Vehicle Combat

[Thanatos]

We have created a thread for each weapon category in Neocron to allow easy communication between you and us. Here you can post your first impressions, experiences and suggestions. You can also ask us about changes – for bugs related to the combat area please use this [link] thread.

You will find updates to these threads in the original post as well as in the normal post list – that way you can easily keep yourselves up to date or participate in the discussion.

As we are currently in the Christmas period, we will from time to time present a new „toy“ that you should check out.

Tip: DoY HH4x4 Combat Chaincraft (NEXT HH4x4 Chaincraft, Improved Gatlin Cannon, KeyTL 88, WaffenTL 84)

Missing Features: None

Known Bugs:

[Thanatos]

Now open for discussion!

[CMaster]

Vehicle weapons = HC weapons of equivilant TL is simply daft.
Lets look at all the disadvantages of using a combat vehicle:

Risk - vehicles can easily be destroyed meaning you lose that investment
Versitatlity - you can take a gun anywhere. Vehicles can only be used in some very specific situations
Manouverability - a player with a gun can dodge around every which way, pop inside vehicles, etc. A player on a vehicle gun is only slightly better off than stood still
Aiming - a player with a gun can follow opponets around corners. A vehicle gunner is often permenantly losing lock as their target hops inside
Top out level - in PVP, nobody ever really uses a weapon under TL100. Yet pretty much all the vehicle guns are.
Ammo is ridiclously heavy
Damage types not moddable, resulting in lower effectiveness.
Limited places to get a vehicle out.


And now the advantages:

In certain vehicles you get protection from the elements.
Faster.


So erm, you see my point?
Combined with the fact that many vehicles are now either impossible to ever use (Assault and Advanced Assault gliders) or involve drugging rather heavily on a HC PE which is now a completely gimped class (Heavy Trike, combat hovertec), and the fact that vehicle prices are twice what they were in 2.1, we can cleary see that 2.2 is going to be a combat-vehicle free zone.

We are talking bigass guns mounted on vehicles here, bigger than anything that can be carried. For both logical and balance reasons they should do significantly more damage than an equvilant HC hand weapon. Remember that the situations you can actualy use vehicles in are alraedy limited.
For balancing reasons, vehicle weapons need to aim faster than HC guns. Often combat ends up with people going around objects - with normal weapons this isn't a big problem - you follow the other guy and keep a lock. With vehicles this often simply isn't possible to do, so to compensate for the extra difficulty in mainitng a lock, the reticle should close faster.

In addition, I don't think anyone has ever had a problem with vehicles being best done by a HC PE. So lets either have the HC PE Fixed (come on, strength 81 with PA2 is just daft in a 2.2 world What are HC PEPA 3 and 4 even for? they are impossible to ever wear) or a lot of the gunning seats brought down to a PE's range. Nothing to say that tank's can't always be a little bit BETTER vehicle gunners.

Edit: I'm rather tired and there are probably serveal mistakes, both in my english and logic in this post. The general point - VHC weps need to be > same TL HC weps stands however.

[Brammers]

Have to agree with Cmaster here.

As things stand now in 2.2 tank with a TL90 weapon is going to deal the same damage as a TL90 gun on wheels.

Or if you look at a TL90 weapon on a tank, it looks big. But a rhino is basically a BFG on wheels that should hurt anyone stupid enough to get in the way of a Rhino. The fact that the Rhino is less manoeuvrable than a runner, should mean that a the extra firepower makes up for the rhino's slow speed and manoeuvrability.

I'll get to the other vehicles when I get a chance.

Also for patch 164 (Not check 165 yet) the cost of FSM vehicles have gone up too much, they have nearly doubled in price. 1 million is way to much for a Heavy Assault Scorpian trike. The same applies to Rhinos. Runners with no barter can build Rhinos for about 260k on retail. This is now closer to 470k on test server.

[Safunte]

double vehicle damage,
make all the vehicles usable..... from what i remember its impossible to use some of the driver/gunner seats...
basically, that means, your damage is way too low, and your requirements are too high.

vehicles were far better off the way they previously were, you unbalanced a perfectly fine part of neocron

[Lifewaster]

From my testings with a 2.2 rhino vs a WB, my tank did about 2-3 times more dmg when he jumped out and fired his ravager at the mob instead.

The main use of the Vehicle turned out to be as a portable obstacle to hide behind when hunting WBs :p

[Dribble Joy]

Also agreed.

[awkward silence]

Have to agree with the above as well!

Atleast double the vech damage. Start from there!

Then we shall see...

[Sylow]

Actually i posted something like this in the german part of the forum the last days, too.

My first line of thought also is, why should all combat vehicles be limited to the tank? The "classic" driver is the spy, but the only vehicles a spy can use which another class is blocked out of are all the airborne vehicles. All of them both in retail and now are rarely worth using.

My suggestions to fix this would either be:
1. drop the STR-requirements on those combat vehicles where the driver has a gun available completely. Make damage scale based on your H-C and WEP skills. (Or alternatively, also not completely wrong, base it on H-C and VHC. )

2. introduce a bigger variety of vehicles. So the combat hovertec may still have the high STR-requirements, but a light combat hovertec may be created which uses DEX or INT instead.
Edit: For bigger variety, the vehicles with INT or DEX requirements for the guns may also have a different kind of weaponry. Why not replace the gattlin of the combat hovertech with a pulse laser cannon on the combat hovertech and mounting a tripple-plasma-bolt launcher instead of a tripple-rocket launcher on the scorpion assault trike?

You gimp yourself pretty much when making a driver-spy, switching implants will be a must to have H-C available anyways, but being completely locked out is embarassing.

My other line of thought is about cost efficiency. My calculation still is based on the retail prices, on the testserver it would be even more dramatic. Still, just calculate how much somebody looses who goes into an OpFight with a normal pistol or APU or whatever infantry setup. You die, you loose a little cash for the genrep, all fine. The owner of a rhino looses aprox. 250k, the owner of a bomber over 500k.

If vehicles should be cost efficient, a single bomber would have to be able to go into battle against a force of 100 players and still have a decent chance of winning. Of course, this would be totally unbalanced again, i am not insane enough to ask for it.

Rather, my suggestion would be to make vehicles much cheaper to replace. I basically see two options:
1. reduce prices of vehicles and parts at the FMS a lot. When a new Rhino can be bought for 15k and a bomber for 30k, you suddenly also can afford loosing one or even more in an OpFight. The advantage of this option would be that player interaction would be helped a bit, the disadvantage is that vehicles would not be "special" any more.
2. Keep destroyed vehicles in the ASG-List so they can be patched up again. This can be done be either or both of:
2a. Vehicles can be fixed up with the normal "repair" option in the ASG. A full repair should then cost like 20k.
2b. "Destroyed" vehicles can be respawned at the ASG at 99% damage. Anybody with a remote repair tool then can patch it up again. (Considering the price of the nanites, this won't be significally cheaper than the mentioned 20k. )

I personally would prefer variant 2 with both options available. Vehicles still will be expencive to get and thus being a bit of something special. Still, they are not a complete loss when being shot down, so risking them in a playerfight will be acceptable.

And, as also mentioned by others, vehicles should be stronger than the normal infantryman. A rhino requires two, a bomber three people to operate. Thus those vehicles should be able to handle themselves well against groups of the same size. And since you have to "gimp" yourself a good deal when skilling yourself to use a bomber, you're a rather easy target anywhere out of the wastelands. (So, most of the time. ) Thus i would also say that vehicles should give some noticeable edge in the wastes and not be a disadvantage, as they are right now.

[Lifewaster]

Regarding the cost and repair of broken vhc options, I would prefer this to be a tradeskill function eg: letting tl 100 recycle fully repair broken rhino keys

Or if it is to be implemented at the asg terminal let it require recycle to do, so for example if your tl 7 bike is destroyed you can repair it at the asg provided you have 7 recycle skill.

Apply this to epic vehicles also, so ppl using quads will need to spec 17 recycle to repair them if destroyed (so we just keep the lower credit cost as the bonus for epicness)

#######

This would also establish a new tradeskill market, as you could then "hire" recyclers to restore your vehicles.

[Dribble Joy]

1. drop the STR-requirements on those combat vehicles where the driver has a gun available completely. Make damage scale based on your H-C and WEP skills. (Or alternatively, also not completely wrong, base it on H-C and VHC. )
This has been suggested before and would be a good idea. TL of normal weapons isn't such an issue with the caps removed, so if someone only has 20 HC, they're not going to do well on a rhino gun anyway.

[Lifewaster]

Please add this option to the ASG menu :

"Click here to recall to depot all vehicles currently lost in various sectors of the game due to sync bugs !"

[Sakletare]

So... i can't access the test server since my account wasn't active december 1. :(
But i wanted to say that i hope that vehicles finaly will get a clan/faction tag just as drones have. You can't have a battle with vehicles on both sides when noone knows who is friend and who is enemy.

[Lifewaster]

After patch 166 , it seems improved..........

I was able to kill WBs/spiderbots at battledome quite easy using scorpion trike, heavy assault scorpion trike, combat hovertech, combat chaincraft, assault bike, assault quad.

Also tested the guns on Reveller, Doy reveller and was able to kill the same mobs about same speed.

#####

In First place was the heavy assault scorpion trike.......this owns WBs nicely , with salvos of 3x 100dmg rockets.....WB is dead before trike has lost 20% hlt. (main trick is to keep long range to minimise dmg to you)

Next place was assault bike , doing 1x 100 dmg rockets (about 1/2 the overall freq of the scorpion)......WB dead before bike lost 30% hlt. (keeping long range helped minimise dmg)

Next place was the Next Reveller 30mm cannon , with a high freq doing 4x 50 per burst.
Doy Reveller was similar , but with about double (extremely high) freq and half dmg of next reveller.

Combat hovertech and combat chaincraft did also a 4x 50dmg , quite similar to reveller freq/dmg wise... WB died when veh was at 70% hlt.

Assault quad , did 2x 40 dmg rockets , seems a little weaker then assault bike (lower freq overall despite double shots) WB died with quad at 50% hlt.

Combat wheeler was a complete joke, its grenades cannot be aimed at all, they always land 5 feet ahead of where the veh is pointing , and do weak dmg if they ever even manage to hit

######

(didnt test the Rhino or gliders/bombers)

######

Overall it seems like the vehicles (single user in particular) are effective now for PvE , WB/rare hunting in particular , and since the driver is now also protected from PvE dmg it makes hacking solo WBs easier also.

The assault scorpion trike really is quite awesome......and if its extra gunner is used that adds similar dmg to what the combat hover/chain do , on top of the rocket dmg.

PS:
It also felt like aiming was easier with all the vehs , not sure , but perhaps its a side effect of removing the INT reqs somehow.

[awkward silence]

Vechicles still need to be a bit more stronger if they are to be worth it.

[Chuck Norris]

Multiple different weapon types on a vehicle.. for example adding some sort of explosive (aoe) weapon on the rhino and/or some kind of machine gun.

or a little red car with mini rockets! :)

Do not know if this is common knowledge yet but it seems LE'd gunners do no dmg with the vehicle's weapon as of 2.2, come on fix!

so far liking 2.2's balanced experience gains and the ability to Interact and effect LE'd and LE'd characters I wish that idea would be expanded on even further.

[D31C1D3]

I like the idea of multiple weapons. I think a new tank with 2 or more turrets would be kicking rad. Have one turret fire HC, one fire a DEX weap, and maybe some sort of psi-use integrated into vehicles would be very interesting.

[Apecc]

I was just wondering that, how much does that HH 4x4 Chaincraft v.1 cost?
would be awesome to get one tho ^^

[J J]

Don't know if this has been raised anywhere else but seems a major, major problem with vehicles atm - gunners get no xp from killing mobs. Please tell me this isn't deliberate? Vehicles were a great way for levelling runners, both drivers and gunners, has there been any official word on this anywhere? It just seems ridiculous.

[Apecc]

erm... im just asking the prize of it .. like ***k nc ^^
im pretty new one with driving and i would rly like to know how much i need
to save money for it :p

[Eneco]

I was just wondering that, how much does that HH 4x4 Chaincraft v.1 cost?
would be awesome to get one tho ^^

I think it's about 350k from the vehicle smuggler in industrial 2. You need hack the door to access the smuggler though.

[Bredahl]

erm... im just asking the prize of it .. like ***k nc ^^
im pretty new one with driving and i would rly like to know how much i need
to save money for it :p
Do the next epic.. you get a Reveler for that (when it gets blown up, you can just go to a ASG and get it again)