Yogi Klatt · Senior Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience

Well, that problem existed before already, because a large ship like a Hammerhead cannot just evade the bullets. It has to tank the damage one way or another. But that specific use case actually came out of the playtest. We didn't see that in our internal tests. The behavior of kiting the ships at a large range and just trying to avoid the shots that way while still keeping the firing forward is something that we honestly didn't see before. It might sound odd, but it was like that. So we tried to counter that by reducing the range of the heavy hitters, like the cannons, the ones which have a shorter range now, to allow the fighters to get into range and take down the Hammerhead faster. Though I would still argue that it's not the range that is effectively defining how well a Hammerhead can defend itself. It's always the projectile velocity. And it came up in the feedback that the Hammerhead was supposed to get weapons with projectiles that just fly fast and thus give the ship a better chance to hit attacking fighters. We actually wanted to try that out, but the weapon system cannot do this at the moment. We can change the properties of a weapon contextually, but we cannot change the properties of a projectile. So once that kind of tech has been built in, we can reevaluate that thing. But for 3.14, it was not possible to address. That being said, we would still see any kind of gun gameplay as short-range gameplay. And we do have missiles for medium- and long-range gameplay. But it can be argued that looking forward, we can also implement other kinds of weapons which are more effective well beyond the close-range area.

Mark Abent · Lead Vehicle Engineer

There's also, once we get physicalized damage, things are going to change a bit where the Hammerhead is going to be, as you're saying, more of a tank beast, where it could take more of an impact. It has much thicker armor that the physicalized damage is just not going to be able to penetrate as well as the guns that it's shooting onto fighters. So right now it's probably going to be mostly just a health pool, while in the future when physicalized damage comes along, it's going to be a different type of game. It's where velocity and the projectile masses will be taken more into account. And you're going to see a different dynamic with that. But that's also going with what Dave was saying earlier. We're adding these incremental changes to get to where we want to go, and we don't want to just throw everything in all at once and unbalance the game. We're adding little bits of changes to see how well it affects the gameplay and getting player feedback to change some things with the analytical data.