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Message Edited by DavidHarper on 07-03-2005 01:59 AM

Message Edited by DavidHarper on 07-03-2005 02:01 AM

Any yahoo can go fast in a line and avoid NPC fire, that's easy. It takes a certain amount of skill to use the bigger ships, that's why they are certed for masters. No one will argue that POBs need help, but I can solo an ISD in an Xwing or Bwing and get hit just as rarely as an Awing, if I am paying attention to my flying.

Your Bwing vs JSF example of course is flawed because obviously if someone is going to be going up against a defended player cap ship they are going to have a figther screen of their own. If the Bwing can't function versus a player cap ship you have a point, but expecting a Bwing to hold up in a dogfight vs a JSF? You're not gonna sell that point.

Your point that certain ships go unused is valid. Your point that certain ships need help is valid. Your contention that the entire extant system is broken beyond repair and must be redone completely is what is so terribly wrong.

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DavidHarper wrote:

I have decided to write to LucasArts about the current state of Star Fighters in Jump to Light Speed. However I need help first to gather statistics on the current ships in the game and sugestions on how they should function.

Once I have statistics on all the ships I wish to compare them to the new system I propose, which I hope will make the game a lot more balanced in both the way all the ships function continuity wise (for example Episode 3 ships will not function better than Episode 4 ships) and how they function in PvE and PvP.

Please note I am using Rebel Star Fighters in this example:

I sugest for simplicitys sake that when assuming Star Fighter speed we use 100.0 kmp (thats 1000 speed to those of you who don't know how speed functions in the game) as a base and then modify it for each ship. An example of a 100 speed engine in Star Fighters:

A-Wing : 105.0

X-Wing :100.0

Z-95 : 100.0

Nova Courier : 95.0

B-Wing : 95.0

Y-Wing : 90.0

Y-Wing Longporbe : 85.0

ARC-170 : 80.0

I believe this system would make the game far more equal. Makeing all the ships a lot more eligible to use in both PvE and PvP. When I think of PvP I do not think of 1 Vs. 1 but Many Vs. Many around a Capitol Ship.

Now onto weapons. Currently the ship weapons load outs make little sence from a continuity point of view. An X-Wing has 3 weapons mounts whilst the TIE Interceptor has 1? I do not understand this at all. My sugestion currently is to half both weapons weight, I have a seperte proposal for damage. All ships should have 2 Warhead Launchers.

A-Wing (Curently has 1 Weapon) : 2 Weapons

X-Wing (Curently has 1 Weapon) :4 Weapons

Z-95 (Curently has 1 Weapon) : 2 Weapons

Nova Courier (Curently has 1 Weapon) : Unknown balance concerns*

B-Wing (Curently has 1 Weapon) : 6 Weapons

Y-Wing (Curently has 1 Weapon) : 4 Weapons

Y-Wing Longporbe (Curently has 1 Weapon) : 4 Weapons

ARC-170 (Unknown as I have never used it) : Unknown as I am unsure of the continuity of this ship

*Nove Courier: In theory these ships should be able to mount "Quad Lasers" this would mean they can carry 8 Weapons in total, 4 on the top mount and 4 on the bottom mount. However I am unsure how this would affect the game.

I also propose a drastic change in the weapons and shield system for both PvE and PvP. This is because currently PvP and PvE are almost diffrent games and the ships are totaly diffrent from one and other. This needs to change so that PvE and PvP are the almost identical. Meaning both PvE ships and PvP ships of the same tier will take the same number of hits to kill. For example if a ship has the following shields and armour.

Shields: 2000 Front/2000 Rear

Armour: 2000 Front/2000 Rear

I believe that it should take 4 hits from an X-Wing fireing all 4 guns to take down a fighter with these stats. That would mean 4 weapons hitting a ship does a total of 500 damage. This would mean that each individual weapon does 125 damage. However fireing all 4 weapons at once would be slow compared to fireing all 4 weapons individually (Anyone who has played the X-Wing games would know this). The player would be given the option of chooseing to link the weapons or fire them individualy on a cycle. So a player could choose to fire all 4 weapons at once and cause more damageto a target with a slower fire rate and if they miss it means they do no damage, or they could choose to fire each weapon individualy meaning they do less damage with each hit but fireing there weapons more quickly. It also means that iff they miss it is not as big a deal because they will be ready to fire again straight away instead of having to wait.

Now you also have the problem of Tiers essentialy 6 of them, Tiers 0-5. Well this would be simple to solve the equipment statistics for this simply take 10 off of each stat for each tier. Engines for example:

Tier 0 : 50 Speed

Tier 1 : 60 Speed

Tier 2 : 70 Speed

Tier 3 : 80 Speed

Tier 4 : 90 Speed

Tier 5 :100 Speed

Or weapons:

Tier 0 :75 Damage

Tier 1 :85 Damage

Tier 2 :95 Damage

Tier 3 :105 Damage

Tier 4 :115 Damage

Tier 5 :125 Damage

I also believe that like engines our shields should have a modfier. It is quite hard to do this considering I can't actually go in game and test engine speed vs shields ^_^; Again taking this as the basic shields rating:

Shields: 2000 Front/2000 Rear

A-Wing : x0.9 :1800 Front/1800 Rear

X-Wing : x1.0 : 2000 Front/2000 Rear

Z-95 : x0.95 : 1900 Front/1900 Rear

Nova Courier : x1.5 : 2500 Front/2500 Rear

B-Wing : x1.2 : 2400 Front/2400 Rear

Y-Wing : x1.1 : 2200 Front/2200 Rear

Y-Wing Longporbe : x1.1 : 2200 Front/2200 Rear

ARC-170 : Unknown

Again I am finding hard how to balance PoB ships. Note the Y-Wing's quite inferior. This is because it is quite an old ship and was replaced by the B-Wing and so no Master Pilots would really want to use this as there "Bomber" ship when they have access to the B-Wing, however it is not so inferior that it makes it an unviable ship and Tier 4 pilots and lower should still find it usefull. Also note the Y-Wing Longprobe will still be very usefull as it can fire behind it. This is why it is slower. So this is my proposal. What do people think?

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Let me get this right.....you have taken how much time out of your day to create this? All for the sake of continuity?

Continuity? Hello?

SWG has nothing to do with continuity with the Star Wars canon. Any argument spawning from such is just simply ludicrous and totally invalid. You've already lost any credibility for your argument, I'm sorry to say.

If SWG is going to be about continuity, then the Devs will have to remove player Jedi from the SWG universe. Until that happens, any argument made by the players, and yourself, are pretty much totally invalid when it comes to continuity or anything based on the Star Wars canon.

SWG is simply a theme based on Star Wars....nothing more. Changes to this universe cannot be made simply based on continuity unless some serious overhauls are made to the universe....like the removal of player jedi. Since that isn't going to happen, arguments about continuity are totally invalid.

Message Edited by Mordib1 on 07-06-2005 12:49 AM

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DavidHarper wrote:

Once I have statistics on all the ships I wish to compare them to the new system I propose, which I hope will make the game a lot more balanced in both the way all the ships function continuity wise (for example Episode 3 ships will not function better than Episode 4 ships) and how they function in PvE and PvP.

I never understand why people constantly harp about the apparent lack of continuity for the suggested difference in peformance between the Episodes 1, 2 and 3 ships and the ships shown to us in Episodes 4, 5 and 6.

The history of the Republic spans over 25,000 years. Read that again. Here, let me repeat that one more time: 25,000 years.

The Republic itself didn't just spring into existence fully formed. The Republic only formed due to the easy availability of the Hyperdrive and eventually the Holonet. Of which, the Holonet itself was far more important for the establishment of the Republic, in that it allowed the sharing of ideas and technology in ways only dreamed about before.

Anyway, in 25,000 years with billions upon billions of sentient entities living, working, sharing and experimenting on technology there's a chance so massive as to dwarf the imagination that just about anything that can be developed would have been developed.

Thus, it is entirely possible for a 200 year old starfighter to vastly outperform anything available in the Prequels or anything available in the Post-RotJ Expanded Universe.

When it comes to the Star Wars universe one must throw out the idea of linear technological development. The Star Wars galaxy has been so fully explored and developed that linear technological development ceased to exist more time then most can imagine. By the downfall of the Republic, technology was based upon looks, style and functionality which sometimes determined how a piece of technology would perform.

By the middle of Palpatine's Empire, with the dismantling of the civilian Holonet network and the purposeful dumbing down of the people that Palpatine had implemented, the technology available at the time of "A New Hope" could very well have been a regression from the height of the Old Republic. Besides, it was written in many places that Palpatine instituted a cheap, throw away doctrine to the Empire; Severly damage a Star Destroyer? Throw it a way and build another one. Just look at the massive amount of "garbage" that the Star Destroyer tossed out during "Empire Strikes Back", there was so much of it and it was so large, that the Millenium Falcon was actually able to "hide" within the floating debris and still didn't notice Boba Fett's Slave One hiding in that same debris!

Even if you want to completely ignore that concept within the fantastic universe of Star Wars, there are plenty of examples of similar peaks and valleys of technology in our own development of technology. Read about the technology of the Roman Empire and gaze upon the technology black hole that was all of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Read about the scientific knowledge of the Aztec Empire and the complete destruction and loss of what they knew and had available.

Those are just two, fairly easy to research examples.

Do yourself a favor, toss out the concept of linear technology development and things will mesh much better in regards to the Star Wars Universe.

See the thing of it is this: We're all playing Star Wars as if we were on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise!!

Engage Warp Speed Number One!!!

In the movies they sent the Y-Wings into the Death Star trench first because they were faster than the X-Wings. That little bit of canon went out the window over ten years ago, though.

Meanwhile ... would someone explain to me why, according to the book, an X-Wing gets three energy weapons mounts and the TIE Interceptor only gets one? And why the Y-Wing & Dunelizard, both at Tier 1, get two energy weapon mounts while the first Imperial ship to do this is the Tie Bomber at Tier 3? And why does a Tier 3 TIE Interceptor weigh in at an average of 50,000kg while a Tier 1 Dunelizard weighs over 80,000kg on average?

Oh wait ... I forgot ... the game is only slightly slanted. After all, a 10-to-1 player ratio just isn't enough of an advantage ...

ROTFL!!!

Message Edited by DavidHarper on 07-07-2005 03:57 PM

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DavidHarper wrote:

There! I hope that makes some people happy? That is a totally unbiased chart which does not take fair play or game play mechanics into account or anything like that.

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So, you're proposing that we use numbers that weren't thought of taking into account the needs of a multiplayer sim? That's just inane. These people make movies, they came up with those numbers arbitrarily, or with the specific goal of finding speeds that looked good on a movie screen, they should have no bearing on a game that has totally different requirements.

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DavidHarper wrote:

If I remember correctly something about an A-Wing's design made it harder for star fighters to track it however it made it easier for capitol ships to track it. So maybe A-Wings should be made almost useless vs. capitol ships but great vs. fighters, whilst the X-Wing is balanced vs. both fighters and capitol ships and the B-Wing is almost useless vs. fighters but great vs. capitol ships.

The A-Wing had a jamming system that made it difficult to impossible for other snub fighters to track the A-Wing as well as communicate with other snub fighters. The sensors on a Capital ship would be able to see the large "ball" of interference created by an A-Wing with a jamming system turned on an running.

In game, what that would mean is that for other players and NPCs their sensors would become nothing but static. Targeting systems wouldn't be able to lock-on and everything would have to be done via visual sensors. (The eyes in the pilot's head.) Of course, the A-Wing pilot would also suffer the same loss of sensor information, so that would sort of even things out a bit.

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DavidHarper wrote:

And just for fun, how powerfull was the B-Wing? Well something which was going to be used in Return of the Jedi but in the end was not? 3 B-Wings take out a Star Destroyer! http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v136/david_harper_1983/B-WingsPower.jpg

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So a picture showing 3 Bwings means they took out the Star Destroyer behind them? lol You need help! That is just a shot of 3 Bwings in front of an ISD blowing up. It doesn't mean that only they destroyed it.

If an ISD was to be found without the 72 fighters it carries as cover, it would still take a squadron of Bwings linking their Proton Torps to pop the sheilds and allows them to fire in more torps to do damage to the ship. In combat, it would have taken an organized strike force of of 5 squadrons of X/A/Bwings to take down an ISD and its full fighter compliment.

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Salco wrote:
LA doesn't have any control over JTL or SWG anyways, afaik. The game is fine the way it is now anyways.

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You are 100% wrong.... SOE does not have full control SWG, everthing they do has go through LUCAS ARTS for approval. Whos fault do you think the Holocron debacle was SOE, try again. It was LA stepping in a messing up the game.

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psikobunny wrote:

So, you're proposing that we use numbers that weren't thought of taking into account the needs of a multiplayer sim? That's just inane. These people make movies, they came up with those numbers arbitrarily, or with the specific goal of finding speeds that looked good on a movie screen, they should have no bearing on a game that has totally different requirements.

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*Sighs*

I do not just assume that from the picture. Originally there was going to be a scene in Return of the Jedi where 3 B-Wings were shown blowing up one Imperial Star Destroyer, however the scene was scraped as it was decided the scene served no purpose. However that picture is a result from some of the concept ideas.

Anyway that does not really matter because I can solo the Star Destroyer in my A-Wing and X-Wing /shrug

Could you people please tell my why on earth you are being so hostile because I really do not understand.

Message Edited by DavidHarper on 07-07-2005 08:05 PM

Message Edited by DavidHarper on 07-07-2005 08:08 PM

i think a better way would be to take a look at how the ships work in XWA (X-Wing Alliance for those that dont know ) all the different classes of ships between factions i though had the right feel and balance, tie interceptors could easily keep up with a-wings as they should be able to since the interceptor was designed to counter the threat of the a-wings or vice versa, at the moment it sometimes feels a chore trying to keep behind an a-wng in anything other than the JSF.

Also if they used a modle similar to XWA imagine some of the battles that could be pulled off, if you've never played xwa go out and grab a copy and give it a whirl and you'll see what i mean, then give a go to creating your own LARGE scale space battles in game then imagin how much superiour jtls would be with those in

i patienlty wait for the fay we can get space battles in game on the scale of what was in RoTJ, that would be soo sweet to engage in.....