I'd just lean into what they've been doing: shields debuff energy weapons, armor debuffs ballistic. You still get the bonus to ballistic, which it needs because ammunition is finite, and thus it's not as debuffed by shields. Then you apply that debuff based on the size of the shield and the size of the armor. If the sum is greater than the damage, then that weapon doesn't do any damage to that target. I'd think that S3 would be the cutoff for harming cap ships, so S3 would still be doing damage, but it would be minimal, and if the shields are up, good luck.
The torpedo bit sounds great. Having an option to either lock and fire or take manual control of the torpedo would add some awesome gameplay. That would add a layer to electronic warfare/hacking too, ships like the vanguard sentinel could activate some jamming device to stop manual control of torpedos or drones.
Great video. You always bring up some good points. Regarding the problem with current gun sizes, I think that size 4 guns on a small fighter was alway bogus game design. Light and medium fighters should have size 1 and 2 weapons. Heavy fighters size 3, corvettes size 4 to 5 and sizes 6 and up should be capital only. Size 4 weapons on a small ship like the hornet mk2 are insane and are really just there to sell the ship with a promise of it being overpowered. I would not be surprised if all these gun size inflations with the "new" ships will get nerfed to oblivion once the actually start looking at balance. The biggest problem with CIG is that they always talk about balance concepts, but they are not balancing the game at all. And they will never do it untill the need for selling fantasy ship concept to bring in money goes away. As long as marketing is driving development, the next ship sale is always going to massively break any balance they had. They are just bullshitting us.
Only the polaris requires more ships to take down a capital. As it lacks the weapons to prepare its targets for torps, unless your dumb firing but that comes with extreme risks, you have to get close and hope your torp doesnt get shot when launched and still within blast radius of the polaris. This also breaks the game design cig want as it will make capital battles quicker than large ship battles. All other capitals can weaken and destroy eachother - but even the victor would suffer extreme damages, to win without taking damage you need the 'support fleet'. Best scenario - enemy capital doesn't have a fleet to counter yours or your fleet eradicates theirs allowing you to disarm the enemy before approaching weapons range of the target capital.
A fully functioning PD system should stop all missles and torpedoes 99% of the time. That is perfectly IRL representation in game. They should also be of some effect against large projectiles and dumbfire. I win button denied until you destroy or deplete the defense. Hopefully more ships get that treatment and missile boats become a more strategic weapon. 👍👍
There should be another way, and that is overload PDS. We will be testing it soon with my orgmates, but basically we want to see if firing a torpedoe amongst a dozen rattlers can overwhelm the PDS, sort of blind it, and hit with the torpedoe.
Point defenses being 99% effective is objectively untrue in real life, and as a game mechanic, it shouldn't be a binary guaranteed/bypassed condition. In real life, fleet/area/point defenses are not defeated via being destroyed, they are defeated via mass. Mass can be achieved in a variety of ways, but the most common is through saturation. Every fleet of warships, depending on the situation, their capabilities, and effectiveness, will have a critical mass at which a certain weapon system, depending on its own situation, capabilties, and effectiveness as well, will overwhelm an adversarial defense network through sheer weight of numbers. This in turn guarantees you a limited number of hits for weapons spent. Mass can also take other forms, such as electronic warfare, or launched decoys (a la MALD), but the general effect is the same. Point defenses are anything but an "I win" button. They are the last, final, desperate hope and prayer of a multi-layered, tiered defense network of multiple concentric rings, the opening layers of which are typically some kind of aerial fighter/air superiority asset, and/or a fleet defense warship responsible for the safety of the fleet as a whole. A strike package must ingress through these initial broad rings, which are typically the most robust layers of a fleet's defenses (ERAM, ASTER, Aegis, PAAMS, etc.), and then penetrate into the local area defenses of individual ships, which may or may not be overlapping one another. Here, they must survive active hardkill measures, such as medium-range SAMs (ESSM, ASTER, etc.), as well as softkill measures, such as seduction and distraction jamming, frequency-agile radars, thermal decoys, and in more modern times, even things such as electronic virus attacks. If the attack pushes through these layers, only now do point defenses come into play. In order to defeat a saturation strike, your most powerful allies are time and distance. This is why you see modern navies investing much more in technologies that expand both the distance of their awareness, and their fidelity within it. Point defenses are certainly evolving, yes, but not to the same degree as a fleet's ability to defeat a strike at distance. Fleet defense is your primary defender, the largest circle. The farther out you detect a threat, the longer it takes the threat to reach your ship. The more time you have for the threat to reach your ship, the more time you have to engage threats, re-engage unsuccessful engagements, build passive defenses like chaff and decoy clouds, etc. The more time you have to wear down the strike to a defeated state. Threats to warships nowadays are not defeated primarily via point defenses. They are defeated primarily at distance. Point defenses are not a reliable method with which to defend a warship, and the biggest threat to a warship, massed saturation strikes, are most effective at defeating point defenses.
@Mike5Brown It certainly could, as could a more complex missile system. I think the biggest issue with that is gameplay, though. Most players aren't military strategy enthusiasts, and trying to understand how to use and evade missiles isn't intuitive. It can be unfun to play against. Electronic warfare is much the same. I agree completely that SC should really bring on some deeper gameplay mechanics beyond just nose-on dogfighting for every ship type (nose-on is fine for fighters, but nothing else should fight like that), and more complex missile systems and EW could be great options to do that. But they need to be careful to not make things *too* complex for the basic everyday player.
Completely agree with the more hands-on torpedoe gameplay, that would be so much more interesting. I love when you compare the Polaris to just an enormous gladius, it's exactly what we've been seeing for the length of Save Stanton phase III: Polaris kiting the Idris, trying to stay in the back, while the Idris, which is even a bigger whale, tries to align it's railgun. Absolutely not a capital ships fight.
They changed torpedoes from a meaningful first strike threat to a neglectable finish move... really sad day for any Polaris owner as it's torpedoes are its main weaponry. In my opinion non target locked torpedoes should be laser guided. They should also be harder to shoot down than small missiles. A volley of four "capital ship killer torpedoes" ( this is how CIG calls them btw) should pose a threat and not be shrugged off because PDC is still active.
what? totally depends what you are shooting against. It will take down a hammerhead with one torps that hits it. You are thinking with a brain that only seen it fight a super pve buffed Idris with 44 million hp.
Honestly I think the torps should be manually controlled, I've been saying that to my group forever now. Smaller missiles should home, and the torps should be an aiming and timing skill check.
For me gold standard of space combat was in Free Space 2, you were piloting fighter, your primary job was to take care of enemy fighters and bombs (SC torpedoes). Only fighters had shields, large ships were just too large for fighters, you could have destroyed their subsystems but almost never entire ships. Large ships were firing at each other with very distinct weapons: beam weapons, large to target large ships and small to target fighters and bombs.
I like the multiple shield faces because it's like Star Trek. In Star Trek you have different shields for different sections of the ship, and if you have to disengage in reverse, you put 'em up higher on the front. If you want to turn tail and run, you can just put the shields up on the rear. This adds a ton of tactical options for larger ships that you don't get in other games. It also makes multi-crew a lot more important because you have someone just working the shield faces -- there was a video where a multi-crew org was doing this in a Hammerhead, actively using the different shield faces based on positional attacks, which was very tactical and cool. Evolving that for large squad gameplay means it requires a lot more strategy from all sides.
Seems like part of this would be easy to fix if small enough guns simply do no damage at all to Capital class shields and or armor. I'm not sure where the cutoff should be, and maybe it should depend on the class or quality of components and armor, but when they say a pistol being shot at a tank does very little, that's not true. A pistol being shot at a tank does absolutely nothing. And a rifle fired at the side of a battleship similarly does nothing. You should have to have a minimum amount of damage coming from the hit in order to do anything, or perhaps some other stat for projectiles related to penetration. But basically, most fighters should be able to do nothing at all to a capital ship. Maybe damaging some weak spots or external components, but that's it. No actual hull damage.
This won't work because most turrets have the same weapon sizes as most fighters. So by making fighters useless against cap ships, you are also making turrets useless against cap ships. Then the only way to damage a cap ship will be torpedoes which, funnily enough, are also useless because of PDCs
@@_Anaklysmos_ They could add a individual stat like the person said above, opting for customizable penetration values. Armor penetration would likely be different for the size of the ships armor as well. For instance, ships which do have larger guns. I don't know how much the limitations would be, I wonder if it would be more like for a Polaris Armor, anything S3 and below would be useless on penetrating armor but would play a role in disabling turrets. Where as S4 and higher would be useful for targeting armor itself. However for say a Perseus receiving armor, maybe that limitation would be for weapons S2 and lower, with S3 or higher being able to work against armor. These are just examples of how it could potentially work.
@@_Anaklysmos_ I thought "ship to ship" turrets often have size 5 and up? Size 1-2 could be fast firing for saturation against small targets (missiles and light fighters), 3-4 could hit harder for bigger fighters and mid size multicrew ships (Connie and such), and then 5+ could be the things that can actually hard capital ships. Or something along those lines. Turrets with size 3 or 4 could be great for fending off mid size stuff, they don't necessarily have to hurt cap ships.
I think as a shorter term solution, making the main way of doing damage to larger ships being to target components (internal and external) with hull damage doing very little would help a fair bit with the geometry problem, especially if those components on larger ships tend to be smaller than the fighters or require them to be closer to do damage etc. Maybe one way you could do that is by introducing a penetration mechanic, or something like that, where the closer a fighter is the more it penetrates, so while you might be able to damage components on the surface of a capital ship by kiting it, you shouldn't be able to kill it or take out too many critical systems without closing distance. In other words, you could introduce a mechanic similar to what you see in games like "War Thunder" for example, where there is a penetration/deflection element to firing through the hull on a ship. The larger the ship, and the higher the "armor", the more likely that ship is to deflect or "shatter" the incoming fire. The higher caliber the weapon, the less likely it is to be deflected/shattered. The closer you are to the target, (and I know this is a little arcadey but that is where we are at with this game) the less likely it is deflect/penetrate. Weapons, whether laser or kinetic, have a penetration distance proportinate to their remaining "range" when the round contacted the enemy. In addition to affecting a delfection/shatter chance, more heavily "armored" ships can have higher internal density (reflecting internal armoring, or depending on the ship type, like industrial vs military) which serves as a multiplier on how far the round penetrates inside the hull. While Hull's can accumulate damage, it shouldn't mean too much on its own and it should take an absurd accumulation of damage to the hull of a larger ship to cause it to be destroyed, if at all possible. I would say that maybe as the hull accumulates damage, its "density" is reduced, meaning shots penetrate further and further into it, but low caliber weapons should do very little to effect hull structure/density. Instead, the goal should be damaging internal and external components that are smaller than the fighters firing on it, thus requiring fighters to close distance to hit them consistently. Maybe you could have a "sparking effect" when you damage or hit near an internal component, to give feedback on what is effective or not. Kinetic weapons vs. laser weapons could have different penetration profiles, with kinetic rounds penetrating in a straight line that penetrates deeper, but laser rounds cause "spalling" and have multiple shorter vectors inside the capital ship. I like the idea of this system because I think it scales well for capital vs. capital warfare, and fighter vs capital warfare. By adjusting armor/density values across different ship sizes, you should be able to get a smooth gradient of ships survivability being proportionate to their size/crew count. In my view, the goal should be to allow people to play in multiple ways effectively, and ideally whether you are a squadron of 5 fighter pilots, or a 5 man gunship, your combat potential should be about proportional all else being equal. In the long term, they should introduce a precision mode to the turrets that not only allows them to shoot more accurately, but increases the velocity of the turret rounds by 50% or something. This would play into the tiered/layered combat they were talking about, where maybe early on in an engagement between fighters and a capital ship, the fighters can kite, which gives them a defensive advantage, (though hopefully not too significant of one, if the large ship turrets can go into precision mode and still hit shots on the fighters, especially if they are moving slowly to use their own precision mode) but from a distance/kiting they can only damage some components, maybe making the larger ship more vulnerable. After the large ship has been weakened by kiting, the fighters have to close distance and engage in much closer range to actually do critical/crippling damage to the larger ship. Alternatively, the fighters could close distance from the very beginning in order to do more critical damage from the start of the engagement, but this would involve taking on a lot more risk as you would be engaging the large ships weapons in their more optimal range/configuration.
35:02 I love this idea of a large bubble shield only issue is that Master Modes has us moving way to slow for that. Imo get rid of master modes for more exciting high speed fights. Maybe decrease time to kill for light fighters. High risk high reward
Hey Avenger, I really liked this video, I think it touched on a couple important aspects of the game that I hope CIG addresses in the future. I really liked your video on geometry in SC, and I hope CIG does something to address engagement distances and projectile speeds in the future. 11:23 Here I would argue in CIG's favour. Killing capital ships should require weapons specifically for their weight class, for a few different reasons. It would encourage a diverse airwing in terms of player specialties and types, maybe some players are better suited to attacking capital ships with ships like the Ares, and some like dogfighting more so they take Hornets. I would also argue that most players aren't going to tolerate a fight dragging on forever like a Monopoly game. If your ship has been stripped of turrets and other tools to defend itself with, and you're waiting for the next 20 minutes to drag by while a Hornet outside sprays your ship with peashooters, people are probably going to exit to menu lol If you're going to invest in capital ship gameplay, the weapons involved in hunting them should be powerful enough to have a reasonable TTK. Does that mean fighters can't kill capital ships? Yes, at least not if they don't have a way to equip anti-capital ship weapons. But then I would argue that fighters should be focused on protecting their ship-killer friends. With regards to gun sizes on these capital ships, not every weapon on a capital ship should be capable of damaging another capital ship. Using the Polaris as an example, the only weapons it has that should be engaging enemy capital ships are its torpedos and S6 bow turret. The other smaller turrets onboard are for defending the ship from fighters. A large ship will require a variety of weapons to use against a variety of threats. Weapons shouldn't be one-size-fits-all, the ship should be outfitted with a few different weapon systems for a variety of likely threats, both in an offensive and defensive nature. 23:49 I definitely agree with your assessment on torpedos in particular, and multicrew ship mechanics in general. Torpedos should be an opening weapon, something that fleets begin an engagement with. As fleet begin to make contact and look to win a positional advantage or begin to close the distance to gun range, an opening torpedo barrage could be a great tool a fleet could use to counter an enemy rushing into their own poorly-positioned fleet to buy themselves time to group up properly, or it could be used by that same opponent to cement an advantage in an adversary caught at a bad moment as they rush in. Whether that's in a barrage or player-guided single shots is dependent on the situation and players involved, but the main point is that having torpedos in a niche to kill an already-finished ship is pointless. Multicrew large ship gameplay should require a degree of skill and intelligence in terms of positioning and supporting fires with allies, and a torpedo barrage could be a fantastic tool in breaking up a well-positioned enemy, or crippling a poorly-positioned one. A torpedo barrage should be the SWAT door ram that your fleet rushes in behind to gun range. I also agree that more multicrew combat should be fought from an all-aspect sense, in that the ship's bridge crew should all have access to their own sensor rings, and they should be able to cue up weapon systems onto enemy targets and engage them with that sensor ring display, instead of requiring the ship to be nose-on all the time. This could provide for missileers and torpedomen being their own distinct roles on multicrew ships, much like engineers are about to be. Missileers could also help add to the defense of a ship, and a CO having their own sensor ring to point out and designate specific targets or waypoints for weapons officers and navigational officers to engage or move to could be a super handy tool. 28:32 Going back to my previous statement about weapons on capital ships, these large ships should be violent, scary threats to those around them. A modern destroyer is a very harrowing threat to modern aircraft. Aircraft are a only a threat to modern sea-going warships if used in coordinated numbers, with weapons specifically for killing warships. In much the same way, warship-vs-warship combat can be a very violent affair, with many modern anti-ship weapons being very cutting-edge, blisteringly-fast, intelligent, violent weapon systems. Having two capital ships going after one another shouldn't be like watching paint dry. It should be like watching mom and dad fight. No one's going to enjoy it, and there's going to be a big mess and an awkward silence after. I absolutely agree that large ship combat shouldn't be a slow process. Capital ships are the core of your fleet, and provide the bulk of your firepower, survivability, and bulk. They certainly fight better with supporting assets, yes, but there isn't a more powerful single ship out there than a modern guided missile destroyer. 29:16 I think it's a little concerning here how CIG talks a lot about how fighters interact with capital ships, but they don't seem to have a lot of vision regarding how capital ships interact with capital ships. What are capital ships supposed to be doing during all this time while fighters are whittling away at their modules and subsystems? Twiddling their fingers? They will be fighting, obviously, and if they're engaging another capital ship... why isn't your capital ship slapping the snot out of the enemy capital ship? Why is everything apparently the responsibility of the screening ships and fighters? lol 30:39 I assume the intention here is that while lower on raw DPS output, the weapon systems on the Ares is big enough to actually damage capital-class components, where a Hornet cannot. An infantry assault rifle will have a much higher rate of fire than a Javelin ATGM, but then, they are designed to function against wildly different threats. You wouldn't use an assault rifle to kill a tank, and you wouldn't use an ATGM to clear a structure. Whatever the DPS those two unrelated weapon systems have is purely anecdotal. 37:42 I'm genuinely confused by what these guys are saying here. What they are offering here only makes sense if this defending capital ship is by itself against an enemy fighter group. If it is, why not just decline the engagement and quantum out? If there's an enemy capital ship, it should be engaging that. A lot of what CIG seems to be envisioning in capital ship combat seems to be predicated on capital ships being these static backliners wandering around and not moving very much. I don't see anyone in SC's player base using their capital ships in that way at all. They are going to be very much in the fight trying to blow crap up, not waiting around to get swarmed by Hornets. CIG doesn't seem to understand how their own game works and plays sometimes. So much of their gameplay loop around taking down capital ships seems to rely on fighter stripping away components one-by-one, and no one's going to tolerate the amount of time it takes to do all that. Capital ships are going to be directly engaging one another, not waiting around like NPCs. Once their capital ship reaches a point of no return in terms of damage, they'll just suicide rush the nearest enemy or self-destruct or return to menu. No one's going to wait around helplessly for 20 minutes while a swarm of fighters nibbles their non-functional capital ship to death.
@@GunnarGotGame that's a part of the process big dog. Seasoned steak doesn't come seasoned and ready to eat from scratch. It's a bloody process. This too, is a messy process. They could do more, but it'll probably just create new issues overtime.
@@durtyred86 I feel you. Still sucks that they gutted a flawed but mature and deep flight model for one with the depth of a puddle and the width of a hair and left it alone for six months to work on other shit
Great ideas. I agree with most of your thoughts. People that disagree with all your points have copium blinders on, can’t critically think, or are greedily protecting an advantage they want. I appreciate your critical thinking, Analyse, explanations, and that you represent fighter pilots and Multicrew players interests. Controlled missile idea sounds fun and skilled.
not me i use my polaris to baby ram your ship this is not to ram damage hull it to try to pin your ship from being able to face me if my nose is preventing you to angle ship and if the nose of my ship can rub your turrets i probably disable some of your turrets... a fight should be mostly determined by how many players you can bring to aid the battle skill will matter but quantity should be the main factor what tools you use should be next best then skill should be third
Completely agree with being able to fly torps, like in battlefield helicopters, and have the ability to turn off the booster and let it coast into the target with a dampened signature. Completely disagree with bubble shields on cap ships. If anything it should be the opposite where small craft have bubble shields, and large+ ships have segmented shields because it is harder for one generator to cover the whole ship. We should be rewarded for good coordination and focus fire on large targets. A “floating” shield around the cap ships sounds like a good idea but conflicts with your KISS mentality. A pain to program. Why are cap ships deflected off the shield while small ships are not? Is it size? Speed? What about torps and missiles? Why are fighters immune? Would all kinetic entities pass through shields? Lots of questions on that.
Interesting food for thought overall. I have to present a counter argument to your bubble shield concept because the shield cannot both allow fighters to pass through it and deflect kamikaze fighters. Those are mutually exclusive mechanics. It also presents complications with missiles. Do missiles bypass the shield or do they blow up on its exterior? This issue should be solvable, but creating a solution that fits the rest of the game seems like it would take too long.
I think what they have for shields works fine as it is. Being able to move shield faces around gives it an added layer of tactics you don't get in other space sims.
27:20 this would only be a thing if two Polarii fight against eachother. The Polaris is the only capital ship with peashooters and the 500k each anti-cap torps that are meant to be used after the fight is over already. They want it to be a ranged-ship rather than a brawler but the torpedos are only useful in close-range dumbfire scenarios. The Idris for example has the S10 railgun (with 5000 m/s projectile speed), dual s7 anti-capital guns and lots of s5 guns, it wont have any of the Polaris issues.
For energy based weapons modifying the weapon characteristics not only on hardpoint but also powerplant size could be a way to distinguish size4 cap ship turret guns from size4 guns on a fighter. Not sure what to do about ballistic weapons though because power plant intraction makes little sense here.
Torpedos, in real life, travel at roughly 10 knots faster than your typical warship max speed, and operate on passive sonar or are wire-guided. They should be easy to destroy by point defense weapons if they are launched solo. It should take squadrons of small ships to take out a capital ship, and that would have to include bombers and torpedo ships. Fighters do not have large enough weaponry to do damage through the armor and shields of a capital ship's size do not carry the firepower to destroy capital ships. Only bombs and torpedoes should be able to destroy capital ships, fighters are only there to keep the enemy fighters off the ships delivering those bombs and torpedoes. Maybe they could destroy point defense and maybe light gun turrets, but armor on a capital ship is far too heavy for the guns of a fighter. I dont know why you're bitching bro. Unless you dont understand how carrier fleet engagements work. They showed how things are going to work during the Squadron 42 gameplay. I thought it was cool.
I thought the Squadron 42 gameplay was awesome too. The tactical way fleet management worked and reduced role of light fighters to support attacks were cool to me. I also thought it made the bombers look really cool and very powerful.
I would suggest that the Polaris main armament consists of the size 10 torpedoes and the bespoke size 6 turret. The rest of the guns are part of the layered defense.
With engineering, and advanced scanning, all the elements are there to find, highlight, and send a subcomponent as a target to a fighter squadron. The same system that displays our components to the pilot and engineer on a ship can be used to identify those same elements in an enemy ship
Size 4 guns on a Polaris won’t (may not) be useful against another Polaris, but could be as useful against fighters (if they can fix geometry issues and turret control) This was showin in squadron, as the gunner had both smaller size guns for fighters, and larger size guns for larger ships. And swapping between.
Spicy opinions are my favorite! Seems like the way that CIG plans to resolve the geometric issue for large ships is physicalized damage where in order to disable a ship you need to penetrate the hull and do component damage. This would make critical points that would allow smaller weapons to cause real damage to large ships, but would also mean that the larger the ship and the more spread out the components the larger the apparent health pool. I don't think that's something CIG is at all ready to balance since component placement to date has largely been convenience based and not part of ship TTK/TTD design.
I also think that the torpedo gameplay is very poor. I don’t understand how they didn’t make a torpedo control system in the future. Why will torpedo bombers be needed? just to finish off the ship faster?
I like your ideas for the torpedo gunner. Give them the guidance, or tethering. This sounds cool! Capital ships should resolve each other... Nice take on cap ship! The bubble makes sense to me…
The other thing with lots of shield facings is that it encourages capital ships to roll continuously, but that makes being a player gunner an awful experience. They are not thinking about this from all perspectives, they are thinking ship v ship, and fighter vs target. Not crew running around inside the washing machines with force reactions as they are trying to change a lightbulb. Also the 'character giving blind spots" given to all major capital ships years ago when the stern crewed turrets went away means that fighters will just fly behind major capitals and sit there until they win.
Which is precisely why having shield faces and forcing capital ships to roll is necessary for keeping strategies fresh. No one piloting the ship is going to sit there and let someone stay on the rear blind side -- and thanks to shield faces, they can just overload the rear shield faces to prevent taking any significant damage.
With everything slowed down, the torpedoes pretty much crawl across the battlespace. There's no point to a long engagement range if the target could just turn back. What you mentioned about manual control of torpedoes and reducing signature? Look at how "Nebulous Fleet Command" handled it. Heavy torpedoes can carry additional decoys, reduced signature ... or have a smaller kinetic penetrator warhead inside of a large frame. This adds a lot more nuance to missile gameplay than just lock and shoot.
from what i know is size 1-3 is max effect small 4-5 max damage med 6-7 is for large 8-10 is for extra large to shoot smaller ships will be limited with weapon grouping and to attack a ship 1 size larger you do half damage 2 sizes higher is no damage shooting ships 2 sizes smaller may be nerfed into oblivion. most weapons on cap ships are ment for small and medium and some large but few cap ships will be able to effect cap ships armor and shield resistance
If you take what I'm saying personal, THAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, NOT MINE, AND THAT'S DIRECTLY POINTED AT SOME PEOPLE WITHIN CIG AS WELL 200 IQ Avenger again. 💀
I probably know they are trying to explain something but after 12 years I'm unable to listening to the BS CIG is saying... they try to explain something and say look at cinematics... i got alergic to this BS how the leaders who are there to explain things are allowed to spread such a BS... cinematics like Reclaimer and his Claw Munching never manifested in any gameplay and they come here and dare to say look at cinematic... i'm alergic to this BS can't listen to this anymore, why are they still talking shit instead of producing good game... i literaly lost ability to listen to them cause it never came to anything good... here & there i check A1 videos to get some update about game state but that's all... at least he is around but I gave up on game with this fly model can't stand it
I respectfully disagree with your suggestion to add markers on ships for components like the power plant. While it might help new pilots initially, it removes an important skill-based element of the game. Part of becoming a good pilot is learning the locations of key components on different ships. Adding markers risks oversimplifying this aspect, which could diminish the depth of gameplay.
Actually he agrees with you about that. He said they should NOT have marker outlines on ship components within the ship. I actually disagree that they should not have markers, because I'll be honest, I have no clue where components are on most ships from the outside. It's completely different when you're inside. Trying to calculate where the components are by memory is just kind of a crap shoot for most of us who are not ace pilots. Now... what I will say is that certain spec grade radars/scanners should allow you to scan and get an outline of marker ship components, whereas industrial or civilian grade radars should not allow you to get that info easily.
Missile torpedo operator really does need to be much more than press the fire button. I would love to command the torpedo in flight to bring it onto the target, and aim for the right spot. If load, lock, and fire is all there is to missile operator, it might as well be the commander - because particularly on the Retaliator, the entire ship only has 6 shots, and pressing the button 6 times is just not going to cut it for anyone other than a second account alt. Destroyers are meant to hunt down and kill enemy ships ... if they cannot solo kill other capitals, there is a big problem.
Being a gunner a few times. The Polaris was always rolling, dodging. I often came to a point I couldn`t rotate the turret fast enough or had invisible walls of firing arcs. Was not what I imagened it should be. It was a pain. I also lacked an overview. What is an enemy or a player who was red, what kind of ship is this I am dealing with? The useful information is much too small. There was no pip in Precision mode either.
“Monkey pull stick hahaha” has to be the first lesson in ship combat. Add it to the basics playlist! “Small is better!” - Thank you!! My wife still won’t believe me.
Realism aside, what about being able to participate in an encounter and feeling like you're doing something meaningful and having fun? I like the SW approach much better than simply rendering weapons under a certain size useless vs ships of a certain size and up. Your torpedo ideas are really cool. I feel like it would make people fight over who gets to man the torpedoes.
Yes, but the Star Wars approach doesn't include combined arms, nor capital ship tactics (since you can't actually fly them). The cap ships in that game are essentially giant static targets, so that everyone flying in the fighters feel like the hero.
@@Billy-bc8pk I feel like proper combined arms will be a very rare thing to see and hard to organize in this game. Much more often you'll just see a bunch of people thrown together, each with whatever they were able to bring and I think that needs to feel fun and engaging for everyone.
I would like to see PDCs more akin to something like the expanse, highly accurate ballistic gatling's with limited ammo. This would make PDCs more like other expendable countermeasures and give target the defense against the 'I win button" while making torps still a viable threat in a quick saturation or sustained combat. You could also have crew on board reloading PDCs or clearing jams giving more role to engineering gameplay down the line and pilot skill of knowing which PDCs are low or empty on ammo and rotating the ship to give PDCs with sufficient ammo line of sight on incoming torps.
Not only did they give the Polaris less turret dps than a hammerhead, no we can also run out of ammo. 5 minutes into a battle our turret ammo is depleted and we are left with LESS than half the turret dps of a hammerhead. in the ISC ironclad is rad they said and i quote: "we are looking at upgunning the polaris so it is not just a topedo boat it can hold its own against other capital ships with its turrets". where the hell is the upgunning ? what the hell are we supposed to do in battle ? sit there and wait til the the rest of the fleet has done their job and the WE step in to act when its all done anyways ? Polaris is by far, ship wise, the biggest disapointment in CIG history.
@@TheNikosawa Thorston mentioned that rearming is coming with resource management as part of the charge/drain mechanic. You will be able to rearm your turrets on cap ships.
To make disparity of ship size issues work, just give shields a recharge rate while it's under fire. Light fighters would never be able to solo a large vessel. Torpedoes in the lore were highly dangerous to a cap-ship without wearing the ship down. The also had the ability to skip/jump to get to the target.
The part about two capitals fighting. If its two Polaris, they are by design a support capital that relies on torps right, so it kinda makes sense that if both have point defense the trops wont make it to the other. I do agree the torp implementation is dumb and needs to be fixed, however, but ideally, they should be able to punch a whole through shields from long range and need to be checked by a forward group. But I think an Idris vs a Polaris for example the Idris will win most of the time, since it 1. has more support vessels inside it (mini carrier), and 2. has a rail gun that can do massive damage to the Polaris shields. I would like it if the Polaris would have tools to use those torps from long range and force the Idris to engage closer up. All this is just theory though, we are yet to see how any of this plays out.
I like the idea of most guns not being usefull in cap ship battles. Then capital kills would need big torpedoes, or Idris railgun shots, or sustained fire from like, a size 6 and up. Just like in real life a battleship has alot of different weapons, but most are for a variety of purposes like point defense, shooting at smaller vessels, and theres usually 1 big set of guns or torpedos that can actually harm another battleship. That way for example a Hammerhead would be almost useless against any capital ship but also almost invincible against fighters
Big bubble shields seem like a good idea, but if they are powerful enough to bounce a multicrew ship and a small bullet, then it wouldn’t make sense for a fighter sized in between to make it past them. They could do something like dune shields where slow is allowed but fast isn’t allowed, but I can imagine the physics engine having issues around edge cases.
I think this is the first time in all the video you did I agree with you. And I agree 100%. Especially about the way fighters should be able to take capitals, by not being able to do any damage unless by dropping shields and shooting strategic points, which could make capitals go down either faster if people attacking it know what they do, or literally impossible, if they don't. My only contradiction is torpedoes. I like having capital ship busters under my thumb with nothing else to do to launch them. We don't need skills to use them nor should we need it.
I still think, they, as game developers of a healthy MMO game, still need to iron out a system on how the gameplay should be, not something so ambiguous as what they're saying. Everything should just be according to a system they are designing, then iterate as the game grows. I don't get why does it have to be "Oh we give you the freedom to do whatever"?? Just simplify the gameplay, make it fun.
First, it's a sandbox. You have the freedom to what you want. That was part of the pitch. Secondly, they already outlined the systems a decade ago, but you can't build out gameplay if your foundation isn't complete. Server meshing was only recently completed, so NOW they can start building gameplay on top of it. Everything else you have been playing has mostly been placeholders for the last decade.
I have looked into what already exists, namely the penetration distance damage that weapons do . What we don't know is how thick the armor is on each ship, but I do have some examples here of how deep weapons penetrate. everything is assigned the term pd, penetration distance, because I don't know whether that will be mm or cm or something else. penetration distance ( depending on the weapon, penetration distance from -> to ) s1 = 14 -> 38 s2 = 14 -> 44 s3 = 20 -> 50 s4 = 23 -> 50 s5 = 23 -> 50 s6 = 80 bespoke polaris s6 s7 = 32 for the ares , 50 for the ion s10 = 92 destroyer mass driver There are some surprises here, such as the S6 bespoke of the Polaris, which has a very nice penetration distance. but also the disappointing penetration distance of the ares and the ion. ( although this will certainly be adjusted in the future ) and the 3rd surprise is that from size 3 to 5, all 3 go up to a penetration distance of 50. ( although this will certainly be adjusted in the future ) In any case, I'm looking forward to the Perseus S7 bespoke guns, which I think should have a penetration distance somewhere between 80 and 92.
You're doing a fantastic job! A bit off-topic, but I wanted to ask: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). What's the best way to send them to Binance?
I gotta be honest here, first of all, if people take this kind of criticism personally... well they probably don't have much on their brain. But i gotta say, Avenger always has a relatively fair point, and this might just be because he's just a player wich has a few working brain cells and understands what works and what doesn't in this game, unlike the ones that just complain about everything and offer no solution; some points i share with him, some i don't and that's fair, everyone has a different opinion, but i don't fail to notice how he always offers options that would incentivise player skill wich is something i love, over other less important things. People might criticize him, hate him, whatever they want, but if you're smart you'll understand yourself that he proposes ideas that are not even that far fetched or hard to achieve, compared to the "good looking" kind of gameplay CIG wants to achieve at all cost at the expense of fun and individual player skills
Capital ship combat brought to you by Rich Tyrer, the guy that also hardlines on the FPS TTK and has his subordinates like Zach Preece just outright dismiss valueable feedback on balance matters. Colour me surprised lol
Nah, CIG needs to dismiss most feedback because most people are making suggestions based on placeholders rather than what CIG has internally designed. A lot of the feedback I see just is not good, or completely incompatible with how actual game development works. I spend more time trying to explain the engineering processes to people than actually discussing the game. So whenever I see people say, "CIG needs to listen to the community", I'm inclined to ask, "Which members of the community?" because some of us have more knowlegde about actual software design than others, and in a practical sense, they should only be listening to those of us with actual design expertise and ignore everyone else.
@@Billy-bc8pk that is a terrible take, "they should only be listening to people with actual design expertise and ignore everyone else" is a statement completely debased of reality and highly elitist
@@auburn8833 Think about the irony of saying CIG should listen to the top 1% of PvPers when it comes to tuning, yet also say it's highly elitist to say CIG should only listen to people with design/engineering experience.
I hope they'll take a different approach to capital-ships combat than what they did with the Polaris tbh. Two Polaris circling around each other in CQC while trying to keep their nose aligned isn't what I would've expected from multi-crew capital-ship gameplay personally. We shouldn't have to 'dogfight' in ships of this size. The SQ42 gameplay reveal we had is actually a very good example of what I mean: you see the Bengal, Javelin, Idris, Polaris in a tight formation and moving only tactically, whereas ships of Hammerhead size and smaller roam around to protect them. There's a good space shooter game that understood this well called Star Conflict (made by War Thunder devs). In this game, your control model changes if you use a destroyer (capital equivalent) compared to smaller ships. So you can actually move your camera around while flying, and shoot from broadside at much longer range than smaller ships, which is way more realistic and satisfying in ships of these size. Another good example would be Battlestar Galactica Online for those of you who remember that relic of a game. Those games did destroyer/capital ships combat right. Ofc this wouldn't work the same in Star Citizen since the pilot of a capital-ship doesn't also have control of all weapons, obviously, but they could've at least taken inspiration from this. When I think of fleet battle, I think of lines of massive ships facing each other at long range while smaller, faster ships dogfight in CQC. That's what I thought the Polaris vs Polaris experience would be, especially since it's supposed to be a long range capital-ship killer with S10 torps. Unfortunately, that's not what we got. Instead, a Polaris vs Polaris battle feels the same as with smaller ships, but much slower and taking more time due to the high hp/shield pool. I don't want my Polaris to feel like a multi-crew, overly larger and slower fighter. I want it to feel like a capital-ship. Slow, durable, able to take a shit ton of damage, but also have a much longer range to push Mass Effect-type fleet vs fleet battles, rather than force you to get in CQC.
I have to disagree in one point: the example! The S42 battle was actually pretty terrible from a tactical pov. The UEE fleet was almost stationary the entire time, the Vanduul moved into the line a bit in the second half. That makes no sense. For capital ships goes the same as for fighters: speed is life! Just look at maps from WW battles: Jutland, Midway, Coral Sea etc... ships move and they move alot over the multiple hours those battles lasted. The problem as I see it is, the Polaris is basically what you describe, a (heavy - in comparison to a Perseus as a light) destroyer. Its not really meant for brawls, but for fast (in capital terms) and overwhelming attack runs. This is even what the entire design is layed out for Another side of the problem is weapons range and speed- speed for the ships and the projectiles. To get actuall naval-like combat out of this we need to remember Churchills phrase of "Eggshells with hammers" If such a ship hits its opponent, it should hurt... bad. But at the same time those ships need to be able to move enough to evade shots, and to make that happen their wepoans range has to go up, so that leading a target actually is needed and good gunnery and piloting and especially both combined, is rewarded.
That's exactly what engineering and Maelstrom address -- which is why they said last year the reason they didn't want to add capital ships BEFORE resource management is that they're just a bigger Gladius.
I agree: using torpedoes only when the target ship is almost destroyed isn't ideal. A better approach would be to redesign torpedoes to function more like TV-guided missiles, where the gunner remotely controls their trajectory. Additionally, capital ships should have player-controlled defenses to counter these torpedoes. This would introduce engaging new gameplay mechanics and make it more challenging to take down a capital ship too easily.
I'd like to see CIG emulate the missile combat in Nebulous Fleet Command. Torpedoes with shielding, ECM, erratic closure maneuvers, etc. that can defeat the defenses of an enemy ship. Combat, as it's being developed presently, is going to be so basic and unrealistic that players are going to quickly lose interest in it.
I said before to friends that PDCs strength should come from numbers and overlapping fire from other assets in the fleet, not from singular vessels. Encourage the interaction of fleet based assets in the fleet and make it rewarding to remove them from the enemy forces. I still don't think a proper balance can be achieved in any sort of immediate time frame because IRL missiles are the most deadly threats in naval combat and the evolution of both missiles and countermeasures has changed constantly. They would also have to balance it out with gunboats in mind as missiles IRL also made traditional gun focused ships obsolete due to many factors.
I feel like an easy fix for turrets guns on capital ships and all ships really, would be to give them engineering based tuning. Give them enough capacitor to be able to distribute power into fire-rate and velocity (anti-fighter) vs. projectile range and damage (anti-ship). Also, I feel like component targeting and coordination could be a function of the ships computer size/quality. And for Torps, I think they should definitely be more important throughout the entire fight but having 28 of them... IDK giving too much player control or making them too fast feels a little off, but firing several SHOULD overwhelm defenses.
@@Billy-bc8pkwith all due respect, your fact is irrelevant in many ways. First, this is a video game. Gameplay has priority. Seconly, your fact says nothing about what happens when there is no support ship and two battleships just duel. Thirdly, most encounters in the 'Verse will not be fleet battle. By the way, a U-Boat is exactly what I thought the Polaris would be. A hunter trying to remain undected and deal a serious amount of damage by surprise at long range. Maybe deploy a Hornet Tracker from the hangar to get radar data without having to get close. Make the Polaris easier to detect with each torpedo fired. I don't know really. But there has to be something better than cap ships being just huge fighters in a rate fight. CIG need to be much more creative. Unfortunately it's very late in the development process and I don't think they'll spend time on rethinking that.
27:40 this video is a great refusal to the people who strawman as someone who just want fighter to be powerful. You are literally advocating for fighter to not be the neccesity in this case. I honestly don't think the people in charge in CIG are nerdy enough about naval warfare/ aeronautical dogfight/ theoretical 0-g dogfight
That's literally the opposite of what they said, and even used the SQadron 42 cinematic as a reference to the role of bombers. The light fighters were useless against the kingship, even useless against its shields and its shield emitters -- they needed another larger enemy ship to destroy the emitter. The only way they could damage the capital ship WAS with bombers. Meaning, even if you get the shields down with light, medium, or heavy fighters, you will likely not survive long enough to soft-death the ship with those alone. You NEED bombers to weaken the capital ship significantly.
@Billy-bc8pk king ship may have pds later on, any human capital will have them si on order you need : Scan the Shield to now where you want to focus Bring Big guns to get the Shield down, heavy gun to destroy Shield emitters , destroy turrets then light fighter Can destroy pds. Bonus point if you destroy engine. Now you Can bring bomber for finish move, until pds it's a waste of ressources and the brute force method
Once pdcs are down you should be able to use torps. Or overwhelm pdcs with missiles followed closely by a torp. Basically use missiles as cover for a torp.
Another issue is the PDCs take out torps even when you dummy fire unless you are point blank launching them. It removes the skill element/gameplay of dummy firing torps as well. Obviously subject to change, but currently a shame.
My feeling is one of the things that is going to have to change is the Ion. The whole S7 cannon goes against CIGs whole concept of ships taking time to die, so there is a chance to escape or eject. Smaller cannons arent too much an issue but when you stick an S7 cannon that is supposed to bat down capital ship shields then you have a real balance issue. My feeling is they will need to make it be more like a repeater. If it stays a cannon then they will need to turn it into a brick, so it cant target fighters. Then though it wont be able to evade AA guns so it will have to stay out of range, and if it can hit beyond the range of AA guns then its invulnerable to defenses. The Inferno doesnt seem to have half the issues the Ion does because its a gatling gun and its designed to kill a target with a million small rounds vs 1 big one. The existing charge mechanic is awful and I have doubts they will ever get it to feel right. An alternative idea I had was two different weapon groups. So group one the gun does normal energy damage, with a damage model and fire rate similar to what it was before the charge mechanic was put in place. Light fighters were still a pain then, but heavy fighters and medium/large ships seemed ideal for the gun and its fire rate. Group two now slows the fire rate some, slows the round speed some, increases the energy damage some and it adds a healthy amount of distortion damage. So group one is optimal when doing bounties and you are killing things like a Connie, or Reclaimer and group two becomes more optimal when fighting things like a corvette or bigger.
Actually all you have to do is fly a tiny fighter straight into a capital ship and it will explode. So I don’t understand WTF they are talking about with tiered defence. That’s laughable right now.
Right now we don't have Maelstrom, which is pretty obvious. Ships have HP pools, which is why you can fly a box into it with a multi-tool and eventually blow it up. Maelstrom completely negates that.
I think if you are you turret in this game. You will want it an anti-aircraft turret, not an anti-personal turret, AA turret i don't mean the insane rate of fire that blows up incoming missiles, i mean the flak canon. you can keep the same velocity of the projectile but do a corn area chance to catch the target of each shot and when it catches it deals a bubble area effect, the further the target is the bigger the area becomes basically an upgraded version of SC ship's shotgun but needs a big powerplant to use
In the case of capital vs capital, i think with this style of projectile you force those ships to not only keep moving in 6 direction but also spin themself in close range where you can precision target to protect their own PDC and turret, and the more skilled crew can hit other ship point defend and component more often when the ship is spin
I think the PDCs tuning are fine. Who would want a sophisticated defense system that has a 50/50 chance to be effective. You'd want something to be near perfect. In order to penetrate it, you'd have to make high level strategic executions to bypass and or exploit these systems.
I have an idea that could fix both the armor problem and the geometry problem. What if we made armor penetration based pn projectile velocity instead of weapon size ? Then we make all turret mounted gun higher velocities (because of dedicated capacitors) and boom. Multi crew can engage fighters from further and can penetrate heavily armored targets
Torps should be weapons for taking down shields and/or armour. These aren't precision weapons. Most will be shot down which is where you need saturation of a target for some of them to get through, just like is the case attacking a carrier in DCS. It seems like currently PDCs are already overwhelmed by a lot of targets, which is good.
Since PDCs don’t track dumb fired torps, have you gone back and seen if targeting with the crosshairs has changed with MM and missile/torp speed changes?
For me I would like torps to be fired by the pilot but you have to position them perfectly, you need to find the deadzone of the pdc's if you don't want them to catch em. Why the pilot? otherwise (which is already the case) the 'torp officer' feels like the 'emp officer' in the antares... (a button pusher) Two polarisses slugging it out, without fighters, should be epic! If both teams have a fighter screen then it should become complete mayhem... I really hope CIG can find some competent people to get the flight model and multi crew back on track, cause the current team is not cutting it. I think Titan Fall had a good concept in that aspect. You had kind of a the rock paper siccors between the light, medium, heavy titans. and when you had no titan (at the start or when it was destroyed) you would walk on the ground, pilots on the ground are extremely mobile and required a lot of skill to actual take down a titan. they are however very good at taking out each other. So if you where slugging it out against other titans you would not pay attention to players on foot cause they where wrapped up fighting each other. but when you destroyed all titans of the other team, 3 skilled players on foot working together could become threat again for enemy titans. I was really hoping cig would take some cue's from titan fall, it was really well balanced in that respect.
there is a larger issue that ties into this: they can't even do point defense, yet. it's been more than ten years and they can not design an automated point defense that works for larger ships. they are more worried as a company over programming planetary fauna than they are basic game dynamics. they have issues with basic ship completion and updates, but they spent millions of manhours making clouds pretty. they waste their efforts on minutia before they have basic game functionality and as they continue down this lane, basic problems are amplifying (mice are swelling to elephantine sizes). the people in charge of basic game functionality and balance are NOT up to the challenge (whether this is a matter of improper priorities or improper resourcing or improper manning)...
@@Billy-bc8pk you do know you pointed out something entirely irrelevant, right? the point you failed to make (but, none the less, obliquely highlighted) is that an inordinate amount of resources were wasted on a matter of low importance to the game...
@@Billy-bc8pk resources used on accomplishing secondary and tertiary goals when primary goals are not met are wasted. what would you consider THE single, primary goal of SC as a game (not some other game you'd like to be playing, but SC as originally conceptualized by chris)?...
@@CruentusV If you look at the original Kickstarter -- exploration, since one of the biggest selling points was 100 star systems, and then obviously combat. The fact that they built out the game with 64-bit floating point coordinates, and a new middleware suite in Genesis specifcally to build out POIs for exploration, I would say that it makes up a large part of the immersive experience.
But as per normal maelstrom + crew is being ignored. Engineering gameplay + onboard marines is the counter to both hacking/boarding. While engineering game play is the possible counter to hard killing the ship being attacked. Time to disable is what they want to get to less than time to kill. What they have described sounds fine...it also gets rid of solo cap ship in it's entirety which was always dumb. Stripping the shields destroying the emitters while the engineering team tries to get them back up/rerouted/components repaired is very much a Star Trek way of doing this. Broadly speaking CIG are taking the right approach here. There's nothing stopping an attacking team destroying a ship with fighters and torps before the PDCs and all of the shields/emitters and components are knocked out. EG blowing the manned turret off and creating an ingress point/weak spot in the hull has all sorts of potential uses....it's just going to be difficult to do and use a lot of resource to do it. Avengers apparently fighter biased approach doesn't really incentivise ship boarding which is a whole big gameplay loop in itself and really lends itself to combined arms type gameplay. Which creates another level of attacker vs defender. This does get it away from the big fighter approach we have right now. Torpedo guidance options I'm sure will arrive to be combined with precision targeting as that's probably the only thing that's really missing.
18:15 I disagree, they should have to destroy or bypass that protective "screen" before being able to engage torps. Ballistic weapon still punch through shields so if you don't want to drop the shields, use ballistics to take out the point defense guns
being able to "fly" the torp would be sick
That definitley needs to be added to the game, sort of like the remote missiles in Battlefront 2.
ive been thinking of battlefield tv missiles in this game forever
Torpedo? That would be fun 😂
I took those excessively loud discord notifications personally!
Sorry about that
@@Avenger__One Was more funny than anything, made me check if I was actually in a VC haha
@@Lightfall-vt4yh exactly xD no hate just a fun note
I'd just lean into what they've been doing: shields debuff energy weapons, armor debuffs ballistic. You still get the bonus to ballistic, which it needs because ammunition is finite, and thus it's not as debuffed by shields. Then you apply that debuff based on the size of the shield and the size of the armor. If the sum is greater than the damage, then that weapon doesn't do any damage to that target. I'd think that S3 would be the cutoff for harming cap ships, so S3 would still be doing damage, but it would be minimal, and if the shields are up, good luck.
"If you take what I'm saying personally that is your problem not mine!"
...
And I took that personally
😂 god I love memes
The torpedo bit sounds great. Having an option to either lock and fire or take manual control of the torpedo would add some awesome gameplay. That would add a layer to electronic warfare/hacking too, ships like the vanguard sentinel could activate some jamming device to stop manual control of torpedos or drones.
Hello, citizens. I wanted to write a lot, but I’ll limit myself to a : "Don’t count your chickens before they hatch."
Great video. You always bring up some good points. Regarding the problem with current gun sizes, I think that size 4 guns on a small fighter was alway bogus game design. Light and medium fighters should have size 1 and 2 weapons. Heavy fighters size 3, corvettes size 4 to 5 and sizes 6 and up should be capital only. Size 4 weapons on a small ship like the hornet mk2 are insane and are really just there to sell the ship with a promise of it being overpowered. I would not be surprised if all these gun size inflations with the "new" ships will get nerfed to oblivion once the actually start looking at balance. The biggest problem with CIG is that they always talk about balance concepts, but they are not balancing the game at all. And they will never do it untill the need for selling fantasy ship concept to bring in money goes away. As long as marketing is driving development, the next ship sale is always going to massively break any balance they had. They are just bullshitting us.
Only the polaris requires more ships to take down a capital.
As it lacks the weapons to prepare its targets for torps, unless your dumb firing but that comes with extreme risks, you have to get close and hope your torp doesnt get shot when launched and still within blast radius of the polaris.
This also breaks the game design cig want as it will make capital battles quicker than large ship battles.
All other capitals can weaken and destroy eachother - but even the victor would suffer extreme damages, to win without taking damage you need the 'support fleet'.
Best scenario - enemy capital doesn't have a fleet to counter yours or your fleet eradicates theirs allowing you to disarm the enemy before approaching weapons range of the target capital.
Heavy Fighter: Rock
Fighter: Paper
Turret: Scissors
Armor: Gun 😂
bomber eating glue until the combat is nearly done, "I am helping!"
Rock is actually just a scrunched up ball of paper.
@@zelange69ma heart 😂
Gunship: Rock
Bombers: Paper
Fighters: Scissors
A fully functioning PD system should stop all missles and torpedoes 99% of the time. That is perfectly IRL representation in game. They should also be of some effect against large projectiles and dumbfire. I win button denied until you destroy or deplete the defense. Hopefully more ships get that treatment and missile boats become a more strategic weapon. 👍👍
There should be another way, and that is overload PDS. We will be testing it soon with my orgmates, but basically we want to see if firing a torpedoe amongst a dozen rattlers can overwhelm the PDS, sort of blind it, and hit with the torpedoe.
Point defenses being 99% effective is objectively untrue in real life, and as a game mechanic, it shouldn't be a binary guaranteed/bypassed condition. In real life, fleet/area/point defenses are not defeated via being destroyed, they are defeated via mass. Mass can be achieved in a variety of ways, but the most common is through saturation. Every fleet of warships, depending on the situation, their capabilities, and effectiveness, will have a critical mass at which a certain weapon system, depending on its own situation, capabilties, and effectiveness as well, will overwhelm an adversarial defense network through sheer weight of numbers. This in turn guarantees you a limited number of hits for weapons spent. Mass can also take other forms, such as electronic warfare, or launched decoys (a la MALD), but the general effect is the same.
Point defenses are anything but an "I win" button. They are the last, final, desperate hope and prayer of a multi-layered, tiered defense network of multiple concentric rings, the opening layers of which are typically some kind of aerial fighter/air superiority asset, and/or a fleet defense warship responsible for the safety of the fleet as a whole. A strike package must ingress through these initial broad rings, which are typically the most robust layers of a fleet's defenses (ERAM, ASTER, Aegis, PAAMS, etc.), and then penetrate into the local area defenses of individual ships, which may or may not be overlapping one another. Here, they must survive active hardkill measures, such as medium-range SAMs (ESSM, ASTER, etc.), as well as softkill measures, such as seduction and distraction jamming, frequency-agile radars, thermal decoys, and in more modern times, even things such as electronic virus attacks. If the attack pushes through these layers, only now do point defenses come into play.
In order to defeat a saturation strike, your most powerful allies are time and distance. This is why you see modern navies investing much more in technologies that expand both the distance of their awareness, and their fidelity within it. Point defenses are certainly evolving, yes, but not to the same degree as a fleet's ability to defeat a strike at distance. Fleet defense is your primary defender, the largest circle. The farther out you detect a threat, the longer it takes the threat to reach your ship. The more time you have for the threat to reach your ship, the more time you have to engage threats, re-engage unsuccessful engagements, build passive defenses like chaff and decoy clouds, etc. The more time you have to wear down the strike to a defeated state.
Threats to warships nowadays are not defeated primarily via point defenses. They are defeated primarily at distance. Point defenses are not a reliable method with which to defend a warship, and the biggest threat to a warship, massed saturation strikes, are most effective at defeating point defenses.
Electronic Warfare could also be a good way to deal with PDC as well.
@Mike5Brown It certainly could, as could a more complex missile system. I think the biggest issue with that is gameplay, though. Most players aren't military strategy enthusiasts, and trying to understand how to use and evade missiles isn't intuitive. It can be unfun to play against. Electronic warfare is much the same.
I agree completely that SC should really bring on some deeper gameplay mechanics beyond just nose-on dogfighting for every ship type (nose-on is fine for fighters, but nothing else should fight like that), and more complex missile systems and EW could be great options to do that. But they need to be careful to not make things *too* complex for the basic everyday player.
Completely agree with the more hands-on torpedoe gameplay, that would be so much more interesting. I love when you compare the Polaris to just an enormous gladius, it's exactly what we've been seeing for the length of Save Stanton phase III: Polaris kiting the Idris, trying to stay in the back, while the Idris, which is even a bigger whale, tries to align it's railgun. Absolutely not a capital ships fight.
They changed torpedoes from a meaningful first strike threat to a neglectable finish move... really sad day for any Polaris owner as it's torpedoes are its main weaponry.
In my opinion non target locked torpedoes should be laser guided. They should also be harder to shoot down than small missiles. A volley of four "capital ship killer torpedoes" ( this is how CIG calls them btw) should pose a threat and not be shrugged off because PDC is still active.
what? totally depends what you are shooting against. It will take down a hammerhead with one torps that hits it. You are thinking with a brain that only seen it fight a super pve buffed Idris with 44 million hp.
Honestly I think the torps should be manually controlled, I've been saying that to my group forever now. Smaller missiles should home, and the torps should be an aiming and timing skill check.
For me gold standard of space combat was in Free Space 2, you were piloting fighter, your primary job was to take care of enemy fighters and bombs (SC torpedoes). Only fighters had shields, large ships were just too large for fighters, you could have destroyed their subsystems but almost never entire ships. Large ships were firing at each other with very distinct weapons: beam weapons, large to target large ships and small to target fighters and bombs.
I like the multiple shield faces because it's like Star Trek. In Star Trek you have different shields for different sections of the ship, and if you have to disengage in reverse, you put 'em up higher on the front. If you want to turn tail and run, you can just put the shields up on the rear. This adds a ton of tactical options for larger ships that you don't get in other games. It also makes multi-crew a lot more important because you have someone just working the shield faces -- there was a video where a multi-crew org was doing this in a Hammerhead, actively using the different shield faces based on positional attacks, which was very tactical and cool. Evolving that for large squad gameplay means it requires a lot more strategy from all sides.
Torps and missiles should have evasive patterns and be stupid fast. As there is no human to crush with G Force. Reference: The Expanse
Seems like part of this would be easy to fix if small enough guns simply do no damage at all to Capital class shields and or armor. I'm not sure where the cutoff should be, and maybe it should depend on the class or quality of components and armor, but when they say a pistol being shot at a tank does very little, that's not true. A pistol being shot at a tank does absolutely nothing. And a rifle fired at the side of a battleship similarly does nothing. You should have to have a minimum amount of damage coming from the hit in order to do anything, or perhaps some other stat for projectiles related to penetration. But basically, most fighters should be able to do nothing at all to a capital ship. Maybe damaging some weak spots or external components, but that's it. No actual hull damage.
This won't work because most turrets have the same weapon sizes as most fighters. So by making fighters useless against cap ships, you are also making turrets useless against cap ships. Then the only way to damage a cap ship will be torpedoes which, funnily enough, are also useless because of PDCs
@@_Anaklysmos_ They could add a individual stat like the person said above, opting for customizable penetration values. Armor penetration would likely be different for the size of the ships armor as well. For instance, ships which do have larger guns.
I don't know how much the limitations would be, I wonder if it would be more like for a Polaris Armor, anything S3 and below would be useless on penetrating armor but would play a role in disabling turrets. Where as S4 and higher would be useful for targeting armor itself. However for say a Perseus receiving armor, maybe that limitation would be for weapons S2 and lower, with S3 or higher being able to work against armor. These are just examples of how it could potentially work.
@@_Anaklysmos_ I thought "ship to ship" turrets often have size 5 and up? Size 1-2 could be fast firing for saturation against small targets (missiles and light fighters), 3-4 could hit harder for bigger fighters and mid size multicrew ships (Connie and such), and then 5+ could be the things that can actually hard capital ships. Or something along those lines. Turrets with size 3 or 4 could be great for fending off mid size stuff, they don't necessarily have to hurt cap ships.
I think as a shorter term solution, making the main way of doing damage to larger ships being to target components (internal and external) with hull damage doing very little would help a fair bit with the geometry problem, especially if those components on larger ships tend to be smaller than the fighters or require them to be closer to do damage etc.
Maybe one way you could do that is by introducing a penetration mechanic, or something like that, where the closer a fighter is the more it penetrates, so while you might be able to damage components on the surface of a capital ship by kiting it, you shouldn't be able to kill it or take out too many critical systems without closing distance. In other words, you could introduce a mechanic similar to what you see in games like "War Thunder" for example, where there is a penetration/deflection element to firing through the hull on a ship. The larger the ship, and the higher the "armor", the more likely that ship is to deflect or "shatter" the incoming fire. The higher caliber the weapon, the less likely it is to be deflected/shattered. The closer you are to the target, (and I know this is a little arcadey but that is where we are at with this game) the less likely it is deflect/penetrate. Weapons, whether laser or kinetic, have a penetration distance proportinate to their remaining "range" when the round contacted the enemy. In addition to affecting a delfection/shatter chance, more heavily "armored" ships can have higher internal density (reflecting internal armoring, or depending on the ship type, like industrial vs military) which serves as a multiplier on how far the round penetrates inside the hull.
While Hull's can accumulate damage, it shouldn't mean too much on its own and it should take an absurd accumulation of damage to the hull of a larger ship to cause it to be destroyed, if at all possible. I would say that maybe as the hull accumulates damage, its "density" is reduced, meaning shots penetrate further and further into it, but low caliber weapons should do very little to effect hull structure/density. Instead, the goal should be damaging internal and external components that are smaller than the fighters firing on it, thus requiring fighters to close distance to hit them consistently. Maybe you could have a "sparking effect" when you damage or hit near an internal component, to give feedback on what is effective or not. Kinetic weapons vs. laser weapons could have different penetration profiles, with kinetic rounds penetrating in a straight line that penetrates deeper, but laser rounds cause "spalling" and have multiple shorter vectors inside the capital ship.
I like the idea of this system because I think it scales well for capital vs. capital warfare, and fighter vs capital warfare. By adjusting armor/density values across different ship sizes, you should be able to get a smooth gradient of ships survivability being proportionate to their size/crew count.
In my view, the goal should be to allow people to play in multiple ways effectively, and ideally whether you are a squadron of 5 fighter pilots, or a 5 man gunship, your combat potential should be about proportional all else being equal.
In the long term, they should introduce a precision mode to the turrets that not only allows them to shoot more accurately, but increases the velocity of the turret rounds by 50% or something.
This would play into the tiered/layered combat they were talking about, where maybe early on in an engagement between fighters and a capital ship, the fighters can kite, which gives them a defensive advantage, (though hopefully not too significant of one, if the large ship turrets can go into precision mode and still hit shots on the fighters, especially if they are moving slowly to use their own precision mode) but from a distance/kiting they can only damage some components, maybe making the larger ship more vulnerable. After the large ship has been weakened by kiting, the fighters have to close distance and engage in much closer range to actually do critical/crippling damage to the larger ship.
Alternatively, the fighters could close distance from the very beginning in order to do more critical damage from the start of the engagement, but this would involve taking on a lot more risk as you would be engaging the large ships weapons in their more optimal range/configuration.
35:02 I love this idea of a large bubble shield only issue is that Master Modes has us moving way to slow for that. Imo get rid of master modes for more exciting high speed fights. Maybe decrease time to kill for light fighters. High risk high reward
Hey Avenger, I really liked this video, I think it touched on a couple important aspects of the game that I hope CIG addresses in the future. I really liked your video on geometry in SC, and I hope CIG does something to address engagement distances and projectile speeds in the future.
11:23 Here I would argue in CIG's favour. Killing capital ships should require weapons specifically for their weight class, for a few different reasons. It would encourage a diverse airwing in terms of player specialties and types, maybe some players are better suited to attacking capital ships with ships like the Ares, and some like dogfighting more so they take Hornets. I would also argue that most players aren't going to tolerate a fight dragging on forever like a Monopoly game. If your ship has been stripped of turrets and other tools to defend itself with, and you're waiting for the next 20 minutes to drag by while a Hornet outside sprays your ship with peashooters, people are probably going to exit to menu lol If you're going to invest in capital ship gameplay, the weapons involved in hunting them should be powerful enough to have a reasonable TTK. Does that mean fighters can't kill capital ships? Yes, at least not if they don't have a way to equip anti-capital ship weapons. But then I would argue that fighters should be focused on protecting their ship-killer friends. With regards to gun sizes on these capital ships, not every weapon on a capital ship should be capable of damaging another capital ship. Using the Polaris as an example, the only weapons it has that should be engaging enemy capital ships are its torpedos and S6 bow turret. The other smaller turrets onboard are for defending the ship from fighters. A large ship will require a variety of weapons to use against a variety of threats. Weapons shouldn't be one-size-fits-all, the ship should be outfitted with a few different weapon systems for a variety of likely threats, both in an offensive and defensive nature.
23:49 I definitely agree with your assessment on torpedos in particular, and multicrew ship mechanics in general. Torpedos should be an opening weapon, something that fleets begin an engagement with. As fleet begin to make contact and look to win a positional advantage or begin to close the distance to gun range, an opening torpedo barrage could be a great tool a fleet could use to counter an enemy rushing into their own poorly-positioned fleet to buy themselves time to group up properly, or it could be used by that same opponent to cement an advantage in an adversary caught at a bad moment as they rush in. Whether that's in a barrage or player-guided single shots is dependent on the situation and players involved, but the main point is that having torpedos in a niche to kill an already-finished ship is pointless. Multicrew large ship gameplay should require a degree of skill and intelligence in terms of positioning and supporting fires with allies, and a torpedo barrage could be a fantastic tool in breaking up a well-positioned enemy, or crippling a poorly-positioned one. A torpedo barrage should be the SWAT door ram that your fleet rushes in behind to gun range. I also agree that more multicrew combat should be fought from an all-aspect sense, in that the ship's bridge crew should all have access to their own sensor rings, and they should be able to cue up weapon systems onto enemy targets and engage them with that sensor ring display, instead of requiring the ship to be nose-on all the time. This could provide for missileers and torpedomen being their own distinct roles on multicrew ships, much like engineers are about to be. Missileers could also help add to the defense of a ship, and a CO having their own sensor ring to point out and designate specific targets or waypoints for weapons officers and navigational officers to engage or move to could be a super handy tool.
28:32 Going back to my previous statement about weapons on capital ships, these large ships should be violent, scary threats to those around them. A modern destroyer is a very harrowing threat to modern aircraft. Aircraft are a only a threat to modern sea-going warships if used in coordinated numbers, with weapons specifically for killing warships. In much the same way, warship-vs-warship combat can be a very violent affair, with many modern anti-ship weapons being very cutting-edge, blisteringly-fast, intelligent, violent weapon systems. Having two capital ships going after one another shouldn't be like watching paint dry. It should be like watching mom and dad fight. No one's going to enjoy it, and there's going to be a big mess and an awkward silence after. I absolutely agree that large ship combat shouldn't be a slow process. Capital ships are the core of your fleet, and provide the bulk of your firepower, survivability, and bulk. They certainly fight better with supporting assets, yes, but there isn't a more powerful single ship out there than a modern guided missile destroyer.
29:16 I think it's a little concerning here how CIG talks a lot about how fighters interact with capital ships, but they don't seem to have a lot of vision regarding how capital ships interact with capital ships. What are capital ships supposed to be doing during all this time while fighters are whittling away at their modules and subsystems? Twiddling their fingers? They will be fighting, obviously, and if they're engaging another capital ship... why isn't your capital ship slapping the snot out of the enemy capital ship? Why is everything apparently the responsibility of the screening ships and fighters? lol
30:39 I assume the intention here is that while lower on raw DPS output, the weapon systems on the Ares is big enough to actually damage capital-class components, where a Hornet cannot. An infantry assault rifle will have a much higher rate of fire than a Javelin ATGM, but then, they are designed to function against wildly different threats. You wouldn't use an assault rifle to kill a tank, and you wouldn't use an ATGM to clear a structure. Whatever the DPS those two unrelated weapon systems have is purely anecdotal.
37:42 I'm genuinely confused by what these guys are saying here. What they are offering here only makes sense if this defending capital ship is by itself against an enemy fighter group. If it is, why not just decline the engagement and quantum out? If there's an enemy capital ship, it should be engaging that. A lot of what CIG seems to be envisioning in capital ship combat seems to be predicated on capital ships being these static backliners wandering around and not moving very much. I don't see anyone in SC's player base using their capital ships in that way at all. They are going to be very much in the fight trying to blow crap up, not waiting around to get swarmed by Hornets. CIG doesn't seem to understand how their own game works and plays sometimes. So much of their gameplay loop around taking down capital ships seems to rely on fighter stripping away components one-by-one, and no one's going to tolerate the amount of time it takes to do all that. Capital ships are going to be directly engaging one another, not waiting around like NPCs. Once their capital ship reaches a point of no return in terms of damage, they'll just suicide rush the nearest enemy or self-destruct or return to menu. No one's going to wait around helplessly for 20 minutes while a swarm of fighters nibbles their non-functional capital ship to death.
A 890jumps pdc ate my cutty black, like it was nothing.
Just roll at 1100 meters away, keep your nose on him and roll baby, EZ
@@Avenger__One those weapon sizes won't do anything eventually. The shields will just eat your shots and regen.
@@durtyred86 Key word. Eventually. right now, shits fucked.
@@GunnarGotGame that's a part of the process big dog. Seasoned steak doesn't come seasoned and ready to eat from scratch. It's a bloody process. This too, is a messy process. They could do more, but it'll probably just create new issues overtime.
@@durtyred86 I feel you. Still sucks that they gutted a flawed but mature and deep flight model for one with the depth of a puddle and the width of a hair and left it alone for six months to work on other shit
Great ideas. I agree with most of your thoughts. People that disagree with all your points have copium blinders on, can’t critically think, or are greedily protecting an advantage they want.
I appreciate your critical thinking, Analyse, explanations, and that you represent fighter pilots and Multicrew players interests.
Controlled missile idea sounds fun and skilled.
Imagine if sea of thieves had two galleons fight each other and it never would work. You need to bring your dingies lol.
That's a funny mental picture lol😂
not me i use my polaris to baby ram your ship this is not to ram damage hull it to try to pin your ship from being able to face me if my nose is preventing you to angle ship and if the nose of my ship can rub your turrets i probably disable some of your turrets...
a fight should be mostly determined by how many players you can bring to aid the battle skill will matter but quantity should be the main factor what tools you use should be next best then skill should be third
Completely agree with being able to fly torps, like in battlefield helicopters, and have the ability to turn off the booster and let it coast into the target with a dampened signature.
Completely disagree with bubble shields on cap ships. If anything it should be the opposite where small craft have bubble shields, and large+ ships have segmented shields because it is harder for one generator to cover the whole ship. We should be rewarded for good coordination and focus fire on large targets.
A “floating” shield around the cap ships sounds like a good idea but conflicts with your KISS mentality. A pain to program. Why are cap ships deflected off the shield while small ships are not? Is it size? Speed? What about torps and missiles? Why are fighters immune? Would all kinetic entities pass through shields? Lots of questions on that.
Interesting food for thought overall.
I have to present a counter argument to your bubble shield concept because the shield cannot both allow fighters to pass through it and deflect kamikaze fighters. Those are mutually exclusive mechanics.
It also presents complications with missiles. Do missiles bypass the shield or do they blow up on its exterior? This issue should be solvable, but creating a solution that fits the rest of the game seems like it would take too long.
I think what they have for shields works fine as it is. Being able to move shield faces around gives it an added layer of tactics you don't get in other space sims.
19:03. Having a mini game for the torpedo operator would be very fun.
27:20 this would only be a thing if two Polarii fight against eachother.
The Polaris is the only capital ship with peashooters and the 500k each anti-cap torps that are meant to be used after the fight is over already.
They want it to be a ranged-ship rather than a brawler but the torpedos are only useful in close-range dumbfire scenarios.
The Idris for example has the S10 railgun (with 5000 m/s projectile speed), dual s7 anti-capital guns and lots of s5 guns, it wont have any of the Polaris issues.
For energy based weapons modifying the weapon characteristics not only on hardpoint but also powerplant size could be a way to distinguish size4 cap ship turret guns from size4 guns on a fighter. Not sure what to do about ballistic weapons though because power plant intraction makes little sense here.
Torpedos, in real life, travel at roughly 10 knots faster than your typical warship max speed, and operate on passive sonar or are wire-guided. They should be easy to destroy by point defense weapons if they are launched solo. It should take squadrons of small ships to take out a capital ship, and that would have to include bombers and torpedo ships. Fighters do not have large enough weaponry to do damage through the armor and shields of a capital ship's size do not carry the firepower to destroy capital ships. Only bombs and torpedoes should be able to destroy capital ships, fighters are only there to keep the enemy fighters off the ships delivering those bombs and torpedoes. Maybe they could destroy point defense and maybe light gun turrets, but armor on a capital ship is far too heavy for the guns of a fighter. I dont know why you're bitching bro. Unless you dont understand how carrier fleet engagements work. They showed how things are going to work during the Squadron 42 gameplay. I thought it was cool.
I thought the Squadron 42 gameplay was awesome too. The tactical way fleet management worked and reduced role of light fighters to support attacks were cool to me. I also thought it made the bombers look really cool and very powerful.
I would suggest that the Polaris main armament consists of the size 10 torpedoes and the bespoke size 6 turret. The rest of the guns are part of the layered defense.
I always thought that the smaller (size 4 ish) guns on larger ships were exactly that. Anti-fighter turrets. Granted they dont work too well right now
Agreed torpedos need a MUCH higher ceiling 😊
I so hope Rich and the team watch this react. One of your better discussions - direct, intelligent and constructive. 😎
With engineering, and advanced scanning, all the elements are there to find, highlight, and send a subcomponent as a target to a fighter squadron.
The same system that displays our components to the pilot and engineer on a ship can be used to identify those same elements in an enemy ship
Size 4 guns on a Polaris won’t (may not) be useful against another Polaris, but could be as useful against fighters (if they can fix geometry issues and turret control)
This was showin in squadron, as the gunner had both smaller size guns for fighters, and larger size guns for larger ships. And swapping between.
Cig: Give us money so we can afford our lavish office space.
Avenger: Imagine if they could make a game.
Spicy opinions are my favorite!
Seems like the way that CIG plans to resolve the geometric issue for large ships is physicalized damage where in order to disable a ship you need to penetrate the hull and do component damage. This would make critical points that would allow smaller weapons to cause real damage to large ships, but would also mean that the larger the ship and the more spread out the components the larger the apparent health pool. I don't think that's something CIG is at all ready to balance since component placement to date has largely been convenience based and not part of ship TTK/TTD design.
I also think that the torpedo gameplay is very poor.
I don’t understand how they didn’t make a torpedo control system in the future. Why will torpedo bombers be needed?
just to finish off the ship faster?
Avenger, ignore torps. They're expensive and when you fire them it's for mass destruction. So like rich said board or super fuck up the ship
I like your ideas for the torpedo gunner. Give them the guidance, or tethering. This sounds cool!
Capital ships should resolve each other...
Nice take on cap ship! The bubble makes sense to me…
The other thing with lots of shield facings is that it encourages capital ships to roll continuously, but that makes being a player gunner an awful experience. They are not thinking about this from all perspectives, they are thinking ship v ship, and fighter vs target. Not crew running around inside the washing machines with force reactions as they are trying to change a lightbulb. Also the 'character giving blind spots" given to all major capital ships years ago when the stern crewed turrets went away means that fighters will just fly behind major capitals and sit there until they win.
Which is precisely why having shield faces and forcing capital ships to roll is necessary for keeping strategies fresh. No one piloting the ship is going to sit there and let someone stay on the rear blind side -- and thanks to shield faces, they can just overload the rear shield faces to prevent taking any significant damage.
With everything slowed down, the torpedoes pretty much crawl across the battlespace. There's no point to a long engagement range if the target could just turn back.
What you mentioned about manual control of torpedoes and reducing signature? Look at how "Nebulous Fleet Command" handled it. Heavy torpedoes can carry additional decoys, reduced signature ... or have a smaller kinetic penetrator warhead inside of a large frame. This adds a lot more nuance to missile gameplay than just lock and shoot.
from what i know is size 1-3 is max effect small 4-5 max damage med 6-7 is for large 8-10 is for extra large to shoot smaller ships will be limited with weapon grouping and to attack a ship 1 size larger you do half damage 2 sizes higher is no damage shooting ships 2 sizes smaller may be nerfed into oblivion. most weapons on cap ships are ment for small and medium and some large but few cap ships will be able to effect cap ships armor and shield resistance
Armor + armor pen stats on weapons would fix alot of these issues... a s2 laser shouldn't pen the armor of a capital ship but s7 should
If you take what I'm saying personal, THAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, NOT MINE, AND THAT'S DIRECTLY POINTED AT SOME PEOPLE WITHIN CIG AS WELL
200 IQ Avenger again. 💀
Ehh, no need to be smarmy about it.
I probably know they are trying to explain something but after 12 years I'm unable to listening to the BS CIG is saying... they try to explain something and say look at cinematics... i got alergic to this BS how the leaders who are there to explain things are allowed to spread such a BS... cinematics like Reclaimer and his Claw Munching never manifested in any gameplay and they come here and dare to say look at cinematic... i'm alergic to this BS can't listen to this anymore, why are they still talking shit instead of producing good game... i literaly lost ability to listen to them cause it never came to anything good... here & there i check A1 videos to get some update about game state but that's all... at least he is around but I gave up on game with this fly model can't stand it
I respectfully disagree with your suggestion to add markers on ships for components like the power plant. While it might help new pilots initially, it removes an important skill-based element of the game. Part of becoming a good pilot is learning the locations of key components on different ships. Adding markers risks oversimplifying this aspect, which could diminish the depth of gameplay.
Actually he agrees with you about that. He said they should NOT have marker outlines on ship components within the ship. I actually disagree that they should not have markers, because I'll be honest, I have no clue where components are on most ships from the outside. It's completely different when you're inside. Trying to calculate where the components are by memory is just kind of a crap shoot for most of us who are not ace pilots. Now... what I will say is that certain spec grade radars/scanners should allow you to scan and get an outline of marker ship components, whereas industrial or civilian grade radars should not allow you to get that info easily.
Thanks for sharing
Missile torpedo operator really does need to be much more than press the fire button. I would love to command the torpedo in flight to bring it onto the target, and aim for the right spot. If load, lock, and fire is all there is to missile operator, it might as well be the commander - because particularly on the Retaliator, the entire ship only has 6 shots, and pressing the button 6 times is just not going to cut it for anyone other than a second account alt. Destroyers are meant to hunt down and kill enemy ships ... if they cannot solo kill other capitals, there is a big problem.
Being a gunner a few times. The Polaris was always rolling, dodging. I often came to a point I couldn`t rotate the turret fast enough or had invisible walls of firing arcs. Was not what I imagened it should be. It was a pain. I also lacked an overview. What is an enemy or a player who was red, what kind of ship is this I am dealing with? The useful information is much too small. There was no pip in Precision mode either.
They make big ships to be just huge fighters and rate fight each other, relying on agility way too much.
“Monkey pull stick hahaha” has to be the first lesson in ship combat. Add it to the basics playlist!
“Small is better!” - Thank you!! My wife still won’t believe me.
Realism aside, what about being able to participate in an encounter and feeling like you're doing something meaningful and having fun? I like the SW approach much better than simply rendering weapons under a certain size useless vs ships of a certain size and up.
Your torpedo ideas are really cool. I feel like it would make people fight over who gets to man the torpedoes.
Yes, but the Star Wars approach doesn't include combined arms, nor capital ship tactics (since you can't actually fly them). The cap ships in that game are essentially giant static targets, so that everyone flying in the fighters feel like the hero.
@@Billy-bc8pk I feel like proper combined arms will be a very rare thing to see and hard to organize in this game. Much more often you'll just see a bunch of people thrown together, each with whatever they were able to bring and I think that needs to feel fun and engaging for everyone.
@@Pulciu Funnily enough, during Xenothreat, nearly every Idris was boarded at some point by players. So I think it will happen whenever possible.
Agree with too many shield faces. Front and back seems perfect enough for ALL ships
I would like to see PDCs more akin to something like the expanse, highly accurate ballistic gatling's with limited ammo. This would make PDCs more like other expendable countermeasures and give target the defense against the 'I win button" while making torps still a viable threat in a quick saturation or sustained combat. You could also have crew on board reloading PDCs or clearing jams giving more role to engineering gameplay down the line and pilot skill of knowing which PDCs are low or empty on ammo and rotating the ship to give PDCs with sufficient ammo line of sight on incoming torps.
Not only did they give the Polaris less turret dps than a hammerhead, no we can also run out of ammo. 5 minutes into a battle our turret ammo is depleted and we are left with LESS than half the turret dps of a hammerhead. in the ISC ironclad is rad they said and i quote: "we are looking at upgunning the polaris so it is not just a topedo boat it can hold its own against other capital ships with its turrets". where the hell is the upgunning ? what the hell are we supposed to do in battle ? sit there and wait til the the rest of the fleet has done their job and the WE step in to act when its all done anyways ? Polaris is by far, ship wise, the biggest disapointment in CIG history.
Rearming gameplay is missing for now
🍼
Sorry I do not take your point. Sounds like a lot of nonsense to me. Out of the ballistic bespoke gun which other ammo are depleted?
@ the rear missile turret
@@TheNikosawa Thorston mentioned that rearming is coming with resource management as part of the charge/drain mechanic. You will be able to rearm your turrets on cap ships.
To make disparity of ship size issues work, just give shields a recharge rate while it's under fire. Light fighters would never be able to solo a large vessel. Torpedoes in the lore were highly dangerous to a cap-ship without wearing the ship down. The also had the ability to skip/jump to get to the target.
Torpedoes being a passive finisher is very offputting. Where is the gameplay?
RIGHT!!
The part about two capitals fighting. If its two Polaris, they are by design a support capital that relies on torps right, so it kinda makes sense that if both have point defense the trops wont make it to the other. I do agree the torp implementation is dumb and needs to be fixed, however, but ideally, they should be able to punch a whole through shields from long range and need to be checked by a forward group. But I think an Idris vs a Polaris for example the Idris will win most of the time, since it 1. has more support vessels inside it (mini carrier), and 2. has a rail gun that can do massive damage to the Polaris shields. I would like it if the Polaris would have tools to use those torps from long range and force the Idris to engage closer up. All this is just theory though, we are yet to see how any of this plays out.
I like the idea of most guns not being usefull in cap ship battles.
Then capital kills would need big torpedoes, or Idris railgun shots, or sustained fire from like, a size 6 and up.
Just like in real life a battleship has alot of different weapons, but most are for a variety of purposes like point defense, shooting at smaller vessels, and theres usually 1 big set of guns or torpedos that can actually harm another battleship.
That way for example a Hammerhead would be almost useless against any capital ship but also almost invincible against fighters
Big bubble shields seem like a good idea, but if they are powerful enough to bounce a multicrew ship and a small bullet, then it wouldn’t make sense for a fighter sized in between to make it past them. They could do something like dune shields where slow is allowed but fast isn’t allowed, but I can imagine the physics engine having issues around edge cases.
I think this is the first time in all the video you did I agree with you. And I agree 100%. Especially about the way fighters should be able to take capitals, by not being able to do any damage unless by dropping shields and shooting strategic points, which could make capitals go down either faster if people attacking it know what they do, or literally impossible, if they don't.
My only contradiction is torpedoes. I like having capital ship busters under my thumb with nothing else to do to launch them. We don't need skills to use them nor should we need it.
I still think, they, as game developers of a healthy MMO game, still need to iron out a system on how the gameplay should be, not something so ambiguous as what they're saying.
Everything should just be according to a system they are designing, then iterate as the game grows. I don't get why does it have to be "Oh we give you the freedom to do whatever"??
Just simplify the gameplay, make it fun.
First, it's a sandbox. You have the freedom to what you want. That was part of the pitch. Secondly, they already outlined the systems a decade ago, but you can't build out gameplay if your foundation isn't complete. Server meshing was only recently completed, so NOW they can start building gameplay on top of it. Everything else you have been playing has mostly been placeholders for the last decade.
I have looked into what already exists, namely the penetration distance damage that weapons do .
What we don't know is how thick the armor is on each ship, but I do have some examples here of how deep weapons penetrate.
everything is assigned the term pd, penetration distance, because I don't know whether that will be mm or cm or something else.
penetration distance ( depending on the weapon, penetration distance from -> to )
s1 = 14 -> 38
s2 = 14 -> 44
s3 = 20 -> 50
s4 = 23 -> 50
s5 = 23 -> 50
s6 = 80 bespoke polaris s6
s7 = 32 for the ares , 50 for the ion
s10 = 92 destroyer mass driver
There are some surprises here, such as the S6 bespoke of the Polaris, which has a very nice penetration distance.
but also the disappointing penetration distance of the ares and the ion. ( although this will certainly be adjusted in the future )
and the 3rd surprise is that from size 3 to 5, all 3 go up to a penetration distance of 50. ( although this will certainly be adjusted in the future )
In any case, I'm looking forward to the Perseus S7 bespoke guns, which I think should have a penetration distance somewhere between 80 and 92.
You're doing a fantastic job! A bit off-topic, but I wanted to ask: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). What's the best way to send them to Binance?
I gotta be honest here, first of all, if people take this kind of criticism personally... well they probably don't have much on their brain.
But i gotta say, Avenger always has a relatively fair point, and this might just be because he's just a player wich has a few working brain cells and understands what works and what doesn't in this game, unlike the ones that just complain about everything and offer no solution; some points i share with him, some i don't and that's fair, everyone has a different opinion, but i don't fail to notice how he always offers options that would incentivise player skill wich is something i love, over other less important things.
People might criticize him, hate him, whatever they want, but if you're smart you'll understand yourself that he proposes ideas that are not even that far fetched or hard to achieve, compared to the "good looking" kind of gameplay CIG wants to achieve at all cost at the expense of fun and individual player skills
Capital ship combat brought to you by Rich Tyrer, the guy that also hardlines on the FPS TTK and has his subordinates like Zach Preece just outright dismiss valueable feedback on balance matters.
Colour me surprised lol
Nah, CIG needs to dismiss most feedback because most people are making suggestions based on placeholders rather than what CIG has internally designed. A lot of the feedback I see just is not good, or completely incompatible with how actual game development works. I spend more time trying to explain the engineering processes to people than actually discussing the game. So whenever I see people say, "CIG needs to listen to the community", I'm inclined to ask, "Which members of the community?" because some of us have more knowlegde about actual software design than others, and in a practical sense, they should only be listening to those of us with actual design expertise and ignore everyone else.
@@Billy-bc8pk that is a terrible take, "they should only be listening to people with actual design expertise and ignore everyone else" is a statement completely debased of reality and highly elitist
@@auburn8833 Think about the irony of saying CIG should listen to the top 1% of PvPers when it comes to tuning, yet also say it's highly elitist to say CIG should only listen to people with design/engineering experience.
I hope they'll take a different approach to capital-ships combat than what they did with the Polaris tbh.
Two Polaris circling around each other in CQC while trying to keep their nose aligned isn't what I would've expected from multi-crew capital-ship gameplay personally. We shouldn't have to 'dogfight' in ships of this size. The SQ42 gameplay reveal we had is actually a very good example of what I mean: you see the Bengal, Javelin, Idris, Polaris in a tight formation and moving only tactically, whereas ships of Hammerhead size and smaller roam around to protect them.
There's a good space shooter game that understood this well called Star Conflict (made by War Thunder devs). In this game, your control model changes if you use a destroyer (capital equivalent) compared to smaller ships. So you can actually move your camera around while flying, and shoot from broadside at much longer range than smaller ships, which is way more realistic and satisfying in ships of these size.
Another good example would be Battlestar Galactica Online for those of you who remember that relic of a game.
Those games did destroyer/capital ships combat right.
Ofc this wouldn't work the same in Star Citizen since the pilot of a capital-ship doesn't also have control of all weapons, obviously, but they could've at least taken inspiration from this. When I think of fleet battle, I think of lines of massive ships facing each other at long range while smaller, faster ships dogfight in CQC. That's what I thought the Polaris vs Polaris experience would be, especially since it's supposed to be a long range capital-ship killer with S10 torps.
Unfortunately, that's not what we got. Instead, a Polaris vs Polaris battle feels the same as with smaller ships, but much slower and taking more time due to the high hp/shield pool. I don't want my Polaris to feel like a multi-crew, overly larger and slower fighter. I want it to feel like a capital-ship.
Slow, durable, able to take a shit ton of damage, but also have a much longer range to push Mass Effect-type fleet vs fleet battles, rather than force you to get in CQC.
I have to disagree in one point: the example! The S42 battle was actually pretty terrible from a tactical pov. The UEE fleet was almost stationary the entire time, the Vanduul moved into the line a bit in the second half. That makes no sense. For capital ships goes the same as for fighters: speed is life! Just look at maps from WW battles: Jutland, Midway, Coral Sea etc... ships move and they move alot over the multiple hours those battles lasted.
The problem as I see it is, the Polaris is basically what you describe, a (heavy - in comparison to a Perseus as a light) destroyer. Its not really meant for brawls, but for fast (in capital terms) and overwhelming attack runs. This is even what the entire design is layed out for
Another side of the problem is weapons range and speed- speed for the ships and the projectiles. To get actuall naval-like combat out of this we need to remember Churchills phrase of "Eggshells with hammers" If such a ship hits its opponent, it should hurt... bad. But at the same time those ships need to be able to move enough to evade shots, and to make that happen their wepoans range has to go up, so that leading a target actually is needed and good gunnery and piloting and especially both combined, is rewarded.
That's exactly what engineering and Maelstrom address -- which is why they said last year the reason they didn't want to add capital ships BEFORE resource management is that they're just a bigger Gladius.
I agree: using torpedoes only when the target ship is almost destroyed isn't ideal. A better approach would be to redesign torpedoes to function more like TV-guided missiles, where the gunner remotely controls their trajectory. Additionally, capital ships should have player-controlled defenses to counter these torpedoes. This would introduce engaging new gameplay mechanics and make it more challenging to take down a capital ship too easily.
Why? We already have auto tracking anti-missile systems, surely 900 years in the years in the future they'd have evolved a bit?
I really believe that Disco Lando wanted to ask ones or twice if those dudes are mental...
Yes. dumbfire (difficult to detect) torps that go Pitbull(and are detectable) a preset time after launch would be good. Aka: cold waters/silent hunter
Yes, cold waters, god havnt played that in a while
I'd like to see CIG emulate the missile combat in Nebulous Fleet Command. Torpedoes with shielding, ECM, erratic closure maneuvers, etc. that can defeat the defenses of an enemy ship. Combat, as it's being developed presently, is going to be so basic and unrealistic that players are going to quickly lose interest in it.
NFC is such a goated game
Two Polarises fighting each other without support should be no different than two aircraft carriers fighting without support, in a word: ineffectual.
Weak points would be nice.
Make the rest of a hull more armored from certain weapon types of course.
I said before to friends that PDCs strength should come from numbers and overlapping fire from other assets in the fleet, not from singular vessels. Encourage the interaction of fleet based assets in the fleet and make it rewarding to remove them from the enemy forces. I still don't think a proper balance can be achieved in any sort of immediate time frame because IRL missiles are the most deadly threats in naval combat and the evolution of both missiles and countermeasures has changed constantly. They would also have to balance it out with gunboats in mind as missiles IRL also made traditional gun focused ships obsolete due to many factors.
I feel like an easy fix for turrets guns on capital ships and all ships really, would be to give them engineering based tuning.
Give them enough capacitor to be able to distribute power into fire-rate and velocity (anti-fighter) vs. projectile range and damage (anti-ship).
Also, I feel like component targeting and coordination could be a function of the ships computer size/quality.
And for Torps, I think they should definitely be more important throughout the entire fight but having 28 of them... IDK giving too much player control or making them too fast feels a little off, but firing several SHOULD overwhelm defenses.
Is Avenger1 talking about the partially silent running torpedoes from WING COMMANDER THE MOVIE???????????!!!!!!!!!!!
CIG explaining capital ship combat: "1v1 cap ship battles are going to be boring". Excuse me?
They're not wrong. It's why even in real life they have support craft to help them -- most battleships were sunk by U-Boats, not other battleships.
@@Billy-bc8pkwith all due respect, your fact is irrelevant in many ways.
First, this is a video game. Gameplay has priority.
Seconly, your fact says nothing about what happens when there is no support ship and two battleships just duel.
Thirdly, most encounters in the 'Verse will not be fleet battle.
By the way, a U-Boat is exactly what I thought the Polaris would be.
A hunter trying to remain undected and deal a serious amount of damage by surprise at long range.
Maybe deploy a Hornet Tracker from the hangar to get radar data without having to get close.
Make the Polaris easier to detect with each torpedo fired.
I don't know really. But there has to be something better than cap ships being just huge fighters in a rate fight.
CIG need to be much more creative. Unfortunately it's very late in the development process and I don't think they'll spend time on rethinking that.
27:40 this video is a great refusal to the people who strawman as someone who just want fighter to be powerful. You are literally advocating for fighter to not be the neccesity in this case.
I honestly don't think the people in charge in CIG are nerdy enough about naval warfare/ aeronautical dogfight/ theoretical 0-g dogfight
I've always been this way, but you see that over time the truth ALWAYS gets out.
how do you soften the shield with retaliator with pdc on?
All i get is sell your bombers, they are useless now, big guns is all matters.
That's literally the opposite of what they said, and even used the SQadron 42 cinematic as a reference to the role of bombers. The light fighters were useless against the kingship, even useless against its shields and its shield emitters -- they needed another larger enemy ship to destroy the emitter. The only way they could damage the capital ship WAS with bombers. Meaning, even if you get the shields down with light, medium, or heavy fighters, you will likely not survive long enough to soft-death the ship with those alone. You NEED bombers to weaken the capital ship significantly.
@Billy-bc8pk king ship may have pds later on, any human capital will have them si on order you need :
Scan the Shield to now where you want to focus
Bring Big guns to get the Shield down, heavy gun to destroy Shield emitters , destroy turrets then light fighter Can destroy pds.
Bonus point if you destroy engine.
Now you Can bring bomber for finish move, until pds it's a waste of ressources and the brute force method
Once pdcs are down you should be able to use torps. Or overwhelm pdcs with missiles followed closely by a torp. Basically use missiles as cover for a torp.
I think sectional shields are good, the system just needs to be refined.
Bro, please deactivate the Discord sound notifications when you record 😅
I'm really sorry 😂 I forgot
Another issue is the PDCs take out torps even when you dummy fire unless you are point blank launching them. It removes the skill element/gameplay of dummy firing torps as well. Obviously subject to change, but currently a shame.
My feeling is one of the things that is going to have to change is the Ion. The whole S7 cannon goes against CIGs whole concept of ships taking time to die, so there is a chance to escape or eject. Smaller cannons arent too much an issue but when you stick an S7 cannon that is supposed to bat down capital ship shields then you have a real balance issue. My feeling is they will need to make it be more like a repeater. If it stays a cannon then they will need to turn it into a brick, so it cant target fighters. Then though it wont be able to evade AA guns so it will have to stay out of range, and if it can hit beyond the range of AA guns then its invulnerable to defenses. The Inferno doesnt seem to have half the issues the Ion does because its a gatling gun and its designed to kill a target with a million small rounds vs 1 big one.
The existing charge mechanic is awful and I have doubts they will ever get it to feel right. An alternative idea I had was two different weapon groups. So group one the gun does normal energy damage, with a damage model and fire rate similar to what it was before the charge mechanic was put in place. Light fighters were still a pain then, but heavy fighters and medium/large ships seemed ideal for the gun and its fire rate. Group two now slows the fire rate some, slows the round speed some, increases the energy damage some and it adds a healthy amount of distortion damage. So group one is optimal when doing bounties and you are killing things like a Connie, or Reclaimer and group two becomes more optimal when fighting things like a corvette or bigger.
Actually all you have to do is fly a tiny fighter straight into a capital ship and it will explode. So I don’t understand WTF they are talking about with tiered defence. That’s laughable right now.
Right now we don't have Maelstrom, which is pretty obvious. Ships have HP pools, which is why you can fly a box into it with a multi-tool and eventually blow it up. Maelstrom completely negates that.
You can land a torp st the underside of the polaris as it has less turrets.
20:00 We need WW2 style torpedo dropping/ Fighter dumb fire dive bombing gameplay
The Discord alerts got me every single time. Good points tho. "Pistol vs Tank theory and "KISS" Keep It Simple Stoobid"
turrets are way to slow to be useful
I think if you are you turret in this game. You will want it an anti-aircraft turret, not an anti-personal turret, AA turret i don't mean the insane rate of fire that blows up incoming missiles, i mean the flak canon. you can keep the same velocity of the projectile but do a corn area chance to catch the target of each shot and when it catches it deals a bubble area effect, the further the target is the bigger the area becomes basically an upgraded version of SC ship's shotgun but needs a big powerplant to use
In the case of capital vs capital, i think with this style of projectile you force those ships to not only keep moving in 6 direction but also spin themself in close range where you can precision target to protect their own PDC and turret, and the more skilled crew can hit other ship point defend and component more often when the ship is spin
I think the PDCs tuning are fine. Who would want a sophisticated defense system that has a 50/50 chance to be effective. You'd want something to be near perfect. In order to penetrate it, you'd have to make high level strategic executions to bypass and or exploit these systems.
I have an idea that could fix both the armor problem and the geometry problem. What if we made armor penetration based pn projectile velocity instead of weapon size ? Then we make all turret mounted gun higher velocities (because of dedicated capacitors) and boom. Multi crew can engage fighters from further and can penetrate heavily armored targets
Torps should be weapons for taking down shields and/or armour. These aren't precision weapons. Most will be shot down which is where you need saturation of a target for some of them to get through, just like is the case attacking a carrier in DCS. It seems like currently PDCs are already overwhelmed by a lot of targets, which is good.
Since PDCs don’t track dumb fired torps, have you gone back and seen if targeting with the crosshairs has changed with MM and missile/torp speed changes?
they do track dum fires
@ Oh! I haven’t seen for myself, just heard or read that somewhere recently
For me I would like torps to be fired by the pilot but you have to position them perfectly, you need to find the deadzone of the pdc's if you don't want them to catch em.
Why the pilot? otherwise (which is already the case) the 'torp officer' feels like the 'emp officer' in the antares... (a button pusher)
Two polarisses slugging it out, without fighters, should be epic! If both teams have a fighter screen then it should become complete mayhem...
I really hope CIG can find some competent people to get the flight model and multi crew back on track, cause the current team is not cutting it.
I think Titan Fall had a good concept in that aspect.
You had kind of a the rock paper siccors between the light, medium, heavy titans.
and when you had no titan (at the start or when it was destroyed) you would walk on the ground, pilots on the ground are extremely mobile and required a lot of skill to actual take down a titan.
they are however very good at taking out each other.
So if you where slugging it out against other titans you would not pay attention to players on foot cause they where wrapped up fighting each other.
but when you destroyed all titans of the other team, 3 skilled players on foot working together could become threat again for enemy titans.
I was really hoping cig would take some cue's from titan fall, it was really well balanced in that respect.
there is a larger issue that ties into this: they can't even do point defense, yet. it's been more than ten years and they can not design an automated point defense that works for larger ships. they are more worried as a company over programming planetary fauna than they are basic game dynamics. they have issues with basic ship completion and updates, but they spent millions of manhours making clouds pretty. they waste their efforts on minutia before they have basic game functionality and as they continue down this lane, basic problems are amplifying (mice are swelling to elephantine sizes). the people in charge of basic game functionality and balance are NOT up to the challenge (whether this is a matter of improper priorities or improper resourcing or improper manning)...
You do know that the planet tech team has absolutely nothing to do with the vehicle features team, right?
@@Billy-bc8pk you do know you pointed out something entirely irrelevant, right? the point you failed to make (but, none the less, obliquely highlighted) is that an inordinate amount of resources were wasted on a matter of low importance to the game...
@@CruentusV How are planets -- which makes up the brunt of what exploration will entail, a waste of resources?
@@Billy-bc8pk resources used on accomplishing secondary and tertiary goals when primary goals are not met are wasted. what would you consider THE single, primary goal of SC as a game (not some other game you'd like to be playing, but SC as originally conceptualized by chris)?...
@@CruentusV If you look at the original Kickstarter -- exploration, since one of the biggest selling points was 100 star systems, and then obviously combat. The fact that they built out the game with 64-bit floating point coordinates, and a new middleware suite in Genesis specifcally to build out POIs for exploration, I would say that it makes up a large part of the immersive experience.
holy... those DC-pings are wild...^^
Sorry 😊
You the man A1!
Sc cap ships gonna be like the Monitor vs the Merrimac.
But as per normal maelstrom + crew is being ignored. Engineering gameplay + onboard marines is the counter to both hacking/boarding. While engineering game play is the possible counter to hard killing the ship being attacked. Time to disable is what they want to get to less than time to kill. What they have described sounds fine...it also gets rid of solo cap ship in it's entirety which was always dumb. Stripping the shields destroying the emitters while the engineering team tries to get them back up/rerouted/components repaired is very much a Star Trek way of doing this. Broadly speaking CIG are taking the right approach here. There's nothing stopping an attacking team destroying a ship with fighters and torps before the PDCs and all of the shields/emitters and components are knocked out. EG blowing the manned turret off and creating an ingress point/weak spot in the hull has all sorts of potential uses....it's just going to be difficult to do and use a lot of resource to do it. Avengers apparently fighter biased approach doesn't really incentivise ship boarding which is a whole big gameplay loop in itself and really lends itself to combined arms type gameplay. Which creates another level of attacker vs defender. This does get it away from the big fighter approach we have right now. Torpedo guidance options I'm sure will arrive to be combined with precision targeting as that's probably the only thing that's really missing.
18:15 I disagree, they should have to destroy or bypass that protective "screen" before being able to engage torps. Ballistic weapon still punch through shields so if you don't want to drop the shields, use ballistics to take out the point defense guns
Polaris has big turret in the front, it will not be enough to destroy another polaris over 1 hour period?