Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hmm now I'm thinking you got something terribly wrong...!

But trust me, try it, writing down actual figures is really the only way to be sure it will work as intended.

If you want to confirm that your proposal is any good, that is.

Here, I made some 3x3 charts for you:

Current

Proposed

Notice how (as your numbers confirm) under the current system there are 9 different ratios of angular velocity to tracking speed that would give a 50% chance of hitting, while under the proposed system there are only 3 different ratios.

See how that makes it simpler?

I could spend time arguing the maths but enough people before me have done that,

BUT Eve does not need ot be simple, why the hell should it be, If i wanted simple i could go play minesweeper instead give me complicated give me confused, give me odd, give me bizzare, give me hell but in the end the to have fun things and have a greater sence of acheievment, we shoudl remember : "We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard" and really there is more scope in a game that is complicated at its very core and mechanics than one that is easy.

ITT: a lot of people who don't know the difference between complexity and depht

Which is why it should be changed to actually matter.

Your guns resolution or accuracy should matter.

Think of it this way:

Relatively a small gun is a rifle. Very accurate and tight grouping

A medium gun is a tank cannon. Still fairly accurate but you're probably not gonna get a 10mm grouping are you.

A large gun is a warship gun (think 2nd world war battleship guns). Not particularly accurate but when you're shooting at another battleship or an island you just need to get close.

An XL gun is like a big, fuckoff, landbased super gun. That just needs to hit within a couple hundred meters.

This is what weapon sig resolution is but it only comes into play when a target is moving because the tracking formula favours transversal speed over accuracy and if you shoot at a stationary target the sig resolution to signature radius ratio is ignored.

This to me is wrong.

A weapon that has a resolution/grouping of a 400 out to its optimal range is going to struggle to land a shot on a small target that is stationary. Think of a tank trying to land a direct hit on a person at 1000m. Or a piece of artillery trying to bullseye a car from 3km. Yes, it can but out of 10 shots several would completely miss and a few would only just hit and some would be bang on target. The current tracking formula does not take this into account unless the target is moving.

So I say; make the turret resolution to target signature radius independant of tracking and effect the quality of hit.

To me the system should basically go like this:

Step one: Is the target in range? Yes (optimal), Kind of (falloff), only just (double falloff), or No.
Step two: Can I track the target (at this range)? yes/no. This should simply be an angular velocity measurement.
Step three: What is my chance to hit a target that size with this weapons accuracy/resolution. (quality of hit)

This way, TP's would actually matter and you could even consider making TP's scripted to be positive or negative and use them defensively as well as offensively.

We could even mess with racial turrets and have certain turrets have very good accuracy and others poor accuracy. Maybe even have bonuses on hulls, implants, boosters etc to effect this stat.

tl;dr
I say change the tracking formula to use the Sig Resolution to Sig Radius ratio independant of tracking


Edit: you could even have ammo that negatively effects tracking positively effect accuracy by lowering the turret signature resolution making it accurate at long range. Holy cow!! Did I just fix long range T2 ammo for LR guns?

I know this but, like, a web is so much betterer

I think I've said this 20 times in this thread already, but here goes again.

My proposal changes literally nothing about how damage is applied, so there is no need for rebalancing.

The only issue I see with this is it causes un-intuitive things to happen in game.

Say we normalize gun sig radii to 100 m^2 so the tracking speed on my Rokh's Neutron Blaster Cannons goes down to .01778 rad/s

We would still need to explain to new players why you can hit a battleship that is orbiting you faster than that, or why you cant hit an interceptor going around you at exactly that speed.

I understand it wouldnt change the game balance, but it would increase confusion for new players not decrease it.

Bigger ships are easier to hit than smaller ships. Seems pretty intuitive to me.

I'm sure you enjoy saying it, but it doesn't make it true. Skills, modules, and implants will have an entirely different effect on the new tracking value, and since no skill, module, or implant has any effect on turret sig res that expands their efficacy. Changing their values will change how they scale, which will necessarily require other things like ship signature radius to scale with them. Now that that's changed, what about how missiles interact with sig radius? Oops... Back to the grindstone, guys, we've got more work to do...