Assembly Hall

I hope this has been posted before...because if it has it's because its a good idea.

So...Perpetuum is a pretty crappy game. Graphically it sucks and the combat is pretty lame not to mention it is pretty much an EvE ripoff. No really...you can't play Perpetuum and not see the blatant similarities to EvE. There are however a few things that it "improved" on that I believe should be adopted. One of my alliance buddies pointed out a couple to me and I agreed.

1: Static noise. By this I mean targeting restrictions based on the number of ships on grid. The more ships in the "blob" the longer it takes to target an individual ship. In Perpetuum it is explained by the nearby ships creating noise from their targeting systems that counteract or slow the targeting of other ships.

2: AoE ship explosions. Something I brought up on the old forums that seemed rather popular with a few nitpickers. Ship explodes and the resulting explosion causes damage to all the other ships in the area. Bigger the ship...bigger the explosion and damage. Of course the easy way to do this is to make the ship explosions work just like missile explosions for velocity, damage and whatnot.

3: SP accumulation to a point pool. Instead of setting your skill to train and having to worry about changing that skill at a certain time and blah blah blah...instead just have all your SP go into a pool of points that you can specifically assign to whatever skill you want to when you want. The mechanics for this are already in the game as evident when learning skills were removed and the points refunded.

There you go. 3 things Perpetuum does as ****** of a game as it is that CCP can learn from for EvE.

AOE explosions should be restricted to low sec and below. Otherwise this would open up yet another can of worms...

thiink REALLY hard, i'm sure youll figure it out.

but really, the problem that comes is this...
let's say you cant afford a skillbook, well, right now that emans you can't train the skill until you can afford it. in your system, they can just grind isk for a while adn the second they can afford it, BOOM put points in lvl 5, basically meaning a player can in essence, get the sp for every skill in the agme without ever actually having to afford it, basically pre-training a skill before you even buy it. which is bad.

I play perpetuum and know the game's strengths and weaknesses pretty well.

The usual stupid "it's an EVE clone!" arguments don't work well on me - the last time I checked, you couldn't hide behind stations nor even planets in this game but LoS is big there - tracking means nothing there but is a huge consideration here - skillpoints earned real-time is similar but 1ep/min and NO way to enhance/improve building up is a bit different than "remaps" with implants... so on and so forth.

"Exploding ships" - in perp this isn't a major issue though even there you had mitigation due to terrain being discussed (that LoS issue above? It does NOT exist here). In EVE it would be.

Alpha kills in perp are extremely rare but common as dirt in fleet ops here. You aren't running a 1,000 ship battle with such mechanics and exploiting it would be extremely easy. Simply run a ship into an enemy fleet and alpha it with your fleet.

It sounds neat but in reality it would cripple a lot of PvP in the game.

The SP pool has issues. Why log into the game at all if you want to just build up skills? Why even look at the game at all just to build up? There is no expending the SP until you feel like starting to use that char, or sell it.

"Static Noise" - how does this work with Drones? There's nothing like them in Perpetuum yet they are a core/key weapons system in this game. it might work to help out some situations of vast numbers but 500 or less ships shouldn't be crippled unless you want to shut down *ALL* major fleet operations in the game.

PS: Graphics don't suck in perpetuum on many machines. My old machine it looked great on. My new computer - they look a bit washed out. One is an XP box, the other an up to date Win7 box with high end graphics card. It appears the engine renders better with older systems. The why of it, I have no clue, I just spot it very easily if I use my old computer.

Artificial blob limiters will never work unless they are made so horrible to work within that people rage-quit on the spot. Much better to cook up mechanics that encourages not blobbing .. fielding ones entire extended family should remain an option for the Neanderthals.

Do we really want an AoE weapon usable by day 1 characters? I'd much rather have a kamikaze option where I fill my hold with explosives and can do damage to another's hull directly by ramming at full speed.

The SP thing can be done by letting the points added to the pool be as if no implants are used (or lower even) and setting a restriction on the pool of 3-4 days worth. Point would be to expand on the queue concept while making sure that logging in remains the optimal solution.

The only mechanic I'd like to see moved over from perp is their system/outpost control scheme that rewards a constant presence in the system.

Artificial blob limiters won't work imo. Its better to create incentives within the sov system that encourage multiple fleets.

I like the noise idea alot, still signature radius should count for something, this would encourage to fleets to bring hundreds of cheap frigs in alts as nothing more that static noise generators. If there was a way to implement it without abuse factors being painfully obvious it would be cool though

+1

It would work the same way bombs do. one bomb does about 30% damage to battleship AND only 30% damage to frigates.

This would just result in sebo ahacs backed by newbie frigate spam ruling all 0.0 combat. Battleships and capitals wouldn't have much of a chance.

I will task mittens with implementing this immediately!

LoS is another issue all together. Frankly it would be nice to see ships that are occluded by larger ships, objects or even stuff like gas clouds able to be unlockable. Imagine a frigate that flys behind a battlecruiser while you have it locked and suddenly you lose lock and have to lock it again. Or a battleship you lose lock on because it moved behind a carrier. This would also make asteroids, and stations have a tactical role greater than they do now.

This would also make people freak out and QQ to no end but hey...I think the more challenging the PvP is the better it is.