Alright, so the other thread about trading got me thinking about ship to ship combat and how it's quite fastpaced right now. Any ship piloted by an NPC goes down in milliseconds right now, smaller ships can take like one salvo, and even the only capital ship currently in the game, with absolutely fantastical amount of shields, could be disabled in around half a minute by just one gunship (I believe constellation Aquila would suffice, the pilot guns could be used without gimbals since the target is so large) or in mere 9 seconds by one dedicated heavy gunship (I'm fairly sure Hammerhead will have no trouble getting 5 out of 6 turrets on target). After disabling the ship, hammerhead could then just shoot it full of holes with a missile barrage. And that's without even considering ships specifically designed to hunt capital ships, the kinda that come equipped with large torpedoes.
That doesn't leave much room for escort gameplay: You either have enough escorts to destroy every ship entering the range within few seconds, or you don't. It really helps if the ship that's being protected is moving at max speed already, in which case you probably wouldn't need escorts most of the time anyhow, as it doesn't take that long to spool the quantum drive and escape and the ships the size that would hold enough firepower won't be catching up with you anytime soon.
Anyhow, the way I see it, we'll end up having with TTK increased all across the board for all ships. Smaller ships are probably closest to their actual values, but anything that is going to have gameplay with internal components and escape pods is likely going to get lot sturdier. Not necessarily more 'difficult' to kill, just takes longer to do so.
The question is how long will it be, to destroy a ship?
Now, if you come under attack, one thing is you could open up your mobiglass, go to contracts, beacons, and then request combat assistance. This doesn't really work when your ship will be blown up halfway through deploying the beacon, let alone anyone having time to answer it. The closest small and medium sized fighters would still take several minutes to merely travel to the location, and those kind of ships would be who are primarily answering to combat beacons.
This, to me, would seem like especially large and capital ships would take at least a few minutes in most cases, with attacker using a small fleet of ships dedicated for piracy. Capitals should, in my opinion, take like 10 minutes to hammer down with a fleet dedicated at taking down capital ships and their escorts. I mean, it should at least take longer than traveling through a couple of systems, can't be 90% quantum travel and 1% of dying in combat with 9% waiting for expedited respawns. Besides, with med-beds and whatnot, I'd see large battles with couple capital ships and various smaller ones taking over an hour with a half broken capital ship having time to limp behind an asteroid to do some quick repairs while the other one holds out.
Now, if your ship has escape pods, it wouldn't make much sense if you never had any time to run to them. And you wouldn't run to the escape pod if the battle was just starting, you'd probably wait until at least the shields were gone, and maybe the hull was at 25% or 50%. So the last 25% to 50% of hull would need to take like 10-20 seconds to destroy in an average assault, depending on the ships layout. So any ship with escape pods should take like a minute total against reasonable enemy. I mean, if it's something absurd, like freelancer getting hit by a size 9 torpedo, then yeah, it's gone in an instant. But maybe a cutlass and couple of buccaneers would take a bit over a minute to drop that freelancer.
So all in all, when we get features like medical gameplay, escape pods, fixing ships internal components, etc. we should start seeing TTK go up for ships.
That doesn't leave much room for escort gameplay: You either have enough escorts to destroy every ship entering the range within few seconds, or you don't. It really helps if the ship that's being protected is moving at max speed already, in which case you probably wouldn't need escorts most of the time anyhow, as it doesn't take that long to spool the quantum drive and escape and the ships the size that would hold enough firepower won't be catching up with you anytime soon.
Anyhow, the way I see it, we'll end up having with TTK increased all across the board for all ships. Smaller ships are probably closest to their actual values, but anything that is going to have gameplay with internal components and escape pods is likely going to get lot sturdier. Not necessarily more 'difficult' to kill, just takes longer to do so.
The question is how long will it be, to destroy a ship?
Now, if you come under attack, one thing is you could open up your mobiglass, go to contracts, beacons, and then request combat assistance. This doesn't really work when your ship will be blown up halfway through deploying the beacon, let alone anyone having time to answer it. The closest small and medium sized fighters would still take several minutes to merely travel to the location, and those kind of ships would be who are primarily answering to combat beacons.
This, to me, would seem like especially large and capital ships would take at least a few minutes in most cases, with attacker using a small fleet of ships dedicated for piracy. Capitals should, in my opinion, take like 10 minutes to hammer down with a fleet dedicated at taking down capital ships and their escorts. I mean, it should at least take longer than traveling through a couple of systems, can't be 90% quantum travel and 1% of dying in combat with 9% waiting for expedited respawns. Besides, with med-beds and whatnot, I'd see large battles with couple capital ships and various smaller ones taking over an hour with a half broken capital ship having time to limp behind an asteroid to do some quick repairs while the other one holds out.
Now, if your ship has escape pods, it wouldn't make much sense if you never had any time to run to them. And you wouldn't run to the escape pod if the battle was just starting, you'd probably wait until at least the shields were gone, and maybe the hull was at 25% or 50%. So the last 25% to 50% of hull would need to take like 10-20 seconds to destroy in an average assault, depending on the ships layout. So any ship with escape pods should take like a minute total against reasonable enemy. I mean, if it's something absurd, like freelancer getting hit by a size 9 torpedo, then yeah, it's gone in an instant. But maybe a cutlass and couple of buccaneers would take a bit over a minute to drop that freelancer.
So all in all, when we get features like medical gameplay, escape pods, fixing ships internal components, etc. we should start seeing TTK go up for ships.
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