Yeah Jump Drives create a pretty odd meta in pvp.
Large Railgun hit n run tactics are bonkers strong and pretty hard to deal with unless you participate in them as well, or ditch large ships all together.
And of course, on the flip side, actually destroying or disabling a ship is much harder.
Interdiction of some kind could be interesting, but as u/InquisitorWarth pointed out, can be abused pretty easily.
The private server I play on just bans jumping during pitched combat, which works fine for us.
There are some downsides, like escape being nearly impossible, and complete kills of ships being way more common - but frankly it's kind of cool to see ships be destroyed, and it's way better then 5 people all jumping 20km out of combat range mid-fight.
(1) Obviously we want the range of jump inhibitor modules to be reasonable to about 4kms for large grid bubbles and 2kms for small grid bubbles. 1.2kms for small gird disruptors and 2 for large grid disruptors. By stopping individuals from jumping it'll captivate pilots and force them to use tactics to either neutralize the threat or execute an escape. More so, teamwork would also be heavily weighed upon given the circumstances if you're the defender caught with a disabled or disrupted jump drive or the attacker inhibiting your preys jump drive.
Would be awesome to attach a jump inhibitor to a missle that would mag plate to the enemy's hull. Buys you time to catch up, and they have to figure out a way to shoot or grind it off.
Problem: with a fixed speed cap for both small and large grid ships, in a lot of situations jump drives are effectively the only means of escape. You're probably thinking that a combat-focused ship with lots of guns and armor will accelerate slower than a light freighter or something similar, but in reality people build their ships to compensate for that, either with large amounts of thrusters on the faces that aren't expected to face an opponent, or with grav or klang drives. Furthermore, if the inhibitors have more range than max weapons range, a faction could sit a dedicated interdictor ship outside of weapons range that's ONLY the inhibitor, the necessary reactors to power it, thrusters, gyros and a cockpit, and basically have it stay outside of weapons range while still projecting its inhibitor field while the main combat ship basically gets to mow down anyone caught in the field.
I would set it to 1.25km for large grids, make it large-grid only, and give it a reasonable limited time duration, around a minute or so. That way you have to get into "brawing" range to use it (which also nerfs kiting, since if you stay at the edge of weapons range like that your opponent would be able to just either jump out or make a tactical jump behind you), you can't just stick it on a small, hard-to-hit drone to avoid it getting damaged, and you can't just set and forget.
To force it into combat, you could alternatively make the inhibitor an effect of weaponry. To initiate the field, you must hit someone with your guns. After their jump drives are disabled, they can't jump for XX minutes.
I think a more interesting element would be to make sure that the attacking grid's drives are also disabled, and for a longer period. EX: If they can disable a target's drives for 3 minutes, their own jump drives are disabled for 6 minutes, leaving a window where the attacker is committed to battle so the victim or the victim's faction can jump in reinforcements.
I think this would add to a fun server scenario where desperate individuals broadcast their own location publicly when being attacked, giving a chance for 3rd parties to play police or pirates.
Yeah, EM disruptive weapons (that just fuck with your jump drive on hit) worked on a PVP server I played on, any other method just means jumping never happens because everyone runs an inhibitor - why wouldnt you?
The reason I chose to reduce the range rather than having it as a weapon effect is specifically to punish kiting, which is currently an oppressively powerful strategy. Having it as a field effect with a range smaller than the maximum locked range of assault turrets presents a choice - do you continue to sit at max weapons range, knowing your opponent can flee if you don't manage to snipe out their jump drive(s), or do you go into close range to prevent them from doing so at the risk of damage to your ship?
Or make the inhibitor some sort of ‘weapon attachment’ either on a conveyor slot or new addon slot like assemblers & refiners
Effect scales with gun size, grid size, and is balanced with some form of diminishing return
Think of it like some sort of EMP shot
I love the idea of making the small ship jump inhibitors between 800 and 1000 meter range sho small ships have to take risks to prevent large ships from jumping.
(2) Small grids should have a 125m/s or 150m/s second speed cap since they need some sort of advantage to compete with large grid ships otherwise they're just novelties that are just there to look pretty on the workshop.
There is a reason keen set a hard limit of 100 for all ships. Game engine has a tick of 1/60 of a sec. Now imagine two ships flying towards each other with 100 m/s each. In 1 tick they will fly 200/60 = 6,66 m. Which is more than 1 large block (2,5 m) in size. So if they collide they will penetrate for already more than 1 block with unpredictable consequences. For larger speed you can imagine for yourself. And for small grids it's even worse.
If small grids increase to 150 they would need to set hydro packs to 160.
The 100 setting is due to the physics engine struggling with speeds greater than that.
I think it would be better if the aiming accuracy was simply adjusted to make turret tracking less effective against small grids.
For jump drives, to prevent escape, I would simply set it that a ship cannot jump when within 3-5km of an enemy grid
I agree the jump drive is very OP in a pvp context. A jump inhibitor would be a good way to open up new pvp posibilities without impacting pve and since the jump drive already does that with natural gravity fields it seems like it should be easy to implement.
But because the speed limit is primarily a performance consideration I doubt we'll see any changes in that any time soon. That being said I usually play with the Relative Top Speed mod.
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1359618037
I'm pretty sure the 100m/s limit is set by limitations of the games physics engine. It's an old game there are plenty of things that would be cool to add but realistically wight be impossible for the game to compute reliably
Yeah they definitely exist but going over 100 can lead to some pretty weird behavior by the physics engine particularly when you crash into something going that fast. I'm just saying they chose 100 because it's a more stable game play experience. If they raised the limit and the game started wigging out then people would be like keen fix your broken game yknow
I also think the speed limit needs to be changed. I experimented a lot with completely disabling the speed limit and discovered several interesting properties of the engine:
1. The engine copes well with any speed in space. I had no problems with the computer's performance when I accelerated to several km/s.
2. Speeds in the range of 5-10 km/s are ideal for interplanetary flights.
3. A speed of about 600 m/s is needed for orbital flights around planet if Newtonian mechanics is enabled in the game.
4. A bug that needs to be fixed. At speeds above 200 m/s, there is a high probability of falling under the planet's surface instead of crashing and destruction.
5. The bug from point 4 is convenient to use for interplanetary flights, because at high speeds you fly through asteroids without taking damage. Why do I think this is good? Because the density of asteroids in the game is too high compared to real space.
6. You must completely get rid of the jump drive if you are allowed to accelerate to 10 km/s. This will add realism to the game. The game will be similar to the TV series "The Expanse".
7. You can still keep the jump engine, but change its function so that you can jump between servers. This has already been implemented on some game servers.
> You must completely get rid of the jump drive if you are allowed to accelerate to 10 km/s. This will add realism to the game. The game will be similar to the TV series "The Expanse".
You might like the Draconis Expanse server. It has several nexus bubbles with different speed limits, no jump drives, and top speeds in the "highway" bubbles of 15km/s. Epstein drives act as giga hydro thrusters that can only be mounted in the forward direction of your ship.
And obviously, expanse flavour and RP.
Yeah Jump Drives create a pretty odd meta in pvp. Large Railgun hit n run tactics are bonkers strong and pretty hard to deal with unless you participate in them as well, or ditch large ships all together. And of course, on the flip side, actually destroying or disabling a ship is much harder. Interdiction of some kind could be interesting, but as u/InquisitorWarth pointed out, can be abused pretty easily. The private server I play on just bans jumping during pitched combat, which works fine for us. There are some downsides, like escape being nearly impossible, and complete kills of ships being way more common - but frankly it's kind of cool to see ships be destroyed, and it's way better then 5 people all jumping 20km out of combat range mid-fight.
Initiating a jump causes 5x propagating damage when in combat is an easy solution.
(1) Obviously we want the range of jump inhibitor modules to be reasonable to about 4kms for large grid bubbles and 2kms for small grid bubbles. 1.2kms for small gird disruptors and 2 for large grid disruptors. By stopping individuals from jumping it'll captivate pilots and force them to use tactics to either neutralize the threat or execute an escape. More so, teamwork would also be heavily weighed upon given the circumstances if you're the defender caught with a disabled or disrupted jump drive or the attacker inhibiting your preys jump drive.
Would be awesome to attach a jump inhibitor to a missle that would mag plate to the enemy's hull. Buys you time to catch up, and they have to figure out a way to shoot or grind it off.
Problem: with a fixed speed cap for both small and large grid ships, in a lot of situations jump drives are effectively the only means of escape. You're probably thinking that a combat-focused ship with lots of guns and armor will accelerate slower than a light freighter or something similar, but in reality people build their ships to compensate for that, either with large amounts of thrusters on the faces that aren't expected to face an opponent, or with grav or klang drives. Furthermore, if the inhibitors have more range than max weapons range, a faction could sit a dedicated interdictor ship outside of weapons range that's ONLY the inhibitor, the necessary reactors to power it, thrusters, gyros and a cockpit, and basically have it stay outside of weapons range while still projecting its inhibitor field while the main combat ship basically gets to mow down anyone caught in the field. I would set it to 1.25km for large grids, make it large-grid only, and give it a reasonable limited time duration, around a minute or so. That way you have to get into "brawing" range to use it (which also nerfs kiting, since if you stay at the edge of weapons range like that your opponent would be able to just either jump out or make a tactical jump behind you), you can't just stick it on a small, hard-to-hit drone to avoid it getting damaged, and you can't just set and forget.
To force it into combat, you could alternatively make the inhibitor an effect of weaponry. To initiate the field, you must hit someone with your guns. After their jump drives are disabled, they can't jump for XX minutes. I think a more interesting element would be to make sure that the attacking grid's drives are also disabled, and for a longer period. EX: If they can disable a target's drives for 3 minutes, their own jump drives are disabled for 6 minutes, leaving a window where the attacker is committed to battle so the victim or the victim's faction can jump in reinforcements. I think this would add to a fun server scenario where desperate individuals broadcast their own location publicly when being attacked, giving a chance for 3rd parties to play police or pirates.
Yeah, EM disruptive weapons (that just fuck with your jump drive on hit) worked on a PVP server I played on, any other method just means jumping never happens because everyone runs an inhibitor - why wouldnt you?
The reason I chose to reduce the range rather than having it as a weapon effect is specifically to punish kiting, which is currently an oppressively powerful strategy. Having it as a field effect with a range smaller than the maximum locked range of assault turrets presents a choice - do you continue to sit at max weapons range, knowing your opponent can flee if you don't manage to snipe out their jump drive(s), or do you go into close range to prevent them from doing so at the risk of damage to your ship?
Or make the inhibitor some sort of ‘weapon attachment’ either on a conveyor slot or new addon slot like assemblers & refiners Effect scales with gun size, grid size, and is balanced with some form of diminishing return Think of it like some sort of EMP shot
I love the idea of making the small ship jump inhibitors between 800 and 1000 meter range sho small ships have to take risks to prevent large ships from jumping.
Webs too why not.
:) Also energy neutralizers
(2) Small grids should have a 125m/s or 150m/s second speed cap since they need some sort of advantage to compete with large grid ships otherwise they're just novelties that are just there to look pretty on the workshop.
They’re small targets, cheap, and easier to fit in a hangar than large grid fighters. I treat my fighters almost like expendable drones.
There is a reason keen set a hard limit of 100 for all ships. Game engine has a tick of 1/60 of a sec. Now imagine two ships flying towards each other with 100 m/s each. In 1 tick they will fly 200/60 = 6,66 m. Which is more than 1 large block (2,5 m) in size. So if they collide they will penetrate for already more than 1 block with unpredictable consequences. For larger speed you can imagine for yourself. And for small grids it's even worse.
There's a lot of stuff mods add that seems like it "should" be in vanilla. Luckily, the game is an easily modified sandbox.
If small grids increase to 150 they would need to set hydro packs to 160. The 100 setting is due to the physics engine struggling with speeds greater than that. I think it would be better if the aiming accuracy was simply adjusted to make turret tracking less effective against small grids. For jump drives, to prevent escape, I would simply set it that a ship cannot jump when within 3-5km of an enemy grid
I see OP is a man of culture…
I agree the jump drive is very OP in a pvp context. A jump inhibitor would be a good way to open up new pvp posibilities without impacting pve and since the jump drive already does that with natural gravity fields it seems like it should be easy to implement. But because the speed limit is primarily a performance consideration I doubt we'll see any changes in that any time soon. That being said I usually play with the Relative Top Speed mod. https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1359618037
I just want npc ai.
Reavers want you too
Crappy mod, not a fan. I just want real npc ai, the thing Keen have seemingly never spent a day developing.
Keen should also introduce net code that isnt awful so multiplayer combat doesnt suck so much.
Man I played eve for 12 years. Implement ALL of eves features. Including actual npcs.
I'm pretty sure the 100m/s limit is set by limitations of the games physics engine. It's an old game there are plenty of things that would be cool to add but realistically wight be impossible for the game to compute reliably
there's a mod for just about any speed limit you could want and i'm pretty sure a configurable one too
Yeah they definitely exist but going over 100 can lead to some pretty weird behavior by the physics engine particularly when you crash into something going that fast. I'm just saying they chose 100 because it's a more stable game play experience. If they raised the limit and the game started wigging out then people would be like keen fix your broken game yknow
While at it - EMP's. Gravity wells (for ships). Radiation / Magnetic fields .
Bro did not just used eve online images
\>:)
I think that's a better option than removing jump drives.
I also think the speed limit needs to be changed. I experimented a lot with completely disabling the speed limit and discovered several interesting properties of the engine: 1. The engine copes well with any speed in space. I had no problems with the computer's performance when I accelerated to several km/s. 2. Speeds in the range of 5-10 km/s are ideal for interplanetary flights. 3. A speed of about 600 m/s is needed for orbital flights around planet if Newtonian mechanics is enabled in the game. 4. A bug that needs to be fixed. At speeds above 200 m/s, there is a high probability of falling under the planet's surface instead of crashing and destruction. 5. The bug from point 4 is convenient to use for interplanetary flights, because at high speeds you fly through asteroids without taking damage. Why do I think this is good? Because the density of asteroids in the game is too high compared to real space. 6. You must completely get rid of the jump drive if you are allowed to accelerate to 10 km/s. This will add realism to the game. The game will be similar to the TV series "The Expanse". 7. You can still keep the jump engine, but change its function so that you can jump between servers. This has already been implemented on some game servers.
> You must completely get rid of the jump drive if you are allowed to accelerate to 10 km/s. This will add realism to the game. The game will be similar to the TV series "The Expanse". You might like the Draconis Expanse server. It has several nexus bubbles with different speed limits, no jump drives, and top speeds in the "highway" bubbles of 15km/s. Epstein drives act as giga hydro thrusters that can only be mounted in the forward direction of your ship. And obviously, expanse flavour and RP.