Buffing the Iocrym

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Atarlost
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JohnBWatson wrote:
I don't think the spread would look good. I'd go with six single firing point fracture cannon variants on the six pillars of the gazebo shape with probably a 180 degree arc each and 1/3 the damage of your proposed IM-90-like variant. That would give the same single target damage which is all that matters and look a lot better. Or put the disintegrator in the short range slot. Or not have a short range slot.
A short range, ammoless disintegrate weapon might be a bit overpowered for something that that can be obtained at the edge of Human space, where nothing's immune. I'm not certain about how the spread might look, but the idea of 6 turrets would work just as well.
If it's higher than level 10 it can't be installed in human space and there's precedent for scripting the destruction of a weapon. It's done to make sure you always have to take the Qianlong to the Huari to get it repaired. It could be done to keep the first disintegration weapon out of player hands.
JohnBWatson wrote:
Nothing has been said to convince me that the quantumsphere is or within reason can be anything more than an annoying gotcha. Tradition isn't a good enough reason to keep a reference to Star Trek the Motionless Picture around when it's not helping gameplay.


It's a tracking weapon that can deal heavy damage at range and moves slow enough that it can be avoided. If we don't have something like that, I don't see how we can get a ranged fight that's more exciting than simply tanking some other longranged weapon while hammering away with your own. The disintegrate property may be a bit much, though I'm confident that giving the player a 1 time immunity would be enough to nullify that.
No it's not. It's a tracking weapon that does piddly damage because it spends all its design budget on the disintegration and tracking effects. Giving the player 1 time immunity wouldn't help. A new player still wouldn't know disintegration was a thing until disintegrated and it would still be before even seeing the ship that killed him. Fighting the Iocrym right now is exactly the sort of long range slugging match you don't want it to be.
JohnBWatson wrote:
I think the carrier deployment on shield drop thing may also be more annoying than challenging. I'd prefer a finite supply launched all at once. I also think they need to have their armament rethought as well. They're not fast enough to bring their guns to bear against other ships, but changing their speed might mess up the intercept difficulty of the anti-station strikes.
All at once deployment allows the player to just get them launched, run away, then wipe them out without the ICS's fire support. The game's present mechanic for deploying them is indeed quite annoying and not really challenging, but I think that if we replace "deploy 3 whenever shield drops, even if it just came back up" with "try to maintain 3 drones active by launching up to 3 every few minutes whenever shields are down", the 'cheapness' of the addition of drones becomes much less of a problem. At the very least, it'd feel like the ICS is playing by some logical constraints and make destroying the Sentinels in the ICS fight feel less pointless due to the fact that it'll take some time to restock them.
Being able to separate them is a bonus I think. They add almost nothing to the fight except duration and annoyance and I'd just as soon get rid of them, but at least it should be possible to get rid of them for the second or third stage of the fight.

There are ways around the luring issue. For instance setting them to patrol relative to the ICS should work.

Actually, what about putting a station like the Ares ask you to kill in orbit around the planet and having it spawn the sentinels? Then it would be the ICS you had to lure to split them up and whatever changes are made it will have some sort of ability to shoot back at long range.
JohnBWatson wrote:I did list a possible armament change for the Sentinels, what do you think of it?
I think I missed it.

Ah. A tractor adds nothing to the first stage and self destruct makes farming them for ROMs even more punitive than it is already. Since it's nearly impossible to save stations and most of the research missions involve tons of travel distance that's not good. Most players are probably going to have to farm ROMs at least their first time in Heretic. I think the AI will use omnis on targets of opportunity when on a task, but a nondamaging omni-tractor won't accomplish anything. I'm not sure what self-repair is supposed to add either.
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Whats exactly the difference between shockwave and radius effect? And are Ares nukes shockwave producers or radius? And kilton shells?
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TheLoneWolf wrote:Whats exactly the difference between shockwave and radius effect? And are Ares nukes shockwave producers or radius? And kilton shells?
Shockwave expands, like Ares nukes. Radius just does instant damage, like NAMI missiles.

If it's higher than level 10 it can't be installed in human space and there's precedent for scripting the destruction of a weapon. It's done to make sure you always have to take the Qianlong to the Huari to get it repaired. It could be done to keep the first disintegration weapon out of player hands.
That's certainly possible, but without a plot - related reason for destroying the weapon it might feel like a bit of a kludge.
No it's not. It's a tracking weapon that does piddly damage because it spends all its design budget on the disintegration and tracking effects. Giving the player 1 time immunity wouldn't help. A new player still wouldn't know disintegration was a thing until disintegrated and it would still be before even seeing the ship that killed him. Fighting the Iocrym right now is exactly the sort of long range slugging match you don't want it to be.
By "heavy damage", I meant anything that the player really doesn't want to get hit by. Disintegration is included in this, but not necessary for a weapon to fill this role. Replacing the Qsphere's disintegrate effect with a powerful DoT or a high level of raw damage would work just as well.

By "1 time immunity", I meant to imply that there would be some manner of message from Domina, along the lines of "This weapon is beyond your armor's ability to defend against, child! Do not take another hit!", followed by a protective bubble being generated for a short time.
Being able to separate them is a bonus I think. They add almost nothing to the fight except duration and annoyance and I'd just as soon get rid of them, but at least it should be possible to get rid of them for the second or third stage of the fight.

There are ways around the luring issue. For instance setting them to patrol relative to the ICS should work.
This would still allow them to be picked off one by one, though. I suppose it could work, depending on how everything else fits together, but unless there's some major shift in the fight, I can see it playing out like this:

Stage one: Fight the ICS without its Sentinels.

Stage two: ICS deploys Sentinels, isolate and destroy them.

Stage three: Fight the ICS without its Sentinels again.

Which is a bit of a strange difficulty curve for a final boss fight.
Actually, what about putting a station like the Ares ask you to kill in orbit around the planet and having it spawn the sentinels? Then it would be the ICS you had to lure to split them up and whatever changes are made it will have some sort of ability to shoot back at long range.
If there's a station that can deploy and command the sentinels, what would the purpose of the ICS be?
Ah. A tractor adds nothing to the first stage and self destruct makes farming them for ROMs even more punitive than it is already. Since it's nearly impossible to save stations and most of the research missions involve tons of travel distance that's not good. Most players are probably going to have to farm ROMs at least their first time in Heretic. I think the AI will use omnis on targets of opportunity when on a task, but a nondamaging omni-tractor won't accomplish anything. I'm not sure what self-repair is supposed to add either.
I think the ROM - farming mechanic is a bit strange to begin with, but if we want to keep it as - is, we can just adjust the ROM drop chance so that the player's chance of obtaining an ROM remains equal to its current rate. This would make ROM - farming less unpleasant, as fewer wrecks need to be checked for ROMs.

For example, if the current ROM chance is 1/10 and the self destruct survival chance is 1/5, then the new ROM chance would be 1/2.

For the tractor beam, I'd think that putting it on a swivel mount would just pull targets in front of the Sentinel into the IFC's range. Assuming the IFC fires at targets of opportunity, that seems like it would work well enough.
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Shockwave is an "area" effect that is similar to fragmentation, but has some different built-in properties, such as the shockwave image is shown even if some of its 32 fragments are already absorbed and cannot hit anymore. (This is how scanner pods have false negatives.) Default fragments of shockwaves is 32, and default passthrough is 80%. It is quite possible some data is shared among all fragments, unlike true fragmentation weapons.

Kiloton shell is simple fragmentation. It spews 48 or so fragments in all directions. None of the fragments have passthrough (set to 0 by default) like shockwaves.

"Radius" effects, like those spawned by exploding XM900s, hit everyone within a given radius once.


* * *

Another thing to keep in mind regarding the final fight is if the player completes more missions beyond the minimum to shut down quarantine, player can get virus cubes that paralyze all nearby sentinels for a long time.


* * *
Atarlost wrote:If it's higher than level 10 it can't be installed in human space and there's precedent for scripting the destruction of a weapon. It's done to make sure you always have to take the Qianlong to the Huari to get it repaired. It could be done to keep the first disintegration weapon out of player hands.
That used to be true, but Taikon can now install armor and devices up to level 11. Currently, there are no level 11 devices.
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JohnBWatson wrote:By "heavy damage", I meant anything that the player really doesn't want to get hit by. Disintegration is included in this, but not necessary for a weapon to fill this role. Replacing the Qsphere's disintegrate effect with a powerful DoT or a high level of raw damage would work just as well.
Disintegration doesn't qualify. If you have a level appropriate shield you just don't care.

Providing a message is not a fix. People don't read those during a fight.
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Atarlost wrote:
Disintegration doesn't qualify. If you have a level appropriate shield you just don't care.

Providing a message is not a fix. People don't read those during a fight.
A message on the screen after you take a hit from an unknown weapon and Domina just put a shield around your ship, at the start of the final boss fight? It'll probably get noticed, any reasonable player is going to be paying attention at that point. This is likely to occur early on, at a distance, for anyone likely to need it, so it's unlikely the combat would have gotten distracting enough to require the player take all possible focus away from looking at the interface.

Of course, if it turns out I'm wrong here, could always use a dockscreen like the Black Death Pods have.
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I do have some ideas about disintegration, but I think I'll flesh them out a bit more and start a new thread later....basic idea would be:

-Remove current disintegration. Instakill effects with no counter except "own this type of armor" aren't that fun.
-Add new disintegrate effect which acts as a rapid HP drain on affected armor segments, with unique death if it kills you (IE: the splatter effect, but not glowing)
-Make this be a nano effect, and swap the disintegrator over to being a nano weapon, with possibly some renames and definitely some new effect stuff.
-Oh, and probably add some ways to combat disintegration without being immune. Regen nanos, solvents, dockscreens.....maybe some custom kits as well from a quest or whatever.
-I'd probably also make the GDC a nano weapon with disintegration as well so it actually made sense.
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