CV Suggestion: Point cost for Turrets + Class Agility Reductions

TL;DR up front because f*!@ reading, right?

A) CV’s get points to spend on turrets. Each turret costs points from a pool. Same-type turrets (Energy, Missile, projectile, Defensive) gets a point reduction modifier for using same-type up to a cap. Splitting weapon types removes the synergy bonus. Smaller ships have high caps on fixed weapons while larger ships get more points to spend on turrets.

B) As CV’s grow in class size, they gain HUGE diminishing returns on agility up to a hard cap to be determined with further testing. Pitch, Yaw, Roll, Acceleration are the main contenders.

Anyways, read further if this interests you.

So, as everyone knows, Capital Vessels as they stand have no regulations or diversity as far as their weapons go.

Every single one of them can fit 2 artillery, 4 plasma, 4 rockets, 6 flak, 6 pulse, 6 cannon and 6 mini.

Below is going to be an ongoing, editing process of how I would tackle this lack of diversity.

================================================================================

INTRODUCTION TO THE POINT SYSTEM

So lets go over a few reasons why I feel like removing the current turret caps and adding in a “points” system is necessary for going further as a game and adding more diversity to fleets and capital vessels as a whole.

Role warfare. Everyone loves role warfare. Some guys like flying the big slow lumbering battleships that can’t turn for S@#^ and wield these huge blasting artillery batteries that will smash another ship into pieces if given the opportunity. Some guys, myself included, like to fly mid-sized, some-what generalized cruisers that can in the right situations fight both bigger and smaller ships, but aren’t really advantaged in either… and some guys like to fly the tiny little dervishes and corvettes that zip around the battlefield executing precision strikes against the enemy, and that’s cool too!

The point system will, based on ship-Class (further on in this topic we’ll go into more details on limitations by class) allow ships to “spend” points in areas that will maximize their playstyle.

Yes, generalizing ships will still be possible, but to a lesser extend it will scale down with class, with our CURRENT Turret limits being pretty close to what a Class 5 ship could fit using all their points.

Short examples, but not exact to my theory: The player wants to build a Class 2 CV. Small, Destroyer style, decent weapon bonuses and Good agility. Class 2 CV gets 30 points to spend. They want to build an Energy destroyer (Think Fixed Pulse lasers, Pulse laser turrets, plasma turrets). Plasma Turrets cost, lets say for example 6 Turret points, but with the “Energy only” bonus, they cost a whopping 30% less at 4 points, so the player decides to fit 4 plasma turrets for a cost of 16 points. He then wants to put fixed pulse on, which normally cost 2 points, but with energy only bonus, cost 1 point instead, up to a maximum of lets say 8. He only wants 6. (Each type of weapon will get reductions in cost for using only 1 type of weapon) Now he fills out his pulse lasers, which normally cost 3 points, but with bonus, they only cost 2 points. He only has 8 points to spend left, so he can afford 4 pulse turrets at the current bonuses.

30 Points total.
4x Plasma turrets at 4 points each (with reduction) = 16 Points
6x Fixed Pulse at 1 point each = 6 Points
4x Pulse turrets at 2 points each = 8 points
Total points = 30/30

This is just an example for how you could use the type-bonus for energy weapons to maximize a class 2 ship. Obviously with the points system, you could build a 15 pulse turret ship with no fixed weapons, or you could but 6 plasma turrets on a tiny little Class 2 CV and run around with a Walloper… Or you could fit a combination like I have here. The idea is to give incentive to make your ships have a role. This is the basis for the entire idea.

SHIP CLASS/SIZE AND THE POINTS ALLOCATED

As of right now, other than saving resources… there’s no real reason other than lag to build a ship that’s not Maximum possible blocks and devices.

There’s zero penalty for building a big ship like this except for resources and I believe that most everyone will agree that there needs to be mobility penalties for flying larger CV’s. I propose implementing soft caps on agility like Pitch/Roll/Yaw and acceleration, allowing for redundant systems to be put in place, and then on top of that, after a steep diminishing return curve, hard caps on mobility across the classes. Smaller class CV’s will have a higher hard-cap on Fixed weapons (12 fixed pulse on a Class 1/2 versus only 6 on a 3+ etc)

Class 1 CV’s should be small corvettes that specialize in single weapon-types, be it rockets, pulse etc… They are going to be fast, precision strike vehicles that are agile enough to avoid most weapons fire if they are smart about it while delivering a precise and deadly Strike. They’ll get between 15 and 20 points to spend on weapons but will have the least restrictions implemented upon agility and acceleration. Having such low points means that generalizing and spreading out weapon-types will markedly harm your total weapon count, and overall, your damage output. These ships will be focused more towards fixed weapons and limited turrets.

Class 2’s should be more like Destroyers. Still fast, while being notably less agile than Class 1’s but still majorly outperforming class 3-5 in agility and acceleration. Like above, Class 2’s will get enough weapon points, between i’d say 25 and 35 points to make them specialized weapons platforms while being able to with intelligence take on larger ships in numbers.

Class 3’s Are going to be the middle-of the road Cruiser… With between like 45 and 55 points to spend on weapons, you will have enough to specialize heavily in 1 weapon type, or be very formidable in 2. This would be my personal favorite class because it would be the strongest “balance” between maneuverability and firepower. Still significantly less agile and less acceleration than class 1’s and 2’s, these guys can still with intelligence run circles around larger ships… In small wolf-packs, Cruisers would be deadly, except against a large force of smaller ships. These cruisers should be the mainstay of any fleet. These ships can be specialized to kill other cruisers and destroyers and corvettes, or they can be specialized to wolf-pack larger vessels.

Class 4. Battlecruisers. These are your end-all be-all ship of the line. They’ll have around 70 points to spend on weapons, while maintaining a noticeable degree of maneuverability over a Class 5, they will still feel sluggish compared to class 3 and below. These will be what you have 2, maybe 3 of in a particular battle, and should be protected at all costs. These, in even pairs, will shred Class 5’s, while falling vulnerable to the “wolf-pack” of cruisers due to being out maneuvered. They will bear formidable firepower and will be a threat to all ships in 1 on 1’s.

Class 5. Battleships. Flagships. Base busters, Battle-ship busters. These things will be lumbering hulks. Not maneuverable by any standard, a particular faction should only be able to field at maximum 2 of these. They will be slow to accelerate, slow to turn. But they will have anywhere between 80 and 100 points to spend, allowing them to be absolute monsters if they were to fit all of one type, but STRONGLY advised to split weapon groups and have several types of weapons in order to maximize point defense. These ships will be vulnerable to flanking while at the same time capable of fitting enough assault weapons in addition to point-defense weapons to protect themselves. Any ship that falls into the Battleship’s sights should either flee, or be ready to return as much punishment that they will deal.

Of course, the exact details and numbers for soft and hard caps for Pitch/roll/Yaw on these different ships is susceptible to LOTS of testing and retesting and experimentation, but I feel like this is going to be the right way to move forward in the game.

There’s absolutely no reason for a 20k block CV to turn as fast, or if not faster than a smaller CV or even SV’s. If you want to up your weapon points by bumping up to the next class, be prepared to armor your ship for the huge reduction in mobility you’re going to get. The key is to make each larger class feel tangibly and significantly slower than the previous one.

WEAPONS SYSTEMS AND POINT COSTS ALLOCATION

So, the meat of the post, even though this will probably be the shortest written in the OP, but it should be the strongest discussed topic.

In order to simplify the weapon groupings and the Synergy Bonus you can accrue for using a single weapon type we’re going to group weapons into a few groups.

Projectiles - Flak and Artillery. These are the slower-moving, explosive projectiles.

Energy - Plasma and Pulse.

Missiles - Missiles and Fixed Missiles

Point Defense - Cannon and Miniguns. *Special note about Point defense Weapons. This group of weapons will not affect your synergy bonus. These weapons do minimal damage to other CV’s but can be devastating to SV’s, HV’s and players on foot, which is their main purpose, in my opinion.


Projectiles -

Artillery Turrets
Somewhere around 10 points a turret, reduced down to about 8 with synergy bonus. Ideally ships that fit these are going to either A) not have enough points to haphazardly slap a bunch on them, or B) want to efficiently use them. They’re slow, high alpha block-killers. Get hit by one and expect to lose a block. get hit by a broadside of 5-6 of them from a battleship… expect to lose a lot more.

Flak Turrets
About 5 points a turret with a “Synergy” cost of 3. Fast firing, high dps. I would personally lower the range of Flak to bring it in line with it’s high DPS output and it’s cost. Flak in it’s nature is designed to be a point-defense weapon, but I would never put it into the PD weapon group because it’s DPS is too high to not impact the synergy bonus. This is going to be commonplace littered across class 4 and 5 ships to compensate for the lack of mobility. “Keep firing, assholes!” -Spaceballs

HYPOTHETICAL FORWARD FACING ARTILLERY
I believe to maximize the “synergy” groups and allow ships to have forward facing of most types, i believe there should be a forward facing artillery turret. Maybe make the cannon do about 200 or 250 damage (halfway between pulse and rockets) and be significantly slower than pulse, but much faster than rockets. The point cost for these would be about 4 points, with a synergy cost of 2. These artillery should out-range the pulse turrets, but not outrange the artillery turrets themselves.

Energy -

Plasma Turrets
These should cost between 6 points a turret, with a synergy bonus of about 4(class 3 and under) or 5(class 4 and 5). They’re the highest damage-per-magazine weapon, and the highest “CV” DPS. These guys have a drawback, like artillery, for being slow. They’re basically the energy version of Artillery. Less Range, Less Firepower, higher fire-rate. Balanced. These guys are your mid-size ships main batteries. Used in groups of 4 on smaller vessels and up to 10 or more on the bigger ships, they provide long-range firepower.

Pulse Turrets
About 4 points a turret with synergy cost of 2. These are your main DPS for energy. I would balance these against Flak for your synergy groups by giving them a little less damage than flak (maybe 30 damage a shot) and extend their range to about 25% greater than Flak, but increase the projectile speed significantly (it’s a damn laser.)

Fixed Pulse
Point cost of 2, with a synergy cost of 1. Same deal with the Pulse turret, I would keep the range about where it is now, at 850 in space, while increasing projectile speed slightly and damage decreased slightly to about 25 a shot. These are going to be your destroyers and corvettes mainstay weapons, as the synergy cost allows them to affix quite a few of them onto their vessels. These are what makes your corvettes deadly… many of these, with a medium sized pack (5 or so) will make any larger fleet wary of having them buzzing around.


Missiles -

Homing Missile Turrets
I would say 6 points a turret, with a synergy bonus of about 3-4. If you specialize in rockets, you’re going to be a lethal killing machine, but you’re also going to have drawbacks of having no other weapon types. If you’re going to generalize and include these in your normal loadout, you’re going to pay for them. Rockets are good all-round weapons, they will murder SV’s and HV’s, but they will not hurt CV’s as much in low numbers. Now if you make a destroyer with 10 of them… they will really F@!$ something up in close. For this, I would lower rocket range to somewhere between 6-700 meters in-line with flak and other PD weapons. This will make it a gamble to get in close to let loose big volleys of rockets, while making missiles a contender for point defense at a cost.

Fixed Homing Missiles (Rocket Launchers)
4 points a launcher with a synergy cost of 2. These weapons, in my opinion are in a fairly healthy spot. Once the mobility concerns are addressed, they will be even more balanced. Small missile corvette (class 1) buzzing around lobbing rockets at things is dangerous to small CV’s and SV’s will flee like hell from this. Missile destroyer loaded to bear with both turrets and missiles will make even Class 3 ships think twice before closing range to engage. These would be more than likely hard capped at about 10 launchers for a class 1 and 2, and usual 4 launchers for class 3 and up.


Point Defense Systems - Noted again that Point Defense systems DO NOT affect synergy bonus. You can fit these in your ships without causing your other weapons to lose their synergy bonus, but they still cost points! These should be hard-capped at a number based on the class of the ship. Obviously class 5’s can fit more of these than class 3

Cannons
1 point. Cannons at the moment fill a semi-niche spot. They are excellent at killing SV’s. If 6 Cannons (current limit) get locked in on a HV or SV it will start doing massive damage to it, especially considering they’re hitscan. I feel they’re in a healthy spot at about 500m range. Small “Anti air” CV loaded with 6-10 of these Cannons and homing missiles will be an absolute f#$@ing nightmare to any SV’s or HV’s that come near the fleet.

Miniguns
1 point. I feel that miniguns are kind of pointless at the moment. They’re whole idea is that they are supposed to be fast firing… with the way the current turret auto-fire mechanics work, they have the same rate of fire as Cannons. This needs to be fixed. The range on these guys needs to be lowered down to about 350-400m, and they need to have the rate of fire almost tripled. DPS needs to come way up on miniguns for automated fire, while keeping them niche in killing things. If a ship wants to fit minis instead of cannons, they’ll suffer range and a lack of “burst” for sustained high-dps weapon.


CLOSING NOTES

TL;DR is at the top, dummy…

If you managed to read this far, thank you. It means you’re genuinely interested in the idea, or bored, or what have you, but I do thank you for taking the time to read this.

This idea is definitely open for discussion, and I feel like it needs to be said that obviously none of these numbers are set-in-stone. Testing needs to occur and I intend on using my own private server to build and test some ideas for ships with these different “classes” in mind in 5.1 and beyond.

Remember that with how closely Rex and Jascha work with the devs means that the ideas we have, the testing we do, all of this, DIRECTLY impacts the direction the game takes.

Please keep all discussion closely tied to the original topic and dont hesitate to toss out ideas! That’s why we’re here doing this!

Thank you again

r/
Van

4 Likes

I believe we need some kind of projectile class fixed-forward facing weapon as well… possibly a flak cannon or artillery that is forward firing, does between 200-250 damage, but fires at about the speed of flak. Slower than pulse, but definitely faster than rockets. Cost would be about 4 points per, with a synergy cost of 2. (i’ll add it into the OP)

Couple of Example Loadouts of Various Class ships I’ve been coming up with.


Class 4 Loadout, Plasma Slugger Battlecruiser.
8 x Plasma Turrets (8x4 =32)

10x Pulse Turrets (10x2= 20)

6x Fixed Pulse (6x1= 6)

6x Mini, 6x Cannon (12x1 =12) = 70 points total for a class 4.

Would be a slow, long range slugger with solid point-defense capability inherent in the pulse lasers.


Class 3 Loadout at about 50 points. Same, Plasma Slugger.

6x Plasma 24 points

10x Pulse 20 points

6 pulse 6 points = 50. No point defense for super-close in, but it has enough firepower and mobility that the pulse should provide adequate personal defense while the Plasma turrets provide a significant punch.


Class 3 “Meta” Pulse clipper. 50 points

20x pulse turret = 40

5x fixed pulse = 50

600 damage volley with turrets (remember that will spread out a bit due to convergance) would be a pretty solid range brawler. Less splash damage than Flak but faster projectile speed means this thing would be a significant kiting ship. Smart outmaneuvering and looping would allow a stronger volley ship to get in close and hammer it though.


Class 4 mixed projectile. 70 points

4x Artillery = 32 points

10x flak = 30 points

4x Fixed ‘artillery’ = 70 points.

This would be a slow bruiser designed to kill other battle ships with long-range fixed+turreted artillery. This thing would be a base buster as well, considering it has the capability of ranging bases with fixed artillery.


Class 5 Artillery Base-Buster 100 points

6x artillery cannons x8 = 48 points

20x flak

this thing speaks for itself. If it closed on a ship… au revoir. That thing’s dead. No if’s ands or buts. This thing would absolutely hammer anything that got caught in it’s grasp for longer than 30 seconds. It would be glorious dakka.

2 Likes

You’ll have a really tough time getting much of the community to sign off on this idea despite the fact that it’s good as it would “limit their creativity by imposing limits”.

Much of the community is still butthurt that turret limits even exist.

Really at this point they need to release some sort of modding framework to let HWS focus on multiplayer stability and balance while the rest can build their 40 artillery turret 130k block anime ships to kill PoIs in PvE.

1 Like

100% both of these. Ships having role and meta (Tired of hearing me say meta yet Van?) would drastically improve combat. Example, base assault vessel vs atmo fighter, vs space fighter. Im sure almost everyone who wants to PvP would agree with Mord too. Massive ships are cool, to look at, at 1 FPS. I’d still rather not crash and fight in a 7-10K block ship, and die because i’m a scrub still.
o7

You should read up on my similar idea in empyrion forums. Btw, I hope you post this there as well.

I saw you fleshing this idea out in chat last night. I’m all for any idea that creates diversity in ship types. Right now we have super-sized CVs acting like SVs where the only right answer is more combat steel blocks.

Tho I would prioritize this after whitespacing and lag shot fixing

2 Likes

Great ideas, I hope the devs pursue something akin to these. I would do it a little differently myself but the results would be similar. I’d like to see them try and create diversity via power draw, mass/size, ammo explosion power (missiles>projectile>defense>energy) and more complex cores. I’m not a fan of arbitrary points if they can be avoided and implemented in with real game mechanics instead. By implementing limits via actual game mechanics it would reflect more heavily on design and battle damage would have more of an impact on fight outcomes. For example with battle damage you could lose parts of your cores or power output which would impede your functional weapons and other ship systems. With just a hard set point system this would not happen nearly as much. However a points system would be a big step up over what we have now.

This is exactly what this game needs and pls dont say anything about game restricting us buhuu. Its not restricting its forcing us to really design our ships properly. Its not designing to just make your ship as big as possible with as many gus as possible its just stupid not designing.

Whit system like this we can really build ships that suit our combatstyle and not be in disadvantage, You guys know not everyone likes to fly biggest ships possible just becous if you dont have fun when your ships are destroyed on every battle in few secs.