Galaxy gunships and drop pods as well as other side grades.

[Kipper]

You seem to be comparing PS2 with PS1.

I wasn't in PS1 when they brought in GG's.... but whatever happened there, and in fact, whatever happened with ANYTHING in PS1 is out the window for PS2. There will be similarities, vehicle names, basic shapes and uses - but the whole setup as far as armament/toughness/handling is gonna be different and known only to those who've played so far (SOE staff and the few journalists).

If they'd come up with a whole new set of vehicles with different names, it seems this conversation wouldn't be happening... But you should just think about it as different vehicles that happen to have the same name.

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Kipper

You seem to be comparing PS2 with PS1.

I wasn't in PS1 when they brought in GG's.... but whatever happened there, and in fact, whatever happened with ANYTHING in PS1 is out the window for PS2. There will be similarities, vehicle names, basic shapes and uses - but the whole setup as far as armament/toughness/handling is gonna be different and known only to those who've played so far (SOE staff and the few journalists).

If they'd come up with a whole new set of vehicles with different names, it seems this conversation wouldn't be happening... But you should just think about it as different vehicles that happen to have the same name.

The exact values don't mean much when the intrinsic properties are the same.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Figment

The exact values don't mean much when the intrinsic properties are the same.

We don't even know what kind of weapons a GG will have in PS2.

It may very well be that ES fighters can strike at a GG without any danger, meaning that even if there were other AA units guarding the GG, its sheer size would allow rapid strikes by a few air to air fighters to decimate it.

The Lightnings new Skyguard turret may end up being so powerful on direct hits that a couple of Lightnings could knock a GG out of the sky before the GG could even take a single one of them out.

It's not just that the armor and speed and damage may be different for the PS2 GG's vs the PS1 GG's, it may be that their role is entirely rethought.

As kipper noted, they are retaining the names of a lot of vehicles and weapons, and some of them are similar to their namesakes, but clearly there are some significant divergences. The Liberator has missiles instead of bombs now. I don't see why the Galaxy Gunship couldn't be significantly reimagined.

And if this turns into another "It would be have to either be overpowered or underpowered, there is no middle ground" situation, I give up trying to argue on the matter, because that's just a bullshit idea.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in support of having an overpowerd unit dominate the battlefield. In fact, I'm not the biggest fan of how powerful MBT's were compared to Lightnings or how powerful HA weapons were compared to most other weapons in the first game, so I would actually like to see the lethality of a lot of weapons and vehicles brought slightly closer in line with each other, not spread out into a bunch of mostly useless weapons, with a few overpowered weapons that everyone always uses.

I want to see all vehicles/weapons/classes/items get as close to an equal amount of use as possible, and I want them to get used because they are all useful, just not overpowered.

I just firmly believe that something similar to a Galaxy Gunship can fall into that balanced spectrum, and none of us can honestly know if it will end up balanced or not until we get our hands on it.

The devs have tended to be pretty tight lipped about whether something is in the game until they have a little more firm data, so that suggests to me that they have created at least some kind of preliminary GG variant and done some testing on it. If they think it is worth keeping, they know better than us, at least until we try it out ourselves.

Lets just all plan on exploiting the hell out of the GG in beta, to make sure it isn't as overpowered as some fear, or that if it is exploitable, it gets fixed. It's a variant, not an entirely new unique vehicle, so axing it if it ends up universally being a bad idea wouldn't even be a huge loss of time and resources.

[Figment]

Can you know in advance whether a Micheal Bay movie will have explosions and a bad plot?

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Figment

Can you know in advance whether a Micheal Bay movie will have explosions and a bad plot?

Can you know in advance if an action movie will have explosions and a bad plot?

You're thinking it will be too similar to PS1. If there is anything we have seen, it's that the devs aren't afraid of changing things up.

[Mechzz]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

...

The Liberator has missiles instead of bombs now....

Did anyone else see this tweet from arclegger:

https://twitter.com/#!/Arclegger/sta...21139598209025

Strong hint at return of bombing role for Libby?

[Kipper]

Originally Posted by Figment

Can you know in advance whether a Micheal Bay movie will have explosions and a bad plot?

Actually, no. You can at best make an educated guess based on previous information available.

Movie 1 and Movie 2 are independent creations (as Planetside and Planetside 2 are) - so you can't actually KNOW what similarities there are unless you've got insider info - all the info we have is very general, we don't know much about balance yet.

Its possible a movie director could make 5 gritty action films and then come out with a romantic comedy just to change it up. It may not be likely, but its still possible.

[Figment]

You don't know Micheal Bay then.

A tank is a tank, when it is heavier than another, you know some basic properties in relation to another tank. Unit type is half the indication you need. They don't call it a Gunship if they are going to make an ANT out of it! If something is airborne it gets a set of basic traits, due to flight. Assumptions on those are things like the answer to questions like: 'faster or slower than a fighter?' etc. Simple questions giving you an idea of what they are like in comparison on each trait.

Names are not just to keep veterans happy, but also communicate roles to players, new and old alike. You are the one making assumptions based on nothing but fear of getting it wrong or hope that devs know what they are doing.

If you know it has more crew, than that gives an indication of the balance, as individual players have to be worthwhile regardless of their role. That means dps, speed and armour indications depending on unit type. No it does not say if you need a three or four to one ratio, but that's also not the balance I'm talking about. I'm talking about general balance and how many units of what is better than one unit of itself. Furthermore, I give an indication of what type of balance with another unit would be needed and I check what situation it goes into with how large a portion of a squad.

So if you get a big crew into something, general rule of thumb is more armour. This is true in any game, but especially for PS. Initial balance discussion only needs order of magnitude. Specifics are fine tuning. You can't balance something that is fundamentally broken. If you base a GG on storming a heavily fortified base full of AA like they did in PS1, then you just break combat for situations where this magnitude of resistance is missing. You have to balance for the amount of AA you can expect anywhere in the field. And if you can bring in theory 20 GGs than by definition of unit type properties, this is harder to deal with than with 50 tanks.

Yet would they balance for encountering small units in the field? Like say one or two AA tanks? No, it would make the amount of players in the GG relatively worthless. That too is an indication of relative strength and this is what bothers me, all the answers to little questions give a bigger picture that is worrysome. :/

[Mechzz]

Originally Posted by Figment

So if you get a big crew into something, general rule of thumb is more armour. This is true in any game, but especially for PS. Initial balance discussion only needs order of magnitude. Specifics are fine tuning. You can't balance something that is fundamentally broken. If you base a GG on storming a heavily fortified base full of AA like they did in PS1, then you just break combat for situations where this magnitude of resistance is missing. You have to balance for the amount of AA you can expect anywhere in the field. And if you can bring in theory 20 GGs than by definition of unit type properties, this is harder to deal with than with 50 tanks.

I have to say I agree with this. You get good examples of this effect on game balance design if you consider how other "major" online FPS games work:

CoD avoids vehicles completely. There are no true driveable tanks, jeeps, planes etc. Anyone in the game can kill anyone else in the game on a pretty even footing. In other words, the CoD Devs decided they could make their game the most "fun" by avoiding balance-hell altogether!

BF series allows limited tanks and planes. I'm always surprised at how fragile tanks are in BF games (1 or 2 AT hits, 1 or 2 AT mines and you're dead), but I believe their philosophy is to limit the power of any single unit. Aircraft can be trickier to kill due to the lack of decent AA (at least in BF:BC2 which is my most recent experience). The balance to this seems to be to make the planes/helis hard to fly (at least, I can't and crashing them is an internet meme). I'm going to assume for my argument that if the BF planes were as easy to fly as the PS2 planes seem to be, then in a BF game they would be as fragile as BF tanks.

but PS allows everyone to drive whatever they want within cert, resource and plant benefit limits. So you could have 10, 20, 30 GGs circling your base, or 100 tanks, etc.

In the BF tank model this would not present a balance issue, since the individual units would be fragile, not much stronger than the cumulative HP of the crew, and grunts would have a reasonable chance to kill the GGs. So the use of a GG would be limited by how much extra fun was to be had flying as a team trying to keep a powerful but fragile unit alive, NOT by "omg this is soo powerful, I can kill everyone!"

If the GG is made too powerful relative to common group sizes of single units, it could become an annoyance to the players going up against it, since you will need to travel about in packs or risk being picked off.

Now, I can hear the "teamwork" card being played, but realistically, people will always want to run off to the next base to attack. And having to wait on an armoured column to form up, while it will suit the military-minded, will probably not suit someone who wants fast-action modern gameplay.

TL;DR - big powerful single units are a deterrent to fast-paced gameplay and reduce the fun of players going up against them by requiring an equal level of organisation to beat the single unit. We learned that with BFR's and need to be sure that putting "a BFR with a bigger crew" into the game won't break it.

Lots of words, Beta will judge.

[The Janitor]

GG's are sexy. This game needs as much sexy as the devs can cram into it. Balance is irrelevant. That is all.

[Senyu]

This thread feels like the forums 5 months ago. A whole lot of speculation/theories that can't be tested until we get more info/play time.

[Kipper]

The way I see it is that everything has at least one effective counter.

Actually, everything seems to be able to counter everything else, whether you're in a tank, on foot or in an aircraft, you seem to have to make a choice between AA,AI,AV and live with not being (as) effective against the two things you didn't pick.

If one team can get organised enough to pull 20 GGs and fly them in formation, concentrating fire and generally surpressing the hell out of everything then they may well be pretty unbeatable, but that's not the unit thats overpowered, thats the team being well organised - exchange GG's for tanks, infantry squads, whatever - doesn't matter - a lot of something in one place is going to be more powerful than a few of something.

The opposing team is free (and encouraged) to organise themselves and pull the effective counter if they want to shoot these things down, but that isn't even the only option.

Assuming a GG takes 5 crew and 20x5 = 100, and server pop-cap of 666 per team, that would require 15% of your population to be in that group so 85% left to cover the rest of the continent. An opposing empire could choose to give up that base and move their forces elsewhere, with a 15% advantage in numbers on other parts of the map, they should make some good gains.

[Figment]

Kipper, there are a lot of problems with the post you made here:

Originally Posted by Kipper

The way I see it is that everything has at least one effective counter.

Actually, everything seems to be able to counter everything else, whether you're in a tank, on foot or in an aircraft, you seem to have to make a choice between AA,AI,AV and live with not being (as) effective against the two things you didn't pick.

Unless you are an aircraft that has air-to-surface power, particularly not when it has high firepower or high endurance to compensate for medium firepower. This is actually a unit type that does not get hit by any sort of significant deficiency. This was true for the PS1 Reaver and GG in particular.

The Wasp and Mosquito had both low endurance and limited firepower. The Lib had high firepower and reasonable endurance, but the bombs were often hard to put on target so it wasn't very efficient.

IMO, effective counters would suggest that a single unit can beat another single unit. Otherwise you have a dependent unit fighting an independent unit. This is particularly true for AA, which is a unit type that is extremely dependent on others.

If one team can get organised enough to pull 20 GGs and fly them in formation, concentrating fire and generally surpressing the hell out of everything then they may well be pretty unbeatable, but that's not the unit thats overpowered, thats the team being well organised - exchange GG's for tanks, infantry squads, whatever - doesn't matter - a lot of something in one place is going to be more powerful than a few of something.

The opposing team is free (and encouraged) to organise themselves and pull the effective counter if they want to shoot these things down, but that isn't even the only option.

The GGs can handle any kind of enemy, ground, air, infantry, AA, tanks, doesn't matter; they are hazardous to all of those. AA does not. AA ONLY hurts aircraft and they are a liability when also fighting other units.

That means that when you are forced to get a huge percentage of people on AA duty to fight of the GGs, the resistance against the remainder of the enemies (with support from the GGs) is reduced severely.

While being in a GG does not really reduce the threat of your team against specific unit types. Ground units, air units, infantry and AA units can after all, all be engaged by a large group of GGs.

Assuming a GG takes 5 crew and 20x5 = 100, and server pop-cap of 666 per team, that would require 15% of your population to be in that group so 85% left to cover the rest of the continent. An opposing empire could choose to give up that base and move their forces elsewhere, with a 15% advantage in numbers on other parts of the map, they should make some good gains.

If the opposing empire to the GGs moves on... The GGs move on. Avoiding is not possible, moving is simply postponing or relocating an engagement with the GGs, the loss of ground is not necessarily compensated by applying more pressure elsewhere.

In fact, the GGs may move with you and now both your sites have been put under overwhelming pressure. When will you be able to make your stand?

Since GGs are capable of ignoring terrain... I don't think it matters much where you go. With tanks, it's a different situation, you can create choke points for instance to trap large groups of tanks and limit their movement while shooting them like fish in a barrel. There's no barrel to trap GGs since aircraft do not "do" choke points.

[Satexios]

I think fig means this:

Regarding Michael Bay

[xSlideShow]

I'm still not understanding why we need 2 gunships... What happened to my liberator.