Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
1837
   |
Posted - 2013.08.27 11:01:00 -
[1] - Quote
Since this is pretty much the post they gave us internally, I'm pasting my posts from there (Snipped a bit due to NDA stuff though)
Regarding Vehicle power level:
My own view is that the prohibitive cost makes them way too unattractive.
One of the reasons vehicles are not 'fun' is because unlike a dropsuit... You can't really die in them without it being a huge deal and taking up several matches of earnings to even pay for it. In a game where the whole point is basically chaos and lots of things dying, saying "No, you can't die if you want to use this effectively" seems a bit dumb. I think that all vehicles should be relatively cheap and disposable, so that dying in them is no bigger deal than dying in a dropsuit.
I don't feel that vehicles should drastically change the battlefield simply by being there. The battlefield should be drastically changed by the knowledge and skill of the people playing. This tends to come into play when the question "How powerful should turrets be?" comes up. Personally, I'd like to see small turrets be doing around the same damage as their relative infantry weapon equivalents, or as much as possible. Large turrets would be a bit higher in the damage range. I had Tiel Syysch (One of the most level-headed, knowledgeable dudes I know) crunch the numbers for a few days on where to put turret damages. Now, I don't expect you guys to use these numbers, but this is the sort of range/area that they'd be great in, IMO. Linky.
As far as what you guys actually posted;
One thing that I'm super super cautious about is what you mean when you say "Long Cooldowns" on active modules. As a vehicle dude, nothing would irk me more than to have the game pretty much tell me "Here, be useless for a couple minutes as you need to go hide for all your stuff to recharge." I can almost promise the common tactic would be to simple drive/fly around until your stuff went on cooldown, flee to a safe place, and then recall the vehicle and call a new one to shorten the cooldown, if it was anywhere near that long.
IMO, a "long cooldown" should never be anything more than 30-40s. The way I'd personally approach making active modules more situationally useful is making their affects more powerful, but active for only a shorter time, with a mediocre cooldown compared to making them active for a decent time with a mediocre effect, with a super long cooldown
Turrets having ammo is a wonderful thing as it prevents senseless spamming and makes accuracy more important. Awesome change here guys! I think there to be a way for ships to 'restock' their ammo without having to recall it and call another of the same vehicle. Maybe a built-in nanohive that is very slow, and disables turrets while refilling them, or something? I'm not sold on a "Bigger ammo bay module" or needing to hang out at a supply depot (Especially with dropships)
On the topic of roles and such, We've bugged Wolfman about this to no end, but I'll throw it here anyways : Logistics modules simply need to be turrets, instead of pilot controlled modules. The use of these modules currently ranges from simply impractical to use, to downright impossible to use, as you look at them on each vehicle. The only vehicle that can even use them with good practicality is an HAV, because they are the only vehicle where the aiming/LOS is not dictated by movement controls. You could spend weeks/months reworking these module systems and making their aiming & locking functionality much more practical, or you could transfer this function to a series of turrets, and eliminate all of the 'ease of use' concerns pretty much by the sheer viture of how turrets work compared to vehicle controls. The only concern not addressed here is the seriously lacking range of these modules, which could honestly use a pretty big buff.
Now... Art becomes a concern. It is my honest belief that you guys could just rotate the 'turret' part of a blaster turret 90 degrees in each direction and then just slap two of them together side-by-side. You guys have done stuff like that before (*wink* MCC turrets *wink*) and I think this would look cool enough to pass until a real art asset could be drawn up. This only becomes a problem with the 'large' variants of remote-assist modules, because there's really no way I can think of to combine existing turrets to make them look different/cool enough to pass. I don't think this is an issue, if the current logistics vehicles were given proper bonuses (Oh god, PLEASE give them a range bonus)
Something to consider would even be changing up how these modules function entirely, so that they repair a flat amount that is percentage based on total buffer (Making completely passive tanks a possibility, with help) or possibly based from modifying/boosting a vehicle's native regen ability rather than a flat rate. This would eliminate the need for multiple modules to perform the same function, but could come at the risk of making some stuff extremely powerful. (If this happens, some sort of stacking penalty would need to be enacted so that multiple repair modules can't make a buffer fit completely invincible) |
Nova Knife
Seituoda Taskforce Command
Caldari State
1837
|
Posted - 2013.08.27 11:04:00 -
[2] - Quote
In terms of EHP stuff for shield/Armor : There's already a kind of big disconnect here with current vehicles Especially where dropships are concerned, they're just flat out beefier than shields (Because they have superior hardeners, buffer, and the PG to dualtank to a degree) HAV can also boast to these things but since most av weapons have a bonus to armor, it balances out with their lower mobility. Armor LAV just get the shaft in terms of slot layout (Why are gallente LAV 3/3 when Caldari are 4/2?), so shield gets the prize here. I'm a little cautious about making amor too much stronger than shields, now that I think about it. Survivability trumps pretty much everything, so if armor is a lot harder to kill in a straight up fight, most people who study the numbers will probably all flock to armor vehicles. (Especially with the prevalence of logistics dudes with repair tools these days)
Unlike infantry... The speed penalty is almost a nonfactor to most vehicles. I don't even notice the difference between a plated dropship and a nonplated dropship, to be honest. Hell, plating an LAV almost makes it seem like it rolls less and is easier to control. But, I digress. My main point is... You're sort of already sitting in your goal with the armor/shield differences, even if it's not ideally done. You could definitely make it better, but I'm just urging caution to make sure things don't get crazy. You've been pretty awesome with the stuff you've thrown out so far in terms of changes... So I'm comfortable with seeing what you come up with before I go crazy about this point :P
Some of this depends entirely on what the pilot suit can do on the ground, after considering what they will do for vehicles IMO. Will they be any decent in combat? Hp? Slot layout? Right now, because of the prohibitive costs involved with vehicles, most vehicle users feel like they are 'forced' to cross-train into infantry for matches where the enemy team is heavy with AV or if they need to grind up ISK for a half dozen matches just to pull out a decent vehicle. This gripe would be especially worsened if they "needed" to train up yet another suit to "stay competitive".
This is one of the main reasons I'm saying that vehicles + fits should be almost on par with medium or higher-end dropsuits + fits in terms of cost. Some people might whine about immersion or some nonsense, but immersion be damned if it's being used to enforce things that are not fun. With a price model like that, a skilled vehicle user could lose a vehicle (maybe two?) every match and still break about even, maybe make a profit. But same as any player using a non-militia dropsuit and fittings... If they're terrible they will usually take a loss regardless. My main concern here is that vehicle users should never have the feeling of "Well.. I'm useless for this entire match because if I leave my redline I'll die, and all my SP is in vehicles"
If pilot suits could then be extremely cheap, to help keep vehicle costs low... This would go along with the goal of making vehicles "just another thing people are using" instead of this massive, devastating thing. Like said above : A person who sticks all their SP into vehicles should comfortably be able to die and still turn a profit, unless they are dying a LOT. To this end, vehicles should provide diversity and usefulness for by virtue of the modules & tools they have that infantry do not. (Long range mobile scanners, Possible Ewar, mCRU's, etc.) not by virtue of being able to terrorize everything with hilariously strong turrets and mixed degrees of survival chance like they are now. |