This Combat Balancing SUCKS! Here's why...

[Titan2k4]

Hey Everyone,

I am sorry but the relations between fighters, corvettes and large capital ships are so broken. The combat balancing is a mess! And it all has 2 simple reasons:

A.: Shields don't recharge continuously but only after they have not suffered damage for x-amount of time.
B.: Weapon systems have their heating-up mechanic but are NOT bound by Energy Generation of a ship - to get weapon systems power output.

As a result: Any stupid little fighter with half-decent weapons can simply nuke down a Destroyer. The gigantic XL-sized shields (which are WAY TOO WEAK to begin with) won't regenerate as long as the fighter keeps at least one shot coming every few seconds. And since unlike in X3 for example - Sustained Firepower is not dependend on the Energy Generator creating power for weapon systems (weapons recharge rate in MW) - that fighter can not only fire a shot every few seconds and stop that gigantic Capital Warship next to it from regenerating ANY shield capacity whatsoever - But can actually also kill the whole ship slowly but surely. Also because those big ships cant even hit a flying barn when its right in front of them - if they even begin to fire that is...

What a mess... What the heck am I playing here? I started the X-Series for. "TRADE - FIGHT - BUILD - THINK". And especially that "FIGHT-Part" was always a great strength of the X-series, too! Like in X3 - a fighter should not even be able to put a dent into the enormous capital sized shields of Destroyers or Battleships. These enormous ships should easily compensate that bit of energy output a fighter has with their massive shield generation output to not even go below 99% shield after everything the fighter has.

But NOOOO: We needed to bind the Boost to the ship shields and therefore have a regeneration cooldown every time something tabs the energy. And Whoopsy... Now we have worthless piece of shit captial war ships. As if the Ships Generator would seize pumping energy into the shields. Such nonsense! Small weapon systems are almost as powerful as Medium weapons, etc.
This is just horrible and does not really motivate a lot to reach the end-game and control a massive captial war ship from the bridge. Not at all...

[mr.WHO]

I think that's a sad part of X4:
- somehow X4 made fighter combat and dogfights very exiting
- in the same time they seems to neutered capship gameplay significantly.

[CaptainX4]

a big thumbs up. it was always an issue with x games that shields are kinda useless but now they have made it worse than ever. add that turrets wont hit anything any capital is useless. microfighters are the only useful things in the game. there were times when an m6 was able to keep a smaller fleet in bay, that was the reason to buy them but well, now ships are cheap so...

[KreXx]

Couldn't agree more

and since shieldenergy and boostenergy are the same, it's annoying as hell

[ajime]

pretty sure that was just carried over from rebirth. not x3

[csaba]

The whole capital ship system looks placeholder both mechanically and visually.

There are barely any equipment options for large ships.

Most weapons only come in MK1 versions.

Turrets can't aim for Argnu Droppings and do negligible damage even if they hit. "Missile guy" probably missed this dev meeting cause missiles do a ton of damage.

The Behemoth has a proper frontal turret implemented while the Phoneix has 2 rods sticking out of it's front. Showing unfinished design that obviously meant to use the middle section as a weapon placement.

This is after XR where some capital ships were scary to tackle even in a fully upgraded Skunk and when you finally destroyed them you were rewarded with a proper death/explosion sequence.

Here we get firecrackers going across the hull and the ship turning into a husk. They can't even say they have a different graphics engine cause XR VR uses Vulkan as well.

[Revenant342]

Agreed, capships shouldn't have a shield recharge delay, just a steady regeneration rate. Took down a K in a frickin' Discoverer on day one.

[Titan2k4]

pretty sure that was just carried over from rebirth. not x3

I know it was only carried over from X Rebirth because X3 was excellent in that regard. Combat Balancing was amazing. Not necessarily perfect but very well made.
I later found out that the combination of Pulsed Beam Emitter (against shields) and Concussion Impulse Generator afterwards against Armor was Overpowered. But overall: The balancing was great!

You could literally feel that incredible step-up from an M5 Scout or even the M4 Fighters to an M3 Heavy Fighter. The different was brutal! So much more of everything and YET unable to be a real threat to M7 Corvettes - not to mention larger captial ships. However, their weapon systems also weren't meant to fight small fighters - so the big Capital Ships would usually not destroy a fighter (unless armed with Flak) - but in turn the fighter also had no way of even remotely hurting one of them. You needed very large weapon platforms to take on such large ships or stations as only they would provide you with the necessary weapons energy and firepower to deal with them. I am really hoping Egosoft is considering to make some changes here to allow these amazing proportions they had in X3 to exist here, too.

Shield Regeneration stopping makes absolutely no sense.
And the "sustained firepower" of a ship should depend on its energy generation... The Weapons Recharge Rate in MW. That was the perfect way to make sure ships based on their role and size had only certain capabilities.

[nalim27]

Hello,
I agree with OP. Fight is really broken now (except for small ships). When Egosoft will fix turret mechanics then I suggest to redesign all L and XL ships too - they should have big turrets like now to fight with other L/XL (and maybe M) ships and bunch of smaller turrets that will handle fighters and incoming missiles. Small turrets must have faster aiming and of course much lower damage that big ones.

For example military L ship should have 6 big turrets and 16 small turrets on every side of ship (including rear engines).

With that capital ships will have no problem with lets say 4 fighters (that will not use torpedoes). And of course shields must regenerate no matter of damage done to them - just like in X:R and probably in X3.

And one last note - all ship engines must do big damage to some distance - for X:R there was mod for this. It really break immersion when small fighter can park inside big working engine and slowly kill capital ship here.

[razor202]

Totally agree with th OP. Hope egosoft will fix it.

[Titan2k4]

Let's keep this Post up on the Board then to make sure it gets seen.
Very sad that once again - I find myself waiting for crucial updates to not only fix some minor issues but rather to finish an only half way delivered game at release day. When is this horrebdous business practise finally going to crumble? Here's a TOTALLY WILD THOUGHT:

Finish the game first and then enjoy the release with minor Bugfixes and NO BACKLASH for a change afterwards.

[mr.WHO]

Yes, L and LX ships need to be armed better! Maybe not the the point of X-Rebirth (like hundred turrets Fulmekron), but several main turrets and dozen or two light turrets.

On the bright side, seems that forum server stoped sucking.

[CaptainX4]

Let's keep this Post up on the Board then to make sure it gets seen.
Very sad that once again - I find myself waiting for crucial updates to not only fix some minor issues but rather to finish an only half way delivered game at release day. When is this horrendous business practice finally going to crumble? Here's a TOTALLY WILD THOUGHT:

Finish the game first and then enjoy the release with minor Bugfixes and NO BACKLASH for a change afterwards.

well, that train has left when everybody became a gamer and the devs learned that they can sell anything no matter how bad or unfinished, people will buy it, some will even convince themselves that its good while the rest will just put it on the selves and forget about it. back in the good old days only good games sold and the bad ones crashed... just look at star citizen, biggest scam ever and people put millions into it

[aviticus_dragon]

I have to agree, boosting and shields should be two different things with two different icons on the HUD.

[Bozz11]

I just destroyed 3 Xenon P with my eclipse koz they kept boosting and I was just following with travel mode xD
And then I ****** up the shields of a K was too bored to wait till the hull gets destroyed but I could have killed it with my eclipse very easy, I think I'm personnally done with this game until they get some balancing, right now you just need to be moving and the AI can't even hit you with 5+ turrets firing on you... Complete bull.

Game will be great I'm sure but right now the deeper you get into it the more things seem not to be working properly.

[Titan2k4]

I just destroyed 3 Xenon P with my eclipse koz they kept boosting and I was just following with travel mode xD
And then I ****** up the shields of a K was too bored to wait till the hull gets destroyed but I could have killed it with my eclipse very easy, I think I'm personnally done with this game until they get some balancing, right now you just need to be moving and the AI can't even hit you with 5+ turrets firing on you... Complete bull.

Game will be great I'm sure but right now the deeper you get into it the more things seem not to be working properly.

I wish there was no reason to say that but..
Cant agree more. Back to x3, yet again

[Imari]

Game will be great I'm sure but right now the deeper you get into it the more things seem not to be working properly.

Pretty much this. The first few hrs of gameplay is all good. The advanced content though is either broken or is not fleshed out.

[Hardie]

i would like the recharge of shields to be tied to incoming damage: big shields need a certain amount of incoming damage to aboard recharge. that would prevent a single fighter to screw a destroyer or carrier.

i also agree on the weapon balancing (amount/placement) to make big ships scarier, but that is better left until after the turret aim fix. Next think i'm worried about is the deploy rate of carriers. haven't seen one deploy a high amount of fighters yet so i cant be sure. Judging from the deploy rate of a miner it seems kinda low though.

[Tadas]

You should always keep in mind one thing - it might be true that if player controlled S ship meets lonely K it will be able to take him down if said K doesn't have any escort, however, that is not case the for AI controlled S ships. And it's very hard to judge combat when turrets are pretty much non functioning (with exception of maybe beams), we should wait until that gets fixed. My personal experience is that S, M ship combat feels fun and can be challenging, piloting a destroyer feels OP, though my experience is very limited as there is not much fighting in my universe yet.

[Titan2k4]

That is another topic, too. The fact that there's so little fighting going on even though there are supposed to be wars taking place on different fronts. If the Universe wants to be simulated well. That's cool. But I think keeping battles going on for players to jump into and participate in should also be a priority even if it means having some scripted fleet spawns. I dont mind if it enables me to Pick a side and have epic battles taking place with me right in the thick of it.