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DEVS: Space Battles Clutter !
rattraps123
Member Posts: 101 Arc User
During space battles, it seems like they are super cluttered with beams and weapons fire.
LESS is MORE and I think instead of having 8 beams firing out of a ship you have 1 beam that's 8 times more powerfull.
Crazy weapons fire and clutter
http://i.imgur.com/xbUsy.jpg
In all the star trek tv shows and movies we don't see ships do this. Fire everything just all the time like crazy. It needs to be more controlled and refined, less cluttered.
Controlled weapons fire like this
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090319233012/memoryalpha/en/images/3/36/USS_Enterprise-D_fires_on_Duras_sisters_b-o-p.jpg
This is the only instance I can think of where a ship fires more then one of it's weapons at a time on the target.
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/d734afLFPds/maxresdefault.jpg
Here's how it should work,
Beam weapons would stack say you have 4 forward and 4 aft. then your phaser beam weapon should fire 1 phaser x how ever many phaser banks you have installed + tact consoles.
torpedoes should fires Volly's of torpedoes . Say you have 4 forward torpedoes . then it should fire a Volly of 4 in a row + damage + tact console damage.
So your woundering what about Torp spread ? Keep it.
And Fire at will keep that too.
What about Dual beam banks ? Make the phaser beam thickness wider. But add the dual beams + singles + tact consoles damage together.
What about mixed weapon types ? Torps, cannons, dual beams , single beams. it would use the weapon cool down timer to fire.
Cannons & turrets should stay the same, But be synchronized together for burst firing or random for fire at will.
If your using Phaser Quad cannons, all your cannons should fire together regardless of dual heavy, single or turrets. One cool down, One Volly of weapons fire = MORE Star Trek Cannon.
The point is, We need to declutter space battles in sto. LESS is MORE !
LESS is MORE and I think instead of having 8 beams firing out of a ship you have 1 beam that's 8 times more powerfull.
Crazy weapons fire and clutter
http://i.imgur.com/xbUsy.jpg
In all the star trek tv shows and movies we don't see ships do this. Fire everything just all the time like crazy. It needs to be more controlled and refined, less cluttered.
Controlled weapons fire like this
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090319233012/memoryalpha/en/images/3/36/USS_Enterprise-D_fires_on_Duras_sisters_b-o-p.jpg
This is the only instance I can think of where a ship fires more then one of it's weapons at a time on the target.
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/d734afLFPds/maxresdefault.jpg
Here's how it should work,
Beam weapons would stack say you have 4 forward and 4 aft. then your phaser beam weapon should fire 1 phaser x how ever many phaser banks you have installed + tact consoles.
torpedoes should fires Volly's of torpedoes . Say you have 4 forward torpedoes . then it should fire a Volly of 4 in a row + damage + tact console damage.
So your woundering what about Torp spread ? Keep it.
And Fire at will keep that too.
What about Dual beam banks ? Make the phaser beam thickness wider. But add the dual beams + singles + tact consoles damage together.
What about mixed weapon types ? Torps, cannons, dual beams , single beams. it would use the weapon cool down timer to fire.
Cannons & turrets should stay the same, But be synchronized together for burst firing or random for fire at will.
If your using Phaser Quad cannons, all your cannons should fire together regardless of dual heavy, single or turrets. One cool down, One Volly of weapons fire = MORE Star Trek Cannon.
The point is, We need to declutter space battles in sto. LESS is MORE !
Post edited by rattraps123 on
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Comments
I've always been a strong proponent to the weapon spam.
we've got too much TRIBBLE cluttering our screens, it looks like a battle from some other scifi show.
having multiple beams spew out of a single array is ridiculous.
Watch TBoBW, and get back to me.
He's right. There's too much noise in space. Effects need to be reduced in number and magnitude.
TBoBW?
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
There are probably more instances of multiple weapons firing that I don't remember, but this stick out in my mind.
Yeah, pretty much. I actually like the "weapon spam" in this game as a single phaser blast from a ship as big as a Galaxy never made much sense to me.
If we are talking about the same scene in Best of Both Worlds what I see there is more a "beam rapid fire".
The occasions where multiple beams are shot are what we have Fire at Will for.
What Enterprise-E did was neither Fire at Will nor normal shots intended to do much damage. It was a way to find the cloaked Scimitar.
Again the vast majority of battles we see are much less beam heavy.
Slightly off topic, but I would love a BOFF ability called 'Fire all Ventral Phasers' - Does minimal Damage, but any shields hits will reveal cloaked ships within 10 Km
But yeah on topic, there is a bit of an over spam in Beams, In solo play I have been self imposing a limit of beams firing at one time to make the battle feel more true to what we have seen on screen ( Of course in PVE i go back to the most efficient dmg dealing so i don't hold the team back)
Now, talking serious, i could recall games like starfleet command, where the tactics and strategy were the main basics of killing your enemy and you could only see maximum a couple of weapons at the same time in the screen. I always wanted space fights in STO to be like then, but i guess cryptic failed in this and they opted to a more straight forward way, just fire weapons at maximum power and you got it!! lol.
How many Phaser Emitters were firing at the time though? If I remember correctly, it was the dorsal saucer, ventral saucer, and both necelle pylons at least, as well as the forward Torpedo Launcher firing a lot faster than what we can do. It wasn't just one array going off.
Most of the battles in the earlier episodes of Star Trek also didn't see much manuvering of any kind. By your logic, because it was seen on screen, we should just park and trade shots and ONLY equip canon weapon types because its what we saw on TV.
However in STO, moving adds to your defense, and multiple weapons firing is the norm. Crying "Canon" doesn't solve anything. Canon can give us a base to work off of. It shouldn't be The Law that cannot be broken under ANY circumstances.
Yeah! YEAH! Get rid of movement! Root everyone in a single spot.
It simply transferred over to STO, and as a result it's aesthetically displeasing for me.
There should be a fraction of ships for most of the content. Those ships should take the same amount of time to kill as the current situation where you have to kill a few dozen or so ships. That means buffing HP, buffing shields, buffing survivability, buffing regeneration, buffing NPC cleanses, and giving them more powerful weapons and abilities.
It means that escorts we come across should be incredibly overpowered and few in number.
Yes, there should be massive fleet actions like in the Dominion War -- but they should be very few and far between in order to accentuate the gravity of the conflict.
If it takes us 15 minutes to kill a bunch of ships until we get to the end, then a single ship should take 15 minutes to kill. A ship should be destroyed through creativity and 'original thinking' moreso than simply spamming the spacebar, thus cutting that 15 minute average down to maybe 10 minutes or so.
This would also mean there should be more named ships... again, for aesthetics -- and the fact there are fewer NPC ships around to begin with.
But I don't see this changing. The die has been cast. Would be nice to see, but it's one of those design decisions we have to live with. Even if it does kill our framerate in various missions.
Plus, how would accuracy work? You can't make half the beam hit the enemy, so now you're going to fire and do either 4x damage or 0x damage. And when you fire slowly, missing a shot means that the enemy's shields might completely recharge before the next one.
I think a better solution would be to have the beam fire at the same rate as it does now, but either adjust all shields in the game to compensate for the increased DPS, or reduce the damage of a single beam array.
I call it, the Stoutes paradox.
I'm in agreement with you here, Its very anti climatic for a single Defiant Class ship to fight (And completely obliterate not just disable) 9 BoPs without breaking a sweat , This is a win loss ratio that is way off base for reasonable suspension of disbelief and heading towards cheesy action movie Kill counts.
Not to mention taking out multiple Raptors and Battle cruisers on top of that,
This isn't a loss for the enemy, This is Utter Humiliation and it makes me scoff at the very notion there is a long term War in the game to begin with, Depending on which side you play for, the representation is that your side is unbeatable, The hero ship cuts into the enemy at such a rate that tehres barely any threat to you and you feel a bit out of the enemies league
I would like the situation to be that Three Bops are a credible threat , remember the Picard/Romulan stand Off that changed the tables with just Three Birds of Prey?
Well here in STO two Romulan d'deridex class warbirds would Laugh at 3 Bops showing up
you ever tried taking on 3 well built vaper BoPs with a pair of d'dex....its not a contest..you die
Instead of having one massive space battle after another, why not have fewer ships fighting?
But those fights should tanke much longer time and be much more thrilling.
Quality over quantity IMO.
Those were k'vort bops, which we are not allowed to have here. I would think 3 would be a sizeable threat.
This is about NPC trio 'frigate' BoPs
In fact the desparity between these NPCs and the Well built Player BoPs is the entire point of my rant
Still a BoP, in STO that would put them in the Frigate Spawn Mob making them a nuisance at best
Anyway...Cut down on the spam? Yeah, I guess. Do it by making the battles visually boring? Lolnope, please no. We saw plenty of beam spam in most of the good series, but because people only remember TNG, they want parked Galaxies plinking away with one beam.
That gameplay abstraction is seriously stretching the suspesnion of disbelief though, At lest for me and some others I've spoken too.
And as for being a hero ship, theres a limit to that being a reasonable excuse, theres just no accounting for a single ship taking on a dozen others single handed and still seeing the enemy as a credible threat as far as I'm concerned
Assuming that missions are using the same "weak" mob thats available for use in the foundry then its no wonder the combat is so laughably easy
I can totally understand that a few/some/many enjoy seeing a huge amount of beams firing off their ship. Tastes vary. But as a matter of fact even if you totally gimp your cruiser by slotting two torpedoes fore and two aft you are still looking at four beams on a broadside firing at once. That's still more then the usual Fire at Will in the shows.
Hmm, I was thinking about solutions within the current game mechanics that could cater both "factions". IMHO it's always best to let the player decide what he wants to see.
My first thought was some kind of "heavy beam array" with the same DPS as regular arrays, but a much longer cooldown. Kinda like DHCs and DCs. But then Beam Overload would become totally OP. So this doesn't work. And they'd probably still fire all at once, just with a longer pause.
Investigating the "invisible weapons" bug and making it a feature you can toggle... okay that's a bit off
Seriously: Any ideas on how to make less beam spam work without taking it away from those who want it?
No one but the 'I want everything just like the shows' crowd will welcome this sort of change. Because it takes away the effort people put into building a beam boat, a glass cannon and such.
I dont know why people are up in arms with this. When theres 5 or more ships on either side slugging it out. Theres going to be beam spam. No ones going to hold their punches when its a battle to the bloody end.
Most of the shows presented a single sniper beam shot that knocked out weapons, or engines. The Feds werent trying to kill anyone just defuse the situation by denying them their offensive abilities or try to escape. Those moments are few and far between in this game because the entire region is in open conflict.
Believe it or not, this game is still alive because it is Star Trek.
I totally see that a game engine has limitations, I modded enough games to know that. And as I mentioned in my post before I totally understand that different people have different tastes. That's why I tried to direct this thread to a "what can we do to make everyone happy"-direction.