Messages

181

Gameplay / Re: Piloting help please and thank

« on: November 26, 2014, 01:58:52 pm »

So one thing to note here is that typically a pilot gets two roles for the price of one (which is why it is often seen as the most mentally taxing of the jobs on the ship), you are also typically a captain as well as a pilot.

Lots of people have given you good piloting advice here so I wont bother to go into detail on that (besides I'm a mediocre pilot). There is some good captaining advice here too, but I'm just going to throw some thoughts in the mix.

You could serve under an engi or gunner captain if you just want to practice your flying. This isn't a terrible idea as far as practice goes but it is a temporary measure while you learn to fly in combat conditions (you should fly every ship you plan to take out in the blast yard first to get an idea of their capabilities, but you will really only learn what they can do when people are shooting at you at the same time). The reason it is temporary is that the captain has to act as an information conduit between ships and the crew and makes most of the strategic and tactical decisions; the pilot is in the best position to implement those decisions immediately. Putting an engi or gunner in that role will almost always add time between making a decision and implementing it and that is costly.

Captaining is one of those things that is full of subjective judgements and lots of people will have lots of ideas about how to do it, so I'm not going to say what you should do, I'm going to tell you some of the things I try (and often fail) to do and why and you can decide for yourself it will work for you.

This isn't an actual military. You cant court martial your crew and you have no authority. If I want my orders (although I rarely give orders as such, "let's go say hi to that Pyramidion" isn't much of an order) followed I find it is best to convince folks to follow them by showing them it gets them something they want (be that a fun experience, winning matches, playing with the toys they want to play with). If you get to know your crew, get to know what they are after and try to provide them with it you'll find folks want to fly with you and will do what you say under pressure.

No player is perfect, and most crews don't expect you to be. Failure to acknowledge your mistakes (or worse blaming your mistakes on your crew) wont win you any friends however. When you screw up, admit it. Don't linger on it, don't look for sympathy either, just say "I did X wrong, in future I will try to do Y" and move on. By admitting your mistakes you make it clear to your crew you know there is a problem, and by saying how you will do things differently you show them that you are learning and will avoid (as much as possible) similar mistakes in the future.

Any plan is often better than no plan. If no one is taking charge then ships will be poorly co-ordinated and will often be picked off one by one. If no one is leading I will often just step up and do it. Let's say the ideal ship to target is X, and you tell your ally to join you attacking Y. This is usually still better than you attacking Y and them attacking X and failing to focus fire. If the other captain is more experienced or seems to have better situational awareness I let them call the shots, but if no one steps up, odds are pretty good you will only make the situation better by taking charge.

If a match is going to be hard I find it beneficial to make it clear to crew (especially inexperienced crew) that this is the case. We often seek validation in others opinions of us and I don't want to leave people with the impression I think they suck. If your ally has a massive pile of derp, the enemy is two experienced captains and that gunner you know never misses, meanwhile you have a couple of level threes who you are still teaching chem cycles then setting expectations of victory and glory is foolhardy. I try to make the standard on my ship fighting hard and never giving up, not winning constantly.

I try to make sure I know something about what is required of my crew in the roles I'm assigning. Don't have to be good at it, just know what being good means. You are going to have to teach powder monkeys, and you may as well make the best of that. Since you have some experience in other roles this shouldn't be a problem (although knowing something and knowing how to teach it are two entirely different things).

Have fun and happy flying.

182

Gameplay / Re: Pulsing Kerosene

« on: November 25, 2014, 05:13:57 pm »

Ah so it is quadratic drag rather than Stokes drag. Guess that makes sense given the Reynolds numbers involved. That makes the equations a bit more fiddly but as you say matching drag and thrust again gives us max velocity proportional to square root of thrust. I assume the calculations for engine damage work out the same though since that will only effect the thrust portion of the calculation.

183

Gameplay / Pulsing Kerosene

« on: November 25, 2014, 01:50:26 pm »

So a question arose yesterday about the best way to use kerosene on a squid (actually the question didn't so much arise as was forcefully put to me by some jackass I will leave nameless who felt 'you really need to learn how to pilot a squid' is effective pedagogy and a good way to introduce yourself). I've gone and dug up my old calculations from when I started piloting to try to figure out when you want to switch it off. Assuming GoIO uses a linear drag model the ship will top out at 150% faster with kerosene with fully repaired engines as the drag forces match the thrust forces. If engines take damage the ship produces less thrust, and I again assumed this is linear. There is likely an effect from the turning here if engines are asymmetrically damaged but I assume this is minor. It seems to me you fall below normal top speed if engines are on average damaged below 66% (1/1.5).

A decent set of squid engis making use of parkor tricks can easily keep the engines well above 66% average damage (heck I can do that on my own and I'm a crap engineer), so it seems to me leaving kerosene on will always maintain higher speed than turning it off.

As to average speed the calculations for pulsing the kerosene depend entirely on the drag model, which I don't have access to. Has anyone ran speed tests with various duty cycles for the squid in the blast yard? I thinking run from one end to the other with repeated trials at different duty cycles and cycle frequencies and measure which one is faster with the same engis with some randomised design. I'm not especially interested in anecdotes here, it is likely psychological factors will screw with perception so multiple time trials under as controlled conditions as we can get are likely the only way to get an answer to this question. Anyone done this?

184

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: What if level is a multiplyer for glicko2 rating?

« on: November 23, 2014, 08:16:00 am »

It isn't really possible for any of us players to say if this is a good move or not. Muse have kept the secret sauce to the matchmaker under wraps other than that the base rating uses the glicko2. I don't have access to this secret sauce either but if I had to guess they are probably using something like a generalized linear model with a Bernoulli distribution and a logit link function aiming to predict the match outcome with the independent variables the glicko2 ratings of the players on each side possibly with an interaction for player role, match type, etc. Maybe they have some non-linear terms as the game is co-operative.  I expect a generalized linear model as the response variable is not something you can model very well with a standard regression or linear model, the Bernoulli distribution and logit link function because that are what you use when the response variable is binary (match outcomes are either wins or losses).

The stated objective of the matchmaker is to produce balanced games (this is used as a proxy for 'fun' games because measuring 'fun' is hard). This is a hard problem because the model is being asked to predict when it wont know things. Measuring how well a model predicts things is easy (just count how often it gets things right for various sophistication of the word count), but there is no standard procedure for determining if there exists a better model than the one being used which doesn't involve writing down some possible models and computing something like the AIC.

Adding terms to a model is risky, there is a chance of overfitting (when your model does great on past data and suck on future data because it was fitting to noise). If I had to guess this model already has a fair few terms in it, adding more is something that would need to be done very carefully.

Since we don't know what the current model is and don't have access to the data that was used to construct and validate it, we are not really capable of knowing what modifications, if any, could improve it. Maybe adding a term in something like exp(-N) where N is the number of games a player has is a good addition. Maybe a level multiplier would make the system predict better. Maybe non-linear terms in the glicko2 level aren't currently in the model and their addition will improve it.

We cant know and it is probably a good thing we don't know because if I knew the set of model equations I could easily game the system.

Now if folks have a novel idea for a variable to add to the matchmaker that's cool, but unless Muse are completely incompetent and have failed to consult a statistician I'm pretty sure they have considered levels, matches played, kill death ratios, average armour breaks per death and a whole host of other variables they could add to their model. The only thing we have sufficient knowledge to do here is express our like or dislike for the matchmaker from our personal experiences and suggest to Muse that it is something we want more time spent on (or for those who really hate it, ask that it be removed).

185

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Balance problem - metamidion

« on: November 19, 2014, 08:46:45 pm »

The metamidion is effective, but it isn't the most flexible ship. I'd even go so far as to say it is a little noob tubey, although it isn't a straight analogue to the noob tube as it works in competitive play and with other appropriate ships complementing it it can form a good foundation for a decent fleet. That said it provides the captain with really only one option most of the time: get in arc, stay in arc, target hull. Most of the time you don't want to ram in it because your gungineer wont thank you if the mortar loses arc as the hull breaks and fancy flying is just going to spray gattling shots everywhere.

This leaves it somewhat predictable and it can be countered by a good pilot. If you are smart you can get the enemy to waste gattling shots on you while you use cover or back off. A meta is very vulnerable if the gattling is having to reload or doesn't have enough in the clip to strip. The gat can take out components but if it does that it isn't breaking the hull and you now have a mortar as a balloon ornament.

Disabling the gat or mortar on a meta also leaves it vulnerable. If a carronade has redecorated a metamidions mortar shotgun pellet grey or a Hwacha has disabled the gattling then even a well flown metamidion is likely just a nicely positioned bullet magnet.

If I see a meta on the opposition team with a decent crew I know I have to be careful about when and how I end up in its front arcs, but I'm not at panic stations. If I see an all meta enemy then I just bring one of many counter builds (carro-flamer pyra or hwachafish being obvious ones), if the enemy is comparable to my crew and me in skill then I'm feeling pretty good about that match. It is a functional ship, it has a role, but it certainly isn't unstoppable.

The meta can seem OP though because if you are flying against a well balanced team with a meta it is the thing getting the kills. It isn't getting kills on its own though. A meta does well if its ally softens up targets for it by breaking engines or popping balloons (or just acting as a juicy target to get charged while the meta positions itself). The meta gets noticed because it felt like you were coping with the blenderfish and in swooped the meta to kill you. The truth may be you might have beaten the meta had you got the drop on it, but their ally left you vulnerable. The kill is the metas, but your problem was the team.

186

General Discussion / Re: Question For Pilots

« on: November 17, 2014, 12:12:14 pm »

Has to be the main engineer. Gunners and gungineers get enough love when they blow our enemies up but the main has to put up with my piloting, and I'm the kind of pilot who views a repaired engine as an excuse to use kerosene, a functioning armor as an excuse to ram or wall bounce and a working balloon as an excuse to pop a little hydrogen. Usually at the same time as letting them know I'm bringing their gun into arc.

Not to mention just crashing into the canyons because the mountains needed teaching a lesson. Without my main engineers I'm lost, they are the most important person on the boat for me.

187

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Swap ships if it makes the game more balanced

« on: November 15, 2014, 05:45:42 am »

As Omniraptor said this feature is now back in so problem solved.

188

Gameplay / Re: Pyramidion Side Guns

« on: November 14, 2014, 12:05:25 pm »

You want a load out that works or one that is just fun to fly? Because yeah the Pyra poop deck usually gets relegated to utility weapon (still really important, especially in bigger matches where a flare gun is very important), and the main deck is usually a backup, but if you are willing to offer up effectiveness on the altar of fun there are a few interesting things to try.

1) Artemis / Artemis / Artemis / Artemis
Before you take this make sure you play around in the blast yard so you know where to put things, and you will need moonshine (and probably drogue chute) to ensure you can make the ship stay nice and still. All four guns can have arc at one time giving ranged killing power and disable ability. Main engi takes the poop deck, you grab the main deck gun. You want something like heatsink for the added turning because you will need to run back and forth, everyone else wants burst or lesmok or something similar. You will also need someone else to break the armour for you. Make sure you have crew members target different components so they don't waste shots. When I've used it it sort of works, there were a couple of occasions when all four guns on the pyra were firing at the same time and lots of components broke repeatedly. It is hard to fly, the arcs hardly overlap and it is a chunk of work. The ship still functions okay in close combat, you can use the front Artemis to take out an enemies engines and then either bolt it or if they cant face you just grind them down. The lack of ability to break armour, the small arc overlap, the need for constant communication and good targeting make this a suboptimal build, and a good crew is going to just sneak up on you and make you miserable, but when it works it is fun.

2) Carro / Flamer / Banshee / ?
Lots of people have pointed this out, but a Banshee at 3 is great. Especially for the Carro / Flamer Pyra. Rams can be unreliable (especially when I'm driving) and when you have someone pinned and burning a way to speed up death is nice, and the Banshee does the job without you needing to turn too far or lose arc on the front guns. I actually think this is better than a flamer. If the enemy is good, they have chem spray and all that emergency gun has done is help them with their marshmallow roasting project. If the crew is bad then them being behind you and to the left isn't an emergency, it's why you brought Pheonix Claw. If I'm worried about needing my side guns for that kind of situation I bring a carro and aim for balloon or engines and hit hydrogen / kerosene.

3) Banshee / Gat / Banshee / ?
Top Banshee and Gat can be swapped but it slightly reduces arc overlap. This is one to take when you notice your enemy doesn't have adequate fire fighting capabilities but darn you are just bored of flamers. Also nice to bring with a less experienced crew, they can all fire wildly and effectiveness only drops a bit. Experienced crew is going to eat you for breakfast with proper fire fighting and a flak or mortar. It aint good, but it is viable and pretty fun to use. Some novice crews probably use this more effectively than the meta.

4) Carro / Carro /Carro / ?
The enemy squid really starting to get on your nerves? Sure you are going to struggle against good crews, but at least that squid will stop moving, then stop flying, then being attached to itself. Make sure you know the arcs and that each person knows what they should be shooting, you want one on balloon, one on engines and one on guns for most ships. If it is a squid you want one on engines, one on engines and seriously stop moving you pain in the backside!

Out of these the only one I would say 'works' in the sense of being comparable in power to one of the more meta loads is (2) (and really it is a meta load, carro / flamer, just adapted to use the side gun). Having rapid fire explosive damage your main engi can use without you having to take main guns off the target is very useful. Everything else, try for the lolz. If you get a weak pick up crew still trying to learn the difference between a mallet and a buff hammer (3) probably wont do you any harm.

189

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Improve Lobby Timer

« on: November 14, 2014, 09:37:22 am »

I think this is a case of YMMV / subjective experience.

While I'd like to see some changes to the lobby timer (especially if I join a lobby late as captain and need a bit of time to get folks oriented) I think the lobby timer does solve a problem. In the old system some games took 20 minutes to get started with teams that had relatively simple builds and crew that were somewhat experienced. Maybe sometimes they were talking tactics but I've been on teams before that were just chatting and hadn't readied because the captains hadn't noticed.

I enjoy a good chat but people have taken liberties in the past and if you are experienced you can chat and fly at the same time. The time may be a bit tight at the moment, and it could probably do with some tweaking, but it has solved a problem that used to frustrate me and I'd rather it wasn't removed.

190

Feedback and Suggestions / Swap ships if it makes the game more balanced

« on: November 12, 2014, 12:20:14 pm »

Sometimes matchmaking does a decent enough job only for ship swaps to completely kneecap its efforts. Would it be possible to allow ship swapping in a game if the matchmaking system thinks it will make the game more even? Another option would be an 'optimize lobby' request which reshuffles the ships to make it as competitive as possible according to the matchmaking system (say requiring an okay from all captains for it to happen). By allowing it only when matchmaking says the match will be improve you prevent the abuse of the feature that likely resulted in its removal.

Why I would like this feature
The other day matchmaking dropped me with a nice, communicative but relatively novice captain (~100 games) facing off against an experienced captain (>1000 games) and another nice, but novice captain. Crews were generally comparable to their captains in terms of experience. We lost 5-4 but it was fun and the other experienced captain seem to like their ally. Teams co-ordinated, every ship got killed at least once, it was a tense even game. Gold star for the matchmaking system.

The next game saw myself and the other experienced captain facing off against the two novices due to ship swaps. The result was entirely predictable (a great novice captain will still usually get beaten by a bad experienced captain), even though we crippled our ships with ineffective builds it was never going to be fair and it wasn't really fun. The inexperienced captains lost most of their crews during / after the match and it wasn't a good game for anyone. Both myself and my ally for this match would have gladly offered to swap slots to make the game more even but couldn't because this option no longer exists.

191

Gameplay / Re: Why does everyone hate Gunners?

« on: November 11, 2014, 03:21:01 pm »

Lots of reasons folks get asked to switch from gunner, but I'm going to assume this is in response to the known "three engi master race" / "gunner oppressed minority" schism (since almost everyone agrees that more than one gunner on a ship is foolhardy for all except the most exotic of builds).

First let me be open as to where I sit here, for most builds with perfect crews I think 3 engineers works better than having a gunner. You will notice the assumption 'for perfect crews', if you have one of these can I borrow it?

Even with that said, I'm going to make a case for captains (especially captains in pick up games) being more willing to run with a gunner. Advantages of having a gunners (when your crew is not made of magic space juices):

1) Encourages the gunner to keep shooting.
Unless we are trying to flee having one person looking for shooting opportunities (and spotting) rather than trying to fix things is a minimum. If I don't have the tools to be useful fixing stuff then I'm less likely to do it. Plus my role makes it clear what I'm supposed to do, gun. You get something of a mental block to fixing things if that clearly isn't your job.

2) Crew ownership of the boat
You want the crew to think of the ship as theirs. They helped pick their roles, the guns, the tactics. I find crews fight better if they are implementing our plan rather than my plan. Because it can be a fun role odds are pretty good one of your crew will want to go gunner. If you let them you might find they fight a little harder for you.

3) Keeping crews together
A five match old crew fights much better than one freshly formed. Once the crew starts to gel performance generally improves, but how do you keep a crew together? Let them do the things they want, and one of them probably wants to use lots of ammo types and shoot stuff, that is, be a gunner. Sure the mystical perfect crew with none of the trappings of human psychology could operate your boat better by going total airship combat and rotating out the roles like some crazy Dutch sky ballet, but is that something you are going to get from that level 6 gunner who just joined the ship?

Now with that said I think there are lots of cases when a new player should be willing to switch from gunner:

1) Ship already has a gunner.
Unless I'm doing something crazy I don't need two gunners. I'm happy for you to stay as an engineer, and I don't mind if you go to another ship, but those are the two options.

2) Load-out will be seriously suboptimal with a gunner
Some have said the only builds suboptimal with a gunner are the metamidion and the meta-junker, I don't buy this. On Crazy King my squid doesn't need a gunner because killing things aint my job. This isn't super common (most ships will function just fine with a gunner or with a third engineer and the human element messes up the min-maxing calculus the two religious factions here engage in, metamidion being a good example; if you have a good gunner a gunner can be better, a good engineer and an engineer can be better), but if you look at a ship and cant think of a decent reason for a second ammo / third ammo type then you want to switch, or find another ship.

3) This match will end poorly if I have to train you
Some guns are hard to shoot. If this is game number 4 for you or your answer to 'have you fired a lumberjack before?' is 'what's a lumberjack?' I'm probably going to either swap load outs or get a more experienced crew member to gun unless our opposition is weak. I like to train newcomers but dumping a load of pressure on you with a pivotal role when you are inexperienced is unfair and unfun. This is only likely to happen if I know my crew is invested in the load out I've picked since I usually gear the load out to the crew, not vice versa. If that isn't the case I will leave you as gunner if that is what you want and find you a more gentle introduction to the art of making metal sky confetti.

Unless training for a competitive game most of the time the solution to this problem, to the extent that there is a problem here, is for folks to be a bit flexible and try to find a ship configuration that makes everyone at least somewhat happy.

192

Gameplay / Re: Here come the Banshees

« on: October 27, 2014, 05:04:16 pm »

I like the changes to the Banshee, but I think a small nerf might be in it's future.

This highlights a big problem with trying to 'balance' a game. 'Balance' assumes there is some representative team of players which you can pit against some other representative team of players and if things are properly 'balanced' all the weapons can be used in sensible builds and both teams have about an even chance.

The problem of course being that the idea of a 'representative player' is complete balderdash, some players like brawling, some ranged fighting, some are new, some are veterans, some have great engineers, others great gunners. The new Banshee is hard to balance because how powerful it feels depends on the make up of the teams, and in a potentially nasty way (which is why I think it is going to get  a little nerf)

I've found that the new Banshee feels very powerful, unless I'm flying against a ship with decent engineers, then it feels about right. Why? Because fire damage induces panic in novice engineers who don't do their chem spray cycles properly, put out small fire stacks on engines rather than whacking them with a mallet or worse extinguish the hull when it is under fire and close to going down.

I think the question is what do Muse want to achieve. If they are looking for another weapon like the flamer which is punishing on new players but a bit easier to cope with if you have some experience then the changes to the Banshee could do that. It encourages novice engineers to learn how to chem spray and with matchmaking to prevent heavily stacked lobbies the Banshees should do this somewhat gently, similar to what the flamer does. It will also likely be better for this than the flamer as it doesn't make the enemy ship a blazing inferno of burning death.

Unfortunately matchmaking still has a few problems and while I think things are better it is still generating pretty unbalanced matches where the new Banshee facilitates experienced crews crushing new players. Add to that the novelty of the weapon change (half my builds at the moment have one just because I'm enjoying trying it out and from what I've seen I'm not alone) and you have a recipe for newb stomping. That is why I think it is going to get a little nerf, to make it a bit more novice friendly. Probably a small reduction in the secondary damage.

So I don't think it is OP, but I do think it isn't the gentle introduction to the importance of chem spray that new engineers need. If Muse are looking to cater to more hardcore players they might leave it be. If they are looking to make things a bit more novice friendly they might either give it a little nerf or see what further improvements can be made to matchmaking. Of course I'm bias, I often fly with novice crews and I like being able to slowly teach them new things rather than having them panic, lose and get frustrated.