Settings tweaks

[Dr Brain]

Ok, I put the first ship tweak in this afternoon. I will probably have time late tonight to put in a second. I'm asking people to post things that they feel are still unbalanced.

 

Do not reply asking for the old settings. It's a waste of everyones time (including yours). If you do, your post will be removed by myself or by a mod.

[Lanvalk]

Well, I had enough money to test one ship, and that was the Weasel.

 

It's now a miner. At the cost of not being able to bomb, it has 8 L3 Mines with 30 shrap, and a nice Mine RoF, as well as low Mine drain. It still has its awesome health, making mining easier. Now, the bombs are pretty powerful, but the Weasel isn't unbalanced with the ability to chuck these at the enemy, though the clever one will be able to chuck the enemy into them. These mines actually are effective as mines, because a simple rep means a whole bunch of punishment for the first wave.

 

As most ships, it's got its ups and downs versus other ships. The Warbird, Spider, and Weasel can all byp!@#$%^&* its mines. The first can just rip straight thru them. The second can flood with bullets, which can actually reduce the amount of shrap if you fire enough. It can also bullrush the mines. A weasel has enough health and recharge to stand a few mines, and a small enough size to reduce the damage. Most other ships would die, the Lanc being clearly the easiest, for it catches all the shrapnel.

 

Oh, addition. As one of two ships that can cloak, it gets a nice advantage. Lay a nice minefield, hide in cloak, rep, and WHAM!

Edited September 24, 2004 by Lanvalk

[Kilo]

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.

Edited September 26, 2004 by Kilo

[chocko_cc]

I quite like the weasel and its shrap, was testing it out just before, its a good sacrifice (sp?) for the bombs. However the jav is quite slow with shrapnel and a one on one jav fight can quite last a while. Consider l2? Or not? And for terr - multifire adding on one more bullet sure does drain a fair bit, but all round it is quite okay and is basically as fast as the old sett's warbird. with the lanc, it's recharge is a little slow (i just had a terr spin around me shooting for about 2 seconds (around there) and half of my energy depleted) but the speed and size make up for it, and i look forward to more intense flag games =D

[Kilo]

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.

Edited September 26, 2004 by Kilo

[Dr Brain]

Ok, thanks for the helpful post, Kilo. You can expect that stuff to be addressed in the next tweak.

 

I expect that the next tweak will be tomorow.

[chocko_cc]

weasel's shrap is a tad much, eh. i recommend putting a little more than the old weasel had and maybe reduce it to l1 or l2 bombs?

 

EDIT: I just found out from bh - i think, that Anti works in the center. Be the one who hates me but at least i'm getting this fixed asap.

Edited September 26, 2004 by chocko_cc

[Dr Brain]

Added another setting tweak. Comment away!

[Boldot]

gj on the new tweaks

[a n00b.]

i liked them..

[Kilo]

The weasel I have not had a chance to test in a base, but I suspect it's neither lame nor weak at this point.

 

I don't know if this is intentional, but the warbird can plow through many ships just with level 1 bullets, as it can avoid a spray-n'-pray more easily than other ships while its bullets travel at much higher speeds. Good thing when it does get hit it dies quickly.

 

The javelin has been improved to a point of awesomeness. Good job. Spider on the other hand has been improved but yet it still seems to struggle with that huge cost-to-fire guns.

 

Lancaster now is more reasonable, 3500 energy is a lot better than 3000, despite how little more it seems like.

 

I'll post other problems as I find them.

[Lanvalk]

Hi' date=' I'd like to suggest changing the spider to give it double barreled shots and reduce the rotation. The spider has always seemed like a ship designed for basing and a good one too, but with it's increased rotation and single shot it just seems too fiddly and 'wrong' compared to other ships. I've not had much chance to test the other ships as I've not got the money to buy them.

 

I'd also like to recommend making burst a once-only item as it seems to be severely overused, or just weaken it if possible. Finally getting the priv freq can't ball module running would be a big plus and I think it would help bring people to the game, and stay here.

 

That's really all I can think of at the moment... other than getting the rest of the zone items working.[/quote']

This is just a suggestion from an HSer who doesn't want to set up a forum account, so I'm relaying his words.

[Kilo]

(can't you post as a guest?) Anyway..

 

I fully agree. The spider seems like the most out-of-place ship in these settings. It's thrust/speed/recharge leave something to be desired, and its rotation is excellent. However, a single barreled gun can only be so effective, and in my opinion only meant for ships who don't specialize in guns.

 

Though spider can also get level 3 bombs (I think,) its bombs are like most other ships, there are no real advantages to using them often. I propose that the Spider:DoubleBarrel be reset to 1, and possibly naturalize its thrust/rotation to feel more like the other ships. In my opinion, only the lancaster should feel weird compared to the rest, and only because of its size.

[Dr Brain]

I'll take that into account when I do the next setting tweak. I don't know when that will be because I have an exam tomorow and several more next week. If I get some free time to do it, I will take it.

[Kilo]

My current opinion is that most of the ships have a huge weakness, while certain ships do not, mainly warbird, terrier and weasel.

 

The warbird seems especially out of control. I say that its multifireangle should be nerfed significantly, and perhaps its bulletspeed as well, it can spray bullets all over a base for fairly little energy. Its fast nature makes it easy to run away from other ships even when they use afterburners. What would perhaps be more enjoyable, is making all ship speeds more uniform.

 

Javelin is very close to being very good, but when shrapnel speed was reduced, so was the javelin's power. In my opinion, its bomb recoil is just a bit much, it makes it hard to keep up in battle when facing a running opponent. So, perhaps decrease its recoil, or increase its bomb speed even more to give the javelin a distinct advantage that it seems to still need. Another far out suggestion is to increase bombexploderadius a bit to increase the effectiveness of all bombs. Since the javelin is stuck with level 1 bombs, proximity bombs hitting on the outside of the prox range do very little damage right now, increasing this setting even by 8 would help make javelins seem a lot stronger.

 

See above post for comments on spider.

 

The leviathan is also close to perfect. Its bombs, though they bounce, are only really effective at taking out warbirds at this time. Because the leviathan moves so slowly, its bombs are highly inaccurate because even other slow ships can move out of the way a lot of the time. I suggest that its bombs should move a bit faster on this ship, and/or make all bombs a bit stronger.

 

A small note if this wasn't already addressed: Terrier's mutlifireenergy and bulletfireenergy are different even though their rate of fire seems to be the same and the terrier has a multifireangle of 0. As the third/fourth bullet don't -add- any damage, perhaps either give terrier some multifire or just normalize the fire costs. Otherwise, its thrust seems quite unnatural to the rest of the ships.

 

Weasel doesn't really need nerfing, it works quite well in these settings, with a few small weaknesses. Make more ships balanced like this one.

 

As for the shark, it seems like it was reduced to rubble, and not just because its not like the old shark. It is very slow, as is its recharge rate. It's kind of like a 14-pixel radius lancaster with a ton less energy and no upgrades to be had. I recommend giving the shark a boost in all areas, its overall stats seem lower than most ships. Perhaps also reduce its afterburnerenergy to allow it easier travel.

 

That's my rant for now. Sorry if I gave out my ideas without a lot of reason, I'm just tired and trying to take advantage of this opportunity to input my ideas at the same time.