Cap ships

O

olDirtyMin

Spaceman
Is something broken about how cap ships work in the game? I took out a kamekh in a dinky stiletto with 2 tachyons and no missiles. Basically I parked 500m or so off the nose of the ship and held down the trigger for five minutes before it blew. I took maybe one hit.

It seemed like the ship wouldn't even start firing at me until I closed within 1500m or so, and even then, shots came straight out, no tracking or anything. I thought the kamekh had turrets.

Anyone remember if cap ships were that easy in the original?
 
Well I know what you are talking about. What I've noticed is that they fire at me until I damage the armor some, then they just sit there and do nothing. At that point I just park it and hold down the fire button.

But in the original you could take out a Kamekh with practiced ease in any ship. It should not have been too hard.
 
Asciiman said:
Well I know what you are talking about. What I've noticed is that they fire at me until I damage the armor some, then they just sit there and do nothing. At that point I just park it and hold down the fire button.
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Sounds like it's related to the AI behaviour of damaged fighters. They go spinning off to keep the shield facing you broke through away from you until it regenerates. Only problem is that the Kamekh isn't fast enough to do that.
 
there's a blind spot, too, in front of some capships. You can sit there and blow them away... you would think that the AI might notice that the shields are dropping, and try to ram you or something. Maybe they need a forward turret.
 
kilolima said:
there's a blind spot, too, in front of some capships. You can sit there and blow them away... you would think that the AI might notice that the shields are dropping, and try to ram you or something. Maybe they need a forward turret.
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Were they firing turrets but just not hitting you due to the turrets limited field of fire, or just not seeing you at all?

I have a suspicion that turrets all have fixed simple angles of fire (eg a 180 degree half circle) rather than custom fields of fire based on ship design, which can leave unrealistic unprotected areas, even if a ship looks well designed to give good turret field of fire. I could be wrong though.
 
Not only does the Kamekh have a 'blind spot' right in front of it's nose where none of it's turrets or wing cannons can hit you, but it turns rediculously fast for a ship of it's size and manages to keep it's nose pointed right at you.
The only time I've seen it turn away from me is when Confeds, hunters, and/or Militia fighters were engaging it when I was.
It also absorbs a lot more fire than the one in the origional. I unloaded two full launchers worth of torpedoes into it and barely made a dent. It sure didn't take more than 40 torpedoes to kill the origional.
 
it should have a purple (tachyon?) nose cannon

but yeah, kamekh are FAR too manueverable, both as compared to the original and for a ship of the size they're supposed to be
 
i have flown a kamekh. the thing is supposed to be a heavy corvette or a light destroyer. it seems like it handles better than a broadsword!
 
Did the RF mission last night and saw the paradigm in action vs a dralthi. That ship looked really impressive, laying down a huge field of fire from its turrets that took out the dralthi really easily. I didn't try attacking the paradigm, but it looked like it would be a tougher challenge than the kamekh.

I remember in the original whenever I attacked one, it would just ram me and I'd end up thousands of klicks away.

anyone have any experience vs. a paradigm?
 
I took one out for a test of my laser theory. Lasers have more range than any other gun, so I put 4 lasers on my centurion, flew to a safe distance of the Paradigm, put speed to zero, matched my speed, then started firing towards it and tapped on afterburner to get closer, until my bolts started hitting it, and just waited till it blew up. Same technique as with the khameks. Works on carriers also. What all these ships need is laser turrets at the outmost places, like the nose and wing-tips, IMO.
 
Ok this is one case where I am a proponent of the computer cheating. Longer ranged weapons on cap ships would fix the problem.
 
Capships in WC3/4 and WC2 always seemed to start firing at ridiculously long ranges. Especially the Flak cannon from WC2. They rarely would hit anything, but it did add that extra bit of suspense to torpedo runs and strafing. (Note to self: Dodge those big blue bolts coming from the ralatha.)
Anyway, I would love to see a special class of capship turret that has longer range weapons.
 
I noticed the same issue, the best I can say is "it will be fixed in the next WCU release", whether some of my changes make it into Priv Remake depensds on hellcatv (We are currently working on making asteroids more true to the original).
 
Lasers vs Everything

If you outfitted a Paradigm (or any other capital ship) with nothing but lots of lasers, wouldn't that be just as dangerous as having the bigger guns? If you look at the rate of fire versus power draw for one turret with twin plasmas, against /how/ many turrets with lasers would it be an equal power draw? It kind of turns into a questin of 'suppressive fire' versus 'call for fire'. /I/ wouldn't want to walk into a maelstrom of long-range, highly accurate, continually draining my shields, high-volley, withering laser fire...! Throw on more turrets of lighter fire, and it might make the other cap ships worth battling. And speaking of battling cap ships -- why don't they have missile launchers? I realize we're talking about the Remake, here, but 'why not'? I'd be scared to death to get within 10,000 klicks of a Drayman that could have four missile tubes instead of a larger cargo bay!
 
dan_w said:
I took one out for a test of my laser theory. Lasers have more range than any other gun, so I put 4 lasers on my centurion, flew to a safe distance of the Paradigm, put speed to zero, matched my speed, then started firing towards it and tapped on afterburner to get closer, until my bolts started hitting it, and just waited till it blew up. Same technique as with the khameks. Works on carriers also. What all these ships need is laser turrets at the outmost places, like the nose and wing-tips, IMO.
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It's called the monty pythong manouver, and it was used to such cheesy effect in Escape velocity that they had to edit the AI specifically to make it more difficult (but not impossible) to do.

Best way to fix it is improve AI, and add in cap ship projectiles. I'm pretty sure that WC3/4 destroyers were stated to carry torpedoes, so there is no reason why corvettes wouldn't have them.
 
Would you like me to pack up the WCU AI so that people can put it in Priv? Basically it makes capships somewhat smarter (being that WCU has many more classes of capship).
 
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