Beef up ship plating, all of it. TTK is ridiculously fast. Bastium, etc, all just poof. Fights aren't fun b/c the victory is whoever gets the jump.
Tripod cannons ruin it more b/c you have FPS aiming vs a ship that has to align.
Tripods should not be mountable to anything with a MFC or FCU. They basically need to be removed from the game. There's literally no point and it's going to take a lot to balance it.
Currently, fights are too fast, Cannons are too agile, and it's just not fun. If you're trying to make a fun game, make combat the same for everyone. You want multicrew? Add the advanced turrets easier with scripts baked in for aiming (not as good as the autoconnans tho, be reasonable).
1) Autocannon dmg should be minuscule to plating reducing the TTK greatly. They should never be as fast TTK as a giant slug from a mounted cannon which you have to ship align or faster than torpedos and missiles. This makes no logical sense.
2) update plating armor and universally update all ship components to take more hits before exploding. TTK makes fights fun. Increase it.
3) Dynamic shields to ships will also be fun. Make these manageable via buttons. "100% power front shields" type stuff. Add complexity to fights.
4) Add complexity to fights, but don't add insta-kill lame stuff.
I personally don't pvp yet because it just seems boring with autocannons in the running vs mounted weapons. Literally dumb. You can't change my mind either b/c the experience of it is just unfun. It's like old counterstrike when the AWP 1-shot you in the toe.
Personally, I think that each voxel should have a number of hit points based on its material, instead of a number of hit points per object. This means that instead of a plate resisting until its HP were reduced to zero, each voxel would resist incoming damage, and would vanish if its damage was overcome.
For a 12cm Bastium plate, let's say that each 1cc voxel has 5 HP. A shot with an impact energy of 500 and a diameter of 2cm hits the plate. Each voxel hit removes 5 from the impact energy (4 to 9 voxels per layer of the plate, depending on just where it hits), and continues onwards to the next voxels. If the spherical shot hits in the middle of a voxel, the first layer removes 45 from the impact energy, or if the shot hits exactly at the junction of 4 voxels, 20 would be removed from the impact energy. The voxels would then be removed, and calculation would proceed to the next layer. When insufficient impact energy remains to equal or exceed the next voxel hit, the voxel removes the shot and remains unchanged.
For fracture damage, the impact energy could be considered to be able to break a number of voxels equal to its impact energy divided by the HP of the plate material.
In this way, armour would be ablative, and continue to provide protection even with missing voxels. Repeated shots along the same path could penetrate deeply, while scattered shots would simply strip away the top layers of armor.
