Suggestions from a fan!

Gratuitous Forum Suggestions
1

Hey!

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent playing this game. It’s wonderfully addicting and loads of fun!

But I just can’t sit by and not give my suggestions for the game. I feel that is has SOOOO much more potential!

I just woke up and my brain hasn’t started fully functioning yet, so I’m just going to rattle off ideas that have been in my head, and try to justify them as I go, lol.

Firstly, Firing arcs for weapons!
This would be HUGE and completely game changing. Think of how much more strategy this would add! Weapons on the port side of a vessel can only fire in an arc to the left. Same for starboard weapons. Then maybe your prow weapons have a wider arc. Or special weapon types can fire in all directions. Maybe certain hardpoints on the hull can be dorsal or keel mounted weapons and have a 360 degree line of sight. Adds so much more depth, no? Think of what this could do for frigates! Right now they are pretty underestimated because they’re so damned fragile. Now a lot of the time my frigates are fast enough to evade enemy cruisers… if they were smart enough to. Imagine frigates in the blindspot of a huge heavy cruiser that can’t turn fast enough to bring its weapons to bear! How much more realistic is that? I just really think this would add sooo much strategy to the game. Adds some more meaning to speed, positioning, and maneuverability.

You could set up all sorts of different types of ships! Have some brawlers with arc-specific weapons bristling from each side! This ship wants to get right in the middle of the enemy fleet and pound away with both broadsides! Perhaps another ship has lighter weapons all mounted on 360 degree turrets. This ship wants to stay further away, with only one side facing the enemy. It can concentrate more firepower to one side, but would lack the same overall firepower of a more front-line ship.

Different armor/shield arcs!
Your heavy cruisers are going to be packing most of their heavy armor in the front, right? I’d also assume that the shields are concentrated in the front to help deflect all that incoming enemy pew pew. Certainly the engines of a ship should be less durable than the bulkhead, yes? It only makes sense that if you somehow managed to sneak your ships behind your opponent, that you should be able to pound them into submission from the rear, yes? Even the flanks of a ship should be a little more tender than the front. Or maybe you can customize it! Pack armor/shields up in the front of your heavy cruisers so that they can effectively close with the enemy and bring their guns in range. Then perhaps your faster flanking ships which will spend most of their time kiting the enemy could pack armor in the sides? They’d be better at long, protracted firefights, but if you caught up to them, would still go down. Again, changes like this would be huge, (perhaps even impossible with the current game engine), but would add so much strategy/complexity to the game. Think of the added versatility of lighter craft!

Allow fighters to shoot down missiles
Holy shit them cylons just fired 3 nukes at the Galactica, and poor Starbuck is the only one out there competent enough to shoot them down! Let her save the fleet!! This would give fighters a bit more use perhaps?

Allow for more complex orders?
I find myself really wishing that I had a little more control over my ships. I’d like to be able to tell my lighter missile frigates to attempt to actively STAY at long range, or tell my heavy cruisers to keep a bit of space in between each other without causing their pathfinding to go haywire. I want to be able to tell my rocket fighters to not just “not target” enemy cruisers whom they can’t fire, but ignore them altogether. Or tell my cruisers to shoot their heavy guns at an enemy capital ship all day, but for f***s sake stop shooting your goddamn defense laser at that cruiser! There are fighters eating your ass up! Let me shoot my guns at the right targets! I hate when my bombers are just about to land a massive salvo on an enemy ship, only to have them shoot at a lone fighter instead and waste the entire volley! Gah!

Exploding ships might want to do a little more collateral damage.
I see wayyyyy too much stacking in challenges and battles. Ships get confused and trip over each other, and even start stacking into huge piles. Punish people for carelessly allowing their ships to cluster up! When a cruiser finally blows, let’s have the nuclear reactor, plasma drive, bunch of bugs on a treadmill, or whatever else is powering the ship, go up in flames! BOOM! Alternatively, perhaps add some splash damage? Some super-heavy weapon that will seriously punish an opponent for stacking their ships? Again, I just like a more dynamic and/or clean battle. All this crazy stacking starts to look absurd.

More of a role for bombers?
I love the idea of bombers. A squad of tiny craft carrying big scary bombs that could cripple your big ships! But I just can’t make them useful! The only defense fighters can have is speed, and speed and torpedoes don’t mix. Make fighter armor somewhat useful? Perhaps allow fighters/bombers some chance to crit and/or target specific ship systems? I know from playing Homeworld that there’s little more satisfying than sending 2 squads of bombers in to take out the engines on an enemy capital ship, rending them totally defenseless while your heavy hitters creep up into range. Just a cool idea to allow a little more use for underused ships.

Ship systems damaged occasionally? Now I hate RNG for the most part, so I’m not sure how to implement this, but again going along with the firing arcs and such, I think it’d be cool if shots that land square in the aft of a ship for example, might damage engines. Would just be some fun flavor.

I’m sure there will be more, but that’s about all I can jot down at the moment. There’s still loads more swirling around in my head. Do please give it a read and let me know what you think! Thanks!!

2

If you come to the gratuitous modding forum, we can address the issue of fighter missile defenders, bomber hulls and weapons, and maybe even increase your collateral damage.

Ship systems already get knocked out in combat. In fact, once your engines go out, you’re pretty much a sitting duck and get toasted soon after.

Sorry, we really can’t help with the firing arc stuff. It’s my understanding the AI can’t handle them at this time – your ship would always be making stupid navigation decisions that don’t take the weapons into proper account.

3

I am starting to repeat myself, but more choices / more features (while very gratitious) are not guaranteed to add more tactical depth.

4

I know some of it would be difficult to implement, but I honestly feel it would add a lot to the game. As it stands, we need to use complex combination of escort, formation, and other random orders to try to get our ships to go where we want them.

And in the end, most battles just turn into a giant pile of cruisers vs another giant pile of cruisers.

You really don’t think some weapon arcs would change this? I personally much prefer smaller battles, and really dislike the huge pile of cruisers games.

Weapon arcs and armor/shield arcs would make a huge difference.

Right now the game consists mainly of making a fleet, deploying it, testing to see if it goes where you want, re-deploying, testing, re-deploying, testing, etc. I want my ships to behave a little more realistically! (for giant spaceships with lasers, that is)

5

Nothing is guaranteed, but I feel adding more choices/features would add tactical depth. This game is all about making choices and the harder those choices are to make, the better the game.

6

I’m not advocating more useless options. There are plenty of ship types or weapons or random modules that no one touches. Those are certainly extra decisions/features that aren’t adding anything to the game.

My suggestions would much more rework the game system. You certainly wouldn’t see challenges anymore of 30 of the exact same cruiser all stacked on top of each other with 200 laser fighters swarming about.

I’m mostly just against the massive balls of ships and battles so chaotic that no one can tell wtf is going on, o.o;

7

I’m also for all the suggestions the OP posted. Very good suggestions I’d say.

I don’t care if it is a game changer. Erase all challenges and we all start over is fine with me, and that might refresh the game for the older players. New tactics and all. But something must be done with the stacking. It’s ruining the fun. Not only that, but a lot of races need re-balancing. Tribe is pretty much king of the hill. It’s got to the point where we need points for style if we use other races.

Some of the weapons need re-balancing. Plasma seems to be king. Granted, it’s scenario based but plasma tends work more efficient than other things. If the missile guidance scrambler had a recharge timer, that would improve missiles a bit.

I’m a great advocate of ships exploding on top of each other damages 2/3rd of all systems of stacked ships. Any ship within hull length can even get a piece of the damage. You wanna stack, you takes your chances.

The auto-pilot on “keep moving” sucks too. They just want to zig back and forth. They need to want to be at the optimum firing distance that we set.

Fighters need to prioritize their targets better. Why shoot at cruisers that still have shields when other cruisers have lost theirs. Go for the ones you can kill. Isn’t Vulture supposed to remedy this?

8

Arc will just shift the use of one weapon into another. DPS can still be calculated based on how often a particular weapon stops firing.

Arc might mean that stationary cruiser will no longer work, and a few engine might be needed to turn properly. But it does not make a pile of cruisers any less effective. Actually it will force tight formations so it’s easier to cover the flanks/back using dummy armored ships.

9

I guess what we’re trying to get at is make this game a simulator of other simulators.

This game kind of come off to me as a space battle game. Where you have huge ships battling it out in space. Not Icons battling it out on a flat map. Make the game simulate ships floating in space. And as such, ships that have weapons on one side can’t shoot at ships on the opposite side. It’s just one of those things that reality and common sense just get in the way. If you have to turn ship to bring a certain weapon to bare, then so be it. It’s what we have to to in X3. You can’t always cover your flank if you got all your toys on the front of your boat. These icons we’re playing with don’t resemble any great space battles as long as they don’t respect the problems of actually shooting things out in space from solid objects. You want to see if you can set up a better battle than what you saw on Battlestar Galactica? Then you might just have to turn the ship around to bring out the big guns.

If all you want is icon shooters, then the game is gonna get old pretty fast. I for one want simulators. Even simulators for the simulators. But not an arcade game.

10

Even If this was done, wouldn’t the next step be to allow ships to spin on their axis to bring additional weapons to bear anyway? This would allow the ship to fire in all directions and would essentially randomize the damage received across the ship.

11

Problem with simulators is that people want different depths. This is especially problamatic as people have different ideas about what a space combat simulator really is. Contemporary FPS games and air combat simulators have it easy - they have a yardstick to work on. Even then it is a pretty big scope, just look at the problems people experienced with IL-2. Trying to figure out fuel mixture, prop-pitch and turbo-charge settings could be a nightmare.

Space combat itself is pretty unrealistic so a simulator can follow many paths.

I like GSB because it has an easy learning curve, and can be played quickly and casually. 5 minutes gets a mission done, start to finish. Some games take that long just to load and set up. If I wanted a game that played like X3 - I would buy X3. I would want a game to play like VGA-planets but so far Cliffski hasn’t taken the hints. And the campaign I assuming is in its final stages and will be out soon.
Right?

Right?

Berny

12

I’m somewhat hesetant to suport this since if it was done well then it would be awesome, if it was done badly then it would make the game all but unplayable.

I don’t really like this idea since I’ve always imagened GSB’s shields to be like the thing that the gunguns used in the phantom menace-the generator projects a single shield beam straight up and then splits so it surounds the ship.

An interesting idea, but I’m afraid that people will decide that it makes point defences worthless and overpowers fighters

I agree with the ignore button, but other then that I don’t know.

I accually think that this is acually a really good idea, and I’m one of those people who stacks their fleet!

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! one of the few things I dislike about this game is that bombers suck a** even if all cliff did was seriously reduce the weight of fighter torpedos it would make me use bombers a LOT more.

Already happens in the game so this is irrelevent

Just my two cents

13

This, at least, will be getting better. I just improved the deployment code to prevent stacking mroe reliably, so that should be less of a problem. I’m working on all sorts of improvements.

14

Woot! That will be nice, thank you!

You are awesome.

15

I like everything EXCEPT the shield arcs and shooting down missles, and has he said, it would make fighters OP, especially my mech fighter idea, which posessing shields would be killer enough.