Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just spitballing, tell me why these couldn't possibly work. Or think of a better idea. Or a weirder one.

Chaff bomb: disrupts targeting of anything inside to or from outside, probably with the exception of capitals. Multiple chaff bombs stack up the radius and maybe duration of cloud?

Chaff bomb Take2: disrupts targeting when anything is completely on the other side of the chaff cloud, unless you're inside targeting out (or outside targeting in?). Multiple chaff bombs stack up the radius and maybe duration of cloud? Basically just the first chaff idea with different rules.

Cloud bomb: drops a DPS cloud, stacking-penalized. For multiple bombs the cloud should get bigger, but not do much more damage. Probably like stack up to 5x(?) the strength of a single bomb, with the radius growing without stacking penalties for each bomb. For stupidly large damage clouds. Not sure why anyone would want this, frankly. I DID say I was spitballing. Omni damage? Four different types of cloud?

Demolition bomb: Affects asteroids lethally, minimal damage to any ship, smaller and cheaper than normal bombs. Guess what THIS is for. No resources generated, just removes asteroids.

Tractor bomb: sucks in ships for a few seconds, screwing up trajectory and aligns. Very brief. Larger the target, the less effective.

Repulsion bombs: the above, but in the opposite direction. Disperse frigate swarms? Larger the target, the less effective.

Cloak bomb: forcibly cloaks everyone in the area of effect for a period of time? This is starting to sound stupid as a I type it, though.

Cloak bomb is my no 1. :)

But! There's absolute need for:
Pony bomb - as a result of explosion it sprays swarm of winged micro-ponies, which confuse hostile pilots (20% penalty to velocity, RoF and tracking, 50% penalty to drug resistance).

chaff bomb may as well modify the Lockbreaker to have a duration always felt if it was given bonuses from the ECM skill and had a duration ~5s it would be used more.


i like the gas cloud DOT idea but none of this complicated stacking all you have to do is have it deal enough damage to kill another could bomb in a tick. this means you could still use more than one to cover a larger area but there would be limited overlap. to midigate this further make it so the cloud has a very limited optimal and have most of it be in falloff. (with 2x fall off still doing enough to kill a second bomb) so 1km optimal and 14.5km fall off will give it the standard range of a bomb. however these numbers can be played with.

would be cool to see what players do with area denial weapons

These are interesting.
You can basically build a literal firewall against a specific weapon type. If you know what weapons the enemy will have, this could give you a huge advantage.
Though I don't think these should give full protection, more like a big chance of miss for guns and drones, while a similar amount of missiles would hit the tracers instead on the way to the target, dealing AoE damage equal to the missiles' normal amount and type.

Oh, I'm not saying it should negate all shots, just that it should reduce DPS. Change shots into the next lowest type, for instance.


I was thinking about the DOT clouds in various missions. The question of precisely how to apply it would best be mused on someone who actually knows what math the server does.

I suggested diminishing returns- clouds could merge, and clouds that touch could interfere with each other. So huge amounts of bombs would just be wasted.

That way, if they start at medium DPS, and use diminishing returns, there's no point in using very many bombs. They'll just get sucked on into a few max-dps cloud if they're too concentrated. This would create situations where the clouds have gaps between them, which would keep people from just make a huge kill-zone fueled by DOT-bombs. People could just burn out of it until the icon disappears, and sit in the clear area.

I'm trying to design deliberate flaws in, to keep it from being too good. If cloud centers must be maximum_diameter between each other, with say 10-20km (ballpark) added in for clear areas, it'll let people screw with battlefields without being able to just make a lethal gate. And if DOT clouds affect warp bubble generators, that will add another layer.

Comparable to when Left4Dead2 added in the acid-spitters to the mix, as a hard counter to players who liked to hole up in a closet for too long.

I realize that you're trolling, but you did give me a pretty neat idea.

How about giving wormholes the ability to manufacture REALLY special bombs inside? I have ABSOLUTELY no idea about specific numbers, but what if you could make FLARE bombs in WHs with special effects?

So, you have to get in a WH with a given system effect, and gain the capacity to manufacture in the WH. Then you make a bomb, type determined by system effect.

Then, you warp to a sun in a nullsec system, and aim the bomb at the sun. This special-case bomb doesn't explode normally, but behaves like a moon probe, and causes the sun to flare.

Then, for a period of time (15 minutes? an hour?) the system enjoys the WH effect. Further bombs have no effect until the current flare ends.

Aye and my way achieves a similar result with clearer and more uniform mechanics. It should be easier to code and far easier to visually and intuitively understand. It still forces gaps and maintains a cap on the dps. My way also allowed for ships of all sizes to get out of threatening parts of the cloud if flown correctly.

Virus bomb

All effected ships have their UI start lying to them in various ways, including distance from selected target, current hp, the status of players in the overview (like if they're friendly or not), swapping peoples names around in the overview but nothing else, putting fake orders into the fleet window, etc.

That. I'm trying to stay away from things that are guaranteed to destroy every fight, or be nearly required. The anti-weapon-type-bomb notion was probably over that line by itself. This would be worse.

Give the virus bomb to NPCs instead.

Uhm, the constant distance calculations? On explosion, it does distance calculations to on-grid clouds, if they're too close, it adds to cloud instead of making a new one. That would be cloud radius + Xkm of padding distance. These things only need to update once in a while, and the "grow" routine only fires if a bomb explodes too close. Or, attach it to cloud bombs instead, can't be significantly more math per shot than any other weapon.

As far as knowing exactly where? You don't. Why would you? None of the other bombs are particularly user-friendly, why should this have any special guidance? Eyeball it and git gud. Same kind of closeness calculations as any warp bubble.

Same with cloud- you know you're too close when damage ticks start hitting, probably less damage on the edges. Visual effects would make sense too. Give ships a little "damaging environment" status indicator near the HUD, even.