The experimental acceleration changes made the inty virtually indestructible against anything but lucky shots from any other ship, and made inty vs inty fighting to consist of ambushing, “turreting”, or retreating. This made the corvette woefully incompetent, as well as basically any cap ship point defense, including flak. As fun as flying the inty was with massively buffed accelerations, I think the slower paced combat is a better starting point.
It’s also not just increased accelerations, it’s also the entire weapons balancing.
I was not in Beta, so I’m not in a position to argue with you.
I’d like to stress that the interceptor is the base class of the game - it gives the first impression, so to say. And I think it won’t be an overstatement to say that game’s success and popularity will depend on whether or not flying this ship is fun.
I’ll give a quick example. On the other day, I joined a half finished match, where half of both teams were flying capitals. As a novice player in an interceptor I could do very little in large battles.
Not having much more to add to this discussion, I’ll conclude by saying that I encourage you to experiment more - after all early access is specifically for this.
Less of a suggestion per se and more like me banging my head together with everyone elses’.
I can see the problems that come with increasing acceleration on it’s own.
How about slightly increase the acceleration on the inty and make it’s hitbox/shield radius larger while boost is active and for a short while after? That way you get the ability to go from -500m/s to +500m/s when you’re on the edge of the combat zone to get back in the action quicker (without any negative effects), then, while dog fighting you’re easier to hit if you use boost.
One of the issues is that we recently ( 3 months ago ) implemented a mesh (per-triangle) based projectile intersections. Prior to that, projectiles intersections tests were done with the bounding box of the ship. The interceptor’s “hit box” was then twice as big and higher accelerations / engagement ranges were more do-able.
I’ve been considering going back to a hit-box model for the interceptor. It would still be mesh based on the client side ( visually ) but the damage model would be based on a larger hit box on the server side. The interceptor would be easier to shoot at from a larger distance, so boosting ( pun intended ) its accelerations would become possible once again ( as well as adding back the non-gimbaled weapons ).
I see.
Wouldn’t be more preferable quicker and easy, to just give it a small increase on accel now?
And to counter its increased maneuverability to buff its DPS and “maybe” reduce HP slightly?
Less time on target - more DPS on weapons ( fewer projectiles for same damage % ) - “maybe” less HP
But again i must say.
The life expectancy on a fighter is REALLY low on a 1 vs 1 right now, and the gamplay is 80% 1 vs x
Please try first a small accel buf under Eng P mode and boost with the current autogimbal weapons mode.
And let the greater now player base to give you the feedback you need.
I am grateful for peoples opinions and how they feel about the ships. Please continue sharing your subjective experience.
What I am a bit baffled about are the suggestions.
I agree that Interceptor gameplay should be fun and it should feel free. Yet. There isn’t just one way to achieve that. We thankfully live in a complex world where every aspect of the game influences the perception.
The interceptor (probably) had the highest acceleration ever, over it’s whole lifespan in this game, just before early access. There was a huge discussion about this here:
There was a totally 100% different aproach that was also tried:
In the above post I also, in detail, tried to outline what all the factors are that influence the “feeling” of fighting in these ships. From, yes, ship engine power all the way to turret tracking rates and projectile speeds and so forth.
Maybe you agree with me, maybe not, but I want to see if this explanation for the “feelings” most people have is accurate.
It does not have to be “ship feels slugish” = “ship is slugish”. We have to be sure what is the cause of “ship feels slugish” in order to be able to discern possible ways to make it feel better.
I think what is happening is that people try to fly the ships as good as they can, they are in a combat situation after all.
And they go to the limit … to their limit. To the limit of the ship and its weapons. Full power. Fighting on the limit is hard. And hard feels slugish.
Honestly. I think it has more to do with the combat situation being challanging rather then anything else.
Fast relative speeds. Short windows of engagement. Short weapon ranges. Low hit probability. Small targets. Very stressful …
And then you want to make it easier by getting closer to the target … you power up the engine, and what happens? It doesn’t save you. So the “ship feels slugish”.
The suggestions I have seen concerning this issue are either: Increase ship manoeuvrability, which i believe would lead to people going further to the limit to then before. Intensifying the issue. Approaching 800m/s pass speeds and subsequently probably asking for longer weapon ranges and accuracy.
The speeds are crazy currently guys. Most of the engagement time I am matching speed with the target I try to engage instead of duking it out in a cool strafefight arround the engangement range border.
We have two very extreme differences tested now. Sadly not totally comparable due to gimbaled weapons being introduced in 0.5.1.0 too. I hope that is sufficient experience for Flavien to make the apropriate changes.
As for small and hard to hit targets. My opinion here is make them come together closer … and or … mini flack cannons.
Also. Why do we talk about “making the hitbox bigger” when currently the interceptor weapons are gymbaled but with some spread? Isn’t it more straightforward to lower the spread if what is to be achieved is higher hit probability?
I rather want to see my enemy though … I like the close in combat.
It’s not about perception though.
It’s about hard facts and gameplay.
Currently the interceptor is too slow on accelerations and that leads to excess drift, which makes them easy targets.
We’re not talking 100% faster accelerations here, just the option to momentarily increase the potential maneuvers by trading DPS and energy.
I disagree with you.
The excess drift is because, in my opinion, people are going much too fast.
Drift is due to momentum. Momentum comes from mass and velocity. Velocity comes from acceleration.
Acceleration can both remove and add drift. It doesn’t just go one direction and is only capable of removing drift. That’s what I am trying to say.
I am ok with boosting the turbo as it does give players rather quick boost of agency compared to more power to go to limits constantly.
Thing is that, sadly, there’s also another thing that might be somewhat related …
Going to the limit of the energy meter. Which can also feel quite similar to when not being able to match speeds.
Because the “fixed weapon” that you guys want for skills isn’t compatible with both high accelerations ( that we have now, compared to 2 months ago ) AND mesh projectile intersections.
Three things: fixed weapons, high accelerations, mesh projectile intersections. I have found in my tests that one of these three has to go to make the game playable with the fixed weapon. The combination of all three makes it impossible to hit anything with the old fixed weapon. Unless you’re very close ( < 500 m range ), but due to the high accelerations you do not stay that close to your target that long. I’m just telling you the results of my testing so far.
I don’t doubt that a few people like Mattk would find a way to make it work eventually, but I doubt it’d feel good for the vast majority of the players. To me it certainly felt worse than 2 months ago back when we had the fixed weapon, slower accelerations and a hit box.
That’s one of the reasons I haven’t reimplemented it yet, because after the change to higher accellerations ( that even new players are complaining about being too slow now ) and mesh intersections, there’s no way to just turning back the fixed weapons and it all works like before.
Boost already almost quintuples your acceleration for a short period of time and decays to “double” the standard acceleration as long as you keep boosting.
That means you’re in the 20 to 9 gs of acceleration while you are boosting ( interceptor’s standard acceleration rate is close to 4.5 gs ).
i was specifically talking about the question that came up in this thread, unrelated to any fixed weapon discussion we had before.
Thank you for sharing your results though and I can imagine that it turned out that way. I have seen you note this problem before and I see the struggle behind it.
Personally I don’t find gymbaled weapons such a disgrace yet see and agree with other community members that they degrade many aspects of what we had before. I think it’s not just nostalgia speaking. We were at a pretty good place in the past. More then a year back. Much has changed, one of the biggest things being the hitbox thing. I may have helped to degrade the Interceptor combat and I somewhat feel bad about it … yet the changes I proposed should have counteracted the hitbox Problem …
Kind of tempted to say to gradually tweak the fighter combat stats but from reports from other community members such iterative changed have turned up quite bad in other games.
I would say it is good enough for now until weapon load outs become available.
As I said above. I can see that you have collected the experience from the test and will use it wisely.
I think the feeling of nimbleness could be achieved by boosting the boost but lowering the overall acceleration quite a bit.
Lower acceleration to 70%, reduce the boost time, by that I mean that the boost should deplete much faster but should result in the same speeds.
Imagine this is the ship flying a straight line and constantly boosting when available:
Old:
…>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>…>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>…
New:
… … …>----->----->----->… … … …>----->… … …>----->…
It would make changing directions quicker I believe.
If it’s a 3 way triangle between the ship hitbox, accels and fixed weapons, i think the hitbox is the choice, the game felt better to me when that was a thing but it is fairly undesirable to have an innaccurate hit section, it will mess with subtargetting (shooting out engines, inty weapons and such) later on. but unless that’s necessary there are some other reasons the inty might feel a bit slow.
Boost does give a large accel bonus now (i wasnt aware that it initially was a 4x accel bonus, i did know it decayed to around 2x with time but 4x is a lot) but using it has gotten a bit chunkier, you cant burst it as quickly or reliably as before so sometimes the player presses shift and they dont feel that “oh fuck” acceleration that makes the inty feel fast. Because of the ramp down there would have to be some system to make sure if you boost again after it already decayed, it is still decayed, but the cooldown delay itself should be removed to preserve the snappy feeling of tapping boost and getting an immediate response.
Some of the boost stats from the game files
EnergyTurboCost 20.0
TurboThrustRate 2.0
TurboTimerDecay 2.0
TurboInitialBoost 2.5
ThrustScale X=“1.0” Y=“1.0” Z=“0.9”
The last one, thrustscale i beleive means that on the (Z in this engine, iirc)front/back axis, it is only .9 of the boost of the other axes. Im not sure having front back be lower boost makes sense, i think its worth considering setting that Z to like 2.0 and just seeing how it feels to have really strong forward/back boost. There are other games that had that for a short period and i remember enjoying those patches. The logic behind it is that a strong forward boost can help close distance in combat situations when used right. When used wrong obviously it makes it worse, but in the current accel balance i dont even feel there is a “right” way to use boost accel that will reliably get to that short range for combat (against any player), and it being impossible as long as someone holds backstrafe i feel is worse than it just being hard.
What i can’t find in the game files is the current engine overcharge multipliers per side. It feels like engine overcharge should at least be faster even if base accel is held constant. It’s kinda hard to tell sometimes when my engine overcharged right now if i dont know i toggled the setting.
One of the biggest sources of “my ship feels slow” is that the ships are very distant from eachother during fights and tend to slingshot out very easily. Long combat ranges means everything looks further, and when you thrust things move less on your screen, that is a huge source of feeling slow. to shrink combat ranges down maybe reducing projectile velocity a tad is worth a test. I was also thinking maybe one of the formation modes could be used as a default assist on enemy players newbies target, as a way to lead them closer under assist
Its also worth playing with the strafe ratios, there are essentially 3 variables to play with there, forward accel, side/up/down accel, and backwards accel. a well tuned ratio there will tend to keep people closer together in combat, which will make people feel faster while also allowing more interesting manuevering. Hard to say exactly what ratios would be best for battlescape right now, but definitely something to play with.
Tweaking boost is definitely something possible, and easy. For now we’re focusing on the more urgent balance issues ( ramming, station defenses, credits too easy ) but we’re definitely going to do a new weapons / movement balance pass before ship upgrades are implement and the fixed weapon comes back, as it’s pretty much a requirement anyway.
Kreion: That’s a well done video. I really appreciate the visuals. A post could not convey that knowledge.
I hate jousting in fighter games and circle fights aren’t much better. I agree with your observation on how 1v1s degrade to DPS exchanges. I have fun because I can respawn fast.
Also note that in the video SC has a ton of visual clues; blackout and redout, asteroids, debris, and a huge artificial horizon. IB is beautiful, but is a notch lower on nearby visuals that would indicate movement–hence, “this feels sluggish”. A small HUD line/number change isn’t going to convey movement–external cues will.
I prefer a WW2 or Star Wars type dogfight mode. Newtonian physics are neat except in a missile engagement zone. The advantage goes to the missile when the target velocity goes to zero; it’s smarter to run away until the missile times out or loses lock.
On the other side of this equation is that IB isn’t 1v1 or 4v4 match; it’s a brawl without an asteroid field to hide in and a lot of missiles on the field–as you noted.
“Honestly. I think it has more to do with the combat situation being challanging rather then anything else.”
Respectfully – I seriously disagree! I can jump from I:B to E:D, pick one of my small or medium combat ships, go find a PvP fight and fly to the extreme limit of my skill and the ship’s maneuverability. The challenge is there, the stress is there, the unpredictability of fighting a human opponent is there – but the sluggishness is not. I can go from -500m/s to +500m/s in a flash and 1v1 someone doing the same, all the while we stay within a comfortable <2-3km distance to each other, only slipping further than that on purpose.
There are a lot of E:D refugees around here with experience counting in the hundreds or thousands of hours doing 6DOF unassisted flight model PvP. Besides a few differences, the unassisted flight models of I:B and E:D are very close, in my opinion (personally with around 1400hrs in E:D, console and PC experience combined) comparison between the two is completely fair. Actually I:B is a very interesting study in how E:D’s flight model would feel without the “blue zone”, low yaw rates or velocity caps (spoiler: I like it a lot).
I just think the I:B flight model fails in the linear:rotational ratio of the ships’ thruster abilities. The ships turn all right but all that gives me is a good view of my opponent as I’m drifting backwards, furiously trying to change my vector without emptying my blaster capacity doing so. For me it quickly became a showstopper as I’m all about fighters, I don’t care one bit for the big ship gameplay.
I agree the solution is likely not as simple as scaling the ships’ acceleration. I’m fairly confident a reasonable flight model can be reached by tweaking the boost feature. The boost should be cheap and frequent (it should simply regen very quickly and always be available with no delay if there’s >0 boost energy available) and most of all, boost should not leave one drained of ability to fire weapons, otherwise what’s the point of getting into weapons range in the first place?
On G-forces. In design decisions, personally I would favor fun gameplay over scientific accuracy any day of the week. I know everyone may not agree, especially in the niche category of space sims. But games are a form of entertainment and should IMO always err on the side of flowing gameplay and artistic aesthetics over hard realism. YMMV.
On weapons. Fixed weapons should always reward skill – let them be hard to hit but on contact let them do significant damage.
On the flipside, missiles are a very impersonal way to remove a fixed amount of health from your opponent’s health pool. Right now I already see the game favors missile gameplay, and if the current flight model persists, I think it will become the norm even for small ships – instead of closing in for a good 'ole furball, I’ll just dump my missiles and head for the nearest restock point.
That’s one way to play I suppose, but I personally greatly enjoy difficult to aim, slow moving, hard hitting projectiles, delivered at headbutting distance.
Gameplay being king is actually one of the main arguments for including gforce, or an equivalent directional thruster heat system. I dont really care about realism as a goal, but Gforce creates a positional resource, kinda like how airplanes have to deal with energy fighting, gforce you expend directional energy, the other person can see how you expended that energy then use it against you to push you. People good at g-cancelling can pull off pretty much the same manuevers regardless but it very much increases the depth and skill involved in achieving them.
Interestingly, in space the gforce positional resource is totally relative to the ship’s rotation, so rotations and roll especially become way more important for rotating your frame of reference in the gforce-space. Right now in battlescape roll has a somewhat limited usage, mostly for slightly increasing your rot rate or presenting a smaller profile, but gforce would complete the triangle of competing interests for roll… and competing interests for the same mechanics create mega-depth for gameplay.
Of games that have achieved this, SC once in the past had something like this at high skill levels but it was since more or less made irrelevent. Now the only game that makes good use of this in 6dof is Hunternet starfighter really.
I so Agree! Having officially QA’ed other space and flight games. The balance of average velocity, acceleration, target size, weapon fire rate/range/accuracy is crazy hard.
Coupled with the “expected” flight behavior /currently accepted style (ED like - some strange hybrid of quasi physics base Space and Vietnam era air dogfights. ) Is also part of the issue. Make it too realistic (there are games out there that do and they are great and not as “hard” as most think just different) and the average person does not like it as it’s not star wars / battlestar enough to fit there pop sci-fi concept of what should be like vs just modeling air combat in space as been the historical norm.
It is very very hard.
So far the few games I have played it’s in the ballpark of a solid hybrid.
Just basing this of a hunch. I think the gameplay for the interceptor class can be improved by implementing a short visual trail from the engine.
This aids in the predictability of interceptors in dogfights. Because in my opinion the sluggish feel partly comes from the fact that there are no visual ques that the ship you are following and targeting is changing direction and therefore you will most likely be too late to react.
Airplane games don’t have this issue because flight paths are predictable.
Trails are implemented (as a HUD effect), you can edit an XML to lengthen/strengthen them.
Edit: there is a TrailDuration in ClientConfig.xml in my obsolete version (windows issue, accessed from my Linux).
