Absolutely. A big problem there is a new player can’t compare the two systems and get a feel for them at the same time.
It’s a perfectly valid opinion to have, about the state of things being better now, It is a lot easier to get your interceptor into the fight and up close to the enemy now than it was in previous builds. My only issue is what that’s done to the fight when you get there.
Tweaking health stats is always alluring as it is a nice stat that has one of the least impacts to others systems, unlike engine power or weapon spread.
I can see why you propose it as you think everything else is fine.
Don’t forget though that this would decrease Interceptor Survivability in all situation. Not just Interceptor to small ship combat.
I think the reason why it seem ships are too tanky is because they are almost never in optimal weapon range right now.
It was and still is essential to get to optimal weapons range and stay there as long as possible while not being hit.
To me it doesn’t seem like the Interceptor is too tanky. This is already going into the iterative balancing again where we already point at more things to change.
Currently the gimbaled weapons make that weapons range much wider. Meaning that you can land hits, yet very inconsistently, from a wider range of distances.
Also. Not to forget is that the experimental change also added more spread! Which probably made the optimal weapon range much closer!
It makes it really hard to just point at one thing because that’s not the whole truth, it is not just one thing.
We already have to deal with 5 to 6 changes. Add another one and …
You know. Screw that. Let Flavien balance the game and us just share our experiences.
To me, now, it is very hard to stay in optimal weapons range.
My experience is that the time I am in optimal distance to an Interceptor has decreased manifold. Not just a bit but from a few seconds to maybe one second.
That’s what it feels to me.
It is ok if ships can run. We have to accept that in this game. Every ship can do that, even the Carrier. More mobile ships can chase but equal sized ships can’t because they only can react to someone running. This is ok as the enemy has disengaged and is not dealing any more damage. Wouldn’t cycling warp be such an easy way to get rid of momentum they would be out of the fight for even longer.
It is very frustrating though if you are doing all the work to get into range of a target and the window of opportunity is so small.
Sometimes I stare in awe as I see an Interceptor accelerate away at a ridiculous speed.
@Playbenny do you have some combat you recorded you can share? What is your average engagement range? How many hits do you land in percentage per volley?
I guess you are fighting much different then some other players, me included, I wonder how that looks.
I can edit a video this evening. 
Here are the balance changes I’m thinking of doing next patch, probably this week ( friday or saturday, we’ll see ):
Reducing mobility of the interceptor a little bit; I don’t want to reduce it back to the previous levels, so it’ll still be a buff overall. 0.5.1.0 increased accelerations by +50%, but I might settle to roughly half ( aka +25% ), while keeping the previous turbo boost adjustments.
I’d like to test the idea of maybe slightly increasing the gimbal angle ( maybe 2° to 3° ) while reducing the gun rotation speed. It’s currently set to 10°/second, that means it takes 1/5th of a second to go from the central position to the gimbal cone boundary. I might significantly reduce it. If you have any feedback / idea on how long it should probably take to reposition itself let me know.
A buff to corvette weapons, right now I’m thinking of increasing their projectiles speed. I don’t think they need more hitpoints, they’re already pretty tanky and they feel right in terms of mobility too.
Maybe a small buff to the bomber, but I’m not sure what kind yet. It’s pretty weak to interceptors, but keep in mind it’s supposed to be weak against interceptors.
And finally, increasing angular thrust on some of the small ships, while keeping the current maximum turn rates. I’m a bit concerned by this change, as I don’t want to lose the currently flight model “feel” and it’s one of the changes that could most easily affect it negatively, but I’m willing to do some tweaks there too, especially if it can help new players aim more easily.
New user.
I viewed Obsidian Ant’s video on 30 Aug. I was hooked by the visuals. Battlestar Galactica firefight scenes have been a favorite of mine; plus, Bear McCreary’s soundtrack.
Pledging was easy. I was hung up on the credit card entry potion for a few minutes. Normally it is CC#, expiration, CVC. This entry added in billing zip in between expiration and CVC; my zip code was up in the address portion and my auto-fill skipped it on your webform.
Download was painless. Installation failed once; retried—worked.
Game launched without an issue.
The game started with the IB splash page. Went to another page then back to the original splash page. Did I go backwards in loading? Eventually loaded into the game menu.
By this point I had watched Hutch play for about 3 hours through YouTube. Through watching him I was able to understand the mission screen, how-to re-spawn to change ships, and how to reload. Without that video I would have been lost.
I’m not a fan of the ground segment. I would switch to a WW2 flight model with big ships just able to hover above the ground. Inty, bomber as their WW2 counterpart with dog-fighting.
Both ground and space need more defensive guns. It was not intuitive I could destroy the guns or structure for cash.
I played the interceptor; bomber, and corvette. All fun.
Inty; it seemed hard to hit other inty’s with guns. Bomber; fun; even more fun when I figured out there were torpedoes on board. Fixed v gimbals–I don’t agree with it, but Elite has fixed as powerful and gimballed, less powerful. As this is a more PVP centric game than Elite—this will take some balancing.
Corvette. I’m guessing guns I don’t control are under auto-fire AI? If so, the UI should indicate AI and activity.
The carrier should be able to reload and repair smaller ships. Repairing structures should have a place in this game.
When player counts are low; let the store open up to try the big ships to go break infrastructure.
The missile and torpedo lock-on sound needs to be a bit louder (maybe a visual clue)—or user defined. Maybe a UI indicator when you can fire the next salvo.
Close to the station; it could get really dark. Either more lights or night vision mode. During one episode, the station was exploding and shaking. I was next to it and shaking too.
Some of the attacking (AI?) pilots are hiding on the stations. Literally.
HUD/UI needs a little work. Plenty of forum posts on that one.
Mission locations; it was hard to tell if the distant location was in front or behind a planet. Dashed and greyed out is a normal convention for behind. Additionally, sometimes the font color blended into the background.
Please continue working on the economy. The economy develops and generates targets and gaming opportunities. On stellar geography—Elite has no fronts and no economy. It feels and looks dead. Eve is on the other side of the equation. In Eve, geography matters and they have jump gates. I’m not saying go the MOBA route with home bases and capture points; but choke points/lanes drive action.
Good luck.
The corvette is in this awkward spot where it has auto-aiming but manually firing turrets.
Occulted targets are blinking (except planets for some reason).
Take a look at Tutorial for Beginners for more information.
What browser are you using? If you entered your zip/postal code on the address form it should have automatically copied it to the CC/CVC location.
Looking forward to trying that out! 
Have you thought about giving it a strong point-defences vs missiles/torpedoes? Maybe with area-of-effect to provide point-defence for capital ships and add more to its support role?
Not on the starter ship, but once we have upgrades I think it’d definitely be possible to mount a bunch of laser defenses.
Just a quick one:
I was fiddling around with the controls setup on the in-game menu and noticed the “Reverse” option is missing … should be put in sooner rather than later. 
Yeah a lot of settings are missing out at the moment. And the “graphics” tab is empty 
The graphics are perfect, no need for a menu 
Please keep interceptor forward thrust the same as now. You should get more performance from those big rockets in the back. Right now lateral thruster boost keeps you out of the target’s Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ). My concern is that you will not be able to stay out of the WEZ with the planned nerf. Maybe require Override Engines to get the performance you have now with lateral thruster boost.
Buff the lateral thrusters on the bomber as little bit (about 10%).
Seconded. I fear it will feel sluggish again and the good old jousting will ensue… The great thing about the powerful forward thrust right now is that changing directions is not tedious anymore.
I use Chrome and LastPass. I think what happened is that auto-fill attempted to add the zip but I told it not to. I’m used to form fills putting data in the wrong fields. Once you delete the zip, it took a few minutes to figure out the zip input was actually the correct data input. User error.
Heya fellow backers. First time player - long-time backer here.
The vid Obsidian Ant made brought my attention back to “heck, I backed that”. So I just launched myself into the fray.
I will just describe the flow I got as a complete noob getting into the game without tutorials or guides.
It worked out pretty well after a few trial-and-error rounds.
Launcher - I had the default ship “corvette” selected without knowing that’s not possible at begin of the game starting with 0 credits.
So my first launch was in an inty thinking I am steering a (very nimble) corvette.
Getting to the map mode und finding a target was quite intuitive, but it’s tedious at the moment that new targets are announced in the cockpit mode, but not marked in the map mode (needed to learn planet - base combos to find the next target in map mode). Warp drive and approach is pretty straight forward.
Now on to battle!
The radial menues to change loadout and focus power output are intuitive, but you need to find them first.
range indicators for the weapons are not as visible as I would like, as are the reloading times (torps, especially). I still do not know where to find my own shield and hull status, regardless of the ship (but the shields down message is visible enough).
HOTAS support: Could not get my X55 setup working easily, so I settled for mouse/keyboard as I thought it appropriate for big ship maneuvering.
Interceptor: Feels like one. After getting the hang of it, it was fun to fly, you could kill things (or be killed by other things). Inty vs. bomber it seems the bomber dies a wee bit too fast.
Bomber: After finding the torps in the radial menu I was a happy dragon. What I didn’t realize at that time was the rearming function of the corvettes in a near radius around them. I was puzzled why sometimes the torps seemed to replenish automagically. In defense I managed to restock in a hangar, and could even play as a torp turret right out the hangar bay. The bang of the torps is extremely satisfying, and most of the visuals and sounds give a nice sense of “woooo”, at least for a new player.
Corvette: I was not able to really understand the auto-targetting - manually firing thing -> completey eluded me.
Cruiser: as I had too much fun bombing the enemy cruisers, I only had one go or two with a cruiser myself. Didn’t handle myself well on both tries.
On the bottom line it was easy enough to get into the fight, but some additional infos for the beginner would make it easier to understand some mechanics (like turret shooting for creds).
I really had fun in the battles, and found a game that has evolved very well, runs fast and stable and has beautiful graphics and sound design and some very satisfying “boom” visuals.
Kudos to the team and I really look forward to the ongoing development!
Regards
Vere
Hi,
I just discovered Battlescape because of the ObsidianAnt video.
I am interested to start playing, but I am not sure how to start. Should I pledge now (it’s still possible) or wait for the Early Access. What will be the difference?
You can pledge at the link below should you desire, and see the associated rewards! Note which tiers give you access - we are currently in Beta but fast approaching Early Access.
As for whether you wait or not, that’s up to your bank account and whether any of the pledge rewards appeal!
Thanks, Sab1e.
Is it already known at what price level the Early Access will be sold?