Gunboat Balancing & Fixes

Gunboat Balancing & Fixes
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ksully09

ksully09

Galactic Senator
Proposal
Increase Frigate damage at space battles to Gun Boats only by 25%

Remove Chaff from Gun Boats

Add collision damage to Gun Boats only (maybe everything?) ((If someone runs into the Gun Boat, the Gun Boat and the other ship will take damage))
Justification
When a gun boat enters a space battle, typically the Space Battle is over, even when its not fully crewed. They should be powerful, but no "OP". Many players and gun boat crews can either ignore the player fighters while taking down the frigate or ignore the frigate and take on fighters. Theres a common agreement that Gun Boats at Space Battles are just too strong.

Removing chaff from Gun Boats makes bombers (which should be a weakness to gun boats) an actual weakness, but with chaff, the large shields, the slower bombers usually never land many bombs, and are too slow to avoid hits from the gunners. Making it so their long locking bombs actually hit, bombers will pose more of a threat to Gun Boats without chaff. No, chaff on gun boats, may balance multiple bombers, vs a Gun Boat, but then may unbalance Gun Boat vs Fighters.

To combat the fighter vs Gun Boat fights, we need to swing it back in the Gun Boats direction now that they have no chaff, and add in collision damage to prevent fighters just staying ultra close and bouncing off the Gun Boat's hull. (PvP flagged ONLY)

This also will make it more difficult for unintended play, solo gun boating PvE content at PvE space battles, and other PvE content where solo gun boaters can just chaff everything and tank multiple AoA waves, and or Factional duties. The intent for gun boats isnt to park solo in the middle of a space battle and tank everything.
Motivation
See justification.
Would like to get community feedback on the discussions about gunboats - this needs to be a multi-addition/ balancing all at the same time.
 
Upvote 3 Downvote
Okay awesome loving the feedback here, so we are in agreement that there are some issues here, just not 100% set on the solution. That’s what’s important more than anything else.

Dual boxing GBs
Bomber buff in some capacity vs GBs.
Leave fighter vs GB balanced
Make GBs slightly weaker in SBs
 
Iffey said:
Agree with Smogs. Stop letting people dual box a gunship and that eliminates most of the problems with gunship superiority. AoA bounties and space battles are trivialized by this method. If there’s a way to code it such that alts can launch in a Havoc/ARC (starfighters) then even better.

Instead of removing chaff from gunboats, perhaps make the EM Emitter launcher the only possibility for gunships. They’re higher mass (40k+) and lower quantity packs (7-9 currently but maybe bump this lower too) not to mention much higher resource cost.
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I think you missed the point

Right now there is zero reason to use a bomber to actually bomb a GS. If you make a successful attack run without getting shot in the face, and actually launch your 2 missiles, they won't hit because the GB has countermeasures. Changing the type of countermeasure doesn't change anything.
 
While not wholly a bad idea it would be much easier to code and balance the fight without nerfing anyone. Two Defenders/AdvX/Bwings can pace damage on a Capital Ship just as fast as a single Gunship (with obvious tanking/survivablilty dfferences). If the goal here is to balance how the fight goes once the subsystems pop if there is a fight on then a simple debuff system is all that is needed. Reduce damage output by any ship to any capital ship if they have recently engaged in PvP combat by taking or receiving damage. A 30-90 second debuff that is reapplied upon dealing or taking damage. The possbility of a killing blow cleansing the debuff could also help avoid delaying the end of the fight post PvP "win" while keeping the fight focused on players when both sides have someone in the fight. The debuff can also scale based on ship type/role or guns vs missles/bombs etc. Changing how damage can be dealt. This would be a much simplier and more elgant coding choice compared to building an entire PvP flagged debuff/buff system that does not exist. It can piggy back on the current droid command buffing system with different flags for triggering.
 
I think we are overcomplicating a bit here.
I dont think gunboats should have chaff removed completely. I think 1 launcher is enough. If you have a 7 man crew, it doesnt seem right to me that a 3 man oppressor gang can just come and kill you in one volley. One chaff launcher would give 15 chaffs, not enough to last long with half a gunboat against a 3 man team. A full gunboat would however be able to defend itself, requiring 4-5 pilots to take it down, which I think is a fair amount, based on how 2 pilots are usually an even match against a 3 man POB. Scaled up, that would be 4-5 pilots to match a fully crewed gunboat.
I would however fully support moving the ability fire chaff to one of the guns in the gunboat. That way if you play solo, you will not be able to move and defend yourself against incoming missiles.

When it comes to spacebattles, I think a much easier solution is to just make the already larger guns on the capital ships target anything that sits still and gunboats, wheter they move or not and then give them a hefty damage increase over the normal guns and much more HP, so they cant just be shot off in seconds (they look like turbo lasers for capital ships, so let them act like it). That would fix both soloing spacebattles in a gunboat and stop the ship hugging that is the way to kill the capital ships right now. Another solution could be to have the capital ship using missiles launcher to hurl spacebombs at the gunship.
 
Grunanca said:
I think we are overcomplicating a bit here.
I dont think gunboats should have chaff removed completely. I think 1 launcher is enough. If you have a 7 man crew, it doesnt seem right to me that a 3 man oppressor gang can just come and kill you in one volley. One chaff launcher would give 15 chaffs, not enough to last long with half a gunboat against a 3 man team. A full gunboat would however be able to defend itself, requiring 4-5 pilots to take it down, which I think is a fair amount, based on how 2 pilots are usually an even match against a 3 man POB. Scaled up, that would be 4-5 pilots to match a fully crewed gunboat.
I would however fully support moving the ability fire chaff to one of the guns in the gunboat. That way if you play solo, you will not be able to move and defend yourself against incoming missiles.

When it comes to spacebattles, I think a much easier solution is to just make the already larger guns on the capital ships target anything that sits still and gunboats, wheter they move or not and then give them a hefty damage increase over the normal guns and much more HP, so they cant just be shot off in seconds (they look like turbo lasers for capital ships, so let them act like it). That would fix both soloing spacebattles in a gunboat and stop the ship hugging that is the way to kill the capital ships right now. Another solution could be to have the capital ship using missiles launcher to hurl spacebombs at the gunship.
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I once found a gunship sitting overt and afk. It took me 10 mk2 spacebombs to the same side disable the ship and then finish it off with guns.
1. 9 spacebombs would not have done it.
2. If the crew had shunted, 10 spacebombs would not have done it.
3. You are still ignoring the fact that multiple gunners will have easy shots on those bombers flying straight at it to get a lock.
4. Anyone serious about this stuff is using 16 pack chaff, so making the argument that 6 successful attack runs by oppressors, or 9 successful attack runs by any other bomber to just score the first hit as balanced is something I can't agree with. And again this is ignoring shield reinforces and shunts.
 
Maxal said:
I once found a gunship sitting overt and afk. It took me 10 mk2 spacebombs to the same side disable the ship and then finish it off with guns.
1. 9 spacebombs would not have done it.
2. If the crew had shunted, 10 spacebombs would not have done it.
3. You are still ignoring the fact that multiple gunners will have easy shots on those bombers flying straight at it to get a lock.
4. Anyone serious about this stuff is using 16 pack chaff, so making the argument that 6 successful attack runs by oppressors, or 9 successful attack runs by any other bomber to just score the first hit as balanced is something I can't agree with. And again this is ignoring shield reinforces and shunts.
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1. I assume the fighters are also shooting their guns when they are pointing at the gunship anyway to take aim. Even with 2 spacebomb launchers, an oppressor still has space for 2 w8s.
2. Yeah, but if they shunt, they also leave themselves completely open to attack by draining the cap.
3. I dont expect all bombers to survive, but if you still need to have a gunner facing the correct direction. If you coordinate where you come from, you have more ships than guns to return fire, which will not end well for the gunboat.
4. There are a bit more factors against the gunboat. If you assume it will predict the exact number of missiles and each chaff will stop one, then it gets hard when you have multiple overlapping missiles warnings. The chance of shooting a few chaffs too many is very much there. And yes the gunboat has all these things, but again, the missile ships also have guns. The whole spacebomb thing is on top of gunboats already having a hard time with a number of fighters matching the number of crew. The fighters can also pull out and come back, where the gunboat due to speed cannot.
 
DarmanKyale said:
While not wholly a bad idea it would be much easier to code and balance the fight without nerfing anyone. Two Defenders/AdvX/Bwings can pace damage on a Capital Ship just as fast as a single Gunship (with obvious tanking/survivablilty dfferences). If the goal here is to balance how the fight goes once the subsystems pop if there is a fight on then a simple debuff system is all that is needed. Reduce damage output by any ship to any capital ship if they have recently engaged in PvP combat by taking or receiving damage. A 30-90 second debuff that is reapplied upon dealing or taking damage. The possbility of a killing blow cleansing the debuff could also help avoid delaying the end of the fight post PvP "win" while keeping the fight focused on players when both sides have someone in the fight. The debuff can also scale based on ship type/role or guns vs missles/bombs etc. Changing how damage can be dealt. This would be a much simplier and more elgant coding choice compared to building an entire PvP flagged debuff/buff system that does not exist. It can piggy back on the current droid command buffing system with different flags for triggering.
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It does exist, resto already changes damage in PvP to make dogfights last longer. I don't know weather GBs are part of that equation or not.

If they are then remove and there's double damage from all PvP sources of they aren't then the same script that needs the PvP damage for fighters can flick the switch on GBs/pobs.

A lot of crazy stuff gets banded about when there's almost always a very easy scriptable low hanging fruit that can provide a lot of balance before big changes are felt needed.
 
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