Beta 0.4.2.0 Feedback Thread

My quick feedback:

  • Sound sounds very good, new explosions sounds are less repetitve and sound great
  • missile lock on sound is not loud enough, the sound indication for lock-on isn’t clear enough, liked the old better even if it was more annoying
  • auto shoot small weapons for capital ships is awesome
  • new autoturn event is awesome and super useful, control scheme works really well even with gamepad
  • new mouse wheel sensitivity is fantastic!
  • new target health indicators are super useful
  • credit balancing is better, but installation kills are still to rewarding IMO, especially since turrets won’t fire at you if the ship is placed at narrow angles or the station is behind you
  • killing stations in cap ships nets too much money IMO, I was able to affort 4 destroyers in rapid succession until my credits ran out, especially destroying cap ship docks is paid very well and also a huge tactical goal
  • new balance tweaks for station defenses are much better
  • for warp jam I wish there was a short message next to the target name to indicate if their warp was actually jammed
  • Obstructed indicators are great, but blinking is annoying, they should instead be faded or greyed out instead, anyway, the amount of instances were I falsely flew towards a backsided station were reduced to zero, thanks!
  • as a possible solution for the HUD indicator cluttering, I would suggest reducing all indicators to one indicator from a certain distance and just showing the installation name and next to it a summary of friendly and enemy ship numbers, for the future maybe also the names of squad members or by the commander highlighted enemies by name (so I can always know who to avoid :rofl:)
7 Likes

Was experiencing some crashes yesterday (I-Battlescape unrelated) so i was not able to participate much.
Will try later today again.
In the meanwhile i have some brain farts.:

  • I really like the new additions like target shield and hull indicators. Thank you !
  • some of the few new sounds are really nice, like benni said locking sounds is bit silent. But perhaps when/if it will be accompanied by some “lock in progress” “lock acquired” hud symbology, it would be just fine.
  • Fighting and feel in the Interceptor seems to be really in great spot right now.
    It might have questionable usefulness, but Inty VS Inty and Inty VS Bomber feels really well.
    The increased rate of fire is super cool. It would be great with gatling like sound. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
    But i hate to say it, i fear it is causing lot more stress on network.
    It was really laggy in larger skirmishes.
    Would it be possible to trick player into seeing and hearing same amount of projectiles client wise, but calculate trajectories of half of them but with double damage, so it is the same in the end but with less strain on network ?
  • Bomber is quite the damage dealer now with better torps. And it seems to slightly outperform the interceptor in its role.
    I don’t think it should be nerfed in the torpedo damage output. But perhaps made either slower, or have lower shield/hull strength. Or perhaps giving Interceptor higher damage output? letting it shoot both guns at once? just ideas.
  • Turrets, i have mixed feelings about those. On one hand they now actually prevent attackers to just wipe floor with any base which is good. But attacking now is lot harder for it. But this is most likely just me not yet adapting to new situation and need to use actual strategy. Which leads me to:
  • Pricing and overall credits gain, I think loosing 20 Flaviens :slight_smile: every time you have to respawn in Inty is ruining any ability to gain money. I am not suggesting more credit gain, but less credit loss for respawn. Or cheaper bomber.
    Right now loosing side will have very hard time buying anything else then Inty therefore no way to strike back. Perhaps making Bomber / Interceptor price same. So that even loosing team can make some surgical strikes / hit and runs when they cant afford staying power of the big ships.
  • Base repairing we discussed - there were suggestions like corvette repairing them. Or automatic repair over time.
    How about Carrier being the repair ship for bases and resupply for capitals ?
    What popped in my mind is : How about Both teams Starting with the Carrier. Which would be hard to take down. But able to capture repair and resupply bases and capitals. It would not be game over if team had lost it but it would be massive blow for the team. Imagine it as something akin to a construction yard in C&C games, or Banana from Homeworld. Perhaps giving this player some fancy command map interface not unlike Natural selection games.
    Question is whether it would be fun to play for the pilot/commander of said ship.
4 Likes

About the locking sound being too silent ; are you referring to the locking loop while the target is being acquired for a few seconds; or the “locked” sound event that plays once the lock is validated ( that’s the one with the new sound ) ?

2 Likes

Great update, new sounds and autofire turrets are awesome, cruisers are not invulnerable anymore, station defenses work well.

  • We need an option to switch ship or dock before logout that reimburses the ship (I don’t want to throw away these 1000 credits because I have to log out).

  • Small ships are not very manoeuvrable. Interceptors and bombers have too little acceleration, the bomber rotates very slowly (especially in yaw?)

  • We need rewards for defence and ship destruction. It doesn’t seem like it changed. Attacking is the only way to make credits.

  • The blinking in occluded targets is annoying. It should be alpha based, maybe slowly fading in/out.

  • Enemy health is very welcome. It is visible from across the system for allies though. It should be a bar without the percentage IMO.

  • Planets should be visible in combat HUD for quick navigation (there is often an interceptor at the spawn station and it makes it more difficult to select a destination).

  • I lost a cruiser with 90% shields (while attacking a land factory). Are shields that easily bypassed?

  • Reactors are too much of a weakpoint. Add some redundancy? Just reduce turrets RoF/tracking speed?

  • A notification for team events would be nice (player joined, left, switched, player count)

  • Switching views resets camera (external/internal):
    screenshot3
    screenshot4

  • When targeting the same spot: Internal view: hitting
    screenshot6
    External view: missing.


    It gets worse with distance of course, and applies to set target destination. Can lead to collisions inside stations/asteroids.

3 Likes

Are you really speaking about network latency, and not lag as in “framerate drop” ?

What kind of connection are you playing on ?

I don’t think the client will use more than 20-30 KB/s, even in huge battles with lots of projectiles, so I don’t see how it could saturate your connection unless you were playing on a 56K modem.

Maybe next time it happens you could record a short video to show what you’re speaking of ?

Maybe it was just a temporary issue with your provider / route to the server, and neither the server nor your actual connection ?

New locked sound.

I would describe it as complete connection loss for a few seconds, when game completely freezes up (yellow + red connection indicator flashing).
While discord was still receiving and transmitting just fine. (somebody had low transmit threshold therefore he was transmitting all his controlers wiggling sounds :smile: ) If it was connection overall it would cause hiccups with both, but it didn’t.
Like i said, network indicator in lover left corner was flashing yellow during larger battles and occasionally red. (if it is the network indicator :slight_smile: )
But sure it was Saturday after all. And server is in US right ?
Its 100 Mb/s
projectiles being a culprit was just a guess since it was not as bad last time.

About the network issues: the red icon on the bottom left appears when the latency starts to exceed 300 ms.

Where are you physically located ? It could be possible that you usually have like 250 ms, but last Saturday it was slightly worse, which was enough to go over the treshold and display the red icon.

More importantly: forget about the network icons; how did the game feel like ? Was there a lot of stuttering / jittering around, projectiles not gettting fired, latency in the controls ? Overall, would you estimate that the game was playable, barely playable, or pretty much unplayable ?

About the ship pitch/yaw rate and accelerations, i’d like to say please keep things as slow as possible there otherwise you’ll destroy the value of piloting and positioning skills, and turrets. I like these battles being as tactical as possible.
As for Interceptor vs Bomber the balance should come from Bomber being less manoeuvrable so an easier target, and Inty should be faster in order to intercept its targets…

1 Like

persistent econ/trade system ala naval action

Strangely it was all fine and smoothly playable. But there was occasional (during larger skirmishes often) few second hicup as a complete stop, i associated with lag spike. Other then that it was really fine.
I am currently in Czech Rep.

Hmm i have idea. What if its not network, but HDD. Are all the assets preloaded into memory or are they loaded/unloaded as they come into view to save memory ?
I do have battlescape on ordinary HDD.

If it was a framerate hiccup ( as in: the game no longer renders for a second ), then it’s indeed probably related to your hard drive loading stuff up.

We don’t currently have a streaming system in the background, so what the game does is based on your launcher quality setting. At high or extreme, it’ll pre-load all assets in ram and video-ram to minimize disk access. If you play in low or medium however, it’ll only pre-load the ships, and everything else ( stations, buildings etc… ) are loaded from disk on-demand. Which will cause serious hiccups in framerate if you don’t have an SSD.

If your hiccup was purely network related, you’d see ships jumping around / stuttering, but rendering wise you’d still have a responsive framerate. By the sound of it, your hiccup was the first scenario, the entire game froze for a second, and that’s probably not network related.

  • Capital ship auto-turret burst fire targeting bug: after destroying an enemy ship, the auto-turret may start to fire at the new target no matter if it is friendly or enemy

IMHO, the refund formula should be something like, in order to avoid switching the ship when surprise attacked:

  • = Original value * (0.25 * %Shields) * (0.75 * %Hull)
  • or 90% of Original value when the ship is docked

Reminds me of Star Trek and their ineffective shields. “(projectile makes a hole in Enterprise) Shields at 50%!” what shields?

2 Likes

My experience is that it fires in a straight line for some apparent reason. 2-3 bursts after the ship is ‘destroyed.’

As far as I’m aware, missiles (Especially torpedoes) can bypass some amount of shield. Also heavy guns will also ‘breach’ a portion of shields. I don’t have numbers, and I can’t really say much about it besides ‘Kinda?’

This effect is supposed to be a function of the shield level, so there is little bleedthrough at high shields and it increases when shields weaken. But having almost full shields and be destroyed seems buggy.

How much HP did you have with 90% shields? Because again, torps do like 5% of shields. You really can’t underestimate the power of torpedoes anymore.

I had maybe 50% hull at the beginning of the fight, and I was destroyed with my shields almost full. I have destroyed ships with shields at 1/5 strength but 90%? It felt like whatever shot me dealt 10% damage to shields and 90% to hull.


Edit: Blasters are quite underpowered on capitals, they can only fire a few seconds and then nothing, even with weapons overcharge. The contrast to kinetic guns is stark. Sure, they overheat but burst fire is possible, whereas blasters never recharge much. It feels like kinetics do all of the job in ship-to-ship combat.

Blasters are only MK5 on cruisers and destroyers. Not sure about carriers. So yeah, they’re very underwhelming. But honestly the big guns do 90% of the dmg.

1 Like

Small guns should be able to fire almost continuously… And it goes against the design of “drop shields with blasters, finish off with kinetics” IMO.

I agree, but energy is also far to low on the capitals to sustain any meaningful blaster stuff right now. 2k energy is literally 2-3 volleys with the MK5 blasters. Which is maybe. . . 10% shield?

1 Like

To be honest I’m not sure how it is possible. I’d love to hear more about this and possibly how to replicate it.