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Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

Angthoron

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Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
I played a game of ARMA 3 where we all sat in an APC for a whole hour. No one complained. We just shot the shit and chatted a bunch till we got where we need to go. If only you little scrotums could remember Everquest downtime. Waiting for hours for abilities to recharge and not leaving the game because you were having fun just talking to people. You may not find that interesting. Lots of people won't but Star Citizen is targeting a niche of 40-50 year old dads with disposable income and time on their hands. The audience is there. I've played other games with that audience. I've spoken to people who are excited to just chill out on a capital ship as a social space for a couple hours. Your rebuttal is Maths. I am not asian so that shit goes over my head when I have experience that proves my point. This isn't Reddit.


Yeah, that's great except ARMA 3 is a niche game for autists and Star Citizen is supposed to be a be-all, end-all MMO as per Chris. Unless there'll be a massive autism explosion by 2042 when the game reaches beta, I'm afraid it won't quite make the numbers to make it a viable MMO platform.
But you wouldn't have to play in a big multicrew clan. People who want to coordinate playing sessions with large groups and who have access to end-game capital ships would probably be the most autistic subset of players anyway. Most people would probably play solo or in 2 to 3 man groups.
True. It's just a huge feature that will see very little use (in my opinion), maybe something that would've been best to save for an expansion or something. Of course, that's not how SC's funding path went so doesn't really matter.

Well, so are capital ships at this point.
Yeah. I just find it misleading when someone (not you) goes "Well you can do X or Y" when you actually can't, when it's in design docs but not even on the latest roadmaps. I keep cursory track of the project, you keep cursory track of it, but someone else might be like "Oh wow, so you can get a functional capship that you'll pilot and AI will assist? HYPE!!!", and that's kinda wrong at this stage - whether it succeeds or crashes.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
I played a game of ARMA 3 where we all sat in an APC for a whole hour. No one complained. We just shot the shit and chatted a bunch till we got where we need to go.
No one DID anything, either, as you pointed out. You sat in an APC and did nothing. A good number of you probably went AFK and nobody noticed because nobody was doing anything. Find yourself under attack and I imagine you'd discover half of your crew was actually AFK.

Compare that with trying to merely get and hold 5 Codexers together for anything and you'll quickly realize you'd rather be herding cats, it would be easier. There's a REASON I have largely replaced everyone with child slave labor.
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,945
I played a game of ARMA 3 where we all sat in an APC for a whole hour. No one complained. We just shot the shit and chatted a bunch till we got where we need to go. If only you little scrotums could remember Everquest downtime. Waiting for hours for abilities to recharge and not leaving the game because you were having fun just talking to people. You may not find that interesting. Lots of people won't but Star Citizen is targeting a niche of 40-50 year old dads with disposable income and time on their hands. The audience is there. I've played other games with that audience. I've spoken to people who are excited to just chill out on a capital ship as a social space for a couple hours. Your rebuttal is Maths. I am not asian so that shit goes over my head when I have experience that proves my point. This isn't Reddit.

Doing that is a nice change of pace once and awhile, but image doing that again and again as the only way to properly use certain warships for them to be a major assest to your guild. That's unavoidable in a game where some ships require that many to properly man and run it. The closest I can think of that in current MMOs is EVE and leaving secure space solo in a high value ship, or running one to a new system for someone else and not properly equiping it for fighting.

By the very nature of the manning requirement it would become quick for people to realize some ships are gimped in combat because not all of your turrets are in action. Actually, now that I think about it, I could see deliberate, provocative actions being made by PKs seeking to see if ships are properly manned to take out the gimped one. Just have to do challenges or close closely in a suspicious manner and then observe how many turrets are in action responding or reaction to your behaviour.

I could also see the high manning requirement warships being rarely seen and used as a result, even if the game winds up with highly organized, large corps wars like EVE.

The way the game's developed this ships too makes me wonder as they look more like large, multi-crew WWII aircraft than naval warships given the turret layouts they've chosen. Unless they chose to buff these ships and make them artificially better they are going to suck due to the inherent disadvantages of turrets - there are reasons why single manned fighters won out in WWII and why fighters like the Defiant and Roc quickly vanished without successors in that war. Bombers with self-defence turrets and "turret fighters" are less effective and always at the mercy of single manned fighters. The former is why in the post-war everyone turned to abandoning turrets to free up weight to allow bombers to fly higher and faster.

That is completely different from EQs huge downtimes medding or waiting on respwns that at least had a Pavlovian aspect to the waiting and would be more like Necromancers, Mages and other pet classes only being able to use their pets if they had someone else logged in to play them even if they were simply following their orders. No second player around to do so, no pet and no crucial aspect of those classes to be used that could severely damage some classes abilities to perform. It wold turn Mage into a Wizard with weaker, less mana efficient damage spells, no ports and none of their later root and other CC upgrades.
 
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Norfleet

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The former is why in the post-war everyone turned to abandoning turrets to free up weight to allow bombers to fly higher and faster.
The real reason is that air-to-air missiles, which bombers have practically no hope of evading and can kill them from beyond the range of any turret, have made ever getting into a dogfight with a bomber pretty much obsolete. The B-52 had turrets, but those have since been deactivated because there is no real threat against which turrets would have any useful effect. The advent of computer-controlled weaponry may possibly cause such things to make a comeback, seeing them reinstated as CIWS mounts against thirdworldian air defense, but we're just not gonna see anything as backwards as manually operated turrets coming back anytime soon, and I have no fucking clue why such things would even exist in the future. If Future Turrets even CAN be manually operated, it will only be as a backup/fallback option and never their primary mode of operation.

Actually, now that I think about it, I could see deliberate, provocative actions being made by PKs seeking to see if ships are properly manned to take out the gimped one. Just have to do challenges or close closely in a suspicious manner and then observe how many turrets are in action responding or reaction to your behaviour.
I can similarly see a psychological warfare coming into practice on the other side where some turret operators deliberately feign AFK and do not fire, only to open up when the enemy commits. I remember doing shit like that back in the old MUD days, where we'd enter a battle with some of our guns deliberately not active to make us seem unmanned, and when the enemy committed units that were vulnerable to such guns to action, we'd open up and blow them away.
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
Well, to be fair, if we were to have realistic space warfare, it'd be dull as fuck, so I guess WW2 IN SPAAAACE is the best we can hope for.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Well, to be fair, if we were to have realistic space warfare, it'd be dull as fuck, so I guess WW2 IN SPAAAACE is the best we can hope for.
Oh, I'm not even asking for realistic space warfare, we all know that'd be pretty boring. But I'm not convinced that manually operated turrets add to the game when turrets are a point-and-shoot affair. At least in the old days, operating weaponry meant something because there were DETAILS. When dumbed down into a graphical interface where all the details like damage control, power/heat management, reloading, and whatnot have all been removed, there's not much left. Actually firing the weapon is not actually the most interesting aspect of operating it.
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,945
The real reason is that air-to-air missiles, which bombers have practically no hope of evading and can kill them from beyond the range of any turret

Which is why programs like Silverplate were being done in late WWII over a decade before guided missiles became even remotely practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverplate#Silverplate_operational_units

Enola Gay was one such bomber, built intentionally to avoid any possible Japanese interception.

Performance by then allowed bombers to no longer be tied so close to the ground requiring such defences where fighters had a clear advantage. What was later done would have happened even sooner on the B-36s had Britain fallen and necessitated their production instead of the B-29s as it would only become possible to bomber Germany from North America with them (The B-36 was only later revived once it became clear the B-29 was too small to be a proper nuclear bomber and an interim was required until the dedicated one was developed that became the B-52). The same reasons for stripping bombers of defensive armament are also the reasons why recon aircraft go in unarmed. It's partly to maximize their performance, but also to remove the temptation of the pilot to turn around to try to fight it out when that isn't his mission.

have made ever getting into a dogfight with a bomber pretty much obsolete.

Amusing to bring up the term "dogfight" with regard to bombers. The only real bomber any fighter had a chance to dogfight with was the B-36 at altitude. The thin air where the B-36 operated, the swept wings of 50s fighters, and the poor engines of the time made fighter wings ineffective while the -36s own massive wings created a brief environment where the bomber could out maneuver any fighter that could reach them. A "demonstration" had actually been done near the end of the Korean War in a mock attack on Primorye where -36s dropped flares over Vladivostok as Soviet defences were helpless to act against hem. Suspicious types wonder if it's what was what finally brought the war to an end.

but we're just not gonna see anything as backwards as manually operated turrets coming back anytime soon, and I have no fucking clue why such things would even exist in the future.

In the case of SC it's clear they want to establish their setting as a classic, WWII one in space with dogfighting and large aircraft brimming with turrets to engage smaller craft from all directions.

Well, to be fair, if we were to have realistic space warfare, it'd be dull as fuck, so I guess WW2 IN SPAAAACE is the best we can hope for.

It would be Jackie Fisher's wetdream done to the extreme where the first to dectect their enemy and fire would win in an environment that leaves almost nowhere to hide in given the lack of things to lurk behind and the heat signatures spaceships would be giving off leaving everyone like a thermal star.
 
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Well, to be fair, if we were to have realistic space warfare, it'd be dull as fuck, so I guess WW2 IN SPAAAACE is the best we can hope for.
DraQ would like a word with you. As would Children of a Dead Earth.
Let's be honest: That game is dull and only appeals to boring people like DraQ and me. You can't make a 200M MMO on that.
Disagree, partially. 200M MMO probably not, but I do see it as an mmo. Add a proper economy element, make it so that players can form groups like in EVE, and it could be really fun. The actual battles would have to stay as they are, timing of the attacks would need to be something similar to vulnerability windows in EVE. I don't see working well on global level due to TZ differences, but closer geographical grouping would work. One player must be able to control more than one ship for this to work though, otherwise there would be too much downtime between action.
 

DraQ

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Well, to be fair, if we were to have realistic space warfare, it'd be dull as fuck, so I guess WW2 IN SPAAAACE is the best we can hope for.
DraQ would like a word with you. As would Children of a Dead Earth.
Let's be honest: That game is dull and only appeals to boring people like DraQ and me. You can't make a 200M MMO on that.
Disagree, partially. 200M MMO probably not, but I do see it as an mmo. Add a proper economy element, make it so that players can form groups like in EVE, and it could be really fun. The actual battles would have to stay as they are, timing of the attacks would need to be something similar to vulnerability windows in EVE. I don't see working well on global level due to TZ differences, but closer geographical grouping would work. One player must be able to control more than one ship for this to work though, otherwise there would be too much downtime between action.
There are two kinds of MMOs:
  • Ones that carve out their own niche by finding players that are currently not catered for
  • Ones that try to one-up WOW
Anyway, the main problem I see with realistic space MMO is lack of time compression.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
In the case of SC it's clear they want to establish their setting as a classic, WWII one in space with dogfighting and large aircraft brimming with turrets to engage smaller craft from all directions.

That is hardly new, Wing Commander had turrets and eventually the number was reduced to just one on the tail and nobody really used then, even in Privateer.

I think you are missing a thing, one thing is bombers in the line of a A-17 Broadsword that could in a way engage fighters and a complete different one is a Exeter-class destroyer and the demands that have on the players, it sounds nice you can have a carrier but you alone cannot man a entire ship, either the AI takes cares of things but that just leads to having some kind of master weapon fire control system were you see the battleground around the ship and tell what systems to engage, even if you just helm the ship its not going to outmaneuver any kind of fighter/bomber and the turret AI will likely just default to threat/distance priority were it can decide to target bombers first and ignore the heavy fighters that are capable of carrying ship killing weapons such as torpedoes (I never liked using the Longbow in WC III and preferred the more agile Thunderbolt, both were capable of firing torpedoes and the Thunderbolt was often more that enough unless it was anything cruiser and larger), besides classic WWII did not had flying ships and if you want to include then you end up having a problem if you are going to tell players they too can "fly" a Cleaveland-class cruiser.

And there is the fact they will have missiles and torpedoes, WC "solved" the issue by limiting then on fighter/bombers but still, why wouldnt a ship have launchers and be strictly be turrets, in Privateer the Kamekh-class corvette was actually armed with ImRec, IFF and Torpedoes.
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
Imagine an epic SC battle with two capitol ships getting ready to duke it out...

Only to realise that one instance can only fit 50 people max.

So they never actual meet each other.
Waiting For Godot's Spaceship.
 

justincz

Scholar
Joined
Apr 2, 2015
Messages
102
50? this game cant even handle 6 smaller ships at the same time without causing severe stuttering, its been like that for years and they know there is no way for them to fix it.
all its become is a shipsale cashgrab...
 

AN4RCHID

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2013
Messages
4,729
Newer patches can handle large numbers of ships in one area

(twitch streamer audio warning)


I expect they'll bump up the max player count soon as they add more locations in.
 
Self-Ejected

unfairlight

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 20, 2017
Messages
4,092
42 players in a fully simulated world in simulated ships is a large number. What are you expecting, thousands of ships like in EVE online, with several minutes of lag?
EVE is a fully simulated world just as well and it can handle a few hundred players with zero lag. I'm also really curious as to what "fully simulated" means, or are you just spouting marketing bullshit?
Arma games have no player limit at all. You could have over 150 players inside fighter jets over a 270 square kilometre map and you could have the AI battling each other and figuring out situations on their own on the ground all the while. That is actually simulated, not just a few NPCs in space stations and random market change algorithms running in the background.
 

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