Would GSF be more fun without gunships?

[NathanielStarr]

Ok gunships. You can manage to deal with them, but it almost seems like the thing to do is build up your railgun and stay just close enough to shoot at people, but also close enough to run to your launch ship if you are attacked. It's the troll class for GSF. Any half-decent gunship will out kill all but the best pilots for the other crafts. Is it a necessary role to have these?

 

The question is does it really add something to Galactic Starfighter? Would it be better if you didn't have the sniper class and it was about slugging it out between fighters? What do you think Gunships add? Do you think it was necessary to have them? GSF isn't a traditional MMO with tanks/healers/DPS so what do you think the motivation was to add snipers that can one shot ships? Were they trying to emulate FPS? Should they have tried to emulate FPS and if so did they succeed?

Edited December 27, 2013 by NathanielStarr

[codycroft]

Yes, it's a glass cannon meant to be a hazard for other players. It really is the rock, paper, scissors for the game. The game would quickly grow... systematic and stale with 24 scouts shooting here and there. I'm sorry you don't like being one shotted, but feel better that a lot of brave pilots got one shotted in the SW movies. You're in good company.

[Berdilio]

NO! It is a free kill for my mastered flashfire...

 

I was too late to get subbed to try the gunship for myself but unless its used with teamwork a lone gunship is not a threat to anyone else's fun. If anything it adds a different layer of fun of having more things to watch out for than missile locks or dog fighting.

 

I have no clue how fun they are to play though so if that's what OP is getting at I can't claim to have any experience on that end of the game.

[MCaliban]

I have fun playing one, so I'd say 'no.'

[GooseGrims]

i dont think they should be able to one shot anything, i dont pvp alot in any game some but not alot but i have never noticed a one shot ability in any others, sure in FPS snipe someone in the head always 1 shots but shouldnt they need to hit a vital part of the ship then like the engines?

 

on a side note i think they should look at ships turning radius so you can actually dog fight and not end up flying circles with the other person with neither of you every getting a shot off until one gets sick of it breaks off and the other chases (yes sometimes its me that breaks off first sometimes is the other person, really depends on who gets bored first i guess). and if it would be that much easier to dog fight they may need to increase ship health and/or shield.

[GooseGrims]

or maybe give the turrets a def against gunships hitting them too far for the blasters to reach, maybe some sort of torpedo that doesnt lock but atleast forces the gunship to move after shooting at a sat? would give them something else to watch out for and they wouldnt be able to camp one spot. Edited December 27, 2013 by GooseGrims

[Berdilio]

i dont think they should be able to one shot anything, i dont pvp alot in any game some but not alot but i have never noticed a one shot ability in any others, sure in FPS snipe someone in the head always 1 shots but shouldnt they need to hit a vital part of the ship then like the engines?

 

on a side note i think they should look at ships turning radius so you can actually dog fight and not end up flying circles with the other person with neither of you every getting a shot off until one gets sick of it breaks off and the other chases (yes sometimes its me that breaks off first sometimes is the other person, really depends on who gets bored first i guess). and if it would be that much easier to dog fight they may need to increase ship health and/or shield.

 

As far as dog fighting goes its not all never ending circles in my experience.

 

Using the x (breaks) to hard stop as you are pitching around to turn towards a foe that is moving will often get you a few seconds for you to unleash a burst of lasers/rockets. Alternatively if you feel confident in your timing/skills at watching your opposing players graphic in your target you can hit your turbo thrusters to get enough distance to give an opening to fire but this puts your opponent in a more advantageous position if they have faster reflexes and see what you are doing first and slow down to lock on to you.

 

I like the gunships in GSF they add something different cant say its better or worse but its different.

[GooseGrims]

As far as dog fighting goes its not all never ending circles in my experience.

 

Using the x (breaks) to hard stop as you are pitching around to turn towards a foe that is moving will often get you a few seconds for you to unleash a burst of lasers/rockets. Alternatively if you feel confident in your timing/skills at watching your opposing players graphic in your target you can hit your turbo thrusters to get enough distance to give an opening to fire but this puts your opponent in a more advantageous position if they have faster reflexes and see what you are doing first and slow down to lock on to you.

 

I like the gunships in GSF they add something different cant say its better or worse but its different.

 

yea i do the breaking and for the ships that have it i sometimes boost for about 6k and do the 180 turn, if they are a slow striker i can pull this off, if its a scout then i have to hope they didnt follow soon enough. just have to get better at it i guess lol

[Beslley]

I click heads- I mean ships, so I'd be really bummed if there wasn't a sniper ship.

 

So no, I think it would be less fun without gunships.

[paowee]

it would be more annoying imo to not have gunships. too many good satellite humpers are emerging and sometimes its just impossible to kill them. impossible = exaggeration, but you get my meaning Edited December 27, 2013 by paowee

[Ramalina]

Coming from more of a flight sim perspective, Gunships are like highly mobile unguided AAA batteries.

 

Annoying, and dangerous if you happen to be in their ideal kill zone, but not nearly as much of a pain as radar guided AAA or passively guided SAMs. Like older AAA units, gunships are not that hard to kill if you know what you're doing and there aren't too many of them packed together for mutual supporting fire.

 

If you think Gunships are bad, thank your lucky stars that they didn't put in spacetroopers with MANPADS. Too small to see, no warning that you've been fired on, usually oneshot or cripple you if they hit, and there's NEVER just one.

 

Trust me, it could be far, far, far worse than it is.

 

Actually it would feel a bit weird to me if there wasn't anything filling an air defense role. The whole visceral hatred of gunships by a lot of scout and striker pilots, seems quite normal to me. You're not supposed to like air defenses if you're a combat pilot (unless they're friendly air defenses, it's ok to like them).

Edited December 27, 2013 by Ramalina

[Danylia]

The answer will always be subjective. People who play (exclusively) Gunships will say no. I personally find Gunships boring and would actually feel like a cheater if I would play one, so I say yes. But until there will be a really massive outrage against them, they will, and should, be left alone.

 

In fact, lone Gunship (or two in >8vs8 matches) is fine. The (double) 2 Gunships/1Fighter/1Scout Premade is what destroys all the fun for me.

 

Disclaimer: The following is a trolling jab based on personal experience, and hence subjective

Also if you would remove Gunships, 50% of Republic players would be left with nothing to play.

[Helig]

GSF would definitely more fun without satellite-humping. Maps are awesome, and built for creative flying - unfinished sections of starships under construction, pipelines, support beams etc. But the fact is - if you want to be useful, then you're either humping the satellite, or you're sniping people humping the satellite from under a nearby asteroid, or you're moving towards a satellite to hump it/peel enemy humpers off of it.

 

There's no free flying. There's no encouragement towards fancy high-speed maneuvers for breaking chase - you fly towards hard-to-navigate areas to have a bit of an ace contest, enemies just disengage and fly towards the satellite that you've abandoned and lol at you for being an idiot and giving them access to it.

[Ramalina]

GSF would definitely more fun without satellite-humping. Maps are awesome, and built for creative flying - unfinished sections of starships under construction, pipelines, support beams etc. But the fact is - if you want to be useful, then you're either humping the satellite, or you're sniping people humping the satellite from under a nearby asteroid, or you're moving towards a satellite to hump it/peel enemy humpers off of it.

 

There's no free flying. There's no encouragement towards fancy high-speed maneuvers for breaking chase - you fly towards hard-to-navigate areas to have a bit of an ace contest, enemies just disengage and fly towards the satellite that you've abandoned and lol at you for being an idiot and giving them access to it.

 

Good point. I think a lot of that comes from a reward system that says, "keep your fast moving maneuverable ship as close as possible to a large stationary object to win." Rather than 'occupying' (and how are we doing that from inside a starfigher's cockpit anyway) a satellite, it would make much more sense for one side to be trying to destroy the sats, and the other side trying to shoot them down before they can. Or to protect/destroy shuttles carrying techs and slicers who are going to board the sat to take it over. That way you would still have an easy to evaluate PvE objective that you're competing over, but the pilots are free to fly over a much larger area in potentially trying to achieve that goal.

[Itkovian]

GSF would definitely more fun without satellite-humping. Maps are awesome, and built for creative flying - unfinished sections of starships under construction, pipelines, support beams etc. But the fact is - if you want to be useful, then you're either humping the satellite, or you're sniping people humping the satellite from under a nearby asteroid, or you're moving towards a satellite to hump it/peel enemy humpers off of it.

 

I agree, satellite humping is an issue. There are ways to counter it, but still a good humper can make it very difficult to cap a satellite... though all it means is that to gain a sat being humped you need local superiority and a couple of people picking him off as he flies around, which is not unreasonable (requiring superiority to gain the sat).

 

The main problem is it can be _very_ frustrating trying to down a sat humper when you're the only good pilot trying to kill him and everyone else is off dogfighting (or otherwise don't notice or care about the humper who is preventing your side from winning). But how much of that is the humper's fault or your side's poor teamwork? Though a case could be said that a solo tactic requiring teamwork to defeat is bad design in the first place.

 

Nemarus posted a good suggestion about this a while ago, in fact, which basically meant changing the area where sats could be capped, but I'm not sure how feasible that is (and it had the drawback of making gunships even more effective at stopping sat caps).

[Grayseven]

Yes, it's a glass cannon meant to be a hazard for other players. It really is the rock, paper, scissors for the game. The game would quickly grow... systematic and stale with 24 scouts shooting here and there. I'm sorry you don't like being one shotted, but feel better that a lot of brave pilots got one shotted in the SW movies. You're in good company.

 

Glass cannon? Hardly.

[Armonddd]

Yes and no.

 

I like that gunships encourage players to engage in combat outside of the objective and/or a dogfight with their current target. Without them, (even) matches would consist almost entirely of satellite humping. That would make for a very boring game. (See also: GW2 beta demos.)

 

I don't like that gunships can get kills from invisibility. It's not usually true that a gunship can one-shot a target while out of range of all enemy sensors, but it can happen. Much more likely is the gunship lands a shot on someone in the middle of a dogfight who's too distracted to reasonably notice the gunship (and, odds are, is facing away when the gunship starts charging its shot). One thing I really enjoy about dogfighting is the skill involved; if I die, it's often because I screwed up. I can deal with that. But when a gunship one-shots me, or finishes me off when I'm distracted by two other guys, I don't feel like I could have done anything to prevent my death, and it's frustrating.

 

I also don't like the implementation of ion cannons. They're great support for your team, and that's a good thing - ranged utility has, in the games I've played over the years, always proven to be much better design than ranged damage. On the other hand, when you get hit by an ion cannon, you're essentially banned from the game. It makes sense from the lore standpoint, and there's similar examples in real life dogfighting, but...this isn't real life, this is a game.

 

And that's my biggest complaint about gunships: when they're doing their job right, they're not fun to play against. I don't have one myself, but the sniping playstyle ruined TF2 for me because it was so boring (and I also sucked at everything else). That just seems like poor design to me.

 

The best fix would be to turn the gunship into a support ship, not an artillery ship. Essentially, I'm saying that I wish they had rebalanced the bomber and released it instead of the gunship. Even a slightly problematic bomber would be less frustrating to play as, with, and against than the gunship is proving.

[NzFox]

They need a serious looking at. The base gunship is not that much of an issue, it works as intended...high damage, long range, low mobility. Once it is upgrade it can one shot anything with a charge up of a second or two and run away faster than any other ship if someone gets close...nothing should have 3 times the range, be able to one shot anything, the best defense, and stealth. There is also the issue that they can not miss from range..the way the targeting works it is flat out impossible to miss a shot from 1000m+

 

Its also a issue of the maps ...particularly the one in space is way to open, allowing a team of 8/12 gunships (as i frequently see the pubs on The Harbinger piloting) to be completely unstoppable.

 

Chances are they will not get the needed balancing until after early access though

Edited December 28, 2013 by NzFox

[Soul_of_Flames]

They are definitely important to have. But they need to be re-tweaked and re-imagined, in my opinion.

 

To be honest, when I first heard about them, I thought they were like long-range artillery... not a sniper.

[Beslley]

I also don't like the implementation of ion cannons. They're great support for your team, and that's a good thing - ranged utility has, in the games I've played over the years, always proven to be much better design than ranged damage. On the other hand, when you get hit by an ion cannon, you're essentially banned from the game. It makes sense from the lore standpoint, and there's similar examples in real life dogfighting, but...this isn't real life, this is a game.

 

Playing against Ion Cannon gunship is the least fun thing ever. I run slug gunship and if you don't get the jump on an ion gunship they just lovetap you and it's over.

 

"Let me try to outsnipe hi-OH WAIT I CAN'T NO WEAPON POWER. Okay then, I'll just get out of range wait for my stuff to come up and I'll try agai-HAHA NO WAIT I HAVE NO ENGINE POWER EITHER. OKAY I GUESS I'LL JUST SIT HERE AND WAIT TO DIE"

 

It just makes me irritated that I didn't go ion cannon, honestly, because it's pretty much a hard counter to everything. I think ion cannons definitely need to be looked at especially with the gunship implementation because as is they are stupidly good and aggravating as hell.

 

I also think bypass needs to be relooked at or they need to buff HK back up to 100% crit chance because right now EVERYONE is taking bypass because you can oneshot people with it.

[renegadeimp]

I also think bypass needs to be relooked at or they need to buff HK back up to 100% crit chance because right now EVERYONE is taking bypass because you can oneshot people with it.

 

Thats a slight exaggeration. You can only one shot very underskilled ships. Try one shotting a mastered ship. Even a gunship cannot do that unlessthe other ship went full dps with absolutely no mitigation at all.

[OddballEasyEight]

"Would GSF be more fun without gunships?"

 

No.

 

No more fun than it would be without strike fighters or scouts.

They all fill their role and just because gunships fill a previously unconventional role in space sims it doesn't make them less important or fun.

My friend actually pouted about the inclusion of gunships when he first heard of it.

"why would they have a ship with a 'sniper' weapon that has to stand still to aim?" he said.

"why not?" I asked, and he couldn't come up with a response.

 

No, the gunships add to the game, they aren't OP and they are perfect cheap kills for my advanced scoutship

[OddballEasyEight]

GSF would definitely more fun without satellite-humping. Maps are awesome, and built for creative flying - unfinished sections of starships under construction, pipelines, support beams etc. But the fact is - if you want to be useful, then you're either humping the satellite, or you're sniping people humping the satellite from under a nearby asteroid, or you're moving towards a satellite to hump it/peel enemy humpers off of it.

 

There's no free flying. There's no encouragement towards fancy high-speed maneuvers for breaking chase - you fly towards hard-to-navigate areas to have a bit of an ace contest, enemies just disengage and fly towards the satellite that you've abandoned and lol at you for being an idiot and giving them access to it.

 

Well it's early days yet

I heard talk about a scenario where one side has to attack a capitol ship and the other side has to fend off the attackers.

Sounds like fun to me

I wouldn't be surprised if a few purely deathmatch type maps show up with no objectives other than "kill the enemy".

[Armonddd]

Thats a slight exaggeration. You can only one shot very underskilled ships. Try one shotting a mastered ship. Even a gunship cannot do that unlessthe other ship went full dps with absolutely no mitigation at all.

 

I main a mastered Ocula. It happens.

[Armonddd]

My friend actually pouted about the inclusion of gunships when he first heard of it.

"why would they have a ship with a 'sniper' weapon that has to stand still to aim?" he said.

"why not?" I asked, and he couldn't come up with a response.

 

If someone seriously asked me that question, I'd be speechless too.

 

Kidding...kind of. See my previous post. Then ask yourself, why is it that in a dogfighting game there are ships that are specifically designed to break the rules of dogfighting?

Edited December 29, 2013 by Armonddd