Ship Combat

Yeah i was aware of the turrets blind spot and where to position my ship to avoid being hit. But it was more of a presentation to showcase how the turrets are currently working in the game.

There is no point in ship combat as it is atm, because Gatling Turrets or missiles will cut any ship of any size in half and multiple parts simply because the turrets are overpowered and won't miss the target. On other hand currently the light armor and any other item their resistance is too low to the amount of damage a turret does... so balancing is a necessity in the game prior AI becomes mobile and hunt players... So... nerf turrets damage output and biff-up the damage resistance of every other block is a necessity

Valid points made, although I fing your nonsensical approach regarding having modules with abilities rather disingenuous as we already have AI blocks in SE1 with various abilities.

I have always played the game primarily from an engineering point of view, that said the ship combat in SE has always seemed excessively difficult, I've played Eve and elite dangerous and coped fine in those games with the ship combat. I've tried making heavy armor ships, which just result in worse maneuverability and faster destruction, I usually just end up using AI drones and auto turrets.

With regard to the prototech engagements, I managed all of them all with barely any ship combat, flying around with my trusty grinder and where needed spam engaging in small ships getting the ships hp down and getting blown up repeatedly until defeated or the timer expires. The prototech items are intended to be end game items so its expected to be difficult to obtain the modules. The issues with ship combat are present in the game before we even get to the prototech engagements.

The game has long had an issue with players staying planet-side for their entire play-through of the game, I wouldn't be surprised if the ship combat has a part to play in their decision process, spending hours building a ship, going into space and getting destroyed is not appealing to a general playerbase.

As mentioned primarily this is an engineering/crafting game, players should be able to build their way around problems including ship combat but the devs decided to include the need of the player base knowing enough about all the weapons and mechanics to react and adapt in realtime to get through multiple ship engagements, any player without a decent build, all the best weapons and AI blocks has very little chance of success.

I may have a look at ship combat properly again in the future, I may take you up on your offer.

If I guess that the "abilities" ai blocks provide you are referring to were increased turret-lock range and the ability for the AI to target internal blocks on a target, would I be missing any?

-Turrets can fire of their own accord on targets up to the weapon's maximum range without AI if you use the vanilla target-lock feature to lock what you want them to shoot at.

-Turrets have been able to identify targets they didn't have line of sight to since SE1 was limited to only gats and rockets (it was a common way to scan for subterranean bases or figure out where to try and point fixed weapons, and when paired with certain scripts it can allow a player to preemptively generate a map of all the targetable blocks on a grid).

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If I recall, both EVE and ED have decidedly less complicated mechanics in one way or another...

-EVE is like commanding a turret-boat with someone else at the helm, no fear of collisions, and no way for someone to accidentally or intentionally inflict permanent damage to a ship's subsystems short of just entirely destroying their target.

-ED involves a substantial shield-system to provide an hp buffer before anything can take damage (such systems don't do nice things to the pvp-balance in SE), and generally doesn't allow weapons-fire to blow clean through several consecutive important bits at the same time.

-Both EVE and ED make ship repair and replacement easy (if you've got the currency), and involve managing far fewer components than an SE ship does (for instance, all three involve managing weapons, only SE asks you to ensure your ammo-feed lines aren't getting shot).

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You'll find there's often a significant difference between "heavy-armor ships" and "ships with heavy armor on them".

-Small grids shouldn't bother with heavy armor, they live and die on evasion, not tank.

-Large grids with heavy armor on them will typically have it in specific locations to blunt stray medium and small caliber hits, and may make use of a thick heavy-armor nose they can keep between themselves and an opponent, but often rely on evasion, overwhelming fire, or other tricks/gimmicks to win fights against significant foes.

-Large grids running only heavy armor, but only in a single layer, might out-tank lighter ships if both sides choose to just sit and slug it out, but are generally the equivalent of a "medium armor medium speed" ship in a game where defense favors either light-weight high speed evasion or unbreakable mountains of armor.

-"Heavy-armor" large grids are mobile fortresses, boasting several layers of heavy armor such that even the largest weapons fail to penetrate without consecutive hits.

Each style has advantages and drawbacks (some more so than others), and everyone has a personal preference, but learning to build and fly all of them is a good way to learn both what you like, and what works against everything else.

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I've only ever heard of people staying planet-side in SE1 to hide from pvp-players, to play planet-only scenarios, or because they enjoy the extra challenges of gravity and atmosphere. Space is largely the easier place to play as the lack of gravity means a ship doesn't need the thrust to hold itself up, and the concentration of resources in to asteroids means once you get a jump-drive and survey enough rocks to know what is where you can roll yourself in resources fairly easily.

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As for spending hours designing a ship only to lose it, I might suggest you take blueprints of stuff you design, and then make use of a printer should it need to be replaced (the printer and design may require a few tweaks to be compatible with each other).

Are you a combat fanboy or something. I didn't say anything about wanting to beat the big ships in a billy basic one.

Keen have the player data, lets see if anything changes with SE2. I'm not losing sleep if its the similar but there's absolutely nothing wrong with providing feedback trying to improve the game to make it more appealable to a larger portion of the player base instead of a niche of try hards.

Feedback is feedback, Ship combat is the only thing that lets SE down.

I hope I know at least a little bit about aircraft weapons and missiles. I operated them for quite a days...

No, I’m not a fan of space battles like the ones depicted in video games or most movies.

Even with our civilization’s current level of engineering and technology, a battle between spaceships would likely take place at a distance of thousands of kilometers and would be a clash between automated combat systems, not people or even pilots. Humans are too slow and can’t withstand much...

And yes, in SE1, the Prototech combat drones show exactly what space combat might look like...

It’s very unpleasant—you get within range of its railgun, one shot, one hit—and your ship is ready for a major overhaul.

And as a human, you practically have no chance of hitting the drone; human accuracy and reaction speed just aren’t up to par. Without massive support from automated weapons systems (which the player doesn’t have), it’s nearly impossible to hit a Protech drone.

I think it's interesting seeing the progression of combat with this and how it mirrors in different ways Military History.