This thread is for speculating and suggesting ideas for confirmed features. At present, this is the list:
New Factions: Players decide whether to become Loyalists or Rebels, which unlocks a unique new tech tree granting them new technologies and ship variants.
New Titan-class ships: Massive warships for each race that dwarf capital ships, these deadly new monsters are capable of wiping out entire enemy fleets single-handedly.
New Capital Ships: A new capital ship class arrives, giving players new strategic options.
New Corvette-class ships: Small, highly maneuverable light ships that are adept at a variety of tasks.
Loyalist and Rebel versions of some of the existing Sins’ frigates and cruisers, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses.
Updated lighting and particle effects for enhanced visuals.
New Victory Conditions to allow for more variety, differing strategies and shorter game sessions.
Additional capital ship ability levels, for greater strategic choice.
Impulse::Reactor support for chat, friends, achievements and more.
While I know this community has a wealth of creativity and ideas, I want to keep this thread focused on stuff that's going to make it into the game. So, as much as we all know that people want a campaign, that's not on the list. Feel free to write any comments, suggestions, ideas, or random responses to any of the stuff on the list.
So without further adieu, my own ideas and reactions:
Impulse::Reactor
Please, please, please have built-in map/mod transfer. Thank you.
New Victory Conditions
Victory conditions I'd love to see:
Domination: Control at least 60% of the galaxy for at least 30 minutes. The timer counts down twice as quickly if you control at least 70% of the galaxy, and six times as quickly if you control 80%. Victory is instant at 90% control. Uncolonizable gravity wells do not count to this requirement, but pirate bases do.
Artifact Excavation: All artifacts locations are revealed at the start of the match (there will be at least 2 per player under this game setting). To win, your team must control at least 75% of the artifacts (so if there are 5 artifacts, you must control 4 to win). Victory is instant when you achieve this.
Mega-Weapon: Super-weapons are disabled under this game mode; instead you build a “mega-weapon”. Its position on the tech tree replaces the super-weapon tech. The cost varies by faction (more for Vasari, less for Advent, compensating for prerequisites), but once it completes a count-down begins until it activates. Successful activation causes that team to instantly win the match. The location of a mega-weapon is revealed as soon as construction begins.
Contract Acquisition: All players can bid on a special contract to win the game. In order to win, you must maintain the higher bid for five consecutive minutes. Unlike bounty, this bid never depletes and does not contribute to anything except winning the game.
New Capital Ships
First off, I'm still hoping for the Dunov, Revelation, and Antorak to get some love. They've always come across as a bit "rushed" and never have really shined on their own. The guidance rework is a nice start, but doesn't quite get there. But hey, new caps, let's talk about what each faction could use:
TEC: I'd love to see a “command class” capital ship that focuses on controlling the battlefield. The only capital ship ability for TEC that's anything like this is targeting uplink. Here's a concept ability to see what I'm talking about: Disruption Matrix: All units, friendly and hostile, in an area of effect around this capital ship are immune to all special abilities. Persistent effects that are already in play are not removed.. Wouldn't that go nicely to counter guardians or subverters, eh?
Advent: With the Progenitor, Rapture, and Halcyon already providing more fleet support than Advent could ever need, an entirely different approach should be applied here. Advent could really use a true “dreadnaught” like the Marza or Vulkoras, since the dinky Revelation certainly doesn't apply. Pack it full of hard-hitting combat abilities and good frontal weaponry, and perhaps an ability that has stricter cooldown limitations to finally give a good combo for guidance.
Vasari: What do Vasari really need? They have great combat options, great support options, great specialty options... easily the most well-balanced capital ship lineup. I guess the only thing left to add is the sugary cereal to go with the balanced breakfast. How about an industrial capital ship that has the special ability to act as a frigate-factory, enabling it to produce units mid-battle (uses a cooldown rather than a build time, so the unit is produced instantly)?
Titan Class Ships
This one really gives me pause. What is the role of titans? What is their purpose? With capital ships and starbases both countered by bombers, and bombers being the dominant late-game unit to begin with, it would be total overkill for titans to be the same. So I'm actually rooting for some relatively strong anti-strike craft weaponry on these guys. The question becomes, what should their weaknesses be? They can't be unstoppable engines of destruction, after all.
Here's what I'm thinking:
Titans should be weak against capital ships and – wait for it – light frigates. The titans should have special abilities that require antimatter, but unlike capital ships they are not immune to the disruption abilities of light frigates. Once drained of antimatter, titans are much easier to take care of.
All titans should have anti-structure, anti-frigate, and anti-strike craft weapons. This enables them to be used to take down starbases, and tightly-packed frigate/SC forces. They use their antimatter-based abilities to boost their combat performance and plough through enemies, but are less powerful in the long-run once depleted and lack good weapons against high-durability targets that are not structures.
That's my angle on this issue.
Faction/Unit Variants
Am I the only one hoping we see a Skirmisher that gets phase missiles? One-way ticket from least-used unit in the game to everyone's favourite light frigate.
Eh, I'm gunna stop myself there...
Why on earth would you need that much processing power to play a video game?
Fear my Pentium IV of doom! With it I have seen many C-Beams, crushed many Cossacks and, oddly enough, collected ho-cards in the Witcher!
Every game needs ho cards. I don't think I ever gave a crap about video game relationship garbage until they added the Pokemon factor. I went from "kthnxbai" to "Gotta poke em all!"
I was thinking about the armor and DPS of Titans, and came up with this chart....
Damage outputTargets per weapon bank - 3VeryLight - 1.25Light - 0.5Medium - 2Heavy - 1.5VeryHeavy - 1.5Capitalship - 0.5Composite - 2Armored valuesVeryLight - .25Light - 2Medium - .5Heavy - .75VeryHeavy - .75Capitalship - 2.5Composite - 1Other StatsCap points Cost - 4Fleet Cost - 250Start Hull points - 5500Start Shield points - 7500Start Armor points - 15Start AntiMatter - 500maxSpeed - 400
I'm picturing a death ship that can wade into those LRM centric fleets and chew them up. I'm not sure if the speed of the ship would need boosted to do this or not. But I'm thinking the Titans should be trump strike craft, LRM, heavy and supports. It should be weak against Caps, and the lonely light frigs (and their abilities). This would put a good value on the Lights, and make Multi Cap ship fleets with supporting ships a viable counter to Titan ships with typical lrm/carrier fleets.
Thoughts on this?
Hi all, I was wondering with the new titan class will this mean that capital ships no longer have the leveling system? I would love to to capital ships becoming more similar to normal ships and have the titan become the "hero" ship.
Of course this would mean that most of the abilities would have reduced maximum damage and their health/shields could be reduced as well but it would save them being targeted to some extent. What i've seen with many mods is that you need to research technology first before being able to use specific abilities. Perhaps this could be used to prevent capital ships using their deadly level 6 ability at the start of the game.
Cheers,
Maniac
I believe capital ships will stay the same but with additional levels. I think the idea of the Titan class ships is to be a super capital ship like the super star destroyers from star wars.
I was thinking more the Titans from EVE. Ships so big capital ships are tiny next to them.
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/700/shipmap.jpg
With the exception of the Mimnitar, the second largest ships is a supercarrier (super capital class vessel) and the thrid largest is the Dreadnaughts. The largest are, natually, the titans.
EDIT: Just noticed, but at the bottom left hand corner of all the panels, there is the Effeil Tower drawn to the same scale. Just to get across how BIG these things are (the Amarr titan is 13km long)
Titans in EVE also used to have an AOE doomsday, which broke balance and was removed in favor of a single target death ray, which got nerfed because it was used for driveby nuking of caps.
In their current form they're much less useful than super carriers, which kill pretty much everything with fighter bombers.
Dreads are mostly a bad joke these days, standard carriers exist to rep things.
The previous meta was big on long range battle ships with just enough tank to survive an aoe doomsday, the current one is based around battleship gobbling armored heavy assault cruisers, ahac gobbling missile spamming shield tanking battlecruisers, and drake murdering laser using short ranged armored battle ships.
When not in a fleet, most players rumble around in (t2) cruisers or (t1) battle cruisers: light fast ships that, when well flown and fitted, can beat the hell out of anything they can't run away from.
EVE and Sins have a lot in common. Hopefully Sins won't make the mistake of letting the player build more than one titan, and trying to balance overwhelming power with cost. Hopefully they'll also steal the idea of Incursions, where evil robot zombies disrupt space, attack people and mess with travel around a planet.
This is a paste of my post. Sorry for perhaps an unnecessary post.
A list of issues
There needs to be a way to mass scuttle and maybe even mass create strike craft
Strike craft still go through planets and stars
Bomber strike craft are much smaller than fighters. I only noticed this on accident.
Bomber and fighter differences are bothers, as bombers only do about 25% more damage than fighters and theyre missiles take sometimes huge amounts of time to reach theyre targets (I am reffering specifically to TEC and am not sure about vasari, but I know for advent they dont have this problem), especially when targets are on the move.
I am not sure at this time what other things I could add to the "problem" log but you guys might be able to fill it in. also it would be helpful, providing there is a place to do this, if someone could point me to the place I can report things like this.
So for Rebellion I had a few ideas. For starters I thought there might be a game mode where all the expansions are combined in chronological order, appearing one at a time to each player, for a sort of story mode experience. This might be pretty neat, because you could have a preset map set up just for this and advent could appear in an area near your home planet (ravaging the undefended sectors) and then im not sure about the vasari buisness.
The devs probably already thought of this because it is mentioned in the description, "new game modes for faster games" but I was thinking there needs to be modes that give your empire a number of planets and research from the beginning of the game.
The titan class ships I think need to be different, and not just a hunk of meat that costs a crap load of money. I was thinking that maybe becasue the titans are so huge, maybe they take up much less supply than other ships, or maybe none. Sounds unbalanced, crazy, I know but just listen. This could be dependant on research maybe, or maybe a toggled game type in the game options, i dont know. But there should definately be something different about these ships, aside from just being powerful or a way to dump resources.
So some other topics i would like to hear from you guys about is, should titans gain experienc? will they be customizable like a starbase (probably)? should they have both of these features? Well thats all i got, please populate my post! I must hear from you!
And for future reference, I have never really played anything other than TEC, though I know I should. The other day I played as Advent and it really opened things up for me.
Oh and do any of you find plasma storms, magnetic storms, asteroid fields, and dead asteroids a bit annoying? I have more of a bigger problem with the storms, because technically they should not have a gravity well. Dead asteroids and asteroid fields and "storms" are all good, but could they be implemented differently? It is really annoying when I start a game and the first gravity well that leads away from the dead end is almost useless.
Magnetic Clouds definitely go on the annoying list, but the other uncolonizables are fine as is and add a lot of flavour to the game. The random map generator cutting off your early-game expansion options with these guys is another matter entirely.
i don't want titans to be total game breakers, their description is worrying. building them should be the exception not the norm
What do you guys think of this
As I said I think theyre fine and all but even on preset maps you might run into a dead asteroid like I did, I dont think they are bad but they need to keep their distance from the player starting point, and what do you think of the storms having a gravity well? I think they should be applied maybe along a phase route (but technically ships are invincible in phase space so idk) or maybe a path of planets like asteroid fields and dead asteroids with these affects on them leading to more useful planets, and then you might run into a fleet or something along the way and then that would add some strategy. Maybe storms should be a random event, or disaster that happens to your planets. I dont know. The asteroid fields and dead asteroids are fine I guess but the storms should be implemented better, or get lost.
I agree completely. They should definitely be powerful, and very expensive, but in addition to something unique, like a mobile phase gate (someone elses idea). Someone said their power should at least match the power of a starbase, so that they can go head to head in an almost even battle. If that is the case, there will likely be more titans allowed to the player, maybe two or three max. If the devs decide to go all out, they could make a titan really freakin powerful and consequently very expensive, which is what I would want, though some would disagree. There are a number of things the devs could do to balance this out (one thing would definitely be limiting the amount of titans you can have to probably just one) no one should really worry about it being unbalanced. Ogrevs, or some other new unit will likely be able to target it, as a sort of anti titan. Even if the devs go all out and make it so you can build more than one while making them extremely powerful, the devs could find ways to make it work. Hell, they shot down the idea of making capital ships more upgradable with money. worry not. I would actually like to see superweapons like novaliths target these things. MAKE THE GAME EPIC! Thats why I loved the death star in star wars empire at war! and the executer from SWEAW corruption. I love epicness.
Titans can be balanced if the overall ship credit, metal, crystal, fleet cost is balanced out globally. 7DS used existing shield, hull, armor, antimatter, squadron levels, on ships to generate new costs. Then applied similar for capitalships and added extra cost for their additional weapon types, then applied to Titans and made costs 2-3 times more as they have 2-3 targets per banks which makes them meaner than hell.
Said balance worked out titans to be about 28k credits, 3-4 metal and crystal with fleet cost of just over 320 and requiring their own research item(s). Titan armor and shields came up to a combined 20k, some have 15k shields, 5k armor; 10k shields, armor; 5k shields, 15k armor depending on the faction.With fleet supply values what they are, most players won't field more than 3 Titans if their combined fleet cost is 1000 and individually cost as much as the rest of your fielded capitals, cruisers and frigs.
We set all frig weapon ranges under 5k, long range 10k, capitals/titans up to 15-18k base range and starbases and planetary defenses at 30k so they aren't ranged raped.
To make Anti-Module ships Anti-Titan, give Titans Module armor instead of capital. Note, I did try this, gave our Rogue Titan module armor, modified the Gameplay.constants accordingly so all weapons did max 50% damage vs module armor, then module weapons do 100%... Rogue Titan L6 + light capital + compliment of frigs/cruisers/bc ran into a TEC fleet that for some reason had 60 antimodule ships with another 90 frigs/cruisers and a few capitals.
It ended badly for the Titan. lol.
Seeing frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battlecruiser, capital/titan build tabs with 8-9 slots each would be nice -especially for modding.
StarClad could add Advent/Vasari militia to the GalaxyScenarioDef file.
13km Avatar, Try a 15km Executor that overloads enemy shields, implodes them and damages enemy hull.
with that whole module armor or whatever buisness, I have not seen why ogrevs are needed. They are much less armored than kodiaks and get raped by strike craft, so do ogrevs do more damage than 22? or were you suggesting they add module armor to the game because it isnt already there? good point about the titans by the way.
*Suggestion*
Seeing a color wheel or something to customize your faction colors better (like Blair said he was thinking about doing three years ago, I believe it was) would be a not so talked about, but highly utilized feature. Maybe even allow for easier implementation of custom faction icons for the artist type that doesn't want to dive into modding. Because of these two points I think it would be possible:
They're updating and improving the look, so custom colors and icons would be nice for the casual player, mod teams, and clans alike. I'm assuming the "and more" for the Reactor could be something like auto downloading of custom maps for multiplayer, colors are represented by a simple hex code which could easily be passed around at the player join screen, and custom icons can be swapped during map transfers as well prior to game starts.
Each ship does different damage to different types of armor.
Ogrevs do module damage which is how structures and bases are armored.
Module damage per armor is as thus.
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:CapitalShip 1.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:VeryLight 0.25 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Light 0.25 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Medium 0.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Heavy 0.75 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:VeryHeavy 1.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Module 2.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Pirate 0.30
So that 22 dps that Orgevs do, can go up to 44 against structures and starbases with module armor where as against an LRF with light armor it will do about 5.5 dps.
Agreed.
I think the vast majority of uncolonizable "planet" types (with the exception of stars, gas giants, asteroid fields, and wormholes) should be scrapped entirely as singular entities.
Instead, they should be a bit like planet rings. In fact, planet rings would make for a good example of something in this new "orbiting" category I'm suggesting. Along with magnetic clouds, radiation clouds, space junk, plasma storms, and rings, it'd include actual moons (different types of which would grant different bonuses/penalties) and pretty much anything that a planet could have orbiting it.
Most pre-existing uncolonizables on offical maps would simply have asteroid fields or gas giants added to them.
I know it's a bit of a big change, but it'd make a bit more sense (I mean, why does a radiation cloud create a gravity well?) and add more to gameplay than it takes away.
Personally, I don't really like uncolonizables at all. Just doesn't really ever travel through them unless I have to and the special rules each one has are pretty much wasted by their use to fill empty space.
Might as well have a gravitational anomaly where there is just nothing that would fill their role much better. Would also give us an area to have some deep space battles in, which I'd like.
Asteroid fields are good because they kinda have some mineral or crystal deposits to fight over. Sometimes.
Gas Giants are just badass and I like fighting around them. To be honest, however, I don't fight near gas giants enough. Fix that. Adding colonizable moons (very small population, mind you), would bring me there more often.
But what I'm talking about will probably never happen till Sins 2. Likely changes too much.
mods have been colonizing gas giants for a while and using their moons also. Not really hard for StarClad to pull off.
plasma/mag storms need to damage strikecraft, not disable launching.
I dont know. I kind of like how it is. Instead of having to manually put away all your strikecraft, you simply dont get to launch them. And what your suggesting really, is a way to make a plasma storm more a part of the game. I would like plasma storms to be a part of the game, but as the other dude says, not as a friggin gravity well. So I do agree with making plasma storms and other things more an actual part of the game.
And you are right. It doesnt sound like it would be hard to pull off. The question is, is stardock reading this, and will they simply add a bunch of new maps, or remake all existing ones as well? Also, what do you make of novaliths/deliverence engine/vasari thingy being able to perhaps be able to target titans? Give each a special ability with research, and then even the deliv engine could target one. I was thinking at first from long range, but then probably just in the current grav well, so then your superweapons could provide some serious defensive capabilities instead of taking up all of them.
by the way, what is an avatar? is it from EVE or homeworld?
DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:CapitalShip 1.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:VeryLight 0.25 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Light 0.25 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Medium 0.5 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Heavy 0.75 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:VeryHeavy 1.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Module 2.0 DamagePercentBonus:ANTIMODULE:Pirate 0.30 [/quote]
thats very helpful to know. so all those numbers apply to what damage the ogrev woudl do to those, or is that the type of armor that they all have. I understand your point, so now I will make better use of ogrevs, but this is a little confusing. I have also never known what exactly armor istelf does. What does an armor level of 5 do? take away said percent of damage?
for every point of armor, 5% of incoming damage is reduced -also passively boost Hull HP amount a bit.
Level 9 armor, 45% reduction to damage
Level 31 armor, 155% reduction to damage
Initially it was a divine being of sorts in the Hindu world (a tall lanky blue creature with yellow slitted eyes, and it came way before the movie Avatar) that migrated slowly in the religious world overall. The Ultima RPG series began to call your character there an Avatar and soon became synonymous with the idea of the main character that a gamer used. Now it comes to mean your person/character in a lot things like your forum personality and is marked by a name and a picture.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account