Autocannon Minipods in 4.0

[CoyoteTheClever]

Hmm, okay, I have a new idea for the minipod theme. How about making a certain amount of them "attachable" to starships? By this I mean, normally they won't have any bonuses and will be weak, ineffective units, but lets say you can "attach" 10 of them to a starship, and they'll float around it in a circle and all get an attack bonus based on how many there are (And there can be limits to how many you attach to a starship, which I say should be 5 or 10 or so). This can give them a unique role in the game while fitting with the theme of their name.

[Malibu Stacey]

I rather liked these little ships in v3 & am sad they've been sidelined by the changes in v4.

What about an cumulative shot effect? Like the longer they stay alive the more damage they do? Each individual one that hits a target does a set amt of dmg more than the shot before? 10, 15, 20, 25, ect. Total damage would be 70 instead of 40 in this case- you could cap the damage at some specific #. It's different... and it you could do it so it only gets the bonus against certain hull types. It would encourage you to try and keep these guys alive until the right moment, then they would go off like a buzz saw.

Just throwing something different out there!

That's a pretty decent idea. The little gun spins up and fires faster (represented by more damage, or a just a faster fire rate) the longer you stay on one target, then you have to spin down and back up for the next target. Makes them good against fat ships with lots of HP, less useful against other swarm type craft.

Rather than increasing the amount of damage each shot does, a more "in character" change for the ship would be increasing its rate of fire up to a limit for continual sustained fire whether that be at one target or a series of targets. That would increase the DPS of the autocannon minipod against both single high HP units and large waves/swarms of AI ships. For higher tech levels, simply increasing the ROF cap or decreasing the time to reach the cap (or both) would suffice.

Thematically that would fit the concept of an autocannon & the 'swarmer' hull type, while it spins up to top speed it is firing slower & hence doing less damage than when it has spun up fully & is spitting out rounds as fast as it can. Once it stops firing, it needs to spin up again to get back to it's previous level, switching from one target to another shouldn't affect that only not shooting at anything at all should.

[keith.lamothe]

A kind of "spin up" phase could work; a high-ROF certainly fits with the unit name; my concern there is an undue cpu load due to all the distinct shots.  But it does fit the concept, and it could give it a twist on the role of the cloaked attacker: does a lot more damage once it warms up, but considerably less before that, so you need to put them in a situation where enough of them will survive the necessary warm-up period.

[zebramatt]

Bingo!

It'll all hang on whether it can be done without too much strain on the CPU then!

[NickAragua]

A kind of "spin up" phase could work; a high-ROF certainly fits with the unit name; my concern there is an undue cpu load due to all the distinct shots.  But it does fit the concept, and it could give it a twist on the role of the cloaked attacker: does a lot more damage once it warms up, but considerably less before that, so you need to put them in a situation where enough of them will survive the necessary warm-up period.

Yeah, the CPU load is why I was suggesting just raising the damage over time to approximate a faster rate of fire. Although, I admit that it'd look a lot cooler if they actually fired faster.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, damage would be easier on the cpu in one sense, but the way the game is coded it's _really_ important that a ship's attack power against a specific target require as few "runtime" computations as possible.  On the other hand, the code that handles the firing of secondary shots could simply have a branch in there to limit the loop based on how long it's been firing.  Though now that I think about it the efficient detection of "I'm not firing" is non-trivial.  But I think there's a pretty easy way to do it.

[Salamander]

Sounds good. I love the idea of them spewing bullets like mad as it does fit the whole concept of these little guys.

[twistedreasoning]

I like it... increasing ROF would definately do the trick, its all about DPS increasing over time. Saving a bunch of these guys till the end of a battle could be a real game changer.

[Buttons840]

Ok, my first guess was to just bring back the cluster bonus for those, but when I asked Chris he brought up that it really encouraged blobbing and we really don't want to do that.  Which is very true.

They're supposed to be used in a blob.  If we throw out this mechanic based on the grounds that it encourages blobbing, then what of the starship mechanics where they boost nearby units?

[Lancefighter]

eh.

this goes straight back to eve - If you give an alliance the ability to bring an infinite number of ships to a battle, they will bring them.

As it stands, the only thing stopping people in eve is the lagmonster.. and it took a severe blow recently when 2500 people battled in the same system.

In ai war, you are generally ENCOURAGED to bring every single shiptype youve unlocked into a battle.. because, well, its more dps. MOAR dps is good dps.

[keith.lamothe]

Those boost mechanics already have numerical limits, and are useful even for smaller groups.

By the way, the term "blobbing" as Chris generally uses it refers to the practice of using your entire mobile fleet (or very nearly so) to attack a single planet.  Not the relative "geographic" position of the ships within a system (where "blobbing" has sometimes meant keeping everything in one single chunk, as boost and other mechanics have encouraged in the past).

[Echo35]

eh.

this goes straight back to eve - If you give an alliance the ability to bring an infinite number of ships to a battle, they will bring them.

As it stands, the only thing stopping people in eve is the lagmonster.. and it took a severe blow recently when 2500 people battled in the same system.

In ai war, you are generally ENCOURAGED to bring every single shiptype youve unlocked into a battle.. because, well, its more dps. MOAR dps is good dps.

And meat shields. Always send in the Mk 1's first!

[CogDissident]

How about changing the minipods to armor-reducers? Each shot inflicts a penalty to the unit's armor for a period of time. Have them continue to do not-much-damage, but with armor-reduction then it makes them really useful to synergize with other unit types, and help counter some of the super-high-armor units with less than super-strong units of your own.

[keith.lamothe]

That would be interesting and possible (armor already has a by-individual-ship rather than solely by-type computation due to armor boosting), but the cpu load to have it really be satisfying (auto-targeting modifications to take the debuffs into account, all ships having to check for armor debuffs timing out, etc) would be significant and balance problems also non-trivial.  But I'll keep it in mind.