Suggestions for SE2 Combat in response to Marek Rosa - dev blog

in response to the dev diary: Marek Rosa - dev blog: Marek's Dev Diary: July 10, 2025

I hope you give this a good read I put a lot of thought and care into it and I have been playing pvp games for years so I feel I some good knowledge.

I have played a lot of games with rock paper scissors and its not really that fun because often times it turns into a dice roll situation. I suggest instead empathizing skill expression, so that a player who knows the ins and outs of their combat style will be 25% - 50% more effective in battle, its good to also keep the skill ceiling under control because getting obliterated by a more experienced pilot can cause players to lose interest in the game/pvp.

I have some ideas for combat styles and what they would be effective for:

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Ship styles:

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Defensive: Slow moving, poor evasion, Minimal firepower but excels in getting from A to B intact, even when in a 1v10 scenario. In prolonged engagements a defensive ship is superior as it will slowly wittle down the opponents defenses, but it is useless for hunting pvp as its slow moving and slow to destroy enemies so they can easily flee the battle. The only pvp scenario where a defensive ship would be useful would be an unmoving carrier in a faction battle.

Scout: Light, maneuverable, minimal defenses, sabotage oriented weapons and tools, lackluster firepower but could have something like a long range sniper for disabling exposed systems like thrusters. It should excel in avoiding radar detection etc. This style is for surveillance, infiltration and sabotage.

Fighter ship: maneuverable, respectable firepower, limited defenses, empathizes dogfighting: tactical movements, good manual aim etc.

Battleship: massive firepower, but slow and poor maneuverability, it has some defenses but they will easily be overcome in prolonged engagements. Battleships typically carry very explosive weapons that can be a double edged sword.

Cargo: they are quite fast but lack maneuverability, what they lack in battle oriented tools they make up for with advanced scanning(the ability to avoid pkers etc) and the best jump drives (so they can get out of trouble quickly and easily).

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Types of tools/weapons.

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Aimed weapons: these are the best type of weapon, it makes combat engaging.

Rapid fire gun, consistent damage, medium range

Slow precision weapon(sniper): longer range, harder to hit(not hitscan), solid damage that can 1 shot exposed systems

Rockets: very slow, expensive and powerful, easy to outrun or destroy, they show up on radar , rockets are useful for finishing off a ship but requires the ship to be immobile or good timing, also automatic flak turrets will easily destroy rockets so they must be disabled first.

Satellite Missile: A small fast missile that attaches to any grid it hits, at short range allows hacking and accessing the grid and at long range displays the ships location, the device can also connect to a network of satellite antennas automatically(if in range) and potentially allow for hilarious

long range shenanigans. After an encounter, engineers inspect the outside of their ship with a laptop which will highlight any satellite missiles so they can easily grind them off, if satellite missiles require rare materials like gold and uranium, getting hit by one of these could actually be a rewarding experience when it is ground down.

Auto weapons: these should be limited because they are un-fun

flak turrets: short-medium range, high rate of fire, cheap, do pathetic to ships and bases, they excel at destroying incoming missiles keeping engineers away from the ship/station.

EMP(manual activation): a wide range blast that causes a full shutdown/blackout of all grids in range (including the grid that used it), 15 second duration - 5 minute charge. Ships can have EMP protected jump drives that allow them to jump during a blackout but these drives are heavier so it will be only relevant for non combat transport ships.

Mega Laser(Large Grid): It must be on a station grid that has a station bubble(lore: it requires special bubble technology or something), long range, not overly expensive to build, takes 30 seconds to charge up a shot, it's hitscan and wide and will assuredly destroy anything in one shot even piercing and hitting things behind, it will not damage friendly grids/players even if it hits them. This weapon exists to discourage players from griefing and camping outside of other players bases or building too close, the weapon has a strong energy signature and players will be warned if they are approaching a laser.

Utility:

Cockpit/Servers: These devices have symbolic computation capacity and are required by weapons, shields and systems to run, optionally adding more gives diminishing returns in order to help keep things balanced on servers etc.

Radar: Its a dream to be able to find out who is around you, long range pings are very slow but at a respectable distance so that pkers can find potential targets and peaceful players can avoid contact, short-medium range gives frequent helpful data. Dots are different colors depending on what is detected, for example red is a moving grid, orange is a stationary grid and yellow is an engineer.

Hacking: A laptop can be used to slowly hack a single component and install a virus that will slowly hack the entire grid and docked ships as well, but the more things that need to be hacked the longer it takes, the virus prioritises the most valuable targets to hack or even can be configured by the player. Servers can be built in the ship to assist with or slow down hacking with diminishing returns for each additional server built. A ship can hack instead by connecting with a mag plate or satellite missile to the target, once the virus is installed the ship can undock but the virus will operate at standard speed unless the hacking ship stays connected or in range of the satellite missile. To remove a virus a cockpit or supercomputer can be told to scan but it will use a lot of computation which will could stop other ship systems from being able to operate(a computation priority list would be helpful).

Energy shield: Requires a lot of power to have a long lasting energy shield but is useful for all ships to prevent burst damage or allow defensive grids to survive prolonged engagements. Shields have a limited capacity and will draw a lot of power to recharge during a battle or maybe they would use cpu from servers as well/instead, anyway the point is that different types of ships will have different sheild strength and it will create diversity in combat. The first goal in combat would be to deplete the energy shield and then after to focus fire with the intent to destroy ship systems. A pilot who evades well in a scout/fighter etc should be able to regen their shield mid combat.