i think that this is an amazing idea, and will be very, very helpful. I think the colour scheme works, but different sizes will help differentiate between things you need to be concerned about. Also, especially at the higher speeds, this may happen so fast that they may be a bit of lag (or slowdown if offline). Finally, can this be mapped to a hotkey? because once the armour is gone, the many fighters will do a bunch of damage in small portions. Perhaps that if many attacks (say, 6+) occur in 4 RT seconds (so 1 second at 4x speed), than the damage could be combined into one figure. Otherwise we will be just flooded with data. Either that or actually give us numbers when we click on our ship.
sorry ahead of time for the double post, there is a broken pop up in front of the button (the computer i am typing this on sucks), but also maybe we could see when we click on an enemy ship how damaged it is? if that seems like it might be too powerful than maybe put, say lightly damaged at 70-99% health, damaged at 50-70, badly damaged at 20-50, and near destruction at 1-20?. how does that sound
You can already estmate that, you can see when the shieldsfail, and you get open spots if modules are destroyed.
Perhaps a scanning module could be required to enable this.
I tend to agree though, that shields imploding and fire bursting from the hull are sufficient for my needs.
The idea is cool but I think in GSB could be aplied differently. When you hover your mouse over a ship the game shows you that ship’s name. Then, that same name could have different colors according to the hp of such ship (similar to the colored health bars in RTS’s).
The open spots only indicate that the ship has recieved hull damage in a zone graphically. Ships can be filled with holes and have 0 modules destroyed, just make a design with high hp modules and you’ll see that.
Tribe ships tend to catch on fire easily, even when they are at near full health. Burning spots on the hull isn’t a great indicator.
all true, but even so, a simple coloured bar is sufficient. plus really, really helpful for the tribe. (holes dont help for sh*t on a 9000 hp dreadnought cruiser)
scanning modules also sounds alright, but is technically useless on a ship as aside from HP it doesnt help it survive
Scanning modules where suggested in the past a couple of times. The main problem with them is that they are nearly useless. Why I want to know the hp or what modules the enemy ship has when I can add another shield in that slot?
I agree. I don’t see the value in checking an opposing ship’s precise stats at any point, either, though.
Great idea, especially when designing a fleet, I would still like to test my loadout locally instead of uploading the build, then deleting it if I don’t like it.
When is the Campaign release going to be finished?
I must concur. For games where you have some control over your ships’ behavior mid-battle it makes sense. But since I can’t tell my gunners to lob a couple more missiles to finish off the burning hulk over yonder, it just leads to frustration.
I don’t see how it wouldn’t be helpful. Being able to pause the game and check the stats on the ships helps you pinpoint where strengths and weaknesses are in your fleet. Seems very very useful to me.
Since I really suck at this game on the higher difficulties I would love to see this added. The ability to see if my ship setups are having any effect on the enemy would be a huge help. Please add this ASAP.
The patch with the indicators is live now.
Text is visible but really cluttered. My fleets have a lot of small-arms activity going on, which make things a bit worse. Educational, but not very pretty. Is there a hotkey for it?
You can see the effects of optimum range quite clearly though, which is something I don’t think a lot of players understand yet.
It also illustrates some sort of eccentricity of the armor/shield dynamic. Shots that hit a shield will very frequently display as “hull -0”, “armor -0”, or “No Effect” instead of a shield deduction. The message that comes up seems related to the underlying armor value being checked against the shot, although no hull or armor damage actually occurs. This has a very strong correlation with the odd behavior of the order rad cannon we’ve been seeing.
Likewise, once shields suffer from partial collapse, only leaking hull/armor damage is displayed for penetrating shots, although I imagine this is intentional.
You only get one indicator per shot, as I recall. So if a shot takes down a shield and does armor damage, the shield damage part is disregarded by the UI. Hope that explains it.
I may work on tidying up the overload of effects at some point, but I can’t think of an easy way to do this without making it misleading. It is kinda informative to see 25 simultaneous ‘no effect’ hits, when a bunch of fighters unelash their fire. Replacing that with a single bit of etxt might seem weird. That’s also true of shots doing actual damage.
I should add a hotkey bind, this is true.
yeah, hotkeys for that would be really helpful.
also, condensing a large amount of weak damage in a short time (+quantity, -quality) into one text pop-up is weird, but it would be very helpful for fighter-heavy fleets.
well, that and (insert CL, Plasma, Missile, Fighter, or other) spam fleets
Perhaps it could stack up No Damage x16 or something when a whole squadron of rocket fighters fails to do something, or stuff like that? Basically, new damage shows up and if it’s from the same weapon from the same ship loadout, it stacks them.
actually, that sounds really good, but maybe only for frigates and fighters, cruisers should remain independant due to their size and power
Cruisers might still want to stack if it’s the same individual cruiser with like 5 Beam Lasers failing to penetrate a shield.
Its cute,
but it would be nice if there were a Gratuitous Option checkbox
to turn it off.
Little numbers poping up all over your tactical screen
can spoil the Gratuitousness of the galactic spectical unfolding.