- Joined
- May 8, 2020
- Messages
- 21
First of all, everything discussed below is not a demand for an essential feature, it’s more of a “cmon guys, you know we all want it in the future” kind of deal and probably will not even be considered well past EA. I am also well aware that the devs have buglists and urgently needed gameplay features that will keep them busy for months ahead. BUT! It’s a suggestion that is in all of our minds, we don’t really need them, but we all love’em we all crave them, we all want them. I am of course talking about….
Big guns are cool. There is just no way around it. The bigger the gun the cooler it is. And space combat is all about that cool factor. However, while big guns are very fun to look at and fire, they are equally UNfun for the person on the other end of the barrel. No one wants to spend months designing, building and grinding the funds for their first battleship, for someone to just press the “I win” button and to see it blown up by a single shot of a 10m long gun with some thrusters attached to it. And so here comes the main problem with huge artillery in Starbase: How do you make it fair, fun and engaging for both sides of the conflict. Here, I will describe my thoughts and ideas for such a feature in starbase and perhaps one day, they will come in handy for the devs and we will at long last see…. BIG GUNS in starbase!
So! Straight to the point! How can we make heavy artillery fun in starbase for both parties? In my opinion, the best way of doing it is to make it… underpowered...
“But Niko! I thought big guns should be fun killing machines! Not lame underpowered money wasters!” - I hear you say.
Yes, I know, I will get to that later, but for now, let me show you an in-game example – the Railcanon! For those who have wielded that weapon in battle, you know that it’s… situational… to say the least. It has horrible fire rate, way too slow of a projectile speed to hit targets reliably and up until the last patch, the damage they dealt was just not enough to justify using them and even after the buff, they do not feel useful. But we still use them! Why? Because they are fun as hell! They are big, bulky, hit like a truck and make a very cool metal “pzzzeeewww!” sound when you fire them! Let’s not forget that this is a game. And the most important factor in the game is – fun.
Okay, so underpowered guns can still be fun. Cool! Now what about practicality. After all, big guns need to actually be useful, otherwise no one will use them. Just like the Rail cannon above, large weapons should be very effective, in a very niche role – large ship combat. So the answer in making a balanced huge weapon seems to be a very niche weapon, that is very effective in one single role.
BUT
And it is a very big but!
There still remains the issue of the “win button”. There is a reason there are no nukes in most multiplayer games. As fun it would be to watch someone’s year-worth of effort be explosively erased with a push of a button, everyone realizes that such a game mechanic, is just not fun or sustainable. So here is the biggest conundrum. How to make a weapon feel very powerful, without it eliminating every ship in a single shot?
Underpower it… but with a twist.
Big guns need to be cool first – effective later.
In my opinion, big guns do not need to be that good at ship killing. They just need to be fun to use, look cool and most importantly feel great to use them.
Still though, it’s easy to say that, but how would one go about designing such a thing. How to make something powerful without it actually packing that much punch? It’s easy to tweak the numbers and just make the gun bad via numbers, no armor penetration, low damage, so on. But then that would be very unsatisfying and successfully hitting a target with such a weapon only to do no damage would be extremely unsatisfying. So there must be another way.
So. Here is the deal. Starbase has A LOT of depth to it. The game is not just about armor values, damage numbers and explosion types. There is plenty of interesting ways to “nerf” a weapon. The most fun that I have come up with is – moving parts. Physical interaction of machinery is a big part of starbase. Doors, factories, movable cockpit armor, all of it adds to the experience by making our ships and stations feel more real and alive. So if such large artillery peace would make it into the game, it should stay true to its physical counterpart, a.i.
Artillery is not a weapon, it’s a weapons system
Let the whole gun be a system!
Since rail canon has been a good example, let’s use that for the BIG GUN base and see how it would work. Let’s call it… Heavy Gauss Artillery… idk… sounds cool enough.
So, the gun consists of the same modules as a regular mounted guns that are already in game with one exception, the magazine structure is similar to a torpedo tube, which needs to be loaded with a physical shell that will be fired once loaded and then ejected outside. Just like a upscaled bolt action rifle! All the needed components already already in the game! Obviously I have no knowledge of the inner game code workings, but it does not seem too far fetched. Alright. You imagined it? 10m long Gauss rifle that operates like a bolt action? Great! Now add mechanical noises and casing sound effects, make a simple back and forth bolt and receiver animation and what you get is something like this (video is timestamped at 00:10):
Oof! That felt good! And that is exactly what large weapons should feel like! They would be very hard to manage, have very limited ammo due to its physical presence on the ship. Add to that heat mechanics that will eventually make it in the game, massive electricity requirements and you already have a very complex system that requires practically the whole ship be built around the weapon. At that point, it will require 2-3 people just to run it and by having it, you lose 3 fighters or 3 gunners, which arguably, could be even more useful than a single gun.
I feel like that would be a very good way to nerf these things while also adding a lot of content for engineers and gunners. Make them complex and require engineering solutions to feed ammo, get rid of casings, manage heat, so on. Not to mention beam stress and aiming the whole thing. But once you have gone through all those challenges, you turn your battlecruiser towards the enemy’s fleet, find the largest target, slowly aim your huge ship, squint real hard, pull the trigger, the massive barrel charges up for a moment, the gauss coils start glowing blue and… both fleets see a beam cross space between them as your ship changes course due to the massive recoil, metal screeches all around you, the barrel moves backwards and cycles the bolt and throws out the casing with metal clanks! Load the next round BABY! AAAAAAAAH! Damn! I want that so bad!
Sorry, got off track there for a bit. Where was I.
Alright, so we have a very complex gun, that looks cool, makes cool sounds and is very satisfying to fire. How do we make it not blow up a ship in one hit? Well, this is the creative part. For the Heavy Gauss Artillery’s case the solution is to simply launch a near-light speed (hitscan) projectile that punches straight through the ship no matter the armor. A small 20cm hole that goes through the whole ship. Yes, it could hit the reactor and the ship would be done for, or it could hit the bulkhead and not hurt it at all! Or you could design a ship that has a backup reactor, people already do that, like the Nebulon B that participated in events! In any case, such a weapon would not be a “press to win” button, it would require skill to integrate into a ship and a lot of effort to use without blowing up your won ship. I feel like that is enough to justify its existence.
Come to think about it…. It’s exactly like…. (spoiler warning for The Expanse s1e2, wait, you have not seen the Expanse?! What are you doing here! Go watch it! It’s amazing!)
Even the damage! As shown in the scene, rail canons can hit vital parts of the ship and annihilate it or just punch clean through without causing any real harm (The Expanse spoilers for s1e2 and gore warning)
Anyways.
The whole point of this is to suggest a concept that, in my opinion, would be very welcome in the game and add a lot to the ship building aspect. Since right now and in the near future, turrets are the only way to arm a large ship and it’s… been done before. With how physical Starbase is, it could really shine with huge cannons that have a lot of “oomph” to them every time you fire. We would all love to see something like that implemented eventually. Because deep down, we all want to aim a huge cannon, mentally say “fire” and pull the trigger!
p.s. Thank you for reading this incredibly unnecessarily long suggestion. Please leave your own suggestions and ideas in comments and have a great day! Hopefully this was at least a tiny bit helpful <3
NIkofrankoV - Out!
BIG GUNS.
Big guns are cool. There is just no way around it. The bigger the gun the cooler it is. And space combat is all about that cool factor. However, while big guns are very fun to look at and fire, they are equally UNfun for the person on the other end of the barrel. No one wants to spend months designing, building and grinding the funds for their first battleship, for someone to just press the “I win” button and to see it blown up by a single shot of a 10m long gun with some thrusters attached to it. And so here comes the main problem with huge artillery in Starbase: How do you make it fair, fun and engaging for both sides of the conflict. Here, I will describe my thoughts and ideas for such a feature in starbase and perhaps one day, they will come in handy for the devs and we will at long last see…. BIG GUNS in starbase!
So! Straight to the point! How can we make heavy artillery fun in starbase for both parties? In my opinion, the best way of doing it is to make it… underpowered...
“But Niko! I thought big guns should be fun killing machines! Not lame underpowered money wasters!” - I hear you say.
Yes, I know, I will get to that later, but for now, let me show you an in-game example – the Railcanon! For those who have wielded that weapon in battle, you know that it’s… situational… to say the least. It has horrible fire rate, way too slow of a projectile speed to hit targets reliably and up until the last patch, the damage they dealt was just not enough to justify using them and even after the buff, they do not feel useful. But we still use them! Why? Because they are fun as hell! They are big, bulky, hit like a truck and make a very cool metal “pzzzeeewww!” sound when you fire them! Let’s not forget that this is a game. And the most important factor in the game is – fun.
Okay, so underpowered guns can still be fun. Cool! Now what about practicality. After all, big guns need to actually be useful, otherwise no one will use them. Just like the Rail cannon above, large weapons should be very effective, in a very niche role – large ship combat. So the answer in making a balanced huge weapon seems to be a very niche weapon, that is very effective in one single role.
BUT
And it is a very big but!
There still remains the issue of the “win button”. There is a reason there are no nukes in most multiplayer games. As fun it would be to watch someone’s year-worth of effort be explosively erased with a push of a button, everyone realizes that such a game mechanic, is just not fun or sustainable. So here is the biggest conundrum. How to make a weapon feel very powerful, without it eliminating every ship in a single shot?
Underpower it… but with a twist.
Big guns need to be cool first – effective later.
In my opinion, big guns do not need to be that good at ship killing. They just need to be fun to use, look cool and most importantly feel great to use them.
Still though, it’s easy to say that, but how would one go about designing such a thing. How to make something powerful without it actually packing that much punch? It’s easy to tweak the numbers and just make the gun bad via numbers, no armor penetration, low damage, so on. But then that would be very unsatisfying and successfully hitting a target with such a weapon only to do no damage would be extremely unsatisfying. So there must be another way.
So. Here is the deal. Starbase has A LOT of depth to it. The game is not just about armor values, damage numbers and explosion types. There is plenty of interesting ways to “nerf” a weapon. The most fun that I have come up with is – moving parts. Physical interaction of machinery is a big part of starbase. Doors, factories, movable cockpit armor, all of it adds to the experience by making our ships and stations feel more real and alive. So if such large artillery peace would make it into the game, it should stay true to its physical counterpart, a.i.
Artillery is not a weapon, it’s a weapons system
Let the whole gun be a system!
Since rail canon has been a good example, let’s use that for the BIG GUN base and see how it would work. Let’s call it… Heavy Gauss Artillery… idk… sounds cool enough.
So, the gun consists of the same modules as a regular mounted guns that are already in game with one exception, the magazine structure is similar to a torpedo tube, which needs to be loaded with a physical shell that will be fired once loaded and then ejected outside. Just like a upscaled bolt action rifle! All the needed components already already in the game! Obviously I have no knowledge of the inner game code workings, but it does not seem too far fetched. Alright. You imagined it? 10m long Gauss rifle that operates like a bolt action? Great! Now add mechanical noises and casing sound effects, make a simple back and forth bolt and receiver animation and what you get is something like this (video is timestamped at 00:10):
Oof! That felt good! And that is exactly what large weapons should feel like! They would be very hard to manage, have very limited ammo due to its physical presence on the ship. Add to that heat mechanics that will eventually make it in the game, massive electricity requirements and you already have a very complex system that requires practically the whole ship be built around the weapon. At that point, it will require 2-3 people just to run it and by having it, you lose 3 fighters or 3 gunners, which arguably, could be even more useful than a single gun.
I feel like that would be a very good way to nerf these things while also adding a lot of content for engineers and gunners. Make them complex and require engineering solutions to feed ammo, get rid of casings, manage heat, so on. Not to mention beam stress and aiming the whole thing. But once you have gone through all those challenges, you turn your battlecruiser towards the enemy’s fleet, find the largest target, slowly aim your huge ship, squint real hard, pull the trigger, the massive barrel charges up for a moment, the gauss coils start glowing blue and… both fleets see a beam cross space between them as your ship changes course due to the massive recoil, metal screeches all around you, the barrel moves backwards and cycles the bolt and throws out the casing with metal clanks! Load the next round BABY! AAAAAAAAH! Damn! I want that so bad!
Sorry, got off track there for a bit. Where was I.
Alright, so we have a very complex gun, that looks cool, makes cool sounds and is very satisfying to fire. How do we make it not blow up a ship in one hit? Well, this is the creative part. For the Heavy Gauss Artillery’s case the solution is to simply launch a near-light speed (hitscan) projectile that punches straight through the ship no matter the armor. A small 20cm hole that goes through the whole ship. Yes, it could hit the reactor and the ship would be done for, or it could hit the bulkhead and not hurt it at all! Or you could design a ship that has a backup reactor, people already do that, like the Nebulon B that participated in events! In any case, such a weapon would not be a “press to win” button, it would require skill to integrate into a ship and a lot of effort to use without blowing up your won ship. I feel like that is enough to justify its existence.
Come to think about it…. It’s exactly like…. (spoiler warning for The Expanse s1e2, wait, you have not seen the Expanse?! What are you doing here! Go watch it! It’s amazing!)
The whole point of this is to suggest a concept that, in my opinion, would be very welcome in the game and add a lot to the ship building aspect. Since right now and in the near future, turrets are the only way to arm a large ship and it’s… been done before. With how physical Starbase is, it could really shine with huge cannons that have a lot of “oomph” to them every time you fire. We would all love to see something like that implemented eventually. Because deep down, we all want to aim a huge cannon, mentally say “fire” and pull the trigger!
p.s. Thank you for reading this incredibly unnecessarily long suggestion. Please leave your own suggestions and ideas in comments and have a great day! Hopefully this was at least a tiny bit helpful <3
NIkofrankoV - Out!
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