Players are the only ones who have names above their symbols. Even when not selected. Also there’s the stat/leaderbaord to see who’s online. (in White) Chat also helps to coordinate.
All this of course needs to be known. Honestly though. A lot of games don’t tell you these things.
The download page of the game has a description of the basics of the gameplay. It’s outdated though.
I think that would be a good thing to update and see next play-test weekend if a HTML page full of info and images is enough to explain most of the basics of the game.
First thing you would ask them after answering someones gameplay question is if they read the page. Then point to it and see if any questions remain.
Thanks, in retrospect, this makes sense in terms of finding players via the icons over them. I actually hopped on again once more after posting and found a few folks in the player list. Even had a semi proper little dogfight (jousting in interceptors in a 50 km elliptical loop). Not sure how many more alpha backer weekends there will be, but I imagine this game would 10x more fun with a crew to meet up with.
Suggestion regarding cockpit view and cockpit itself as i did in previous post but with more details!
It may just be professional dissease so others may not spot it, so maybe it’s not that important but as a guy working many years in aircraft cockpits i will suggest these practices in aircraft design which are study for it self.
-Why i suggested more distanced first person view!
It is standard in aircraft design that all crucial inflight information in this case flight instruments providing mandatory information are placed inside field of view (engine parameters, airspeed, altitude, failure messages…etc.) while other less used during the flight like switch panels go in second plan.
In flight simming limitations are field of view and non-existing eye movement which are covered and replaced by head movement using mouse, headtracking or VR devices, so in order to compensate that more distanced view is used.
-another thing is switch panel and instruments position and direction which follows flight direction, in that case i noticed that keyboard on LH side being placed upright making it not usage friendly for pilot, in practice it should be placed parallel with pilot and other instruments and panels.
This is a game so it really may not be relevant, if so please ignore it!
If it helps and if i can help further in future in those things feel free to contact me i it will be my pleasure to help!
I’d like to make a case for making the smaller ships more fragile.
I’m an average skill level combat pilot and I found that one on one interceptor fights take a long time and often have no definite result. At least half of the fights result in one combatant breaking off and disengaging. This is made worse by the current behaviour where a targeting lock is easily lost, and then finding the target you were previously engaging can be difficult.
Making ships more fragile will solve this problem as a much higher proportion of fights will end in the destruction of one of the combatants. Deadlier fights are more engaging and fun, getting a “kill” is the endorphin reward that makes the game exciting and if this result is too hard to achieve, it makes for a game asks the player to do a lot of work for little reward.
There is an argument that can be made that being destroyed quickly isn’t much fun either. However this already happens as soon as an interceptor gets targeted by one of the larger classes of ship. That’s the worst of both worlds as the player has to put a lot of effort into getting a kill on the ships that are on a par with it, but still can be killed quickly by a larger ship, making all that effort worthless.
The sweet spot for gameplay purposes in FPS games seems to be 2-3 good hits causing a kill. Single shot kills appear to be generally disliked by gamers and getting lots of good hits without a kill is also disliked and can lead to accusations of bad netcode.
To ensure that it always takes at least two hits to kill an opponent, the first shot could always be absorbed by shields, even if they are overwhelmed by the power of the shot, subsequent shots would then cause hull damage. For this to work there would need to be a delay of perhaps ten seconds after being hit before the shields start to recharge.
Barrages of fire from larger ships do seem to be too deadly at the moment, if you get hit once then you will probably get hit multiple times. The turrets on larger ships seem to converge too accurately on their target. Giving a greater spread to their fire would help smaller ships to survive longer without impeding the effectiveness of turrets against larger ships too much.
I wonder if convergence of fire is even needed at all. If all turrets on a ship simply point in the same direction it then becomes up to the player to confine the spread of fire by choosing an angle of attack that minimises spread.
I’m ok with the direction of your suggestion. Though the extensiveness of your proposed changes go to far in my opinion.
I think this is the main problem with your proposal. I:Bs current gameplay isn’t really comparable to an FPS. Just taking the usual hits to kill and transposing it to I:B won’t end well in my opinion.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy tactical, tense shooters. I really don’t think I:B will translate just inherit the emotional engagement these tactical FPS invoke by lowering ship survivability. At least not by this amount and not by this change alone.
I:Bs current gameplay, emotionally, is more akin to melee combat games. Like Chivalry. It’s a kind of dueling. Moving around each other. Deciding how to act, to retreat, to recharge shields, etc.
This is not because ships have so much health. It’s mostly because how ships can move around, see each other and all this while not being in each others weapon range.
In an FPS, if you see someone you can/must shoot him.
In a melee combat game you see someone, but you are usually still in the position to decide what to do.
I think this would result, in the end effect, in something like we’ve seen with the terminator bots in the previous version. Was that fun? I mean even playing as one of the bots? Most engagements consistent of: aligning, firing one salve, changing targets or being dead. With a really, really small window of opportunity (about 1 to 3 seconds). It is/was similar to FPS games but without any tension. You know where the targets are and if you don’t know it was due to you being overwhelmed with what was going on, not someone hiding behind a corner …
With dueling you have tension to who is going to win the duel, with the stress of fighting this extended amount of time and trying to survive.
With tactical FPS it’s the tension of danger behind any corner. The knowledge that the enemy is close but not knowing where exactly.
With aircraft combat it’s the preparations you made before the attack and living with the consequences of maybe not chosen the right target or time to attack.
This only creates a struggle to survive a situation that, in most cases, can’t be survived. I like the noticable absence of shield recover time. I don’t like the panic second. Current shield recharge rates are really, really low. Not comparable to anything console shooter like.
Just for reference. I usually hit about 4-5 shots for an average, well timed, salvo. I would probably instantly kill every interceptor and probably every bomber with the extend of changes you propose.
Yesterday I was even able to destroy a corvette with two full salvos.
I don’t agree there. Without convergence hitting anything that is more than 500meters away will be a thing of luck. Also, I would bet that even with the bigger ships, above 50% of the shots will miss at a range higher than 2km.
The problem is that turrets currently aim perfectly at the lead indicator. NPC interceptors don’t because their aiming skills have been nerved. The turret behavior on the other hand has not. Turret weapons need some inherent inaccuracy. I would propose weapon specific inaccuracy instead of introducing inaccuracy in the turret aiming.
Honestly. When new weapons are introduced I would like Flavien to put in a test weapon that can 2-3 shot an Interceptor with a fire rate about 2/3 of the current placeholder weapon. I want to be able to compare how that changes gameplay side by side.
Was the corvette on full health? Because that’s far from my experience. I’m obvious not as good shot as you as I generally get 2-3 hits on a good salvo. It currently feels like it takes at least a dozen of these to bring down an opposing interceptor.
For the 2-3 hits to kill sweet point, it would be fair to translate that to 2-3 salvos, so perhaps 5-10 hits to kill might be the sweet point in battlescape. Whatever the actual parameters are, currently there are some major flaws with trying to participate in combat using a small ship for the average player.
It was two times 3/4 of the Interceptor energy with about 75% hits and a full corvette brought down below about 10% health. It’s a big target. I myself was surprised how easy it was to hit.
I did try it on a fresh corvette. It did disengage after my second run.
Maybe @Hutchings can remember if he was full.
I can do some more testing. Still, your subjective opinion isn’t wrong, I just fear it would slide too much into the one-hit direction. Open for some experimentation for sure. Would really like some side by side comparison. Remembering how last version felt isn’t really optimal!
By the way. It’s less about the aiming and more about the movement. If you can get (relatively) close without the enemy really being able to respond in time you can get a lot of hits.
One may argue that that’s a special case but I usually don’t even bother to fire when not in a favorable position/vector with higher likelihood to hit.
Pretty much this. All of these comments are sound and valid but I’d like to remind everybody that the turret auto-aiming implementation is less than 2 weeks old. Of course it’s gonna get adjusted, many many times, before we end up with something that even resembles a final system.
As for interceptors survivability, I agree that interceptor vs interceptor in the current build takes too much time. But it has to be balanced with travel time. If it takes 3 or 4 minutes average to go back to the battlefield ( assuming you’re not respawning there, but at another base of course ), you don’t want to die within seconds because you had bad luck / were not careful. Especially as we currently suffer from lack of tactical awareness. Once we address awareness issues and have a better idea of respawn mechanics, I think it’ll be time to balance ships more seriously. Until then you should not draw conclusions on what the balance will be, based on the current build.
Another thing I forgot to add: bots in the current build flee away temporarily until their shields have recharged. They’re also able to overcharge their shields when not firing. So finishing them off is definitely harder than in the previous builds, but that can be adjusted ofc
I disagree with this as it’s not born out by player behaviour in other games. Many of the most popular modern games (eg. PUBG) ask a player to travel for minutes with the possibility of getting killed within seconds of their arrival. It’s worse to make the player feel ineffective when they get there. Plus an interceptor will still die in seconds if targeted effectively by one of the larger ship types.
PUBG is a Battle Royale game. Survival. One death and you’re out. That’s wildly different from a team versus team game with shared objectives and respawning. Players stay in Battlescape games, and spending all your time getting back to the fight is simply not going to work.
I know of no game that revolves around teams that introduces minutes of delay to get back into a fight. Every game I’ve ever played like that involved a way to revive the downed man so he could rejoin the group then and there. ARMA has medics and fantasy games have healers.
That said, Battlescape has Carriers. That is the small ship “revive” in the sense that when an Interceptor or Bomber is destroyed, the player can get a new ship at the nearest Carrier. The enemy will clearly want to take out the Carriers, and when too many have been destroyed, or their capacity for spawning small ships is consumed, that fleet is going to have to withdraw because they don’t have enough small ships to support their operations.
That all seems like it would work quite well to support quick and violent deaths in Interceptor and Bomber fights. It would be a war of attrition, with each team knowing that they were going to lose a lot of small ships. That attrition effect would be affected by pilot skill, of course, with a disparity in pilot skill (or fleet coordination) being sufficient to turn the tide, even against a superior Carrier force. Battle of Britain stuff.
So I don’t believe that citing PUBG is a viable argument, but Battlescape gameplay could be structured to make fragile small ships work just fine.
My feedback from this weekend:
Downloading the game and everything went very smooth.
Starting game for first time took awhile, but i remember reading something about the first time may take awhile.
when game finally loaded and finally ready to play…I had NO idea what to do. I spent 5 minutes just trying to figure out how to even make the ship move. Once I finally did get the ship moving…I couldnt figure out how to get from place to place quickly. As in, i spent 5 minutes flying to nearest planet…and gave up because i still wasnt close. I think last time i remember a warp speed option…but for some reason i couldnt find it for this play.
anyways, i got frustrated not knowing what to do…and stopped playing after 10 minutes. Certainly im not frustrated with the game overall because i know this is VERY early in development still…so i wont put much emphasis on that. However, it would be nice if on those weekend plays…if you create a quick “how to” document…video…or something that you tell people to watch before playing for first time.
I am sure those videos are out there, but honestly i dindt want to go around finding videos…mostly because i wouldnt know what was current or not (since it is actively being developed). You can also call me lazy if you want =)
This is what happens at higher velocities, the net-code breaks because of client prediction and latency, it makes using weapons useless even if you are not in warp at those velocities.
There was nobody online to guide you?
The warp button has been removed and now it is in the systems menu (V key IIRC).
I totally agree that we should have a tutorial somewhere.
dont get me wrong, i am sure most of my troubles are because i was too lazy to get the help.
certainly a tutorial is not high on their list of things to do…but when you have a testing weekend…as in limited time to play…people should be given more direction to start.
if i was open to play any time during the week…i wouldnt have same complaint. but i didnt have a lot of time to play this weekend…and as soon as i realized it was going to take a bit to figure everything out…i went back to doing something else that was more enjoyable for me.
I didn’t upgrade the profile version, so it probably didn’t overwrite your old version. It should be there for new players though, or you can simply copy/paste the file from the Battlescape installed folder ( should be in Dev/Profiles )
