Attack From Warp Jump

May have the words incorrect here but players can attack a station while in warp and there’s little to no counter to this. The player continues to fly-by at high speed after they’ve launched missiles at the station. Seems pretty game breaking IMO as, if coordinated, one team could all do significant damage against another team. Haven’t seen it this bad yet but in one match today we had 3X players doing this in a coordinated attack. And there was no way to stop them.

Well corvettes can use warp jam to drop them out of warp or stop them from getting in, so if you coordinate you can defend from it. It is pretty abusable though.

Yeah I’m probably not clear in what I’m saying: a player should not be able to attack while jumping/while in this high speed mode. But apparently they can. They should have to drop out of hyper jump before deploying weapons.

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Deploying weapons is not possible in warp.
If you saw someone doing it please share video if possible.

Normal weapons cannot fire in warp, but I’m not sure sure missiles / torps / mines cannot. It sounds like what Kubicide is describing is players firing missiles in warp. If that is so, it is definitely a bug and I’ll fix it tomorrow.

Possible solution: If you disable the speed limit and fly manually you can easily reach speeds which may look like warp to someone new to the game.

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Thanks for the replies. I can say for certain that some players are indeed attacking while at high speed - slow warp speeds. It seems that is what they do by somehow slowing / coasting, firing missile or torps, then going back to high warp. Like a high speed strafe. Only seen this used against stationary targets like stations in space. It’s not too effective mind you but it’s difficult/impossible to stop them in an interceptor.

You can force them out of warp with a corvette’s warp jam though.

The real question is: is this a bug ? Are they getting out of warp, attacking, then going back to warp ? If so that could be questionnable design, but not a bug.

If they’re in warp ( purple halo around them ), none of the weapons ( including missiles / torps ) should be working. If you see it happening, please post a pic or some more details. I checked the code an hour ago and firing missiles does indeed verify that the player isn’t in warp, so I’m not sure how it would be possible.

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Thanks for the reply. I’ll keep looking for it to happen again.

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I have been practicing something that would appear to be what’s being described here. As a bomber, travelling at ~1.5 Km/s, but without warp, then dropping a torpedo at a station. I can hit the station but… it’s super impractical, to a degree that makes it extremely not worthwhile.

It’s extremely difficult to line up a shot on a specific component, such as a hangar bay, without coming too close to avoid collision. Turning around to make another pass takes a huge amount of time as well. I can reliably hit the station in general, but that doesn’t guarantee damage, let alone worthwhile damage. Definitely something to keep in mind as the stations get re-worked, though.

I can land decently accurate shots coming in at ~800 m/s, but at that point it’s just a bombing run.

I did have a fun moment where I was leading up to a warp-speed bombing run attempt, but ended up switching targets to a cruiser. The poor cruiser was escaping my team, and had made it to warp. He was going 1.5 Km/s and rising… I was going 2.5 Km/s without warp drive. Drifted right up to him and dropped a torpedo on his nose. Poor guy must have had such a roller coaster of emotion.

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Wow! Do you have that on tape? :heart_eyes:


Momentum is definitely what makes it hard to get there … and in a way safe too. High speeds give a certain amount of safety.
The thing is. Speeding up takes time, but you can use warp to slow down quite easily as well as change directions. If this becomes a problem … which I don’t think it currently is … warp activation could be limited to a velocity region instead of just “faster then” it has to be “between a certain speed”. This would add another drawback to trying to fight at these high speeds.

I love that I:B has that freedom. It is not lying when it says “no speedcap”.


Also. Welcome to the forums Incursus. :smiley:

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Yeah speed is a dimension of it’s own I really like that aspect of it.

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No, sadly, I wasn’t recording at the time. Definitely wish I had that clipped somewhere.

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This is often how I operate as a bomber pilot. I turn flight assist off. I turn speed cap off. I drop out of warp at a cozy 100 km and accelerate non-stop. I fire torpedoes at cruisers, carriers, the station, whatever I want. Once the last torp is away, I transition back into warp. Changing directions from high speed is not actually a huge problem because you turn fast once you do re-enter warp.

If it is not safe to return to warp, or if I’m jammed, I continue to accelerate forward, often right through the fighting, until I reach safety on the far side. Smart interceptor pilots will sometimes drop out of warp next to me and try to engage, but dropping out of warp costs them too much speed and I can easily avoid them.

I feel like I can always play it safe, and it’s definitely really fun to feel nigh untouchable, but I’m not sure how much a single bomber can contribute to a large battle if they play things this safe. If I do die, it’s because I’m taking risks or attempting to rearm at a corvette when an interceptor jumps me. Missiles can be threatening but I’m proficient at countermeasures; an interceptor doesn’t have enough to be a bother.

However, when flying a bomber on defense, I would never use this tactic. It’s much more effective to dump all your ordnance, shotgun the nearest capital ship until you die, and then launch again with a fresh loadout.

I think the tactic I would worry about from a game design perspective is not “boom and zoom,” but rather it’s the sniper bomber tactic, where one or more bombers camps out at 100km with a corvette to unload an unlimited supply of torpedoes at everyone. I have done this and it’s fairly silly. While a couple of B&Zing bombers can be hard to kill, they put out an order of magnitude fewer torpedoes than a bomber/corvette sniper duo.

Right now tactics are still evolving so I’d be very hesitant to call anything bad or broken. Even though torp sniping isn’t particularly fun or exciting for anyone (I lie; it’s pretty fun to land all those torps on a cruiser), it remains to be seen what the community will learn to counter. I noticed some kind of anti-torpedo countermeasures are on the dev’s to-do list, and that might be enough.

(FYI you can B&Z with a cruiser too…)

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where one or more bombers camps out at 100km with a corvette to unload an unlimited supply of torpedoes at everyone.

I don’t know what the max lock on range is for missiles or torps, but this is something I expect may be adjusted soon. The Devs already talked about limiting the flight time of missiles and torps to something sane like 20 seconds and 50 seconds. 100km standoff weapons just aren’t that much fun. There’s not enough risk since the bombers and corvette can warp to the other side of the station if anyone comes to engage them.

That said, I also hope the devs adopt a wait and see approach to making major balance adjustments. I would go so far to say that no one really knows how to play Battlescape at a high level yet, and new strategies and counters may pop up that no one has thought of yet.

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