Ship and Combat balance?

Yeah.. I played most of the day yesterday, pretty much all over the cluster, and except for a few minor flight issues, and small frieghter/enemy collision issues, I didn't have any problems.

Is there anyway that you can make lateral thrusters upgradable, so that people who want a more responsive craft can upgrade, ect.?

I think we need to look into this ship to ship collision issue closely. We don't want a repeat of X, even by accident.

There are a bunch of test cases we should try, mostly involving big ships arriving out of LDS at stations. Those have been problematic in the past. And what happens when groups of large ships arrive out of LDS together. They may not be able to avoid each other and crash.

I would guess the tugs have enough lateral thrust to avoid hitting the player, but the freighter is too large, and they cannot dodge fast enough. We need to find the minimum the AI can cope with, and stay above that. Flux always wins in the end.

For the time being, we should turn the collision sound back on, so it is clear when ships are hitting one another. We can turn it back off after we are sure it isn't happening.

It might be prudent to remove, or at least thin out, the asteroids around L-points and stations, as those two locations are where traffic seem to congest, and piracy/combat happens...and those asteroids have been getting in the way alot, at least for me.

Those asteroids are meant to look scary, without actually hitting anyone. I think some have a random placement component, so they could be getting too close. I will take a look. If you can keep a list of lpoints and stations where this is an issue (and what troubles you had) that would be helpful.

If we mod in more mining features (blowing up asteroids, etc) it might be fun to have the player need to clear an lpoint before jumping through. Or even have some jump routes that you would just never take wingmen through (cause they would get smacked), but those would need to be very uncommon, since so much player value is invested in wingmen.

If you can keep a list of lpoints and stations where this is an issue (and what troubles you had) that would be helpful.

That's just it, they seem to move around and be in differrent locations between each jump. Sometimes they are off to the side, and sometimes right smack in front when I exit that tunnel thingy.

I'll start a record of the more annoying L-points.

JT how does the flight model strike you? That of the player ships and the NPC ships? And of combat in general? We are open to making changes, so let us know your likes and dislikes. One thing I am changing tonight is the NPC lda's. They are way too strong, and make too many ships almost unkillable. That was a bug I had overlooked before GrandpaTrout released this developer build.