Dominion A-20 Ram adjustments

posted on July 31st, 2009, 11:46 am

okay yea, thats a point. perhaps something like hostile-damage only, but that might not be easy to implement. we will discuss that

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on July 31st, 2009, 2:34 pm

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on July 31st, 2009, 2:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think rank up is the system that will be most doable without possible exploits... though I suppose that if you made it so that damage caused by the ram would only increase dramatically when the Bug ship had less than 50% hull health (and perhaps zero shields), it wouldn't matter if the player tried to damage his or her own ships... as these Bugs would go down quite quickly.

Of course, another possibility is making the collision ability an "activated ability": as soon as you click the button, defensive and offensive stats decrease tremendously, but then the ship can ram (perhaps showing the vessel is overloading its warp core or something similar to increase the damage potential). In this case, the self-damage exploit would be quite hard to pull off... as your Bugs would die very very quickly.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 2:57 pm

yep, that could be a solution too. perhaps ram increases movement speed, but drops the shields of the A-20.. i will consider that

posted on July 31st, 2009, 3:05 pm

Then you could focus fire on any ramming ships and have a good chance to destroy them actually... 

[Zebh]

posted on July 31st, 2009, 3:12 pm

Last edited by Zebh on July 31st, 2009, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ramming Speed! Incresed speed would make sense, even when power for it would be taken from shields or somewhere else, as more speed would cause more damage to the target and decrease the avoidance change. And when ramming there is no need to care about the engine health, how much power input can engines take as it will be one way trip, but if there is still extra energy available (not too much to engines so it won't explode before it rams the target), it can always be used to warm up the warp core.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:24 pm

i don't think shooting your own vessels would be a really good way to exploit. ok, maybe when using them on unguarded targets.

to disable the shield when using the special is much easier to 'exploit' as you only have first to move your vessel in front of the target and then activate the ramming.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:28 pm

i don't think shooting your own vessels would be a really good way to exploit. ok, maybe when using them on unguarded targets.

You just know someone would try it...

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:44 pm

to disable the shield when using the special is much easier to 'exploit' as you only have first to move your vessel in front of the target and then activate the ramming.

Yes I agree that this method is exploitable, BUT if you make it so that there is a delay between when shields drop, and when you can ram (say after pressing the collision button, it needs 1-2 second to prepare for collision), then it is much less exploitable I think. This still wouldn't take care of the extremely overpowered tendency of some players to exploit the first two dominion bugs produced to take out both enemy constructors (and afterwords, to kill mining vessels). Only one way remains to stop that... and that is to reduce the damage dealt to constructors and mining vessels.

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:48 pm

yep, collision deals no longer enough damage from unranked A20s to kill a constructor with a single hit. i might also add a special damage reduction against civil units, i will take a look into that.. or increase the defense value of constructors, thats something i'm thinking about either way

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:49 pm

yes, a delay would of course be possible. some kind of minimum time that has to pass between execution and explosion

posted on July 31st, 2009, 4:50 pm

I think a A-20 should pown any ship with a defensive value of 23 or less with one ram. That seems more realistic...

posted on August 1st, 2009, 10:29 am

But it would hardly be balanced. For a ram that powerful, dominion wouldn't need to build anything else for the first half of theg game. A-20s are cheap as chips as far as destroyers go.