Ship battles

"Make an alias" is something that could be said for a lot of threads in here, and that’s not the point of this forum. Neither is the person’s identity.

That being said, there is some strategy to it. Space combat isn’t just "spam fire more than the other team". There are matters like recharge rate to think about.[/quote:10r5bq5u]

Perhaps an extra parameter to the command then? Like fire ion slow/medium/rapid would alter the rate of fire?[/quote:10r5bq5u]

Slow would hit more often than rapid, and would also do more damage because it’s easier to score a critical hit if you aim first? Yes, I support the idea, although I haven’t been in a space battle as a pilot and never intend to unless something awful happens.

The only difficulty with space combat as there is, is seeing messages rush past your screen. How quickly you can spam a command isn’t a difficulty level.[/quote:5sycrixz]

That is really unfair, and untrue.

Ions or turbolasers? Which ship to target? Where is your battlegroup position? How much fuel can you afford to engage with? When to chaff. Should you chaff. What about torpedoes? When to recharge?

There are a very, very, very, very very many things wrong with ship battles, but the fundamental concepts of them are really alright in my book. Though I think it would be better if more than [x4] shots could be grouped together at a time.

As I said, there’s a great many things that need changed with ship combat, it’s just… This isn’t one of them in my book.[/quote:5sycrixz]

You don’t think there’s a problem with having to spam to fire each shot?

Ground combat is automated, why not also make space combat automated to a small degree? Still let people decide when to do all that crap you just listed off there, but make it so that you don’t have to be the fastest fingers in the west to actually get anywhere when it comes to firing the guns.

Ask the rebels if it’s just a spam war, or if Gathorn’s really just that much better than they are <!– s;) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!– s;) –>[/quote:11xwjgjj][/quote:11xwjgjj]

How about we ask him if his tractorbeam finger gets numb? Or if he enjoys gloating OOCly about ordering autopilots activated in order to abuse battlegroup bugs. <!– s:) –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!– s:) –> The Rebel ships engaging the main Imperial ones, at this point, is about as winnable as iunno… Some dumbass droid with terrible DEX and AC and only a blaster trying to go head-to-head against a trained, eq’d BHer. It’s possible to win if you get real lucky and the more powerful and advantageous being/ship screws up, but generally you’re on a road to death.

Speaking of which, one addition to space combat that would be nice is a more dynamic tractoring system… Something along the lines of, you know, having to actually recharge them… Maybe having some usage lag… Maybe even make a multi-stage skill, since it’s not exactly supposed to be -easy- to nail someone with a tractorbeam.

How about you type in the tractoring command, have a set pause around the time it takes to do a diagnose, and THEN the tractorbeam does what you wanted it to, IF you manage to get a lock-on. And if you do anything else while you’re fiddling with the beam’s controls, you abort it.

Oh, and a piloting skill to break tractorbeam locks. Perhaps the targetted ship would get a message when the enemy begins trying to tractor them, and has a chance of breaking the lock similar to how shipdodge works (dependant on size, using the pilot command, etc). But I think it’d require a specific command, not just be a passive skill. Or maybe we could expand ‘roll’
to do this, considering that anything that’s too large to make use of our ‘roll’ skill would have no business trying to manuever out of a tractorbeam anyway.

[EDIT] PS: We also need to fix the space echoes. I’m pretty tired of my ship being halted before I actually see the ‘tractored’ message pop up. And even though it’s funny, seeing ‘The ship leaves the platform far behind as it flies into space’ while you’re in a hyper already, is a little ridiculous. Also, ships leave the system in hyperspace before you actually see the message quite often.