Boarding and the trouble it brings.

[҉]

It would still have to be a really crappy ship for gunfire in the main areas to have even a chance of damaging something important, though. As was previously stated, getting into a firefight in the armory or engine room might be a very bad idea, but if anything seriously bad happened because of shooting in the hallways or whatever you would have to wonder whether a ship like that was worth trying to capture in the first place.

[joykler]

jedi dit you even consider my extra hit boxes idea because that would get us out this mess

both weapons would really have advantages over another

[҉]

jedi dit you even consider my extra hit boxes idea because that would get us out this mess

both weapons would really have advantages over another

A guy with a gun will still beat a guy with a sword pretty much every time. Real life has precision hitboxes, and you don't see any soldiers running around with swords today, because assault rifles are just better.

[joykler]

real soldiers dont have power armor

and you dont have to make it realistic

[Keon]

Or laser swords. But the truth is, a gun is still better.

[Chairman_Tiel]

The reason I bring this up in the first place is because I'm concerned about how guns will fit into gameplay. Even Flan's which has been standing for close to over 2 years now hasn't got it 100% right - most servers with it run exclusively that mod in a TDM setting. It just doesn't blend with Minecraft all that well, even if it's made that you can't hit the side of a barn that only serves to annoy the user who gets cut down by some bloke with a stone sword while wielding an AK-47 or other assault rifle. It doesn't make sense.

And while I'm not trying to pull the 'realism' argument out of my bum, that'd be the only way to balance it out - by making guns sucky initially and gradually making them better as the player progresses in tiers, when even the early arquebuses killed a man in one (1) shot. You could try to nerf them by increasing reload times, but then we end up back where we started with everyone opting for what's effectively a sniper rifle.

I'm saying offer a progression tree like so:

MELEE

Sword

Spoiler:

Vibrosabres

Spoiler:

Plasma Blades

Spoiler:

Lasersabres

Spoiler:

GUNS

Bows

Spoiler:

Steampunkish Gun

Spoiler:

Heavy Blaster (dramatically slows movement but still portable)

Spoiler:

Laser Cannon (Stationary)

Spoiler:

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, ranged weaponry becomes more cumbersome armor gets better in order to compensate. Speaking of which:

Standard Armors

Spoiler:

- Modernesque Armors (think Kevlar and such) -

Spoiler:

Planetside 2 esque Infantry Armors

Spoiler:

Powersuits

Spoiler:

No but really

Each tier corresponds with its others in similar positions, so ideally you'll be equipping yourself with some variation of Heavy Blaster and the Planetside 2 esque Armors - the same tier. Now, Note that each is a category of items, not just one. So there are 3 'levels' in Standard Armors, for example, Leather, Iron, and Diamond. In the next tier, Modernesque Armors, there would also be 3 successive levels, each negating damage from weapons within their own tier and those prior with each upgrade. However, weapons from tiers above the armor's will still inflict close to full damage, meaning that a charge of Lasersabres against people armed with Planetside 2 esque Armor is going to become a rout pretty quickly. In addition, just as with the 'vanilla' tier, upgrading to a new weapon level within the tier (ie, Iron to Diamond) would largely balance the playing field against someone who did similarly with their armor. It'd only be when you advance to a different tier completely that you gain a massive advantage; armor would all but repel damage from prior tiers (so like Planetside 2 esque Armor would have shields that'd render anything but sustained fire from Steampunkish Guns ineffective), and weapons, as mentioned earlier, all but ignore prior tiers of armor (A Plasmablade would pretty much cleave you cleanly in half, diamond armor or not)

This offers a ton of variety and provides something of a 'tech race' between opponents as they scramble to get the edge on one another - except this time it won't be just about getting diamond. Also, on a sidenote, armor could be enhanced by other modules like stealth and such to provide an even more varied playing field.

[ACH0225]

+1

I like the idea, and feel that also perhaps items can be recycled. That way, when you advance/raid, any junk you don't need can be reduced to ~half of its original cost. This solves the problem of chests of Diamond accumulating when you need real diamonds. This would promote the salvage industry, which would in turn prevent massive orbital junk piles from accumulating after battles, as the hulls would be quickly recycled by opportunistic "crows" following fleets. The fleets themselves could carry salvage vessels, and mop up after battles. Armor could also be made of previous armors, like a diamond helm can be reinforced with Kevlar to make a special helm that is better than the rest, making people who carefully manage their resources come out on top. We would probably want a Tier between Planetside/blaster and laser gun. Maybe plasma weapons? Shielded armor? Perhaps a plasma rifle-middle range damage, effective against light armor, rapid fire, and then perhaps nano-armor that has cool orange line and stuff, and repairs itself very very slowly and protects slightly better than PS2 armor, but with a shield by default.

TL;DR- Recycling, Salvage, class between PS2 and Forerunner

[҉]

I guess the question is whether we're talking about battles between two well-established factions or between one established faction and a bunch of stone-weilding barbarians. This tech tree looks like it would fit pretty well into vMC/the extremely early FC tech tree, and thus is great for battles between stone-weilding barbarians (or nearly so, anyway), but by the time you get to spaceflight you should have advanced past all that. What I get from the first part of your post is that guns don't fit into MC, which is something I completely agree with and is why I've never been even slightly tempted to play Survival or anything like that with a gun mod. However, guns do fit in with FC's tanks and planes and stuff, so that should be less of an issue. If an established faction decides to bring the wrath of the gods down upon some unfortunate barbarians, they should be able to do so and probably not even take casualties (keeping high-tech factions from pwning new ones is something that needs to be resolved, but not like that). I guess I'm just not sure how you get from that to the idea of removing guns or whatever. Once both factions are at the highest tier, and they probably usually will be, you're back exactly where you started. Not that that's a bad place to be, IMO, and I'd support this tech tree in the mod, but I don't know why it's here.

[Chairman_Tiel]

I guess the question is whether we're talking about battles between two well-established factions or between one established faction and a bunch of stone-weilding barbarians. This tech tree looks like it would fit pretty well into vMC/the extremely early FC tech tree, and thus is great for battles between stone-weilding barbarians (or nearly so, anyway), but by the time you get to spaceflight you should have advanced past all that. What I get from the first part of your post is that guns don't fit into MC, which is something I completely agree with and is why I've never been even slightly tempted to play Survival or anything like that with a gun mod. However, guns do fit in with FC's tanks and planes and stuff, so that should be less of an issue. If an established faction decides to bring the wrath of the gods down upon some unfortunate barbarians, they should be able to do so and probably not even take casualties (keeping high-tech factions from pwning new ones is something that needs to be resolved, but not like that). I guess I'm just not sure how you get from that to the idea of removing guns or whatever. Once both factions are at the highest tier, and they probably usually will be, you're back exactly where you started. Not that that's a bad place to be, IMO, and I'd support this tech tree in the mod, but I don't know why it's here.

You'll notice there are guns in the tech tree, just relegated to a secondary role. As I've said, the logic behind it is that to compensate for advances in armor tech, weapons become more cumbersome, to the point of having to be all but immovable to take down the highest tier of infantry armor. The idea is to make melee weapons a more and more appealing option as you advance through the various techs and not just have everyone wielding sniper rifles of doom. This in no way affects tanks and planes (what, are we gonna arm our VTOLs with giant chainsaws? ), but I imagine building those and whatever mechsuits end up in the mod will require some significant investment (ie not just duct taping a propeller and wings to a boat ala Flan's mod) that could be spent on improving individual ground forces instead.

That also begs the question of how starfighters and such factor into things. The main point I bring up here is this - stuff like sniper rifles and jets are usually hindered by skill-barriers or a limit of the total people using them in most games. In Minecraft, that's no longer possible; people are going to be manufacturing away. Die in a bomber? Pull one up from the one bajillion you have sitting in your ship and go again. This doesn't really hurt all that much if you can't store them in item form, but if most people on the ground are using melee weapons, well...It'd make SENSE, but there really wouldn't even be a reason to fight on the ground (even without my proposed tech tree); everyone should have their personal jet or mech. It becomes less grand warfare and more a handful of people duking it out with high technology. The obvious solution would be to make them expensive to deploy, but that makes all the stuff we've seen in sci fi franchises almost impossible to replicate without uber *$.

I don't know. I don't expect my ideas to accepted, I'm just putting my thoughts on the table here as far as potential obstacles in gameplay.

[Keon]

I agree, and that's the problem with it. Once you get to the point of having a powerful battlecruiser, a fighter is nothing. And once a fighter is nothing, what is ground combat?

I guess I have two ideas: Only dropships, droppods, Orbital Strikes, and fighters can go into atmosphere. Everything else explodes. Therefor, as long as a fighter can be shot down by an AA cannon and Orbital Strikes can't be abused, ground combat is seperate from space combat. Therefor, to capture a planet, you need two things; control the solar system, then control air and ground, and ultimately destroy their resistance on ground.

[ACH0225]

Orbital strikes aren't quick or clean. To perform one, you first have to make sure an opportunistic frigate won't take potshots at you. That means orbital control, and even if the fleet doesn't nuke you, you're still screwed because they can just pour dropship a down.

[҉]

Something that needs to come up if we're discussing ground combat is NPC soldiers. We've got NPC crewmembers on ships, but we should also have NPC infantry grunts to make up armies, even if they're not far beyond the level of the Mine & Blade mod. There will never be enough players around to have ground battles be even remotely interesting without NPCs, so more important than balancing player weaponry would be balancing those weapons in terms of the NPCs that can use them. For example, to prevent sniper rifles from becoming the only weapon used in the game, make training an NPC to use an assault rifle cost ten credits and take a day, while training an NPC to snipe effectively takes five hundred credits and two weeks. Players having super sniper rifles of doom wouldn't matter if the player wasn't the single deciding force in any ground battle. While players should definitely be able to make a difference, they shouldn't be able to kill an entire armor column by themselves, Rambo-style. That should require at least a couple of NPCs who've been trained and equipped with rocket launchers or some such. Given that it would cost an empire essentially the same to manufacture a pistol as it would to manufacture a chaingun, it's much easier to balance (and makes a bit more sense IMO) by having the NPCs have to be taught to use weapons for varying cost/time, which depends on the quality of the weapon. They could all pretty much be born knowing how to use a pistol, so if you wanted a really cheap army you could set up a pistol factory and just throw guys at the enemy, whereas if you wanted an uber sniper army of destruction you'd have to have training camps or whatever, and you'd end up spending a lot more time and effort achieving it. If both sides have 500 soldiers, the weapon the player uses won't make a ton of difference and thus isn't a huge problem.

[ACH0225]

But built up empires would either have literal millions of soldiers with pistols just swarm planets, or a few thousand super skilled snipers that can kill planets.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

Unless of course we limited the number of soldier that COULD FIT ON A SHIP!!!!

But if they got access to the Gate, then sure, swarm away.

[Error]

kekeke.