BP that is assigned to that tube at 3x times the reload speed after firing. (if a titanium tube has a 20 second reload, it will take 1 minute after firing to begin putting new torps into the tube, at 20 seconds a pop.) This basically means you can fly into combat with plenty of torpedos "rack ready" but after you expend them, you'll have a much lower rate of fire.

 

Allow torps to bleed over damage through shields. (if I do 35k damage to 5k of shield, there should be 30k of explosion damage dealt to the hull near the point of impact, similar to a near miss explosion)

 

 

 

[Kelevra]

Big like fore these Ideas!!  8)

[Kamo]

It seems that a 2x2x2 launcher holds the same amount of torpedoes as a 20x20x20 launcher but not the same torpedoes: apparently torpedoes have a size variable that go from 1 to 5, which should limit what size of launcher is needed to fire them.

Of course, I wonder if it's volume-wise (so a 2x2x2 launcher would hold size 8 torpedoes, so it'd be overkill), edge-wise (so a 2x2x2 launcher would hold size 2 torpedoes, as would a 2x2x10 launcher), a composite (so a 2x2x2 would hold size 2 torpedoes, but a 2x2x10 would size ~3.41), or amount-wise (so a size 5 torpedo would simply take 5 slots in the tube and/or in storage).

 

The main problem with torpedoes is the guidance based on instantaneous lock, plus their ridiculous speed. Torpedoes beat guns so thoroughly that normal guns do not even count anymore while assessing threats, only the amount of NPC torpedo boats, others are harmless non-issues on the same threat level as flying wreckage.

Torpedoes' threat also, by the same way, dramatically increases the amount of necessary resources to build a ship that would be "flyable" (as in, have enough point defense to withstand all the torpedo fire, and being strong enough to afford a few hits), disqualifying all ships beneath a certain health amount (because all are locked the same way)... an amount that apparently increases exponentially with torpedo tech level (and material also increasing torpedo amounts, up to 23 by enemy bomber), as much as people flying ships outdoing stations in the health department (station 10x HP boost included) would be oneshotted in the Avorion Core.