I was watching one of your dev vids on youtube, #10 to be exact, and I noticed your turrets track based on where you were aiming. I really liked that feature but felt the turrets tracked rather quickly.

My suggestion:

It'd be neat if the larger the vessel and weaponry, the slower the turret track speed. This would also allow smaller craft to dart in and out of deadly turret fire.


PS: Maneuvering thrusters but I think you had some in video #11 but I wasn't sure.


Other than that this game looks amazing.

Considering the latest dev update, it seems we have a continuous range of "compactness" now (unless Josh reconsiders that bit). Which leads me to two obvious questions:

• "Which weapon fits into which hardpoint"?
• and "Are there clearly separated size classes (as in fighter vs. battleship hardpoint)?"

For a change, I'll pull a Gazz and suggest a system that goes for maximum flexibility, maybe at the expense of nicely distinct categories

Here goes:

• An item fits into a hardpoint if its "compactness" (inverse of size) exceeds the "minimum compactness" of the hardpoint.
  This may be more intuitive if we use the inverse and say "the size of the item may not exceed the max. allowed size of the item in the hardpoint".
• The resources needed by the hardpoint go up with the max. allowed size of the item in the hardpoint. I'm intentionally vague here since we don't know the scaling laws of the LTverse yet.
• You start out with a freely selectable hardpoint size (as in, "for this fighter design I want a hardpoint that can hold anything with at least 0.9 compactness") and maybe power capacity ("at least 5 GW, I need to power a point defense laser"). The room needed in the ship follows from this player-selected size and power capacity.
• Same for turrets, which are a special kind of hardpoint.
• Turrets with large allowed item size tend to have a lower slew rate.
• Turrets are researchable objects where you can trade slew rate for maximum item size and vice versa. Maybe more properties, I'm just a bit out of ideas right now

Edit:
The AI counts as player in this, following Josh's motto "the AI is equally powerful". And I'm curious if the AI will understand ship engineering as well as a human player

Unfortunately limiting the track speed on larger ships will severely gimp the ships versus fighters - thus needing you to have fighter escorts anywhere you go. I would rather the turret speed be dependent on the type of weapons mounted. For example, a flak turret will have fast tracking speed but low damage to deal with fighters while a capital ship buster turret will have slow tracking speed but high damage. Also, this would allow for customization of your fleet: fighter screen at the front and battleship destroyers at the back.

TanC wrote:Unfortunately limiting the track speed on larger ships will severely gimp the ships versus fighters

And I think that's just splendid. =)

TanC wrote: I would rather the turret speed be dependent on the type of weapons mounted.

I'd tie it to the hardpoint.

If a battleship has a heavy mount for a 50 ton laser, it will probably turn slowly.
If you install a machine gun in it, it's still a heavy mount and doesn't turn any faster.

That leads to more specialised ship designs because (unlike in X3 =) you can't instantly switch all turrets to fast-tracking anti-fighter lasers.

You can still install different weapon systems in this one mount but it would probably be a good idea to install the biggest gun you can to not waste any hardpoint capacity.

When building / outfitting your ships you'd have to make a battle plan and commit to it. No hedging your bets indefinitely!
If you want a hard-hitting battleship, you better figure out what kind of escorts it needs. =)
Or you build a can-do-everything ship that doesn't excel in anything specific.

Well put Gazz. It would also tie into the research tree specialization Josh was talking about.

TanC: Missiles lock on independent of facing. Modern sidewinders can be locked on by just looking with your helmet why not here? It would help against smaller vessels although I doubt fighters pack the kind of weaponry to seriously endanger a battleship but bombers... now those would be a threat.

You could have it so different ship types are built for different things. Battleships were built to fight other capital ships while destroyers are lightly armored and moderately fast but use torpedoes. Frigates run point defense screens against enemy bombers and fighters, etc

I like the idea of tying tracking speed to hardpoint type. You're right -- a 40-ton ballistic cannon hardpoint isn't going to turn fast even if all you've got in it is a little 25mm pea-shooter!

I REALLY like the idea of being able to customize my capital ships with custom hardpoint types and loadouts. This is the sort of gameplay I was trained into by EVE Online -- you have to plan your engagements way ahead by cleverly building your ship's systems to deal with what you expect to encounter.

In EVE it was all worked out on probabilities -- the turrets all graphically tracked exactly on target, but their "tracking speed" would drop the likelihood of scoring a hit if your enemy were way too close and circling too fast for your turrets to supposedly track on the target. It was like rolling a d20 to hit, but having a -5 or a -10 to hit based on how close and how fast your target was.

Close and fast = hard to hit, HOWEVER you can outfit yourself with fast-tracking, lightweight guns that CAN track on tiny, zippy targets.

But this isn't EVE, this is LT, and in LT you get to run your own guns instead of just hitting the "SHOOT THAT MOFO" button and hoping for the best.

Man, oh, man. What this game is offering is exactly why I left EVE Online -- action and lots of it, and less math with more RPG-ness.

I want a skill-based, heart-thumping ACTION RPG IN SPACE. LT is just my thing.

Think World of Tanks in terms of turret traverse. You have a free aim system and you can shoot whenever but if your turret hasn't turned enough you won't hit anything. The lighter tanks can orbit larger tanks and stay away from their turrets but there are ways to counter. You can turn your hull and turret in sync to increase the degrees of traverse per second. I believe Josh said that having fire originate from the actual turrets means you need position correctly and adding this in would make that even more so but it would mostly be an endgame consideration.

Smaller ships have much faster traverse so the skill curve ramps up evenly throughout so it doesn't overload the player as well which is nice. Also smaller ships need to get closer to make the traverse more pronounced. From long ranges 30 degrees of traverse per second can easily keep up with fast ships but from short range they have severe issues with traversing.

Unfortunately limiting the track speed on larger ships will severely gimp the ships versus fighters

As Gazz said, its how it should be done.

For fighter defence should be used other things:
1.Fighters and interceptors (from own hangar or another carrier) - brings synergy of ships to the field and more tactic/strategic gameplay.
2. Small hardpoints with light AA weaponry - brings diversity to ship design and looks just awesome. (i hate weapon loadouts in EVE-online, to to ships TOTAL specialisation)
3. Fast missiles - just cool.
4. Heavy shields/armour - makes sense ot be protected from small firearms.

In general I like the approach Gazz is proposing, but I think some refinements would be helpful:

• Small hardpoints use less ship volume/other resources, and more of them can be built for a given hull size. That is mainly for consistency, it would be weird if a big battleship could carry only a handful of small flak guns.
• Big guns get a bonus at breaking through strong shields/armor. Or maybe they just have more overall DPS than the bunch of smaller guns that could be built in the same place. That ensures they are more valuable in the anti-capital role than a couple of small guns.

Yeah, big ships having big turrets for anti capital use, and medium turrets for anti frigate, and small turrets for anti fighter would be great.

Hell, look at those Iowa class battleships. They had 9x 16 inchers, 20x 5inch, 80x 40mm, and 49x 20mm. Granted, this ain't WW2, but so long as we're playing with gunships, may as well model after actual gun ships.

Also, we need proximity flak. VT fuse, baby!


Also, small pop guns on fighters shouldn't even dent capital armor. All you do by shooting a battleship with a machine gun is scrape up the paint.

Gazz wrote:Or you build a can-do-everything ship that doesn't excel in anything specific.

I was thinking of more along these lines. I do agree with the hardpoint-specific turrets though. It makes sense.

However, I believe that not all the turrets will be limited to slow-tracking turrets? Much like the same way that current battleships have 3-4 turrets for the big guns, and a few faster-tracking turrets along each sides for flak guns:

CutterJohn wrote:Hell, look at those Iowa class battleships. They had 9x 16 inchers, 20x 5inch, 80x 40mm, and 49x 20mm. Granted, this ain't WW2, but so long as we're playing with gunships, may as well model after actual gun ships

Precisely.

CutterJohn wrote:Also, small pop guns on fighters shouldn't even dent capital armor. All you do by shooting a battleship with a machine gun is scrape up the paint.

Yes, I'm thinking in World Of Tanks categories here:
Some light tanks can carry machine guns with a very high theoretical DPS, and against a thin-skinned artillery unit they are quite deadly. But against a heavy tank, most bullets simply bounce and the effective DPS becomes pretty weak.

It is also a matter of balance:
I think if LT gives heavy guns a handicap in tracking (weak against nimble fighters), this should be balanced by small guns having another disadvantage. Such as being poor at penetrating capital shields and armor. Otherwise, the battleship with 200 small guns becomes an "I Win" button - deadly against fighters and just as effective against other battleships as a ship with a few big guns .

Similar thoughts apply to missiles BTW .

TanC wrote:
Unfortunately limiting the track speed on larger ships will severely gimp the ships versus fighters - thus needing you to have fighter escorts anywhere you go. I would rather the turret speed be dependent on the type of weapons mounted. For example, a flak turret will have fast tracking speed but low damage to deal with fighters while a capital ship buster turret will have slow tracking speed but high damage. Also, this would allow for customization of your fleet: fighter screen at the front and battleship destroyers at the back.

Why didn't I think of this sooner?! TRACTOR BEAMS! (or just something that sucks up engine power)

There is the Battleship's solution to fast movers. Takes up a turret slot but gives more functionality in that you can use it on anything. Fast freighter trying to make a run for it? NOT TODAY MUAHAHAHAHA

Yes, and some sort of interdictor cruiser, that project some sort of field to throw ships out of warp. Let's play pirates!

And this also keeps with ship specialization.

If you build a ship that has nothing but large hardpoints, don't expect it to do anything when swarmed by fighters. And if you decide to mount nothing but small hardpoints, don't expect to make a dent against other capital ships.

I love this.