Pilot Archive

Yesterday was busy in deep space on Ahazi and it gave me a chance to test 2 things. Combat with prior warning to my opponent and combat versus multiple enemy's.

I've created a Macro with /ttell that sends a warning to my target telling them I'm coming. (Imperial Pilot! Fleet Command here, There is a Rebel ace in your area, ENGAGE!)

This has been received extremely well as not only does it allow them to chat me back should they win or lose they are able to react in time and make the fights more interesting.

Sadly the fights are not more interesting, 75% were decided on the initial pass with me either nailing them head on or hitting them just as we crossed from the side. With a few exceptions all went down with one volley. The fights that were more interesting were the ones with weapon overload 3 turned off. In a few cases I ran into an opponent before I had all my Droid programs turned on and those fights required more shots to bring down the enemy and were a lot more fun.

I expected the engagements with 2 opponents to last longer and be much harder, but they were not. I either got clipp'd by their incoming fire or I landed a snap shot and one exploded. I got both targets a few times mainly because one was still brinign droid programs back and once because they were both afk or something.

The engagement with 3 opponents was just massive firepower pointed in my direction the whole time. Not interesting or fun, just dodge bullets of death till u die. And you will. As long as your targets are firing at you there is really nothign u can do. You take one hit and you're dead.

Feedback on PvP:

Weapon Overload 3 needs to be fixed and probably Weapon Overload programs need a nerf bat. Giving bonus's of that much to firepower takes a lot of skill out of combat. It becomes just 2 ships firing continually until someone hits.

Engine Overload Programs. I personally hate these things. You have to use them to survive in pvp, no question. I think the boost they give to YPR is making things in space arcade like. Doesn't matter what ship you are in you can point the front in any direction and fire while you ship catches up. If they nerfed these programs down to ONLY adjust top speed things would be a lot more interesting. Ships can basically skid turn and space and it's pretty silly. It doesn't take any skill to kill someone if you ship spins on a dime, can shoot sideways, and each blaster can kill/disable an enemy.

That is my .02

Message Edited by Tumbler2002 on 04-17-2005 01:18 PM

If Weapon Overload made you drain capacitator energy faster (as must be intended) instead of slower, this may actually make people think twice before running this program. Good post.

Thats funny, i made a thread a week or so ago being critical of droid commands and specualting most of the PvP problems are more due to the current incarnation of droid commands and not neccessarily PvP damage.

Naturally it was thread no one liked to read

Although I've not enough skill boxes to enter Deep Space, nor have I progressed far enough to warrant a flight computer, I've read quite a few people's opinions on droid commands and I keep coming back to the same question: what's wrong with the old power level controls?

X-Wing had these, as did a few other games of that era (Wing Commander III comes to mind). For those that don't remember them, you could adjust the distribution of power amongst a handful of subsystems (usually engines, shields and weapons). I think that such a system would be far more dynamic than the current system of droid commands, particularly since you're making a tradeoff no matter what you did: either everything was "equal" or one or more subsystems were enhanced at the cost of the other(s). *shrug* I don't know if this would necessarily improve PvP, but it seems rather less broke-like than the current set of droid commands.

Then again, I also think it's rather lame that only Rebels can write commands to stack and normalise shields (again, see X-Wing).

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Sin-Vraal wrote:
I keep coming back to the same question: what's wrong with the old power level controls?

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Well, in all of those games the system decided the stats of the ship you were in. You were given the ship to fly and you dealt with it as best you could.

In JtL, your ship is as good as, and only as good as, the components you put in it. If you find a more efficient Reactor then you have more Energy to spare. If you want to upgrade to a heavier, higher drain Weapon, you better have the space and Energy available.

I do not believe that the two systems mesh, but I do believe that the component-based ships are a fact of JtL and I'd hate to see anything to change that. Attempting to change JtL into a power level division system would mean a complete overhaul of the component system. Since we can not expect that, I think it best to try to focus on what we have to work with.

Droid programs were added with the intention to be...... to be something like ground Weapon PuPs are going to be post-CU: positive in one area with a closely balanced negative in another, and it's up to you to decided if it's worth using. The problem is that we have one Program (WO3) in particular with multiple positives and no negative (imagine if one PuP raised Damage and reduced Speed while all others were balances of the two... which PuP would you choose?). The other problem is that some entire lines (Cap Os) of Programs have an inherent positive(s) that are going to outweigh the negative(s) every time. And finally, we have a dual program synergy (Cap O and CtSS) that, to some extent, produces an effect that outweighs component values.

The idea that Energy Drain was to be the negative to outweigh increased system performance is not itself a bad one. I believe the problems we have are caused partly because of a poor balance in Reactors throughout the game (loot and crafted) and the playerbase's ability to find the weak link in a system such is this is quite impressive. The fact that Energy Drain is being used almost exclusively as the negative means any crack in a balanced Reactor/Component-Drain system blows away the cost/benefit basis of Droid Programs.

Shona

Fair enough, and I agree that it would be a travesty to lose the component based ships, but I still can't shake the feeling that droid programs are--at least superficially--not working in the best possible way they could. Perhaps they simply are broken, and perhaps it will be addressed. It's just off, to me, that everyone seems to be suggesting the same bloody set of of programs (how is it again, RO3, EO3, WO3 and CtSS3?). That just completely kills any sort of dynamism: instead of everyone competing on a flat playing field where their ships are all mediocre, they're all playing on a flat field where their ships are über, if that makes nay sense.

You missed CO3, but pretty much, you got it. There is no bad side of WO3 and the positives of CO3 in addition to the synergy with CtSS means those programs will be used. EO3 is a bit tricky, but the increased performance is typically worth the drain, while combining it with the reduced drain of WO3 makes it easier to absorb.

Lots of pluses, few to no minuses... no decision necessary.

Shona

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SheenaBrelya wrote:
Lots of pluses, few to no minuses... no decision necessary.

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Precisely. And if there's no decisions to be made, no tradeoffs to contemplate... then why have them at all?

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Sin-Vraal wrote:
Precisely. And if there's no decisions to be made, no tradeoffs to contemplate... then why have them at all?

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Because the system is not the problem. A single bug in one program and a possibly unforesen synergy between two others are a large part of the problem. Another large part is that, for many of the programs, Energy Drain is the only listed negative.

Fix WO3, reduce the effectiveness of a CO and a CtSS, and add some more factors into the trade-off of higher performance.

Scrapping the entire system would have an interesting effect on all forms of high end space combat, but would remove the possibility of a tactical choice that Droid Programs have the potential to provide. My vote is that an effort is made to work with the present system first. If that fails, then I'd be more open to ideas such as scrapping it, which I consider a bit extreme for where we are right now.

Shona

Mmm... I don't think I was completely clear with my last post: I hadn't meant to advocate removing the whole system, merely to point out that there isn't a reason to have it [the system of droid commands] in the game as it exists now, exactly because it doesn't add anything to the tactics of spaceflight, it only makes everyone that much more powerful.

What I'd meant to imply is that I feel it needs to be "worked on" (read: fixed) to be worthwhile, from a make-space-combat-more-interesting standpoint. Simply adding an intelligent set of negative tradeoffs to the commands would do wonders (and, if I'm envisioning it properly, go a long way to emulating the old power systems I originally brought up).