Analysing the firts Boltcrakers tournament

[Tom21]

The first Boltcrakers tournament was about a week ago when the meta of starships was what the comunity has coined 'cheesball' where the ship you fly in is armored with floormats. The cheesyness of this strategy is that by making your ships armor out of floormats the armor peneration value so high that it is basicly imppossible to shoot throug your ship and damage the internals like the generator or the fuel tanks.

This strategy doesn't explot any bug and it is a clever use of game mechaniks and makes the ships of the collective tournament legal and this is according to the devs so how then can you counter this meta in a tournament where the price is very hig?

Well when talking about armored ships it makes sence to take into consideration the most recent fix to the game and it's the upcomming
armor fix and it should make the meta of floormats not viable. Still there is still a meta of using floormats for armor at this current time so how does one counter such armor. Well my young intrepid endokid listen as I tell you how: " Shoot the shoft bits!"

This strategy entail the shooting of the weakest parts of any starship the cocpit and engine because what is a ship without a cocpit/engine, well it's space debrie. So why should you shoot the cocpit and engine block if a ship that is armored well that is beacause you can't really armor your cocpit or engines at all. Now why would that be the case well it's easy if you'd armor your cocpit you limit visibility and visibilty in a dogfigt situation is key to winning. And well you really cant cover your engine block in armor fullty since the exshaust of your engine will melt any armor plates in the back of them for obvious reasons.
( and well this isn't spce enginees where you can make a cube with all of it's thrusthers inside the ship for this reason so yea it is impossible because the armor would simply melt)

So how did the collective win 2 - 0 aqainst the Simulations, welp that is because the simulator bots couldn't aim for the cocpit and thrushter sections of the enemy starhips very well because the Collective pilots knew what they were doing. Since you can use any 'cheesball' ship for dogfights but it aint got nothing if you'r against an Ace pilot,

So what is the counter you ask: "Shoot the soft bits!" and how do we accoplish such feat well we train our manouvering skills in space and try to make our ships very fast and very aqile to counter this meta because the collective ships are armored and tehy are rather fast and aqile for boxes that is. So the counter to a armor meta is speed and aqility meta with a helping of autocannon spread for more brobability to hit the soft bits for a moving target and massive largescale damage for an expoced engine block.

So go out there in the asteroid fields with your best medium ships turn off your hud and start practising those turns and soon you'll outmanuver any ship that tries to hussle with you. Here is some free advice from a friend remember this mantra and you'd do fine: " I'm a leaf in the wind, now wach me soar"

Your friendly Trailblazer pilot in training extraodaneer
Tom

 

[CalenLoki]

Armour system has been already changed, and floor mats are completely useless. Luckily for collective they also used turret armour - it's made of Oninum, so still can stop quite some beating.

Tournament is still going and, despite loosing a lot of ship durability, Collective is still winning every match. It's just very well designed and piloted ship, utilising currently available game mechanics.

Aiming at specific spot of a ship is easier said than done. Most of the time you're happy if you manage to land any hits at all. Ships are really agile - a lot of them are capable of up to 50G of acceleration. That applies to Gladiator as well, despite also being tanky and having decent dakka.

Turn rate is more limited by what you can control precisely, rather than size of the ship.

Cockpit can be armoured pretty well, while keeping really wide LoS (+-45 degree elevation, 270 degree azimuth). The only part of your body that need to stick out is the head, controls can be behind or below you.

 

[Tom21]

That is good to know that floormats are no longer usefull and the cockpit armouring can be done to that degree. Still it leaves the engines to be the most vulnerable spot on any ship, the broblem is hitting the engines since as a good pilot you really don't want your engineblock to explode in the first minutes of a dogfight.

And when it comes to dakka lasers are accurate and have basicly infinite ammo since it uses energy for ammunition, but other guns have ammo counts and energy requirements for firing. Railguns have a lot of downtime since they are the most energy hungry gun out there next is the laser gun and last is autocannons.

Out of these guns autocannons have some spread to their shots making them good for targets that are aqile as all hell since when you fire in a randomish pattern it makes the probability of hitting your opponent higer, well up to a point since the spread of a weapon comes with some setbackrs as well. This setback is in effective range of the weapon if say we have a 5% spread on a weapons shots the effective range of it drops exponentially after a certain range.

Now I have no clue what is the effective range of autocannons but from what I have gathered from waching streamed PVP footage from previous events they have an effective range of about 300-350m maybe a bit lower for more aqile ships. When it comes to the aqility of a ship turn rate is key and it depends on where in your ship you have put your manouver engines, since you want them to be as far away fro your center of mass as possible to make those 180 degree handbrake turns you see the collective pilots doing.

Tuning controlls for ships is an artform onto itself since you need to make it just right since too much and you turn too much and miss your target and too little and you are basicly a space whale and turn like a cow. This is the reason I recomended practising your turns in a environment where you need aqility to be key and that is in the middle of an asteroid field where one wrong move is all it takes to make your ship into spacedebriee.

By the way thanks for the input I leaned some new things thanks. I created this post for learning to counter the collective armor meta and to discuss any other way to improve ones skill in PVP or dogfight situation.

Yours truly

Trailblazer Tom

 

[CalenLoki]

A bit more of fact checking:

LC now has limited ammo as well. It's quite high: 200 active ammo and 800 inactive. So it lost it's "unlimited ammo" perk, even though most of the time your ship won't live to see the clip used up.

Most active PVP-ers seems to agree that AC is the current meta, except when you can reliably land hits with PC.

LC is too precise for evasive targets, RC is not reliable enough (too hard to hit, too much downtime if you miss). That may change once we get less clunky controls (mouse, joystick or other controllers).

AC spread is around 2m diameter at 50m range. That makes it 4% (40 mil). So you were close with your observation.

 

[Tom21]

huh that's cool that my observation was somewhat correct. By the way what is this PC you talk about is it a typo since I got AC = autocannon, RC = railcannon/railgun, LC = lasercannon, PC = ???.

Laser ammocount change is news to me but about 1000 ammo in total is quite alot.

This spread of 2m at 50m range is good for some balpark figures for effective range, so if you'd be at 100m the spread would be 4m and so on if the range and spread of the autocannon would be linear not exponential. Might need more data to get the effective range of autocannons since I don't think you'd dogfigt within 50m of each others ships.

I'm not shure about this range estimate thoug since I don't own Starbase yet so I've only seen the PVP events that have been streamed and there the combat range was about 200m maybe less and when it comes to PVP in general I'm basically a noob since I have no experience in these situations at all.

Hopefylly I can still try this analysing stuff even if I have no clue about the current meta and all.

Trailblazer Tom

 

[CalenLoki]

PC is plasma cannon. It's on the official wiki. Low rof, low velocity, low penetration, very high damage.

AC spread is linear. Projectiles are physical and travel in a straight line, so it couldn't be anything else.

 

[Tom21]

oh yea totally forgot that plasma turrets where a thing lol