This section will deal with Combat and flight based feedback
This will be the longest input as it seems most people around have a lot of opinions about this specifically at this moment.
Some of the issues that revolves around the balance of combat, stands between capital ships and fighters (S-types).
But it appears the point people have been trying to make has not fully come across to the devs.
One of these revolves around the fact of how the shields functions together with the booster.
The other is about the weapons and specifically what can be used and on on what.
As well as controlling Turrets, fighters/subordinates & wings
when in the pilot seat of ie a carrier.
(I have not piloted a destroyer yet, but from what i gather its similar with destroyers)
- 1: Commanding turrets, drones and fighters -
This mainly applies to L+ ship turrets, But also any ship that holds drones, I have personally not tried the destroyers yet.
There is a complete absence of control over your turrets and drones when you pilot a capital ship.
- At the very least, please add the same turret control that M-ships have for their turrets to carriers.
Preferably i would also like to see additions to the right click command menu - when piloting a cap-ship.
- One option to tell drones/fighters and turrets to attack something specific, aka focused fire.
- Open general fire against any and all hostiles around you. "Defend ship" dose not seem to be very aggressive as it stands
- Or simply to hold fire & docking at .
This seems to reasonable be possible
short term. As some of these seem to be available on the map if you don't pilot the ship you are using.
But would be nice to have it while flying manually as well basically.
As it is now exiting the pilot chair -> letting AI captain take over -> going into the map and there try to tell them (often in vein) what to do.
It required a lot of manual input that seems to also get overridden by the ai at times - making it a bit clunky and a chore to maintain. Maybe i am a derp though!
It prevents you from actually participating and watching the battle myself
- Now over to Long term
Another thing really want to see done asap, atm Missile turrets are all automatic as well.
I feel since this is a Limited resource, this really should when the player is piloting a Large+ ship be fully manually controlled.
Secondly since we have bridges and several captain chairs in these capitals. Please at some point reinstate the manual turret control from older X games.
What you now have is the perfect opportunity to implement a "turret command chair" where you can allow the AI to pilot the ship, while you yourself control all turrets individually or "generally/automatically" defending the ship from threats.
- 2: Shields -
Here there is a massive issue, especially for capital ships again.
This revolves around how boosting is designed. How boosting fully depletes the shields on the ship, under 8 seconds.
Allowing a simple pee shooter to keep the shields down - making combat be a bit stale and make really no sense as a result, unreasonable and frustrating.
- Please for the time being prevent AI from boosting on L & XL ships, so they do not drain shields down to 0% mid combat.
There simply is no reasonable gain in speed and basically self sabotages the ship and renders it useless for no good reason.
I personally, together with a lot of others it seems, feel shields
need to be a constant rather than a trigger.
The constant recharge would prevent a small pee shooter from basically disabling a capital ship shields in unreasonable time frames.
People are of the opinion that boosters need to be bound by either it separate cap - or by a weapon pool of energy instead as well.
I will return to this later. But again this I realize would be a big change and likely not happen anytime soon before 2.0.
As a side note - I would FULLY approve of EMP and Ion based weapons - forcing shields
not to recharge for a certain amount of time.
In fact that would make sense, and quite frankly be cool
- 2: S Ships and Weapons -
As it stands now there are no limits as to what a small ship can use as far as guns go, this kinda make "ship types" go out of the window, and hence it's kinda a big issue. I gathered there are a few possibilities of change being possible to negate this and balance things out a bit.
- My first, short term suggestions
Here is one change i would think would be a
short term solution to negate some of the issues of s-ships being a bit to powerful against larger ships. But even with the long term changes i will go into later, this too would apply somewhat.
Specifically, limit what type of weapons ships can used based on their type or even more interestingly, that and also by race.
But for simplistic reasons, lets start by making some examples for allowed weapon types for each ship type in S-M ships.
- S-Type ships -
- Scouts: Pulse only, maybe also either Shard or bolt.
- Couriers: Pulse, Shard, bolt & Dumb-fire missiles.
- Interceptor: Pulse, Shard, Dumb-fire missiles (Maybe??)
- Fighter: Pulse, Ion, Bolt, shard & Dumb-fire.
- Heavy fighters: Pulse, Beam, Ion, Bolt, shard, Dumb-fire & Tracking (1 or 2 plasma MAX)
- Miner: Pulse, Mining laser
- M-type ships weapons
- Miner: Pulse, Mining, Dumb-fire & Tracking.
- Frigate: All except no Plasma & Torpedo
- Bomber: Plasma, Dumb-fire, Tracking, torpedo
- M-Type Turrets
- Transport: Pulse, Bolt, shard
- Frigate: All, but no Plasma
I could go on with L ships but lets keep it at that as an example only.
Also to note, some missiles with really high damage regardles, should also be limited to Bombers & capital ship turrets only.
- Long term
Now off to the more extreme examples people have suggested and I also can see
viable Long Term.
This is also where the Boosters I mentioned earlier would come in.
This would be another way to negate some of the issues of small ships being to powerful over capital ships.
First of all this would also only work best if the mentioned shield changes come true.
As in having shields have a set constant recharge over a "trigger" holding shield recharge back.
In eve online you have 3 things to keep track of, Cap, cpu and Powergrid.
Now that dose not necessarily make since to implement in X4 - So lets stick with the implementation of "Powergrid" and a a Capacitor.
First of all, you had something like this in the old X engine, On top of what i mentioned about weapon types being limited to specific ship types.
Specifically, and correct me if this is inaccurate, but you had the Shield generation output and weapon energy output. These would be very nice to bring back with X4 in the following manner.
Having a "power grid" for starters on all ships. Would stand as a maximum limit for how many weapons your ships can handle at once.
This would force you to be a bit more conservative and creative with weapon choices, and preferably force you to mix weapon types.
And actually make weapon grouping make more since and useful.
For example, it would negate a heavy fighter for going all out on plasma weapons which makes these way to overpowered over other s-type ships.
Maybe limiting it to 2 plasma and 1-2 dumb-fire/tracking missiles or maybe a pulse laser in the mix too.
Yes sure, heavy fighters should be stronger but not impossible to face by lets say an interceptor or other fighter even.
With that out of the way as and example. Secondly i think each weapon yes should have the overheat thing back. but you could either do this per weapon basis (Especially for plasma guns). but also then have them share the same capacitor/energy bar with the boosters.
As far as capacity, weapons and boosters go. Having these all linked instead would make combat more interesting and fun.
My thinking here is like with others too. It's that you only really realistically use boosting in combat now with the travel mode available to us.
And thus
it would make sense to bind boosting to weapons over shields, shields that after all are vital for your survival.
And compromising that is basically self sabotage.
Maybe you could make use of the "burst weapon output / sustained weapon output" which are in the game already?
This would be another way to negate some of the issues of small ships being to powerful over capital ships.
First of all this would also only work best if the mentioned shield changes come true.
As in having shields have a set constant recharge over a "trigger" holding shield recharge back.
In eve online you have 3 things to keep track of, Cap, cpu and Power grid.
Now that dose not necessarily make since to implement in X4 - So lets stick with the implementation of "Power grid" and a a Capacitor.
First of all, you had something like this in the old X engine i think, On top of what i mentioned about weapon types being limited to specific ship types.
Correct me if this is inaccurate, but you had the Shield generation output and weapon energy output? These would be very nice to bring back with X4 in the following manner.
Having a "power grid" for starters on all ships. Would stand as a maximum limit for how many weapons your ships can handle at once.
This would force you to be a bit more conservative and creative with weapon choices, and preferably force you to mix weapon types.
And actually make weapon grouping make more since and useful.
For example, it would negate a heavy fighter for going all out on plasma weapons which makes these way to overpowered over other s-type ships.
Maybe limiting it to 2 plasma and 1-2 dumb-fire/tracking missiles or maybe a pulse laser in the mix too.
Yes sure, heavy fighters should be stronger but not impossible to face by lets say an interceptor or other fighter even.
With that out of the way as and example. Secondly i think each weapon yes should have the overheat thing back. but you could either do this per weapon basis (Especially for plasma guns). but also then have them share the same capacitor/energy bar with the boosters.
As far as capacity, weapons and boosters go having these all linked instead would make combat very interesting.
My thinking here too is that you only really realistically use boosting in combat now with the travel mode available to us.
And thus it would make sense to bind boosting to weapons over shields that are vital for your survival.
