Messages

16

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Pilot Training

« on: March 22, 2013, 04:35:50 am »

Generally a pilot is two things: helmsman (obviously) and commander. Commanding is the harder but more important skill to master, and I find there are a few important aspects:

Voice communication: use of a microphone is critical, since typed commands will go unnoticed until they're too late to be helpful, and typing means you're not piloting or doing whatever else you need to be doing.

Situational Awareness: in a fight, gunners will usually only notice what they're aiming at (even between reloads), and typical engineers will be too busy looking at the inside of your ship to notice what's going on with the outside. Make sure you don't focus your attention solely on a single enemy ship: as both a pilot and a commander, you need to be visually skimming your entire field of view periodically, calling out enemies, and notifying your crew about terrain that you can't avoid or lag spikes you're experiencing, if and when it occurs (it can be helpful for gun crews to distinguish between a captain turning to acquire a new target, or spinning due to loss of control). Be sure to keep a constant eye on the status of your components. Applying this sense correctly, it's not uncommon to be able to manage simultaneous, sustained attacks on two or more enemies.

Exert a sense of control: your crew should sense that you have a plan (even if you don't actually have one). By plan, I mean some short-term goal you're trying to achieve (or continue achieving) over the next several seconds. Based on your active situational awareness and that plan, you know which components need to be prioritized and which will not. There may be times when you need engines but don't care about a balloon, or your team is leading by 3 kills, but the enemy will soon regroup and you need everyone on guns more than you need them repairing your hull. Unless the crew can read your mind, they can't situationally prioritize, and so you do need to tell them what to focus on.

I regularly inform my crew when I'm about to use a skill that damages engines (it allows engineers to get in position, and keeps the crew from thinking you're under fire when you're not), or when I'm going to ram, and particularly which fields of fire I expect to open up. You'll also find gunners keep trying to track an enemy that you're turning away from, until you tell them to aim toward another enemy (when switching targets, it helps if you can tell them where to aim, relative to their current viewpoint).

Invite the crew to make suggestions: since you're not the one gunning, take requests for loadout changes. Certainly a lumberjack will be less useful in the canyons than it will be on the dunes, and your ship and configuration should reflect the map and complement friendlies while countering enemies, there will usually be several applicable weapon/ship combinations that play well into your style, so it can help in those cases to determine crew preference. Discussing it is best left for private crew chat, rather than lobby voice chat, of course. Good engineers and gunners will direct your attention to things you may not be noticing -- that's a good thing!

Coordinate with your team: particularly with new allied captains, you'll be trying to manage the team dynamic quite a bit too: it hurts your team quite a bit if one of your ships keeps dashing off into 1v3 battles, or is sight-seeing in capture point matches. Even with competent allies, great coordination can allow a pair mediocre crews to isolate and defeat strong opponents.

Use pilot abilities: in fact, it can help to have 3 abilities rather than 2 and a spyglass. Your crew will generally each have a spyglass (were they planning on piloting your ship?), and should be spotting ships for you (feel free to tell them to spot ships, and remind them that without the targeting reticule, you won't be able to line your ship up in the thick of three-dimensional battle for good shots anyway). If you're not regularly employing your abilities, you'll be at a definite disadvantage.

17

The Pit / Re: Honest suggestion.

« on: March 22, 2013, 02:49:50 am »

This feels like a topic for the pit. You can't really expect game designers, good or bad, with a published game, good or bad, to just take the suggestion and abandon their game and their community at the snap of your fingers. Even if they did, it'd be somewhat paradoxical, since it doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to realize it's impossible to improve a game by giving up on it (thus your suggestion can't possibly "help" anyone who already plays one of Muse' games).

A more realistic suggestion (though still, probably pit material) would be to ask them to stop accepting people's money, though for some reason, even (or perhaps especially) people who've already played their games just seem to want to give it to them anyway.

18

News and Announcements / Re: Adventure Mode... it's coming (Kickstarter).

« on: March 22, 2013, 02:14:34 am »

We're going to try VERY VERY hard to stick to 8-10am launch.  Our video is undergoing the final touches.  I've seen a rough cut and it gets me so pumped every time.

Awesome. Well all of you at Muse work hard for us, so you better believe we'll work hard for you!

19

News and Announcements / Re: Adventure Mode... it's coming (Kickstarter).

« on: March 22, 2013, 01:48:21 am »

A very old idea that I had was if a faction was trying to take over a town, you would need to successfully complete some number of attack missions (number depending on players we have)... basically making that progress bar go up within a certain time period (hours, days, weeks, months?).

Economy seems like a very natural solution for this... if a city is under siege or blockade, they need a few things: food, water (water possibly being provided by the location, by being built around a river or reservoir), building materials, and ammunition (possibly manufacturable from raw materials if it's an industrial city). Building materials for repairs could be cannibalized from non-defensive structures (such as private dwellings), which is a tradeoff, since the economy of that city would take longer to recover by doing so (less demand for luxury goods when you don't even have a place to live).

The defending nation, its allies, or neutral entrepreneurial pilots could bring these through supply missions: you start on an edge of the map (with the town being in roughly the center of a square map, or the opposite edge of an elongated map, depending on how many approach routes there are), and must simply make it through the blockade and deliver supplies to the town. Ideally you make it through alive, though you could crash into the town -- depending on the severity, some to all of your supplies may get destroyed, and if you crash into anything besides empty ground, you'd be doing damage to your own town. The AI will naturally try to do this, but they'd be easy to shoot down (and with too many losses, they may just give up on the town).

The attackers could have at least three attack mission types:

assault: destroy as much as possible, and harass the town (this weakens the town's economic contribution to its controlling nation), and may disable that town as a spawn point until rebuilt.

siege: attempting to break through defenses and deliver ground forces to occupy; the ground battle could be implied, with troops just being another deliverable resource -- if enough attackers land safely for long enough (all hull damage after the armor is destroyed could injure or kill troops), then the town will be overwhelmed.

blockade: simply starving the town out -- staying out of range of their defensive armaments, but preventing resources from being delivered in.

Towns could have a meter indicating defensive strength. If defensive strength is high when an enemy action begins, a portion of allied ships (relative to defensive strength) could opt to spawn by the town; if defensive strength is low, most allied ships would have to spawn far away from the town (giving the attackers time to attack the town without much resistance). If the defenders win a match, defensive strength increases; otherwise, it decreases, with damage to a town counting in favor of the attackers winning. Towns could also have a state, such as the state of being attacked or not -- a player mission would always be needed to change the state to something worse, but the state could continue to have a dampened effect on the town between missions.

Scouting missions could also exist: the strength meters of enemy raiders along a trade route could only be fully known if you manage to explore enough of a given map without dying too much, for example.

--------------

As far as economy goes, even if it's not fully dynamic, I find an important part of keeping that aspect from getting stale is to have supply and demand (not just the amount of, but also the types of resources) gradually shift over time as a form of economic climate; it could change in response to events (or a major event could randomize the economic nature of a town drastically), but in general it would be predictable over the course of a week or two (if you play constantly and are good at noticing trends, it'll usually be predictable), but will give something for periodically returning players to do, however artificial (or not) the economy is in terms of the underlying mechanics; sometimes the easy way out can be good enough and still sufficiently interesting.

I rather like the idea of a faction's ships being community-distributable across the world map, including AI ships -- players could jump into battles wherever their own or AI ships have been positioned, with force strengths relative to where the faction has its concentration of ships. Those ships would take a while to position (for offense or defense), and trade routes take a while to adjust or open up. Players could maneuver their own ships from map to map (or much more slowly have them auto-navigate themselves [such as when logged out] across the world map), but may have a negligible contribution to force strength. This can also help to make an otherwise static economy quite dynamic -- since the community controls ship distribution, they can block established trade routes, or form new ones that were previously too risky to lone-wolf.

I imagine smaller ships would have considerably less cargo capacity then large ships -- a 1v5 single-player blockade run mission could be manageable in a squid, but would have little value.

20

Feedback and Suggestions / Add initial CP activation delay to CP maps (particularly Crazy King)

« on: March 22, 2013, 12:27:20 am »

Since different machines load the maps at different speeds, I find it's not uncommon for one team's ships to be on a points or points (especially Crazy King) before the other ships can be half way there -- in an otherwise fair match, this gives the quicker-loading team a "free" lead. This, coupled with what seems like the possibility for a Crazy King point to start nearer to the first point can give a significant advantage. To diminish both effects, I propose at least a 30 second delay past when the server starts the round before the points are activated (and in the case of Crazy Kings, before the first point is even indicated), diminishing the negative effect of loading delays and allowing ships to disperse past their spawn location enough that spawn-distance bias is also somewhat nullified (since the good preparatory strategy for capturing an as yet unknown point is to position yourself within reach of at least several of them).

21

Feedback and Suggestions / Make it easier to lose a spotted ship

« on: March 22, 2013, 12:16:22 am »

I propose that if nobody on any allied ship has looked in the direction of a spotted ship in a certain amount of time, even if the spotted ship hasn't disappeared behind clouds or obstacles, and the spotted ship through its own action causes its angular position relative to the spotting ships to change enough since the last time anyone looked at it ("it's not where we expected it to be"), the spot will get lost. By "own action", I mean that if allied ships move considerably but the spotted ship is stationary, the spot won't get lost.

The intent is to increase the need for managing the situational awareness of a crew: if an enemy ship is behind you, but all engineers are looking at components and all gunners and the pilot are focusing solely on blasting the ship in front of them, then it seems reasonable that the approaching ship shouldn't have to take extraordinary measures to lose their spot. To make this work really well, the spot reticule would have to be simulated along the movement vector from the time it was last observed, so if you last saw a ship approaching you directly from behind, but nobody looks at it for a while, the indicators will still indicate it's facing you and presumably getting closer along the same movement vector; when you do finally look back towards it, if it's in the same direction as it had been  (maybe within a 30 degree arc), the spot will be freshly updated without any action, but if it's not in that same direction when you look, the spot will be lost immediately. To display the staleness of a spot, all indicators could slowly gray out of existence.

In terms of time expiration, if it is feasible to involve line-of-sight calculations (you can't freshen a spot by looking in its direction when it's visually obstructed by your hull, even if it is following the predictable path), then it might be reasonable to expire a spot in ~30 seconds. Otherwise, if those calculations are not feasible, ~15-20 seconds seems fair.

As a side-proposal, it'd be useful for a flaming ship to be more easily spotted through clouds (similar to the flare effect).

22

Feedback and Suggestions / Obstacles on map edges

« on: March 21, 2013, 11:53:17 pm »

It's probably been mentioned before (but a forum search of "map edge" brought nothing pertinent up): edge of map behavior combined with obstacles on the edges of map (such as the towering wreckage on the edge of Duel at Dawn or Canyon Ambush) can be jarring, particularly for new players in those areas, since without knowing the particular edge of map behavior (it's not necessarily obvious without large points of reference), it's rather easy to be forced into ramming an obstacle, even without enemy assistance.

Unless this is an intentional effect, it'd be ideal for maps to not have free-standing edge-of-map obstacles (ridges and other smooth terrain that don't intersect a map border wouldn't be such a big deal, since any collision with it would have been a result of the "natural" physics). Perhaps this could be achieved by shrinking or extending map borders so that any ship could slide past these obstacles if the edge-of-map effect comes into play.

23

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: New Role: "Saboteur!!!"

« on: March 21, 2013, 11:40:50 pm »

One effect of boarding (don't know if this has been mentioned) is that you'd have to be able to see the enemy crew before you get on their ship (to know where to board most safely); if you can see the enemy crew, then it'd be hard to justify not being able to shoot the enemy crew with mercs, carronades, flamers, etc. Of course, that'd unbalance the game, so they wouldn't allow it (one hwacha salvo and the enemy crew on exposed decks would be dead for a few seconds -- note that all ships' helms are on exposed decks), and with unkillable but visible people, you'd get lots of "wontfix" bug reports.

24

The Docks / Re: Harpoon Research Division

« on: March 21, 2013, 11:09:46 pm »

I'd love to hear what you guys WANT the harpoon to do.  Right now it's kind of... interesting.

My first thoughts is that it needs to not pull you in but maintain range where it doesn't let someone get further away... not just always pull someone in.

I'd like to see, in order of my preference (high to low):

1) the ability to reel in or slacken rope on command (perhaps forward and backward movement keys for that), and as now, the ability to manually release the cable. A ship can never be "pushed" using the tow line, just as a ship can never be "pulled" via ramming.

2) Right now harpoon-forced turning seems unpredictable (though it's hard to gauge with a constantly retracting rope), but controlling enemy facing is generally a far more effective tactic than towing, and intuitively seems like it should be easier to accomplish, even with a large ship-to-ship mass ratio.  Ideally, there'd be a noticeable ability to turn a ship when the harpoon pierces the bow or stern of a ship, particularly when the harpoon gun's facing is also perpendicular to the target ship's orientation; effect would be relative to the center of mass, so piercing amidships would have little effect on turning and more ability to tow, as would piercing the fore or aft sections when both attacked ship and angle of attack are parallel in orientation (firing the front of a galleon from the rear of a squid).

3) tow rope does not ever "time out" or automatically snap at a certain distance, but rather the harpoon component gets damaged with stress; any force greater than that of reeling in the line when both ships have engines idling will cause damage, proportional to the excess force; when the component gets destroyed (including by weapons or fire), the cable snaps. Buffing would increase the winch strength (thus reel-in force, and in turn decrease the amount of damage that stress causes).  The winch force would ideally be lower than it is now, and perhaps without the harpoon being occupied, the rope would lose all tension until it extends to maximum length; this would mean that, except at maximum range, two crew members would be needed to carry out a sustained harpoon attack (one for repair, and one to just keep the rope from slipping).

4) a noticable effect of relative ship mass on the ability to pull -- a pyra harpooning a galleon can get dragged easily, but when attempting to tow a stationary galleon, acceleration would be extremely low.

5) Enough force in counter-directional force causes the equivalent of ramming damage on any ship to which it applies. Inertia is one such force (so getting yanked to a stop or getting yanked into motion does general damage). Being harpooned by two ships travelling in opposite directions may cause the pulling ships no damage but cause the targeted ship ramming damage.

Some practical effects of the above:

A rear-facing harpoon would be useful on the squid (perhaps the squid's rather large array of engines could counter its low mass, though it could still get yanked around from sudden moves by the target vessel). Such a squid cruising past a galleon at full speed and harpooning in alignment with the center of mass, especially while reeling in, would cause the harpoon to break almost immediately.

A side-harpooning pyra would be useful (particularly from the foreward port-side hardpoint), as that would allow the pyra to reliably orbit a ship while keeping the aft port-side weapon on target. The front tip of a galleon would be a good target for this. This tactic could provide a counter to the typical under-use of the pyra's side-facing weapons (which go completely unused in many games). A somewhat similar, but lesser effect would apply to a harpoon on the galleon's left broadside (since the heavy guns are fore of the center of rotation, while the light hardpoint seems somewhat rear of center).

Spires would be rather difficult to force-turn, since the ship is radially symmetrical; conversely a front-facing harpoon on a spire wouldn't be too useful except when towing closer to blast with a double-carronade -- the harpooned ship would probably have to be directly behind the spire and moving away, before the tension would cause the spire to spin around towards the target.

A squid fleeing a pyra's port weapons could fire their harpoon toward the far aft of the port side while travelling away at full speed. When the harpoon attaches, the initial energy would go into turning the pyra, and if skilled, the gunner could cut the rope just the pyra is facing exactly away, preventing what otherwise would have been a yanking stop for the squid as energy transfers from turning to towing; this would also leave the pyra to continue spinning its angles of fire further away from the squid.

I think all of the above could be achieved without needing to treat the rope itself as a physical object. I imagine that snapping the rope unconditionally by having a third ship cut across it would be immensely more difficult to achieve, so I'm not asking for it

25

The Docks / Re: Harpoon Research Division

« on: March 18, 2013, 07:31:32 pm »

I'd be interested in playing around with this mechanic. I've already done a bit of testing in a practice round, but the practice balloons are too radially symmetrical to simulate an attack on anything other than a spire.