what about refractive shielding that is only effective against energy weapons.
essentially this would make it so a portion of beam energy is dissipated and the more layers (modules) you add the better the effect. could make for an interesting situation full diffraction would be retro reflective, this means that the energy is sent back where it came. I’m pretty sure your shields won’t protect you from your own weapons. of course the flaw is that they offer no projectile protection meaning a particle weapon will pierce fully even while the shields are up. I think the play/counterplay would be awesome to watch. ex. okay my beam fleet is ready let’s try this challenge… crap they’ve got refractive shielding I need missiles/plasma/etc. other player’s perspective nuts I guess refractive alone wasn’t a good idea maybe I need to mix it up a bit.
also particle beams: deal minor damage constantly for a short time. essentially these are designed to kill weaker shields or un-armored ships they stack damage rapidly but has very low armor and hull damage I.E 100% shield 5% armor 5%hull. they could break well shielded units but because of the long reload time after a volley they would be useless against fast moving targets and armored units would shrug it off. the way the hit detection works is upon firing if the first shot hits all subsequent shots are guaranteed to hit in that volley (this is a beam not a howitzer). they would also be a hard counter to non-armored refractive ships as they would wreck their systems quickly if left un-checked
The “Ship customisation” topic reminded me of a little problem with bullet weapon in GSB1
Currently, the bullets travel up to their max range, plus a tiny bit of additional distance before disappear.
The additional amount of travel of GSB1 isn’t big enough.
For BIG ship, when they fire at the maximum range and one turrets is at the other side of the ship, sometimes, the bullet will never hit (specially if the target is also a BIG ship, and the targeted area of it is far from it’s centre)
GSB2 is a most exciting development. I haven’t stopped by the forums for some time and this is a fine (if coincidental) “welcome back” surprise.
I’ve been wading thru the suggestions and comments provided on these pages, but decided to chance skipping to the end with my own. Apologies for any repetition. (Since Cliff is working on a deadline of the end of September, these are probably too late to the party anyhow…)
I certainly hope that converting GSB2 to the Mac is high on the business plan “To Do List”. The fact that the GSB DLC “Outcasts” never made the leap across to Mac puts a frownie face of anxiety on me that GSB2 will also be unavailable.
I beg you to fix the “Load Deployment” feature. What fleet formation is offered is, to my eyes, totally random. I download a challenge that’s a tight 20,000 credit/5 pilot fight and the Load Deployment will offer fleets requiring 100,000 on down. There’s a massive fleet engagement with full budget and zero restrictions and the Load Deployment is empty! It’s not based on Supplies, Environment Restrictions, Budget or Pilots. It drives me nuts to see a Challenge and “Oh, a giant fleet engagement, eh? Well, I’ve got just the match for that…and, apparently I don’t. And I’m not going to reinvent the wheel because life is short.”
Also, some fleets are available in the Deployment menu, but then appear on the screen partially on and off the staging area. It’s a mess. If there should be any Deployment restriction, it should be if the fleet can fit or not.
Thank you for your attention. Looking forward to the end result!
Something new finally got added today. Well…two things I guess…
Limpet mines now have a GUI showing their current target and a line connecting the limpet and its target which is really cool to watch
A new class of limpet mine, a ‘tracer’ limpet, acts exactly like a target painting module, so when it attaches to a fighter, it paints that fighter for missiles.
This occurred to me recently: What if the battle on a mission select screen doesn’t take place above a planet? Afaik, the new screen only shows planets.
That could pose some interesting challenges, as well as aesthetic differences. What if ships would “sink” if they lost engines, gradually slipping downward and shrinking on the screen until they explode! Bwahahahah!
I just registered and I have not read all the posts but I would like to make a suggestion nonetheless. I have GSB1 on Apple iPad, but will likely get GSB2 for my new Mac Mini.
I would like the option to play and progress through the game in some smaller scale battles mixed-in with the big ones. Sometimes a GIANT space battle is not what I’m in the mood for, and I’d rather see my small fleet challenge another small fleet.
This isn’t gameplay but I can’t believe I forgot to ask. Will there be a borderless windows option for GSB 2? It’s super convenient to run the game at fullscreen and be able to tab away to answer a message or something, and would definitely be an awesome addition.
Any chance we can get a little more room around our ships in development mode? especially to the top and bottom i tend to ‘fall off’ the screen when adding spikes and fire
Are you sure they were reversed? Or was the heavy cruiser shields intended like it is in Beta 1.19?
For me it is ok if very high shield resistance (26) of heavy cruiser shields comes with low shield strength (50).
However, light cruiser shields (shield resistance 16) had a slightly to high shield strength (200).
Btw. look at the shield strengths of frigates, it is a similar picture. High shield resistance comes with low shield strength.
I had noticed this as well, and I rather like it. It provides a bit more complexity in choosing what shields to install on a given ship design.
That being said, I would like to see the heavy frigate shields get a bit more strength; I stopped using them because effectively, once the frigate gets into range of enemy cruisers/dreadnoughts, suddenly I didn’t put a shield on it at all. Even heavy frigate shields don’t really protect much against cruiser/dreadnought guns (and I’m not saying they should be strong protection, but I’d like to see them moved out of one-hit wonder territory).
I liked GSB1, for a while, although I found it got tired quite quickly
I like what I know about Cliffski and enjoy his blog
I like GSB2 about as much as I liked GSB1. In fact, it feels like pretty much the same game
Some of the graphics are, um, different now. I try to turn them off, but some of the most annoying it seems I cannot turn off
Everything I didn’t like about GSB1, is still the same. Limited space (getting killed while running into corners), inability for ships to try and maintain range, no campaign, fixed costs for all components with no ‘research’ possible, paying Honor to unlock races, hulls and components. I hated them the first time and I still hate them.
The new races make no sense to me. I think they are supposed to be ‘fun’, but they just appear to be unclear. I read the descriptions and have no idea what it means about how they are going to play. Which ones have good fighters, which ones don’t have shields, etc? The GSB1 races made more sense to me.
The diabolical color schemes we see in the new ships (typically) make it look a bit too jokey/not serious.
It is quite crashy. More than I ever recommend GSB1 being.
The component descriptions are too generic. All the armor says “metal plating etc” when what I really want to know is the key characteristics of this armor vs others. Powered armor is lighter than heavy armor, using power instead of mass to provide protection, etc.
You can compare the ‘power required’ or other key components in a graph against other components, but you cannot filter this to only compare against other weapons, or armor against armor.
I agree with others that a LOT more could be done to build up the battles from tiny skirmishes initially. I am quite interested in a few fighters vs a few other fighters, or versus a frigate. It could also let you find out about some of the detailed capabilities of different fighter builds in various circumstances.
I am still playing through it exploring the different capabilities of races, weapons and ships, but I don’t think there has been enough work done on some of the weak areas of the game concepts to really recommend this game to others. I will not be leaving a review on the relevant sites. I would prefer a 4X or similar strategic layer that uses this engine as the combat resolution.
I must say i enjoyed a lot GSB1, i even spent a lot of time modding (near 2 years) but i am a bit dissapointed with this second part.
As the previous guy, everything i didnt like about GSB1 is still present in GSB2. Sad.
Now, graphics, i mean, i dunno if this is my system or not, but i notice the graphics blurry and with poor definition. Not like GSB1 was. I mean, is there any way to increase the sharpness and definition of the graphics?? or are they designed like that?? if thats the case, im sorry but i am not going to play a game with such blury graphics. I mean, GSB1 was great, but GSB2… very dissapointed.
Also, i only tried it in about 3 ocasions. Because it keeps crashing for no reason. When im going to battle, in the main menu, etc. I also didnt notice any improvements in the real-time fights. Nothing that was missing in GSB is added in GSB2, i expected far more interaction with the ships, not just a couple more menus and infos and thats it.
Of course i imagine it is soon to value the final product, but honestly is far inferior than GSB1.
