Oolite Bulletins

Thanks for your comments, suggestions, and scenario testing so far. I think it's time to start examining possible solutions in a bit more detail, to see if we can get 1.82 right in this respect.

This is quite a long post - there's been a lot of conversation so far and even summarising it takes a while.

Preliminary results

So, the combat survey is still collecting results, and if you have time to complete it, please do - especially if you're ranked from Harmless to Dangerous, and especially if you find the combat in 1.80 too difficult.

However, the initial results are fairly clear - and give a difficult challenge for combat balancing. There's no great surprises here, but some of the Elite pilots perhaps need to try harder to remember more how difficult they found combat when they were starting out (which may sometimes mean "in the 1980s"). I include myself in that.

• Player skill and experience makes a big difference - a genuine beginner will have difficulty in a 1-on-1 fight with even the lowest AI, while a skilled pilot can defeat six of them without even upgrading their ship.
• Player equipment also makes a big difference: no surprises there. A fully-upgraded ship can take about twice the damage, heals about twice as fast, and deals damage about seven times faster, as well as having more options for avoiding damage outright.
• NPC equipment doesn't make a huge difference in the early game - if you get blown up by a set of ships with beam lasers, you'd probably also have lost if they'd been armed with pulse lasers: it would just have taken longer. Once the player has their own beam/military lasers it starts to become more important.
• NPC AI makes a massive difference. The weakest AI is around three times worse in combat than the average one.

So ...

The challenge.

• An Elite pilot with an iron-ass (core) ship can probably take on encounters at least ten times and probably over twenty times more challenging than a beginner in a stock ship could expect to survive. The game needs to provide encounters suitable to both types of pilot and to give reasonable ways for a player to avoid or at least survive encounters out of their range (traditionally: avoid that system).
• There are multiple 'sides' in space - trader/pirate/hunter being the main triad, but with other groups providing complications - most of which need to be providing encounters suitable to all levels of player for whatever style of play they're doing while also providing reasonable interactions with each other: it's no good a Corporate State having very strong police patrols and very weak pirates: it might as well have no pirates at all for the number of times the player will actually get to see them.

Extra problems.

There are a number of barriers related to long-standing tradition/canon/history which make resolving those challenges harder. All of these are to a greater or lesser extent related to what Oolite is and range from "absolutely off the table" to "use extreme caution" in terms of what a suggested core-game solution could do to them.

• Obviously and most fundamentally, Oolite is an open-world game. It's also non player-centred. This throws many of the conventional ways of balancing the game out of the window to start with. At least it's not also multiplayer, because that would really give us trouble.
• There are only eight government types, which is the traditional method of scaling combat difficulty, and their spatial distribution makes it impossible to have much fun without passing through at least Communist/Dictatorship systems fairly early in the game. The 1.80 adjustment to include inter-system raids spreads the difficulty out a little more than an 8-point scale, but again, not in a particularly controlled fashion.
• There is a very short list of weapons, an even shorter list of anti-weapon countermeasures, and a relatively small set of core ships most of which (ignoring the freighters and the shuttles) are basically identical in terms of combat characterfistics (e.g. you could remove the NPC Sidewinders, Mambas, Geckos, Kraits, and Cobra IIIs from the game, replacing them all with Morays, without significantly affecting game balance, provided they mostly didn't have full missile loads)
• The military laser is far too good to give to NPCs, but once the player has even one (on the aft mount, preferably) it becomes virtually impossible to lose most fights regardless of enemy numbers because of its extreme range it's not necessarily particularly fun to fight like that. Missiles, on the other hand, go from "extremely dangerous" to "minor irritation" extremely quickly as the ECM (or injectors) can be a very early purchase.

Solutions?

So, these are various ideas which have been suggested so far, and a few more besides. I think they fall into two broad categories: fairly uncontroversial but likely insufficient; really controversial but may be effective. There are probably many options that haven't come up yet, so please suggest them as they occur to you.

Let's start with the ones which I think will probably help a bit without causing serious problems elsewhere.

• Responsiveness: At the moment NPCs respond virtually instantly to alerts. Slowing this down a little would help on the strategic side. I've already put this in to 1.81: you can now hit some NPCs with a missile even if they have ECM, though it's not easy, and you'll see some other delays in reactions at times. It feels better than 1.80 (though it feels slightly odd at first to hit a ship and only have it turn red a couple of seconds later), but it's nowhere near sufficient.
• Tracking: kanthoney's existing work on making NPC target tracking much worse against unpredictable movements.
  
  The 1.80 changes made it possible for the NPC AI to reliably hit a player who was flying completely level at any more distant than point-blank range. Unfortunately they also made it too easy for the AI to hit a player who was dodging in the same circumstances. This - I've tried it out a bit - puts this back to more reasonable levels - NPCs will take a little while to react to your actions, so dodging is much more effective (it feels more effective than in 1.77, too).
  
  On its own it doesn't help much - you can buy time by dodging, but fly level long enough to aim and fire back, and you still get shredded. Useful for being able to recover shields and energy between, though, and makes stalling for help to arrive a more usable tactic.
• Beam laser: Make beam laser half-damage, half-heat. Having briefly tried this, it doesn't make that much difference to how much damage NPCs do - if they're hitting you, they're hitting you, and the reduced per-second damage is compensated for by them firing for longer. It gives you more chance to avoid dying in a head-on fight, but it's not a huge difference.
  
  However, for the player, it's much more forgiving of bad flying. You can hold the trigger down for quite a while before it overheats.
  
  It makes the military laser really seem like an upgrade - with the heat output to match. While experienced pilots starting afresh will still probably buy the military laser as soon as they have the money spare, Jamesons whose aim still needs a bit of practice might find the beam laser a better weapon.
• Deceleration: Make torus mass-locking deceleration (as opposed to normal shutdown deceleration) much sharper. Makes combat more likely to be announced outside of laser range, giving more time to react by running/dumping.
• Missiles Reduce the spread of missile damage a bit (and maybe the average as well). At the moment a missile will often destroy a fully-shielded stock Cobra III on impact - being able to survive a single missile hit is much more important than being able to completely destroy an NPC with a single hit - and NPCs are much better at taking missiles at a favourable angle than a beginning player is.
• Odds calculations: Increase the per-ship weighting in the odds calculation. Change a few other factors around a little. The aim is to make 2-ship and 3-ship pirate formations likely to attack the player's Cobra III even if all they have is some weak light fighters. The current calculation tends to need 4:1 odds for those groups - which is definite overkill.
  
  From the survey, 2:1 odds should be more than sufficient to risk an attack.
  
  Making low-skill NPCs more likely to mess up the odds calculation might also help here: a pair of terribly piloted Mambas aren't actually a match for a Cobra III except in very favourable situations, but they might not know that.
• Weapon selection: Make beam lasers rarer compared with pulse lasers on low-end NPCs. This probably won't make that much difference to the result, but it will at least make the fights last longer and make running to the station while under fire / deciding to dump cargo now that you're definitely losing a bit easier. Mainly this would affect the small "independent" pirate groups, which are the only pirate types native to Corporate/Democracy/Confederacy systems, and the corresponding "light" hunter packs, as well as the lighter escort/trader craft.
  
  Might even affect the Vipers in low-tech low-order systems.
• Leave it to the OXPs: Adjust the system populator a little to include a single-number "this.$npcStrength" variable which applies a global adjustment to NPC armament and skill levels. The results of the "balance test" trial suggest that relatively small tweaks at this level can make a fairly big difference.
  
  Of course, this wouldn't remove the responsibility to make the core game balanced, but it might mean that outliers (in both directions!) could have fun without OXPers having to make quite complex OXPs to do it. It'll also make finding a suitable default value a bit easier since less of the populator script will need rewriting each time.

Those ideas I think are all worth trying first. They may even be enough on their own, after all. I'd like to get these into a nightly build in the next few months, so if you have reasons that they shouldn't go in the core, please speak up about them now.

Backup Plans

And now for some more substantial potential changes, in case the above doesn't work. These might not be necessary, and some of them I don't like for various reasons (I won't say which at this stage) - but see what you think in case we need to go further.

• Dissipation: Scale weapon damage with range, from 100% at short range (<25% max range?) down to 0% at extreme range. The AIs will need adjusting a bit. With a beam or military laser they often won't want to open fire except at relatively short range - even if they're dead certain of a hit. (Naturally this means that the negative-skill AIs will open fire *anyway* and waste their laser heat on misses and minor scratches)
  
  Hopeful result: sniping and long-range battles become less dangerous and give more time to close in; dogfights become the way to get kills. The military laser is still advantageous for range since you can be landing high-damage hits on them at a fair distance, but you're not going to be completely immune to return fire if you want to do actual damage. More time to dump cargo before pirates get in effective range.
  
  Unlikely to harm a beginning player much as they're not going to be hitting very often at 10km to start with; might be more of a problem in the mid-game, though, where you can aim that well and want to thin them out before they get close.
  
  Graphical hint: fade the beam out as it loses power
  
  The Thargoid Laser will not suffer from range dissipation. It's already the lowest power laser in terms of damage/second by a long way, and they could do with something to make them a bit more dangerous than a Python. Thargoid combat tactics will probably switch to the warship trying to hang around at a relatively high distance from its target, using their high flight speed, while the drones close in (their pulse lasers will still dissipate as usual). The military laser will still destroy a warship in ideal circumstances, but you'll have to work a bit more for them.
• New or modified weapons: Lots of possibilities here. No idea if any of them might help, though.
  
  Some sort of low-tech mine the player could drop to discourage or slow down pursuit in a somewhat less globally destructive way than a Q-mine?
  
  Change how ECM disrupts missile targeting so that rather than destroying the missile it just messes up its target prediction temporarily (hardheads are affected but nowhere near as much)? - the key being that missiles remain an effective distraction (NPCs still have to run and dodge even with ECM) but are much less likely to be fatal. The energy cost of ECM would have to come down quite a bit, of course.
  
  EMP mine? When it goes off, ship sensors and targeting get scrambled, and you might be able to get a bit of distance before they pick you up again.
  
  Chaff mine/projector? Explodes into a cloud of small short-lived fragments - doesn't damage ships, but temporarily blocks laser fire (especially pulse fire).
  
  Booster rocket? Takes up a pylon mount, but gives you a significant velocity hit forwards. Useful for getting quickly away from a fight, or at least gaining sufficient distance to be able to run away; potentially useful for getting quickly into a fight, too.
  
  Semi-active homing missiles? Mostly immune to countermeasures as they're guided from the controlling craft, but need to be fired a bit earlier in the fight as destroying the controller causes the missile to self-destruct. Making these the standard missile and making the current one a slightly more expensive fire-and-forget version might help by making it easier to survive the inevitable Cobra I revenge shot; having to maintain target (but not visual) lock isn't likely to be a major penalty to the player in the early game.
  
  Reduce the military laser maximum range? (Or indeed all laser ranges?) If we don't have to balance the middle and upper end of the game for long-range sniping, maybe we can cut the size of some of the larger groups. Weapon ranges I think are quite a bit longer compared with maximum speed in Oolite than most other space combat games.
  
  This would make the boring bit of a losing fight where you've outrun your pursuers to outside laser range, and still have 10km to go at a relative speed of maybe 50m/s before they give up the pursuit and you can activate the torus drive even longer, though. Possibly NPCs could be made to realise that they can't catch up and give up the pursuit - though I tried that a bit in 1.79 and getting it to work without making them also leave alone ships that were doing a wide loop on injectors was tricky.
  
  I really don't know what might actually help here, and a lot of these would require the ability to adjust the starting loadout in Lave without spending much money.
• Respecify ships/weapons: Adjust ship energy and laser damage/heat a bit more - make Sidewinders and the other light fighters comparable with a Cobra I in energy, not a Cobra III - but to make them not just a deathtrap (as the Cobra I is in any serious fight) also reduce the laser damage/heat rate for all weapons so they take at least as many hits to kill as now (and therefore Cobra IIIs, Asps, Pythons, etc. take longer).
  
  At the moment you fire a military laser and most NPCs are dead in just over a second if all shots hit - the player won't survive a full blast from even a beam laser, if all the shots hit the same side of their ship, and that's under three seconds of fire. If we go for something much lower - maybe fifteen seconds to fully overheat a beam laser? - then fights will last a lot longer, and the player won't die before they can react.
  
  Maybe make the freighter turn rates a lot slower, to give the player a much easier job against them. Not so helpful if the player is flying a freighter, of course.
  
  The Viper Interceptor probably needs downgrading a bit, too. It should be an Asp competitor, not a Constrictor competitor. Top-secret military hardware loses its impact a bit if a ship you can see in most high-tech worlds is about as tough.
  
  Obviously this is going to mess up all sorts of ship OXPs, and possibly quite a few others.
• More interceptors: Viper Interceptors or pirate/hunter Kraits/Asps/FDLs, depending on the system. Hang around off the spacelane, watching for distant laser fire, then move in on injectors to help their side.
  
  Stalling for time in a fight becomes more likely to work if you're in the right sort of system; conversely in the wrong sort of system, you need to win fights quickly and then move on before reinforcements show up.
• Starting position: Move the default player start position to Arzaso to give them a friendlier starting cluster. Lave can stick around as "traditional start"
• System safety: Decouple or mostly decouple government type and system safety. e.g. Make regional blocks almost the dominant factor in system safety - so e.g. the Xexedi Cluster is even safer than its constituent mostly-safe systems might suggest, but the Tortuga Expanse is ridiculously dangerous (assuming a non-pirate player here). The cluster between Leesti and Azaqu could then be made really safe.
  
  The regional blocks wouldn't necessarily all be named (the names and borders wouldn't necessarily be visible in game at all), and they would probably have to be set up entirely manually rather than procedurally, since detecting cluster edges would be difficult. There would probably need to be a "threat assessment" line added to F7 separate from the government line, of course.
• Starting conditions: Actually, part of the *problem* is that the player starts in a Cobra III: most small groups will assume it probably has some sort of upgrade and leave it alone, those that do attack it will demand a lot of cargo, and even without upgrades it'll scan as one of the more dangerous ships in the fight just for its speed, energy and missile racks, so it'll take quite a lot for a pirate band to stop shooting at the player even if a couple of Vipers show up. On top of that, it's a really easy target. If the player is only going to start with a pulse laser, may as well start them in a tiny light fighter than no-one's going to be able to even hit.
  
  Adjust ship pricing, stats, equipment, etc. and start the player in a Mamba (maybe a Gecko, for the missile pylon). You start off working your way up as a minion in a pirate gang / an escort pilot to a freighter / an assistant for a bounty hunter. A 5:7 fight in which the player is just one of the ships is a lot more survivable than a 1:3 fight.
  
  By the time the player is good enough to survive solo, they should have enough money to afford a light multi-role ship of their own. (Expert players should be able to go solo from the start anyway, like our "Broke Adder" fans currently do...)
  
  Obviously this requires much more ability for the player to join and work with friendly ships - which requires NPC torus and in-flight comms, with all the complications and implications of that, to prevent the "missions" from becoming hour-long "the waiting is the worst only part" trips.
  
  This is basically not going to be implementable ... but I mention it as an idea in case it inspires something more practical and suitable from someone else.
• Budget-based population: Control the difficulty of encounters by making the NPCs buy and equip their ships. Will obviously require an "NPC price" for ships (and maybe for equipment items as well) to avoid ridiculous situations. Adjusting the relative prices of various items and ships, including potentially the cost of hiring the pilots, might make it easier in the long run to adjust difficulty levels.
• Fame and infamy: Once the player passes Dangerous rank, start adding ship groups specifically after them - they've reached a combat skill few pilots manage, and are starting, like it or not, to make a name for themselves: and with that comes unwanted attention - pirates get tough bounty hunters, traders get pirates hunting them across systems for their valuable cargo, bounty hunters get the friends of pirates they killed paying for a revenge squadron.

Testing any changes

The tricky thing here is that any balance change which is actually right is going to be very difficult to find out as such. You'll have noticed if you've been reading the forums a lot that the balance issues in both 1.77 and 1.80 were commented on a lot after release ... and not much at all even when (at least judging by the download counts on my nightly-only OXPs) lots of people were using the nightly builds just before.

The nightly builds are mainly used by developers and OXP writers to try out new features. Balance testing has previously been done by the much smaller set of players who fly around actually playing the game in the nightly builds: there aren't very many, and I think we all hold Elite rank.

So particularly ridiculous situations or behaviours get remarked on and either removed or toned down - but mainly the challenges are just dealt with.

What we could really do with is some volunteers, ideally ranked at Competent or below, ideally who at best aren't great shots with the aft laser yet (though we'll take Dangerous or above pilots who are finding the current game too difficult as well) who are willing to spend a lot of time - probably more time than the developers spend actually writing the code - testing out the balance, especially the early game balance. This will not be at all an easy task; volunteeers will need to:

• Download the nightly builds regularly and spend a lot of time playing them, putting up with weird unrelated bugs.
• Start and restart tens of times as we make changes.
• Work with us over maybe six months of gradual changes: we'll need to make a change, leave it with you to play, get your feedback, and then make more adjustments and do the whole thing over again.
• Play with very few OXPs (basically, graphical enhancements and other neutral bits only) - we can use the new 1.81 "scenario OXP restriction" feature to make this a bit easier on you by not having to actually uninstall them from regular play.
• Try not to actually improve too much as a pilot in the process.

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, either reply here or PM me.

Crikey, guv'nor... some stuff to ponder there! Arzaso, eh? Hmm... there are even 'friendlier' starting hubs (perhaps too friendly, though).

Indeed, lots to chew over there. Some of the thoughts are very good, and TBH some of the suggestions/ideas I would never want to see.

cim wrote:

Adjust the system populator a little to include a single-number "this.$npcStrength" variable which applies a global adjustment to NPC armament and skill levels.

I do see some mileage in this idea, and a possible solution. The Constrictor mission script adjusts the strength of the constrictor by adding either a shield booster or shield enhancer dependant on 'player.score' - the better you are, the tougher the Constrictor is . Could a similar mechanism allow the populator to read 'player.score' and adjust the npc strength accordingly, to suit the level of the player based on their score/ranking? The obvious issue with this of course is that it might seem odd that the whole Ooniverse seems to be populated with Jamesons when you start, and they all keep pace with your improvements. However, a bit of tweaking and massaging should be able to overcome this.

May have been suggested before but how about making the ecm less reliable?...

Maybe it works on standard missiles only 25% of the time. Don't know what the current success rate is against hardheads but that could be reduced too.

Then missiles are at the very least a concern when fired at an ecm equipped player, and a less likely to be a waste of 30 credits when used in the early game (at least there's a chance you might drain their energy significantly...)

Re starting in a different ship...
I think starting in a Mk III has been partly responsible for the prevalence of 'uber' oxp ships. It's human nature to wish to upgrade or at least to want to keep what they like and so there are many, "nice upgrade from a Cobra Mk III", ships to choose from. Which wouldn't be an issue were it not for the fact that the Mk III is one of the best ships in the standard game.

Some nice ideas about ways to keep a gecko both occupied and relatively safe but I do think that the idea of "going solo" is a major appeal to the very start of the game. From your very first launch, you're out on your own... Good luck.

Remove the ECM and hardhead missile from the game completely. Then firing a missile at an NPC would cause it to turn and run, rather than just being a useless gesture of frustration (and waste of money). And having a missile fired at you would require a real response, not just a button press. The current state of Oolite, wherein missiles are useless and combat is only about dogfighting with lasers, is analogous to seeing First World War biplanes equipped with machine guns fighting against modern jet fighters with missiles and consistently winning.

Make lasers burn out if they're over-worked. Each time the "weapon system overheated" message is displayed increment a counter, and when that counter reaches 100, "Laser, what laser?"

Make the laser parameters of range versus damage continuously variable, so buying pulse, beam or military would only set the total power output. Have a laser focus setting in ship systems, where the player could set the maximum range anywhere from 1 to 30 km, and the destructiveness of the laser would be calculated from total power divided by maximum range. Randomly assign NPC's lasers a range from 1 to 25 km. So knowing that an NPC had a "beam laser" would not tell you how close it would need to approach before opening fire, or how much it was going to hurt if it hit you.

As far as the "non-controversial" ideas go, I'm cool with everything but the oxps suggestion. I'm not necessarily against it, per se, but if oxps are going to be messing with the AI behavior to make things easier or more difficult, I'd prefer if they were up front about it (like in the skilled npcs oxp).

As to the controversial ideas however:
Dissipation: HIGHLY against it (see ---> ). Sniping isn't just a tactic that I use a lot, it IS my fighting style, and if I were forced to rely on the cloaking device in order to properly implement it I would probably no longer update Oolite. I'm even willing to acknowledge the fact that I'm a (perhaps significantly) less skilled pilot than the Elite pilots here and still want to stick to sniping. That's how strongly I feel about that particular issue.

New or modified weapons: I'm all for introducing more weapons. That's why I've downloaded the armoury, the nexus missile, and the missiles and bombs oxps. The only thing I would be against among all those suggestions is the reduction of the military laser range (as if that isn't obvious from what I stated within the previous suggestion).

Respecify ships/weapons: I'm not too hot on reducing the turn rate of the freighters. My main ship is a combat ship given that it's a fully decked out supercobra, but I've started playing a freighter anaconda and those things don't turn on a house, much less a dime. Perhaps the boa and pythons could be slightly changed but not the anaconda? As to the viper intercepter...meh. I'm cool with that either way.

More interceptors: I like this idea, especially the behavior. As it is right now, they only seem to engage their fuel injectors once an enemy has, and that isn't intercepting, that's chasing. I picture intercepting as coming to the aid of ships even when they're off scanner. Actually, speaking of scanners, would it be possible to change the scanner range of interceptors? If they had a larger scanner range and used injectors more freely, perhaps their frequency wouldn't necessarily need to be largely increased given that their presence might be more easily felt.

Starting position: no problems here

System Safety: ....eh. I don't know. Changing that not only goes against years of tradition, it also goes against the reasoning behind why there even is a listing of world governments when you don't ever land on the worlds themselves (barring that one oxp).

That being said, there is a bit of an appeal to having particular sectors being considered more dangerous/less dangerous. If that were implemented, it would give a whole new factor to cross chart navigation, which is a big thing in parcel/passenger/cargo contracts.

I'd say that changing that could be interesting, but it would by no means be an easy thing to do, both in convincing enough people and in actually implementing it. I'd say I'm on the fence about this, though if there was a way to do it without completely removing governmental type influence I'd be more likely to be in favor.

Starting conditions: I'm personally working my way through a broke adder start (no longer so broke, aka about 10 important upgrades to the ship and about 15k in the bank, woot woot), which of course means I'm using an oxp to expand what my starting possibilities are. I'd totally be down for a way to start out as a pirate/escort pilot/bounty hunter assistant. That's three new ways to start the game whereas right now you kind of have to either be smart (i.e. very experienced player) as a pirate or do small time trading, with small time trading being the vastly more often picked choice (I would presume). In addition, all three of those possibilities means not being a loner in the game, which I think is cool. I know that the tradition would be to start as a loner, but given that this would likely be implemented as a choice instead of the norm, I doubt that it would rock the boat too much (presuming it can be implemented). I know that this would be hard to do as the game is now, but perhaps there is a coder that would be interested in making this an oxp? That'd be cool.

Budget based population: hermagerb? I'm sorry, but I don't really understand how this would work from a player's perspective. Not to say that it wouldn't work, I just don't get it.

Fame and infamy: YES! PLEASE! lol.

As to testing: ....sigh. I'd really, really like to say yes to this, but I honestly cannot. As it is right now, I'm spread too thin among real life issues to be able to give myself to this. I'm honestly having enough trouble at times getting the gumption to just open up the game and play, and that's when I'm looking for etertainment! I feel like if I tried to do this I simply wouldn't be able to have time to give the testing its due, much less have any time for regular play. On top of that, my rating is dangerous within the game, for whatever that's worth. My top number of kills is sitting near 1900, so I'd say at this point I'm probably not qualified.

Sorry.


@Smivs: ....massaging?

@Redspear: meh, once I realized just how often an npc fires off hard heads, I stopped relying so much on ecms and switched to a mix of ecm and injectors (or if I've progressed far enough, sheer shields, but that's via military enhanced, capacitor charged equalized shields, so that's really an exception).

@Wildeblood: ................................................................................................................................... No. Just...no. I'm sorry, but I can't get behind the first idea, and I'm outright against the second and third ones. I honestly don't want to be confrontational, but I do feel like I ought to at least speak up once about it. ECMs make a lot of sense to be in the game (there's a reason they were included back during the 1900's when less advanced technology had been developed. Even then the emp bomb was known to exist and be effective), as does a missile that is mostly capable of resisting it. Hardheads DO require a response beyond just hitting a button, that's why they exist.

As to the second idea: no, I can't get behind that. This is a game, not real life, so some suspension of disbelief is required. In my opinion that includes no breakable standard equipment.

I believe I've already addressed and given my opinions on the third idea, if not directly to you.



So yeah, I guess those are my thoughts so far on everything that's been said in this thread.

I'm all for the suggested solutions.

Short comments on backup ideas:
Dissipation: meh
New weapons: HELL YEAH
modifying existing weapons: not so much
Respecify ships/weapons: yes to everything
More interceptors: gimme that
Starting @ Arzaso: YEAH
System safety: combined with existing government safety, not overriding it completely
Starting in Mamba/Gecko: HELL YEAH
Budget-based populations: HELL YEAH!
Fame and infamy: YEAH

I know it's not very wordy but simply I can't find words to express how happy those make me feel - not so much about game balance but they make for a consistent Ooniverse.

I have yet to complete combat survey, though, will try to do it today.

What we could really do with is some volunteers, ideally ranked at Competent or below, ideally who at best aren't great shots with the aft laser yet (though we'll take Dangerous or above pilots who are finding the current game too difficult as well) who are willing to spend a lot of time - probably more time than the developers spend actually writing the code - testing out the balance, especially the early game balance.

I've been playing nightlies exclusively for months - too many goodies to miss out on. I'm rated as Mostly Harmless, because I've gone over to the Dark Side (TM) and didn't have much time to play. My earlier stunts mostly ended at Competent, I think I reached Dangerous once, but that was after I cheated myself enough money to have a fully iron-assed Vortex - and got bored soon afterwards.
I'm not a good pilot, can't use aft laser for the life of me and only just learning to dodge laser fire (I can dodge a missile in the tutorial, though)

For Responsiveness: ...Great, but be careful not to make NPCs TOO dumb. A second or 2 delay on ECMing incoming missiles can be fatal head-on or in close quarters, but it's reasonable that lower-skilled pirates might delay that long before pressing ECM. Only a "sleeping" NPC ship might wait longer.

Tracking is a must-have. NPCs should be able to walk laser shots onto a straight-and-level flight path but have a harder time on jinking targets. And their difficulty should go up slightly for using the rear laser and way up if using side lasers, especially if they are moving as well!
The more skilled the NPCs, the quickler they can walk their shots onto you and generally the shorter their delay between shots...although really bad NPCs might fire fast, miss, and overheat.

Beam laser balancing needs to keep in mind that players will likely only have Beam Lasers for a short while before getting Military Lasers. So changes to it may better consider how NPCs use it. I'm really wary of changing it at all considering that lowering its max rate-of-fire isn't much of an option.

I'm all for Torus Deceleration on mass-locking deceleration (as opposed to normal shutdown deceleration) being much sharper.

Missiles currently have the problem of being crazy-variable in damage even if no ECMs are present. A head-on hit utterly destroys nearly anything if you're injecting as you fire. I've 1-shot obliterated Thargoid Battleships that way. A tail-chase missile doesn't seem to do much at all. I've needed 4 each to kill fleeing freighters.

Odds calculations that have pirates sometimes attacking at 2:1 odds or maybe even demanding tiny amounts of cargo at 1:1 odds but with a long delay before attacking...or not attacking at all. If the player gets the impression that they don't have to bribe every pirate that makes demands to avoid being shot, the game will be more interesting.

Pirates that make cargo demands but don't attack first might get away with being in "safer" systems so long as their offender status was low enough to normally get ignored by police Vipers and Bounty Hunters. Making threats/demanding cargo should draw police Vipers attention and increase their offender status, but scooping cargo should not...so that kind of piracy can take place right under their noses. Pirates might close to shorter range than their lasers require before opening fire because they know they're bad shots...and also because you can't scoop cargo from 10 km away.

Weapon selection for NPCs -- It makes sense for dangerous systems (Anarchy, Feudal, Multi-Gov. types) to have more pirates armed with better equipment. Poorer systems might even see some standard Vipers (but not the interceptor types) only armed with beam or pulse lasers. Let any would-be-pirate players find out the hard way that some police Vipers are much nastier than others!


Starting conditions: A player doesn't have to start in a Cobra 3 -- Starting out in a Cobra 1 in the middle of an Anarchy-filled section of a Galaxy Chart might represent a "hard difficulty" start.

System safety should mostly be based on system's government type but can be adjusted maybe up or down a notch or 2 based on nearby systems. A nod can be given to making Galaxy Chart 1 safer for "similar" systems than Galaxy Chart 4 for instance so starting players aren't thrown into the "deep end of the pool". New pilots would presumably be "let loose into the wild" wherever they are more likely to survive. The real Earth's training centers for ocean-going ship piloting obviously isn't in the middle of a heavy piracy zone.

Fame and infamy might work if the player stays in or near 1 system for "too long" especially after killing many ships there. Wandering around without a set destination should considerably reduce the chance of assassins and revenge groups catching up to you. This might be better suited for OXZs/OXPs to do.

That's an impressive piece of work just to put all those Ideas together. I won't comment on any as I think they should all at least be tested to to see how they perform and what synergies and conflicts the generate.

cim wrote:

What we could really do with is some volunteers, ideally ranked at Competent or below, ideally who at best aren't great shots with the aft laser yet (though we'll take Dangerous or above pilots who are finding the current game too difficult as well) who are willing to spend a lot of time - probably more time than the developers spend actually writing the code - testing out the balance, especially the early game balance. This will not be at all an easy task; volunteeers will need to:

• Download the nightly builds regularly and spend a lot of time playing them, putting up with weird unrelated bugs.
• Start and restart tens of times as we make changes.
• Work with us over maybe six months of gradual changes: we'll need to make a change, leave it with you to play, get your feedback, and then make more adjustments and do the whole thing over again.
• Play with very few OXPs (basically, graphical enhancements and other neutral bits only) - we can use the new 1.81 "scenario OXP restriction" feature to make this a bit easier on you by not having to actually uninstall them from regular play.
• Try not to actually improve too much as a pilot in the process.

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, either reply here or PM me.

I would be interested in helping with the testing, I believe that I have the time to spare, and would like to contribute to the game. Do the nightly builds work on Mac OS, which is what I use?
I would rate myself as a Competent pilot (I'm actually better with the aft laser than front), I prefer to play with only core ships, without extra weapon oxps, or too many game changing exploits. I play ironman most of the time so am used to many starts - I tend to get bored with a charter once it is established, preferring to start different roles each time. I also think I am at the stage where there is very little chance of my piloting skills improving

Venator Dha wrote:

Do the nightly builds work on Mac OS, which is what I use?

Yes... you sound like an excellent test-pilot candidate.

Cody wrote:

Venator Dha wrote:

Do the nightly builds work on Mac OS, which is what I use?

Yes... you sound like an excellent test-pilot candidate.

Thanks for the link Cody. I'll get my first pilot flying tonight, once he's stopped playing with the Galactic chart

I think it's sensible to stick to the first set of possible solutions first, and not get carried away ... attempting to balance combat by adding new weapons, which will themselves need to be balanced, is probably not the way to go for the core game.

From my own experience, and my own combat testing, I found that in a stock Cobra III I could cope easily with 1 opponent, had difficulty but could manage against 2, and lost pretty consistently to 3 or more. With the right kit though I could deal with 6 without breaking sweat - in large part because I could flash-fry them with my rear laser when they couldn't touch me. This very large gap between even a moderately iron-arsed ship and a starting ship makes balancing the game for beginners as well as veterans very tricky.

For me, the player's killer tactic is the rear-mounted military laser. Tougher shields and the rest are all very nice but being able to dish death at extreme range while moving away in a faster ship is the tactic that lets me cope with large numbers of opponents. It is perhaps this one über-tactic that, if squashed, might reduce the gulf between the number of ships a beginner can deal with, and the number of ships a veteran can deal with. Flattening out that slope could make the balancing act easier. So how about removing, or severely limiting, the rear laser mount? Maybe fog up the rear view with "engine glare", if the player's ship is moving faster than a crawl? That way, a rear mount is useful for mining, but not for sustained long-range combat.

Disembodied wrote:

For me, the player's killer tactic is the rear-mounted military laser. [snip] It is perhaps this one über-tactic that, if squashed, might reduce the gulf between the number of ships a beginner can deal with, and the number of ships a veteran can deal with.

This is why I haven't used my aft military laser for years - it becomes a turkey shoot!

Cody wrote:

This is why I haven't used my aft military laser for years - it becomes a turkey shoot!

You have this level of willpower, and can't give up on the snout?

It's also why the game throws in big pirate packs: without this one mega-advantage, we might be able to reduce the size and number of packs, and allow for more dogfighting. Needs testing, of course!

Should rear lasers have reduced range?