Kilo

Ball-baser

Okay, now that the zone has gotten a substantial increase to population, I've noticed a few things. Burst bullets were made stronger, but they could be weakened a bit, since you can just randomly fire one burst and it will take down any ship near you (or not so near you) !@#$%^&*uming it has 1500 energy or less. Remember, repels hardly help to repel the bursts, as they just bounce back in one huge stream, !@#$%^&*uming you're in a base. In the goal especially, teams of weasels putting all eight mines down, gets a LOT of mines covering one area, and thus when all explode either by being repelled into a wall or being rushed, you'll potentially get 300+ level 4 shrapnel in a closed area, enough to wipe out an entire team a few times, not to mention what it can do to two people alone. Seemingly the only way to counter this is to warp in with full energy and shields. I realize that the weasel is THE mining ship, but I don't think it should get quite so many mines total and quite so much shrapnel. 25 max shrapnel and six or seven mines would still make it superior in those areas than other ships but not be as overpowering. Also, perhaps make use of the maximum mines per team setting, if it is not already being utilized. 10-20 max mines per team might be good in order to eliminate complete shrapnel death. Edit: The current value seems to be 30.. that's enough shrapnel potentially to fill up half of a sector outside of the base and kill anyone inside. Isn't that a bit much? 12 or 15 seems a bit more sensible, but that's just my humble opinion. Warbird and terrier seem to be too similar, except for their energy levels. 1250 max on the warbird versus 2000 max for the terrier, yet they can move around about the same. Sure, warbird can travel faster, but having huge speed doesn't really do much good against proximity bombs, even outside of the base. The terrier seems to have a distinct advantage with its bullets, which have a higher rate of fire, but not quite so much speed. Edit 2: Warbird can't get any special except X-radar, terrier can get stealth, X, and antiwarp. The warbird will not be significantly more powerful if it gets at least stealth and maybe even be another ship that can cloak, but at least more useful and thus more people will use it instead of the terrier. I propose that the warbird get even more manuverability than the terrier and thus distinguishing them. The alternative is to tone down the terrier's moving ability a bit, the thrust on that makes it seem like the starfox arena warbird / javelin / spider / levi, which was meant to be slightly exaggerated. Side note: Whoever fixed the max team size forgot to fix the team size for private frequencies, it's still ten.

Well, as I said, his sentence was not the most coherent, so I'm not sure exactly what he meant.

...you used FlagReward for the goal rewards? Shame on you. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, your sentence structure was a bit shaky. (negative values for Soccer:Reward yield fixed rewards)

My next two cents: Further testing shows the warbird to be good. Javelin is NOT crap despite what you whiners think, try getting some shrapnel on it and then it can deal damage well enough. Spider seems to have taken an unnecessary increase to bullet fire energy, considering that it got reduced to a single barrel, why not reduce the bullet fire energy to about what it was? It's guns are obviously not as good as before since their spread is reduced to a mere pixel, so my suggestion is to cut back on the gun fire energy for it a bit, because the current setting seems to reflect the old double barrel bullets more. Sorry for the repe!@#$%^&*ion there. Leviathan seems good to go now, maybe just a slightly bit more cost-to-fire bombs, since level 3 with prox still dominates low energy ships easily and skill-lessly. Terrier I haven't checked much yet. Weasel got an interesting change, no bombs, eight mines, thirty shrapnel. Whether or not you take advantage of the no-gun/better-shrap tradeoff or not, maximum shrapnel makes this ship just as lame as it was before it was nerfed in the last settings set. Also, it has a ton more energy than the leviathan/terrier.. and happens to have the same amount as the lancaster. That just seems a bit peculiar. Anyway, if you can't get near it to kill it because of mines (and repels push them further away too), it is my opinion that they should have approximately 400 less energy. Lancaster is just odd, it seems more like a fighter now than a captain ship. Nothing innately wrong with it, but if you were going for a captain ship, you were off a bit. Shark seems good, more like a low bounty ship should be (slower.) --- Update: This will sound like a huge flip-flop, because it is, but, leviathan is too weak now.. :/ The problem seems to lie in proximity bombs flying into range but not waiting to explode, thus dealing minimal damage on a fairly slow ship with insignificant guns. Suggestions: reduce cost to fire its slow and weak level 1 guns, increase Bomb:BombExplodeDelay such to make sure bombs can get closer before they explode, thus giving bombers a greater advantage. If anyone actually thinks the levis are still too strong and thus don't need this change, please state this. Edit: Comment about the bombexplodedelay retracted, it's fine. On another note: Terrier's multifire cost is more than its regular fire cost, why? Since there is no multi-fire angle, the usefulness of the other two bullets is almost nonexistant, and thus multi-fire is worthless on the terrier, because it costs more energy to fire it when you could save energy and deal the same amount of damage. Unless you intend to forbid multifire from being bought altogether for the terrier in the future, but that's not the case now. Edit 2: See below post for comments on weasels.

How many people showed?

All other things aside, if the leviathans were balanced out (add tremendous amount to Leviathan:BombEnergyUpgrade, or change Leviathan:BombBounceCount to less than 3, or Bomb:BombAliveTime to less than 1500, etc.) it would be a great deal easier to concentrate on other things that need improving. Nothing else really seems so bad after cluster-bombing the goal with a bunch of levis, whose bombs and energy never go away. If that was fixed, it just may get some people here to stop whining like five-year-olds.

Let's complain about it a bit more without giving any useful suggestions and threaten to leave HS. ..What's so wrong with these, besides maybe the spraying levis?

I'm not going to even bother reading most of the above posts after reading a few and seeing a lot of whining. After the levi. chaos died down, I managed to test a few things. Warbird seems to be good to go. Javelin cannot seem to deal damage fast enough, so either make it a 'slower' ship by leaving it's r.o.f the same and increasing it's recharge or increase the r.o.f. I was hitting a warbird directly or very close to directly several times in a row, and it still would not die. As I see, it, the jav had too many good things on its side before: bomb power, bomb rate of fire, bomb speed, bouncing bombs. Now it only seems to have bomb speed. Give it back one of those other attributes, it was too strong with all of them, it seems to be too weak with just speed. Spider: no problems seen so far. Leviathan: Only thing is that it fires those long-lasting bouncing bombs for only a bit of energy. Bring back the old bomb time-to-live. If bouncing bombs still do greater damage than regular bombs, increase levi. cost-to-fire for bombs. Terrier: I haven't gotten a chance to look at this one too much, but why take away its multifire and some of its energy? Weasel: Nice, it seemed weak, but that was in the middle of the levi. chaos earlier. Lancaster: Haven't looked at it yet. Shark: Hey, you gave it prox, now you give it a double barrel. Yet it's still only six bounty, when it clearly is about as strong as at LEAST a ten bounty. Bomb speed is a bit less, which is okay. But let's not start giving this thing multi/bounce/shrapnel... Small note: Flag drop time isn't supposed to be 30 seconds? That is all. (apologies if this sounds whinish as well.)

Yes, and do a good job.

Yes, this is true, but in the end currently, all maxed ships are the same, except maybe for what level of weapon is used, and maybe insignificantly different levels of thrust/rotation/speed. I like pic ano's idea about limiting each category individually. So allow maybe 10-15 items and only allow 3 of the specials (choose between full cloaking, x-radar and antiwarp.) Also, reduce the total number of upgrades or increase the amount you can get for each category, so we can get a bit more variety in that area. Just my 3 cents. EDIT: 3 cents stolen by picano. (boredom is awesome)

As I have suggested in the past, limit the number of items you can buy even more so you can get a wider variety of ships, even if they're all maxed. So something like this, but after you buy one of these, there's not much more you can get.

It's only stupid when combined with shields, because lancasters cannot effectively stop themselves from being brickwarped after they use their repels. Essentially, buying shields and bricks and being close enough to the enemy lancaster when you attached is a guaranteed brickwarp, which shouldn't be the case.

It doesn't matter if I make a profit on the flag game or not. I can and would spend more on winning a flag game than my entire team would make by winning. By doing so, I can often guarantee we do win, just by throwing some shields and bricks as needed. Just because I won't make any money doesn't make it less lame. As for repels: perhaps up the price of repels a bit as well, $1000 for what the offer is too good of a deal...

I have $800k at least. That means I could do it 100 times before I'm broke. Not really that expensive to do it 5 times, and that can bring extremely lame results.

Just because you like pissing people off to have fun doesn't mean that the settings should have easy means to piss people off.

As to the "bugger repelant," see the reps topic on this forum. To solve some of the silly shield+bw silliness going around, I was thinking there could be a "brick pack" that gave you some number of bricks (probably 3) and couldn't be combined with other one-time power ups. Thus bricks could be used more for holding people back instead of just skill-lessly shielding through a team to hit all of the lancasters, a tactic which has ended too many flag games.

No, we don't need any more on a ship, that just makes the game more crazy when people team up with repels, essentially making it impossible for the target to move. Just make them weaker, as in, less pushing speed, less time of effect, less radius of effect. Enough to make them more fair but not worthless.

I like Funk's idea, but that could be chaos to set up..

Host or get someone to host turret wars or a race for big rewards.

There has got to be a way to make prox good but not so good that it doesn't last forever. Example: very low fuse delay, or make the blast radius smaller, or make bombs weaker. Making people buy something again doesn't really make it any less 'cheap.'

That's one thought, but newbs already burn their money on just a few upgrades as it is. On a related note, it'd be nice to see certain inexpensive-but-effective items (repel, bounce, multi) get a significant price increase.

Yes, why not just have everyone start with a ship that, well, doesn't suck so badly, and yet, they can upgrade it? The only drawback, I suppose, is that then most newbs will use the shark.

So, in other words, a way to slow down people from making tons of money using 1bty ships, since anyone can pick up an alternate account and transfer money over? Just wondering.

Another thing I'm curious about...why is there a multiple-ship reward formula? I can see why it might be there, but if higher bounty already decreases rewards, why penalize newbies for wanting two ships besides the shark (and a lot do, in my experience)?