Actually, a squad of Sherman tanks at the right place at the right time may take down a M1 that made some serious blunders. They’d need to take it by surprise at very short range from behind and maybe the sides (and ideally in a position to land shells on its roof), and get lucky, but it could happen.
On a wide open field in a frontal attack with well-trained professionals and the tanks’ last versions on both sides, I don’t see it happen, though. Though a few hundreds possibly may - let’s say if you decide to pit the entire Soviet T-34 reserve against one lone M1 just because.
I just bought CMNAO on sale, so maybe I should look at that once I’ve learned it a bit.
Or they may make the M1 crew panic, crash in a ditch and flee on foot.
Think it was in Beta that ED had a scenario where you needed to take down an Anaconda that had 2 Sidewinders as escort, while you had 2 Sidewinders as support, it was a very hard but doable. Bottom line you can take down any ship in ED with an Eagle, given some widely favorable circumstances.
Say what you want but money should make a difference, paying ~1000x more for a ship should make killing the lightest fighters available very easy.
/edit
Also a F16 and F35 cost nearly the same, the closest comparison to Eagle-FDL is a Cessna (~$180k) taking down a F16 (~$165mil). You would probably need to convince that F16 pilot to commit suicide in order to take down that plane, doable in some weird scenario, sure.
The price differences in ED aren’t really comparable to any real price differences considering how much they reflect typical mmorpg power/price scaling. More money isnt really more valuable, it just seems that way due to the lack of player to player trade, it’s a progression mill through and through. Your argument of realism is predicated on the idea that the price differences between ships mean something, I think it goes too far in the opposite direction. If the price differences were meant to be realistic, then the world would have nothing but sidewinders. I’ve detailed the cost/effectiveness calculations between condas and sidewinders before, look at 10 sidewinders vs a conda, the sidewinders will win while costing an absolutely tiny fraction of the conda.
You could pit 2000 sidewinders against a conda for the same price last i checked it. If this is meant to be realism, it’s extremely shitty realism.
Normally games justify these kind of price differences by designating different roles. Example: “Sure 10 cheap sidewinders could kill a conda, but the conda is a heavy siege ship and has the advantage against emplacements!”. It’s to ED’s detriment that no such combat emplacements exist. All of ED’s combat ships are pretty much the same role.
So the argument from the opposite side of the scale, so far the problem was that a cheap ship can not take down a more expensive one, now the problem is that the expensive ship is not better enough, or that it’s too expensive, meaning that this deadly OP ship should be made even cheaper…
I’m going to mark ED as hitting the middle ground just fine given the two camps on the subject.
The way i’d look at it is that it fails on both counts. It fails to deliver an interesting combat system where weaker ships can come into their own due to the lack of variety and linear power scaling, and also fails to properly deliver a realistic or believable money to performance balance as you suggested.
Its like they started to design a game with scale then realized there wasnt enough mechanical freedom to support it so they just went with the easy way out. There’s a reason im only even referencing the biggest and the smallest ship, the rest is just somewhere between them. In a game like eve pretty much every single ship size has a role and purpose regardless of your wealth and power in the game, here we have a bunch of ships that shouldn’t even exist in-universe because of either their uselessness in single combat, or their extreme price inefficiency.
You might be a bit too harsh, I thoroughly enjoy the game even though I’m basically a casual player with some ~160 hours game time. The game plays just fine, it’s hard to notice that anything is imbalanced with a casual mentality.
There is no pleasing everyone, it’s impossible, especially people that are passionate about a subject.
Im not sure no pleasing everyone applies here, your right that a sufficiently casual player might not notice whether a game’s economy or progression is well done, but making those good certainly shouldn’t displease the casual player, you can certainly do both. Its one of the things where casual players will just be happy with the atmosphere regardless.
I haven’t heard anybody complain about progression in ED so far, there is a ship in nearly every price range and role…
As for the economy, it’s basically single player based, with some global influences and sharing of market with the other players. Would it be fun to have a player run economy, maybe, but that’s a design issue.
Looks great from high up, although the absolute lack of really sharp features stands out even there, if less pronounced.
Closer to ground level however, I sorely miss horizontal displacement. There are simply features in terms of cliffs/steep rock surfaces that their current technique can’t generate. But those would be crucial to let rock look like rock and not a molten ice cream mountain with a rock texture and dramatic normal maps slapped on.
The devs said in the livestream about the planetary tech that further small scale displacement was certainly something they were interested in. I’m sure we’ll see them add that in at some point as they keep on developing the planets.
The more I watch of Outerra, the more disappointed I am by Horizons current state of surface detail generation in terms of mountains/cliffs etc… I suspect Frontier doesn’t consider this as finished themselves, but I’m not aware of any statements from Frontier what they intend to do about it.
Do you have a link? (Deep link if it’s in a video? ;)) That would put my mind at ease.
Wow ! We didn’t read the same threads, in this case. I must admit that I stopped reading the official forum (because I found that it’s a little bit “invaded” by fanboys) but, a few month ago, there was some… let’s say “animated discussions” about the role and the specialization of the ships. I think that “ED opponents” had gone “elsewhere” now, as I do.
There’s a few days, I participate to a thread on the biggest ED french forum, where some early players (pre-release alpha & beta players) complained about the fact that, in fact, there’s only 2 sorts of ships : for trading and for combat. Even so-called “exploration ships” could be easily use as fighters. Think about the abberation of the Anaconda, a sort of “combat fregate” ship which have a the better max jump range than the Asp Explorer…
My comment about progression was just about money or rather having something to buy at various levels of capital, so better ship in your sights at all times, 1.5 ships patch will make this even smoother.
As for some sort of gameplay progression, there really is no progression in ED, it’s a sandbox, so much of a one that you could say there are no guidelines or indicators of what you should do and when. We keep getting more sand and that is welcome.
Calling ED a sandbox with all it’s limits on basic tasks like money transfers to other players is kind of silly. We’re even discussing how all the ships more or less act the same, a sandbox needs variance. The game’s own “progression rating” things for combat, trading and exploration do a much better job of demonstrating why that isnt the case. It doesnt really get away from it’s other problems if you give it that label either, it just becomes a sandbox with no sand, just a small amount of prepackaged tasks for you to pursue which are pretty much identical gameplay no matter where you do them or in what ship.
The original vision for infinity tqfe would have been way closer to a sandbox, and a sandbox is what makes a huge procedural galaxy worth playing in. It becomes terrain that matters rather than scenery that doesn’t.
More sand is great, but not without anyway to manipulate the sand. Mostly in Elite we get to just observe the sand. Rather than building sandcastles we simply watch what happens to the sand as thousands of players walk around on the beach. Also sometimes the devs come along and build sandcastles for us to look at (but not interact, just observe).
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We didn’t read the same threads, in this case. I must admit that I stopped reading the official forum (because I found that it’s a little bit “invaded” by fanboys) but, a few month ago, there was some… let’s say “animated discussions” about the role and the specialization of the ships. I think that “ED opponents” had gone “elsewhere” now, as I do.