Auto Lock Back. If no target is locked, auto lock other ship that locks onto your ship.

Engi shared this feedback ago

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Way back when, weapon round travel was greater than AI targeting range. This was changed so that you could not snipe turrets just outside their targeting range. Good change in my opinion.

I am not suggesting changing round travel ranges. I think you guys did a good job with that taking into account game performance with longer travel ranges.

However, I can now snipe ships by staying outside of 800 meters and locking onto them and assigning turrets with greater range to that target. This is OK if the other ship is manned and can lock onto me and fire back or has locked up another target and is dealing with them first or can change targets to me if they desire, the computer constantly changing targets without the players input just because a new target locks them would be bad. So if the ship is manned and locked onto something, this new Auto Lock Back feature I'm suggesting does not function. However, unmanned ships is a different story.

Unmanned ships (No one in a control seat or using a remote)

Unmanned ships should always auto lock a target that locks them, or they are defenseless, even though they may have turrets that have range to fire at a target. If they were manned and the gunner selects a target they would have range and fire. It should not require a player to select a target in this scenario. One downside, but maybe not, to this is that if you are just locking up a target to check its stats with the targeting info and it is unmanned, you will get fired on even if you don't fire at it. I think this is good, it is risky to lock onto something as it can detect your lock and should defend itself. Second downside to this, but has a solution, is that if multiple ships lock onto the unmanned ship, which one does it lock and fire at? Solution, the closer one or the bigger one. Choosing which would require testing. For example, a large ship with long range guns could sit at just under 2km and pound the target with rail gun and artillery while a smaller more agile ship could get in close and try to draw and evade fire if the auto lock locks the closer ship, actually a good tactic, maybe the AI is not that smart and the advantage goes to the player. Either way, the ship has a fighting chance. The more I think about it, I think it should target the closer target first to keep that closer ship from ramming or getting close enough to get a boarding party on the ship. The biggest threat is a player getting on board or right outside and setting off a warhead. Please fix hydro manning while you are at it. :)

Ok, back to Auto Lock.

Manned ships that are already locked onto something, should NOT auto lock every new target that locks them up. This would be annoying to the pilot/gunner.

Manned ships that are not locked onto a target, MAYBE SHOULD or SHOULD NOT auto lock a new target that locks onto them. I say maybe, because if the ship designer setup the ship to play a warning sound or flash a light when it is locked onto, then the player will become aware real quick of the incoming fire and can search for and lock up the new target. I don't think that a design flaw in the ship should be corrected by the auto lock back system as it can be corrected by the designer/player with a simple sound bock or flashing light. But I can see an argument that it should because, if an unmanned ship can do it, why not a manned ship. So manned ship should only auto lock back (if they should at all) if they are NOT already locked onto a target.

PS Hydro Manning

Either nerf the suit acceleration so turrets can track and hit them or change the name of interior turrets to "anti personal" and/or "anti missile" turrets and make them track and hit players better and/or track and hit missiles better or else just remove the check box because 99% of the time they never hit missiles. Possibly do the same for Gatlings with players and/or incoming missiles. Although missiles are kinda obsolete now. I lean toward interior/anti personal turrets being more accurate because then they have a real purpose in game. However, now we have to have 4 turrets types on our ships and holy pcu and not enough hot bar buttons hell batman. Either way, a player in a suit with a grinder or a welder and warhead parts should not be able to evade turret fire by flying in little circles while approaching a ship at 110m/s and hitting dampers at the last second to get into a safe spot, while not splatting on the hull and then grind into the ship or set a warhead off. A suit should not be able to take down a capital ship covered in turrets. Nerfing the jet pack would also affect other mechanics of just flying around so maybe increasing turret accuracy is the easier solution, less secondary consequences. Actually if I remember correctly, turrets used to have almost no bullet spread but after the bullet range was set to the AI range you guys added bullet spread to balance it out. Or was it the other way around, you did bullet spread to stop turret sniping and then made the ranges the same which really stopped turret sniping but didn't reduce the bullet spread back down...So now with the new turret mechanics maybe bullet spread could be reduced to hit suits better. You've got smart play testers, right? They should be able to work with a programmer to figure it out. Just please do something! It is so easy to evade turrets and get mad loot. I get way to rich in multiplayer with just my suit.

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Replies (1)

Peares Subverse ●

- Turrets calculate their trajectory based on 3 things, Round Travel Speed, Target's Velocity and P-Gravity. It shoots in the direction the target will be if it went in a straight line. There is no way for the turret to predict a change of velocity once the Round has been fired, so in my opinion there's no change needed in turret tracking.

- There are ways to combat player-warhead assaults' by either adding more weapons on your ship to remove blind spots, or using using the fry pan method called regenerative armor with conveyor feed or just hot armor by incorporating welders as player denial without conveyors, welders have a spherical range of 2 meters but deal massive damage to players.

The reason the player can go 110m/s is to catch up with floating objects that are going 100m/s though I must agree to the player jetpack being a hunch too powerful, reducing acceleration by 30% would allow players to still accelerate up in a 1G P-Gravity but will be very difficult at 2.3G, as I agree with the nerf, most players that start on planets will not be happy with the acceleration being reduced. As a side-note, when playing with realistic inventory size, players don't have enough room for all warhead components.

- Auto-targeting is kind of unfair when it comes to stealth gameplay. As a Pvp faction member I have no interest in Instantly locking to targets that track me as, like you mentioned, ship designers can automate defensive measures when locked by another grid. This works as both manned and unmanned. Stations for example, can launch automated drones to search the 2km radius with just under 20 waypoints. And ships can Start alerting as well as deploy decoys. The best place to leave your ship however is inside a hollow asteroid with minimal sky clearance so that defenses can take care of anything inside the asteroid, so when you log back into the server your ship will be in one piece and spotless. If this auto lock thing should become a thing, it should be an optional world setting.

Please stick to one topic per suggestion, it will be much easier to read one topic at the time and vote to all 3 topics individually, to avoid a no-yes-no situation, its also better for the staff to mark topics as considerable, duplicates and planned. You can write as many suggestions as you'd like but just keep them separate I.e. Turret Accuracy Improvement, Jetpack Acceleration re-balancing, Auto targeting, etc. It will keep topics and ideas short and easier to read.

Regardless these are partially good suggestions :D

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Engi ●

I understand how turrets track and fire. Even if I fly in a straight light at 110 m/s at any angle other than right at the turret, they still miss me even in SP with no latency between me and a server.

The target grids I have testing with have no blind spots and lots of turrets. They still miss. I only play on Keen servers and you are limited to 5 welders and even if there was not a limit, that would be a lot of pcu to cover the inside of your ship with conveyors and welders, not to mention the space requirements.

I was not questioning the player speed of 110m/s, just stating the facts. I know you could not catch a ship if you could only go 100m/s. I said nothing about that. I think that jet pack nerf is a good option even if it makes it more difficult in gravity. I only play on keen servers so 3x character inventory is my only option. However, I can hold an h2 bottle, a rifle, elite tools, a pistol and 10 mags for each weapon and all the parts for a warhead and it is 375L, which is under the 400L realistic limit. I also would prefer realistic inventory as it is a tardis right now. But players who drill, grind and weld by hand would cry a lot.

If they manually locked onto you, they already know you are there so you are already not stealthy. If you are trying to be stealthy and you lock onto them, you have also ruined your stealth as a lock would require some sort of active sensor to ping their ship to get range and velocity and mass and grid name. However, this idea is mostly about unmanned ships defending themselves from sniping outside of their AI 800 meter targeting range even if they have guns that will shoot further.

The solutions you mentioned for unmanned require timers and drones, welders, decoys, merge blocks or rotors and all pcu intensive on a 20k pcu limit keen server. Decoys and drones can easily be shot down before getting to the main grid. Also, leaving your ship in an asteroid is a terrible idea, it gives players cover to get close to your ship, just like drilling under a base. And it makes your ship easier to find in space. When your ship is close to an asteroid, that asteroid is rendered in by the ship or player if they are also near. The standard render distance for asteroids is 15km. That asteroid will now be visible from 125km away. That is the longest distance I have seen a "long spawn asteroid." You can tell the distance by setting your jump drive to blind jump greater than 125km and pointing at the asteroid. The jump drive will give you the distance to the obstruction. If that distance is greater than 30km. You have just been found and I can jump right to the asteroid and the streaming and shift+f11 info will tell me the direction to and relative size of your grids even if they are inside the roid. Not sure why there is a delta between 15 and 30km but I never find stuff at asteroids that appear between the 15 to 30km range. They seem to render in up to 30km even with the standard range at 15km. Strong signals will get you within 125km of a player position and if they are on/in and asteroid, I will find them. I have found many players this way.

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