Once you make the connection of killing pet spam and the usual AI bugs remaning it should fall into place.
The first conclusion is, someone thought pets were OP, there were too many of them and they were too active. So, if you try to play it normally you get a penalty, replacing less of them, so you can't just spam a target.
Second, your biggest enemy is warp core breaches.
Put those 2 together and the path is clear. You have to not have your fighters out. This is about less pets, less activity, remember.
They should be recalled, not once or twice, here and there but at all times. Constantly.
You hit attack for all of 2-3 seconds and once you see their projectiles firering, recall.
If a target is below x % HP, and you know it's going to pop, you keep your fighters in the bay.
What it means is, you have to work your rear end off in exchange for fighters that aren't really active. Try this and you won't have time to focus on your own hotbar, that's how hectic it is.
If you follow the rules the nerf is perfect as pets are now a lot less active.
Alternately you can play it like you used to and take the replacing penality.
Either way carriers lost their heart and soul, I hate piloting one now using either method and I feel all empty inside having spent a year building a carrier.
Not sure if some1 already has posted this, but the devs need to fix the pet relaunch. Carrier should be able to relaunch the max pets / hangar not per wing. Because b4 the UI, pet can always be launched at full wings, now the relaunch can only refill the the missing pet / wing - priority to the 1st wing. A lot of firepower is lost if your 1st wing got 1 pet destroyed, but the 2nd wing got 2 pet destroyed. The relaunch will only launch 1 pet to fill the 1st wing. We have to w8 for the cd to refill the 2nd wing. If the 1st wing got a pet killed while w8ing for the cd, only 1 pet will be refilled. That leaves the 2nd wing short 2 pets after 2 cds. This isn't an issue for frigate pets but a big one for fighters.
So instead of launching 2 wings of 3 fighters, can we have 1 wing of 6 fighters. That probably will make an easy fix.
Carrier Command buttons on the HUD do nothing (except for the launch button) on my Caitian Atrox. The old Carrier Commands accessed via the Power/Skills Tray still seem to work as before. However, the HUD buttons no longer provide any feedback on which Carrier Command is active. [Update: HUD buttons do work but not consistently, perhaps a problem with newly launched fighters not getting their orders.]
Hanger Bay timers way too intrusive with single fighter launches. Timers need to be shortened or eliminated, maybe make the time porportional to the number of fighters launched. How about leveling fighters based on kills instead of time; one star for each kill/assist (or scaled according to relative strength of enemy killed).
Could use a Dock (immediately) button; 15s is a long time when most fights only last a few minutes and that doesn't include the time required for the fighters to heal which is the main point of docking. Either replace Recall with Dock or add a new Dock command; I could live with either. Also, some kind of indicator on the HUD to indicate which fighters are docked would be nice.
Instead of the thin horizontal hull strength indicator, a thermometer-like indicator color coded for 100/75/50/25% using the fighter outlines in the HUD (similar to that used for the ship).
Carrier Command buttons on the HUD could use some subtle color coding and a more obtrusive activation highlight.
The ability to command individual fighters to dock would be helpful, it makes no sense to dock six fighters to only repair one or two of them.
First of all, let me say that overall the changes are welcome.
For a long time many of us have been asking for a counter for the number of fighters we have out and the ability to have two seperate hangers doing two seperate things. Yet somehow they seem to have missed the mark a bit.
1.) The great big hanger boxes are way over done. All that was needed in reality are the command buttons at the top of the boxes, and a number to referance the amount of fighters/pets left from a launch. Did we really need a big blocky (or in my case two) extra window to find a place for?
2.) While yes the fighters/pets now are able to do two differant things...sort of, I think this is where they really missed the mark. I say 'sort of' because while you can set one hanger to escort, and one to attack/intercept/etc, you can't get both hangers to escort two differant targets. (ie. I can't set hanger one to escort ship A and hanger 2 to escort ship
This is due to the fact that as soon as you target ship B to set hanger 2 to escort, hanger 1 immediately begins to escort ship B rather than ship A.
As this was the extent of my testing thus far, I'll edit this as I get further into my carriers. I honestly think these will be the only major issues I have with the changes, unless my 120k+ dil worth of advanced slavers are still not taking contraband.
Quick update:
I just completed a CSN (it's my 'test bed' stf lol) with the Vo'quv. Recall has an issue. I had 12 Advanced Slavers out doing their wonderful zap and dash that they do. We knocked down the last cube, killed the remaining Negh'var, and were headed to the carrier spawn point. So, I figured I'd recall both hangers and let them ride to my usual point of attack. They recalled and docked with no problems; however, when the carrier spawned and I switched them to attack mode to relaunch them, only one fighter launched. Both hangers showed full wings (12). I was unable to do anything about it since being both were full there was nothing to replace, thus couldn't launch any new fighters. Also being under attack I was unable to unequip the hangers to effectively kill the current ones.
Now, this is going to be an issue for many people because recall can be a rather important command to use. You don't want to pop that gen early? recall. You don't want your fighters running amok? recall (though they still sometimes do). If the fighters are going to refuse to relaunch, then I thing we should just go back to recall just making them follow rather than docking.
More to follow (possibly)
One last Update for now.
Recall mode has serious issues. There seems to be some very random bugginess involved in which your wings/hangers/pets sometimes will not relaunch from recall. So far I've had (as mentioned above) a single fighter return to duty, one full hanger return (other wouldn't launch), and just a moment ago had both hangers relaunch do nothing at all then dock again as if i'd recalled them (which then they wouldn't return to duty.
In short avoid 'Recall' as if it carries a new strain of Ebola.
Im going to agree on mots of your points here. The recall function would work fine, IF and only if the relaunch actually works. Right now, it doesnt. I end up with random numbers of launching fighters and no way to fix the issue. As an additional extra id like to point out that ive been having this problem with the new "auto recall" feature that was implemented. After X amount of time of not fighting, hangar craft auto recall and head back into the carrier to chill for a bit. Again, conceptually fine but you have to make it work otherwise it just gets in the way and causes problems.
The above is a really big issue since the way i play my carrier (mostly a tanky support science vessel) I rely substantially on my hangar craft for damage output and its a massive hit when only 2 of 12 re-launch after recalling.
Other feedback, i do like the ability to issue separate hangar commands to each hangar, but the implementation isn't working well. Without some way of making these commands "stick" such as it were, they're basically overidden the second you change targets and render the whole idea completely moot. I like what you're going for here cryptic, but you NEED to make each set of hangar craft capable of maintaining their own discrete target, independently of whatever MY current target is otherwise this will never, ever work to any useful level.
The ranking system: I think you've done mostly pretty well here. The amount of scaling per rank seems reasonable and when maxxed out my hangar craft are now better than they were previously with almost no exceptions in terms of both survivability and damage output. The heal on rank up is also useful.
One thing I will offer criticism on however, (this was always going to be a problem right from when you announced it and its proven to definitely be so in practice) is the duration between rank ups. It simply takes too long, no question. There are are two issues here.
1. Overall mission length is often not long enough to get full use out of the ranking system. Play just doesn't last long enough to get there. You can argue that this just means you dont NEED higher ranked hangar craft for trivial content, which i suppose is true to a point, but it still seems wasteful.
2. More importantly, smaller craft (fighters and raiders) lack the survivability of larger craft and invariably very rarely get to make full use of the rank up system. They just die to incidental damage too regularly. We don't have enough fine motor control over the mobility of our hangar craft to avoid this, but the lengthy period between rank ups means we're being punished for it nonetheless. I think you need to scale down the time between ranking up at the very least on small craft, although I cant see much reason you couldn't shorten it for all hangar craft in general.
Note: point 2 above is a bigger issue because right now (with the possible exceptions of BoPs and Jem'hadar frigates (haha, good luck)) fighter craft trump just about anything else, almost all the time (yes, I'm looking at you elite scorpions). You need to re-balance some of the less popular hangar craft to be more useful. There's currently almost no reason to pick a whole bunch of them, even in the circumstance they're designed for because frankly, using fighter craft for damage will STILL do the job faster and better. This is bad and you should fix it =/
One other thing worth noting is the "warp core breach avoidance" thats been toted. Couple things;
a) Its definitely better. My ships are getting hit a lot LESS by them which is fantastic. Nice work.
b) I'm not entirely convinced that you've approached it correctly however. I mentioned previously that we have almost zero control over the manner in which our hangar craft actually fly, their manouvering, their turning their speed etc. These are all fixed. With this in mind, warp core breaches are incredibly binary. We're being punished for the behaviour of our fighters which is is entirely outside our sphere of control. Even if i recall my fighters after every ship dies, i have no control over HOW they turn around and get back and its entirely possible (and happens) that they fly close to the exploding ship and blow up anyway.
My suggestion is that warp core breaches do a percentage of the affected ships total hull HP in damage, mitigated by whatever shielding they have available at the time. Hell, it can even be a BIG percentage, that way its still a BAD thing that you don't want to happen, but this instant exploding business is entirely unreasonable and provides no opportunity to recover, and face it, your new system is encouraging us NOT to spam fighters but rather to keep our old ones alive. Stop making this so difficult >< It's counter intuitive to your own design philosophy.
The current death-by-breach situation feels really binary-RNG in nature and it shouldn't.
God doesn't play dice Cryptic, and neither should you.
Just some of my initial thoughts, will be keeping a close eye on stuff as i continue to explore this (mostly welcome) change. Work with me here Cryptic! Lets get this right!
The buff to Shield Shuttles and Tactyon Drones do make them more interesting.
Still more then Slaver hp nerf, more then the uselessness of the vet system for none friagtes, you need to fix the fighters AI, no more suggestions make them orders.
so i finaly have "BIG V" .... and MY impression from new system ?
extra panels are too big , i splent half hour on rebalance HUD before i find "right" position - resize/modify options are welcome
commands ? lol ..... sometimes my pets ignore everything , when i test carrier before patch 15 km range for atack work fine .....now they dont atack marked target 12 km from me , or go to suicide mision kill something more than 20 km away ....
especialy borg daily empire defense is really funny now .... i start atack at one sphere + cube and i died because my brave fighters lure to combat with me 2 more cubes + 5+ spheres ......
btw why is sphere much more tougher and have more hp than cube ? (cube have at level 44 50k HP , sphere 58k + better shield i think too )
I like the new hanger UI, I've definitely noticed a positive difference to gameplay, probably due to not having to spam fighters every few secs because I didn't know how many were left.
The UI is the perfect size for me, but I've noticed others in this thread think it is too big. I believe this may be related to pc/laptop display screen size and resolution. On a 17" full HD screen I find it is perfect, but maybe on smaller screens/lower res it may be too large. The programmers are obviously not going to be using 15" screens with low res when designing new graphics. So may be this why it is the size it is. If the size of of the hanger interface can't be changed currently this needs to be added.
As for how the hanger UI works in practice, like others I have problems with Recall, and launching pets after Recall. Most of these issues are related to pets not being able to keep up with your ship after you issue a carrier command, and then go straight to full impulse. The pets just can't keep up, because they take too long changing from one carrier command AI behaviour to another. Try it and see.
Possible solutions:
(1) Make the time it takes for pets to change from one carrier command AI behaviour to another instantaneous.
(2) Give pets impulse afterburners so that they can keep up with and dock with a carrier that is at full impulse.
It is a tad on the large side. The info could easilly have been given in bar form instead of the larger icons, making it more compact. The only advantage so far for me is being able to see how many are left and so be able to fill in the slots, wheras before I would re-launch every so often on the principle of "just incase".
I have to call them back when the enemy is at a certain percentage. Even with the new AI they will still fly through exploding ships when you do recall them. On the launching after recall it can take a couple of goes to make it happen.
It is a tad on the large side. The info could easilly have been given in bar form instead of the larger icons, making it more compact. The only advantage so far for me is being able to see how many are left and so be able to fill in the slots, wheras before I would re-launch every so often on the principle of "just incase".
I have to call them back when the enemy is at a certain percentage. Even with the new AI they will still fly through exploding ships when you do recall them. On the launching after recall it can take a couple of goes to make it happen.
Large side? Are you kidding?
Do you even know how to scale down your UI? Its quite simple.
Comments
Once you make the connection of killing pet spam and the usual AI bugs remaning it should fall into place.
The first conclusion is, someone thought pets were OP, there were too many of them and they were too active. So, if you try to play it normally you get a penalty, replacing less of them, so you can't just spam a target.
Second, your biggest enemy is warp core breaches.
Put those 2 together and the path is clear. You have to not have your fighters out. This is about less pets, less activity, remember.
They should be recalled, not once or twice, here and there but at all times. Constantly.
You hit attack for all of 2-3 seconds and once you see their projectiles firering, recall.
If a target is below x % HP, and you know it's going to pop, you keep your fighters in the bay.
What it means is, you have to work your rear end off in exchange for fighters that aren't really active. Try this and you won't have time to focus on your own hotbar, that's how hectic it is.
If you follow the rules the nerf is perfect as pets are now a lot less active.
Alternately you can play it like you used to and take the replacing penality.
Either way carriers lost their heart and soul, I hate piloting one now using either method and I feel all empty inside having spent a year building a carrier.
So instead of launching 2 wings of 3 fighters, can we have 1 wing of 6 fighters. That probably will make an easy fix.
Hanger Bay timers way too intrusive with single fighter launches. Timers need to be shortened or eliminated, maybe make the time porportional to the number of fighters launched. How about leveling fighters based on kills instead of time; one star for each kill/assist (or scaled according to relative strength of enemy killed).
Could use a Dock (immediately) button; 15s is a long time when most fights only last a few minutes and that doesn't include the time required for the fighters to heal which is the main point of docking. Either replace Recall with Dock or add a new Dock command; I could live with either. Also, some kind of indicator on the HUD to indicate which fighters are docked would be nice.
Instead of the thin horizontal hull strength indicator, a thermometer-like indicator color coded for 100/75/50/25% using the fighter outlines in the HUD (similar to that used for the ship).
Carrier Command buttons on the HUD could use some subtle color coding and a more obtrusive activation highlight.
The ability to command individual fighters to dock would be helpful, it makes no sense to dock six fighters to only repair one or two of them.
I like where this is going but needs work.
Im going to agree on mots of your points here. The recall function would work fine, IF and only if the relaunch actually works. Right now, it doesnt. I end up with random numbers of launching fighters and no way to fix the issue. As an additional extra id like to point out that ive been having this problem with the new "auto recall" feature that was implemented. After X amount of time of not fighting, hangar craft auto recall and head back into the carrier to chill for a bit. Again, conceptually fine but you have to make it work otherwise it just gets in the way and causes problems.
The above is a really big issue since the way i play my carrier (mostly a tanky support science vessel) I rely substantially on my hangar craft for damage output and its a massive hit when only 2 of 12 re-launch after recalling.
Other feedback, i do like the ability to issue separate hangar commands to each hangar, but the implementation isn't working well. Without some way of making these commands "stick" such as it were, they're basically overidden the second you change targets and render the whole idea completely moot. I like what you're going for here cryptic, but you NEED to make each set of hangar craft capable of maintaining their own discrete target, independently of whatever MY current target is otherwise this will never, ever work to any useful level.
The ranking system: I think you've done mostly pretty well here. The amount of scaling per rank seems reasonable and when maxxed out my hangar craft are now better than they were previously with almost no exceptions in terms of both survivability and damage output. The heal on rank up is also useful.
One thing I will offer criticism on however, (this was always going to be a problem right from when you announced it and its proven to definitely be so in practice) is the duration between rank ups. It simply takes too long, no question. There are are two issues here.
1. Overall mission length is often not long enough to get full use out of the ranking system. Play just doesn't last long enough to get there. You can argue that this just means you dont NEED higher ranked hangar craft for trivial content, which i suppose is true to a point, but it still seems wasteful.
2. More importantly, smaller craft (fighters and raiders) lack the survivability of larger craft and invariably very rarely get to make full use of the rank up system. They just die to incidental damage too regularly. We don't have enough fine motor control over the mobility of our hangar craft to avoid this, but the lengthy period between rank ups means we're being punished for it nonetheless. I think you need to scale down the time between ranking up at the very least on small craft, although I cant see much reason you couldn't shorten it for all hangar craft in general.
Note: point 2 above is a bigger issue because right now (with the possible exceptions of BoPs and Jem'hadar frigates (haha, good luck)) fighter craft trump just about anything else, almost all the time (yes, I'm looking at you elite scorpions). You need to re-balance some of the less popular hangar craft to be more useful. There's currently almost no reason to pick a whole bunch of them, even in the circumstance they're designed for because frankly, using fighter craft for damage will STILL do the job faster and better. This is bad and you should fix it =/
One other thing worth noting is the "warp core breach avoidance" thats been toted. Couple things;
a) Its definitely better. My ships are getting hit a lot LESS by them which is fantastic. Nice work.
b) I'm not entirely convinced that you've approached it correctly however. I mentioned previously that we have almost zero control over the manner in which our hangar craft actually fly, their manouvering, their turning their speed etc. These are all fixed. With this in mind, warp core breaches are incredibly binary. We're being punished for the behaviour of our fighters which is is entirely outside our sphere of control. Even if i recall my fighters after every ship dies, i have no control over HOW they turn around and get back and its entirely possible (and happens) that they fly close to the exploding ship and blow up anyway.
My suggestion is that warp core breaches do a percentage of the affected ships total hull HP in damage, mitigated by whatever shielding they have available at the time. Hell, it can even be a BIG percentage, that way its still a BAD thing that you don't want to happen, but this instant exploding business is entirely unreasonable and provides no opportunity to recover, and face it, your new system is encouraging us NOT to spam fighters but rather to keep our old ones alive. Stop making this so difficult >< It's counter intuitive to your own design philosophy.
The current death-by-breach situation feels really binary-RNG in nature and it shouldn't.
God doesn't play dice Cryptic, and neither should you.
Just some of my initial thoughts, will be keeping a close eye on stuff as i continue to explore this (mostly welcome) change. Work with me here Cryptic! Lets get this right!
Still more then Slaver hp nerf, more then the uselessness of the vet system for none friagtes, you need to fix the fighters AI, no more suggestions make them orders.
extra panels are too big , i splent half hour on rebalance HUD before i find "right" position - resize/modify options are welcome
commands ? lol ..... sometimes my pets ignore everything , when i test carrier before patch 15 km range for atack work fine .....now they dont atack marked target 12 km from me , or go to suicide mision kill something more than 20 km away ....
especialy borg daily empire defense is really funny now .... i start atack at one sphere + cube and i died because my brave fighters lure to combat with me 2 more cubes + 5+ spheres ......
btw why is sphere much more tougher and have more hp than cube ? (cube have at level 44 50k HP , sphere 58k + better shield i think too )
The UI is the perfect size for me, but I've noticed others in this thread think it is too big. I believe this may be related to pc/laptop display screen size and resolution. On a 17" full HD screen I find it is perfect, but maybe on smaller screens/lower res it may be too large. The programmers are obviously not going to be using 15" screens with low res when designing new graphics. So may be this why it is the size it is. If the size of of the hanger interface can't be changed currently this needs to be added.
As for how the hanger UI works in practice, like others I have problems with Recall, and launching pets after Recall. Most of these issues are related to pets not being able to keep up with your ship after you issue a carrier command, and then go straight to full impulse. The pets just can't keep up, because they take too long changing from one carrier command AI behaviour to another. Try it and see.
Possible solutions:
(1) Make the time it takes for pets to change from one carrier command AI behaviour to another instantaneous.
(2) Give pets impulse afterburners so that they can keep up with and dock with a carrier that is at full impulse.
I have to call them back when the enemy is at a certain percentage. Even with the new AI they will still fly through exploding ships when you do recall them. On the launching after recall it can take a couple of goes to make it happen.
Large side? Are you kidding?
Do you even know how to scale down your UI? Its quite simple.