Maximum ammount of Gunships?

[Quincebo]

Hello,

Today i played a starfighter match, too bad my team lost.

But the reason we lost was not because the other team was (much) better.

The reason was that the enemy team were using 7 GS's.

So when you die trying to reach 1 or 2 of them, you spawn and after 3 seconds you are dead because at least 4 of them fire away.

 

This is unfair and not fun to play at all.

So please either get a maximum amount of certain types of ships, or let the spawn places be guarded by the capital ship at at least 2.000 distance.

[caederon]

Hello,

Today i played a starfighter match, too bad my team lost.

But the reason we lost was not because the other team was (much) better.

The reason was that the enemy team were using 7 GS's.

So when you die trying to reach 1 or 2 of them, you spawn and after 3 seconds you are dead because at least 4 of them fire away.

 

This is unfair and not fun to play at all.

Hi, your frustration is understandable, but you may want to reconsider some of your thoughts on the matter.

 

let the spawn places be guarded by the capital ship at at least 2.000 distance.

This used to be how it was, actually. It turned out that having the spawns defended by capships in TDM just led to teams getting a lead then turtling behind the capship fire-zone, so they turned it off. The current way is better.

 

So please either get a maximum amount of certain types of ships

This seems like a reasonable idea until you consider... who gets to decide who gets to fly a particular ship class? Who decides how many of each is appropriate? Ship limits are not the answer.

 

It is hard to believe, I know, but running 7 gunships neither guarantees a win nor is a very good idea against people who have played the game a bit. It will beat up on new players, but then so will most ship compositions. You'll just see it coming from closer range.

 

of me playing against a team that fields 6gs at first, then adds a 7th out of 8 as the match progresses. I'll be adding a version of this match with commentary and explanations soon to the GSF School YouTube channel but for now it's just the match, and you can see some of what I did to combat the gs wall. My team has a mixed composition of gunships, scouts, a bomber, and a couple strikes.

 

I also wrote a whole guide for beginners on How to Kill Gunships. You might like to check it out.

 

Once you learn some of the techniques necessary to combat such strategies, you'll have more fun!

 

- Despon

Edited December 8, 2016 by caederon

[Quincebo]

Thank you Despon,

 

It turned out that having the spawns defended by capships in TDM just led to teams getting a lead then turtling behind the capship fire-zone, so they turned it off. The current way is better.

There must be a way to get it working.

Maybe make the capships turrets less strong and be able to destroy them for some extra points?

Or unable to stay in that area longer then 1 minute? Same as a PvP area.

This seems like a reasonable idea until you consider... who gets to decide who gets to fly a particular ship class? Who decides how many of each is appropriate? Ship limits are not the answer.

Well no one decides, let the first people who selected the GS(or any class) be able to use it.

Here is a video of me playing against a team that fields 6gs at first, then adds a 7th out of 8 as the match progresses

You are an excellent sniper, your team had some decent players as well.

But once you, or any good/excellent player is dead and nobody is able to get away from your spawn place within 10 seconds till you get hammered, there is nothing much more you can do.

[caederon]

There must be a way to get it working.

Maybe make the capships turrets less strong and be able to destroy them for some extra points?

Or unable to stay in that area longer then 1 minute? Same as a PvP area.

Just from a practical standpoint, the devs haven't updated GSF in over two years... it is probably best to operate under the assumption that what's there is what will continue to be there, and focus on finding solutions.

 

There are three spawn points per side, it is unlikely that the other team has people on all three of them at once. You can see where they are mainly clustered up, so pick the alternate spawn.

 

What often happens, though, is that when a team is pressured hard and driven back they decide to bottle up and just start piling bombers and gunships on the spawn area (often at the open space middle spawn for some reason). This is almost always a losing strategy that only encourages other teams to swap to gs because it becomes too dense with mines and railgun drones from the bombers to advance scouts into the area.

 

Well no one decides, let the first people who selected the GS(or any class) be able to use it.

I would rather not have my team's chances of winning diminished by being locked out of any ship class by virtue of when I got into a match. If that was the situation, you'd immediately have a flood of complaints like '____ always gets to play gs because he loads in fast!' or 'I never get to learn gs' or 'we lost because _____ was taking up the last gs slot!'

 

One of GSF's great strengths is that you are allowed the tactical flexibility to switch ships when the situation dictates it (with the caveat that you have to do it after you've died). I have a video of a TDM going up soon that demonstrates exactly why this is valuable, where I start in scout, things get too bomber-heavy, so I swap to gs after I die and my side wins. If I'd been arbitrarily locked out of switching ships, that could not have happened.

 

If you limit the number of gunships and who gets to fly them, bombers will run (even more) rampant in Domination matches. Gunships are the primary tool for controlling and removing bomber spam. So, you're left with the decision then to either limit the number of bombers in a match, too, and limit who gets to fly them... or only limit gs in TDM. Even then, Type 2 bombers with railgun drones would be very hard to combat en-masse without sufficient gunships. So you're constantly trying to balance the scales by taking away options from the players, and that is usually the worst possible way to balance a game.

 

The one solution that would solve the issue of 'players not wanting to deal with ____' entirely is if GSF had a custom match lobby like games have had since the dawn of the internet, where you could set up matches with specific conditions (ie no gunships, no bombers, etc) and people could decide to join under your rules or just dive into the general queue. I've been advocating this for years, back when devs still occasionally stuck their head in here.

 

But once you, or any good/excellent player is dead and nobody is able to get away from your spawn place within 10 seconds till you get hammered, there is nothing much more you can do.

I know it is frustrating when you are sorted into a team that is not able to handle the other side. Over the course of the 7000 or so matches I've played, it's happened plenty of times to me. It's important to recognize the real cause of the problem, though, and then identify the solutions to it.

 

Any kind of 'spam' strategy overloading a particular ship type succeeds when the other side is not experienced enough to know the counters or be able to execute them. Scout spam is just as bad or worse, it just takes a bit higher of a skill ceiling to pull off on the spamming side so you don't see it as much on NA servers... but the Euro servers (TRE and Prog particularly) have developed a ton of good scout pilots, so if you primarily played there, your perspective might be very different.

 

Find people to group with. Ask veterans in GSF chat to group up with you and get advice from them. The vast majority of GSF players, if presented with someone saying 'Hi, I'm having trouble with this, can you help?' will do so. You'll learn more, your skills will improve, and with some veterans on your side your team will be better equipped to handle whatever situation comes up.

 

- Despon

[TBDNicodemus]

So from my experience to many GS is countered by scout with pods... LOS is huge... also mobility is key...

 

Bomber is perfect for being up under the node and spam mines with HUGE DR and shields and just don't die.

GS is perfect for dropping the mines and pushing bombers around... also for tagging the tunneled dogfighters trying to run circles around the nodes.

Scout is perfect for running node to node trying to dog fight, flanking GS and pod them down.

Striker is perfect for... hanger candy? I mean they are great vs bombers 1v1... they are good vs GS 1v1... they are fun to use (IMHO) but scouts do everything better besides vs bombers... GS vs bombers are better... bombers hold nods better then fighters.

 

its like bomber is rock, Scout is scissors, GS is paper... then we have fighters which is like chocolate useless in the trinity but tasty on its own...

[Pietrastor]

Hi, your frustration is understandable, but you may want to reconsider some of your thoughts on the matter.

 

Or perhaps hard-coded limits need to be put in place because some teams (TRE Imps) will queue as 7-8 Gunships whole day long.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Pietrastor

[Lendul]

Or perhaps hard-coded limits need to be put in place because some teams (TRE Imps) will queue as 7-8 Gunships whole day long.

Not a bad idea if it were done from day one. No way they are going back and redoing it now though. We have been given the word at cantinas that no more development will be done on GSF unless the player base increases. Which would mean getting new players and then also retaining them.

 

With that said an enforced setup like what you would find in group finder would solve some problems and create others. I would not have a problem with a hard coded and enforced 2 of each ship type being in place. It would not be perfect, but would be better than what we have now.

[caederon]

Or perhaps hard-coded limits need to be put in place because some teams (TRE Imps) will queue as 7-8 Gunships whole day long.

The problem isn't the ships chosen. Those 7-8 players running gs all day would be just as ruinous on your team if they were running all scouts. Which, you may or may not recall, they used to do on TRE all the time. They would be just as bad if they were running 7-8 bombers, which used to happen regularly on Harb. There is nothing magic about gunships.

 

The problem you are facing is skill imbalance, not ship imbalance. You need more people on your side with the knowledge of how to deal with gunships (in this case) and the skill to execute the plan.

 

The only time the developers should allow limiting of ships is if there is a custom match lobby where people can set up 'no _____' matches or 'scouts only' matches to their heart's content and see who joins them. That is the one sensible, tried and true, around-since-they-invented-online-games method to allow people to control their gaming environment if they were so inclined.

 

It is also worth noting that if GSF development had continued on course, they would have rolled out Stealth Ships as the next class, and those would have hard-countered gunships. They would have given meaning to useless things like Sensor Beacon and the de-cloaking portion of Targeting Telemetry. The capabilities of what they had planned (and weaknesses) are well documented.

 

To save you the time of looking it up, go read all this info on Stealth Ships, and instead of asking for hard limits here or removal of things there, maybe instead ask that they finish the development of the thing which would have rounded out the meta.

 

As it stands, gunships, scouts, and bombers are well balanced when the player skill level is roughly equal on both sides. You do not see gunship walls in high level play, because they will lose to people who know how to deal with them.

 

Arbitrarily throwing hard limits on things would not solve any problem and would cause more in ways both forseeable and unforseeable.

 

- Despon

Edited December 10, 2016 by caederon

[Linuxizer]

Gunships totally dominate Lost Shipyard 12 vs. 12 Deathmatches. Kuat Mesas 8 vs. 8 is more favorable to having a mix of ships. LSY 8 vs. 8 and Kuat 12 vs. 12 are somewhere in the middle. Domination matches are more about bomber spam.

 

Despon, that is indeed excellent sniping, but the OP would probably rather see a non-gunship smack down the gunship wall. So here is a LSY Deathmatch where the Empire had up to 6 gunships, including Crashtest-dummy, Mr-Goodkat and Etheria whom I recognized. The NovaDive can be a decent ship for this kind of fight and the match was pretty close.

 

 

Getting a bit off topic, but if you are interested in giving this the Breakdown treatment, go for it!

[Ramalina]

You are an excellent sniper, your team had some decent players as well.

But once you, or any good/excellent player is dead and nobody is able to get away from your spawn place within 10 seconds till you get hammered, there is nothing much more you can do.

 

A large part of what makes more experienced players almost impossible to spawn camp is that they're doing a lot of the mental process of the escape before they spawn in.

 

Where is the enemy team in relation to the spawn points? Where are the most dangerous enemy players in relation to the spawn points? Which spawn point do I want to spawn from? Where do I want to go from that spawn point? How am I going to get from the spawn to where I want to be? What am I going to do when I get there (and what shape is my ship going to be in)?

 

An experienced player is going to be able to have answers to most or all of that list before they spawn. So when they spawn in they're not spending precious seconds figuring things out, they're boosting to where they want to be. That difference in preparation, and in subsequent reaction time, can be about enough to get you out of a gunship's range before they can charge and fire a shot.

 

The great pilots have even scanned the map for Damage Overcharge power-ups, possible engine/shield power-ups on the way too and from the D.O., and may have a plan for how they want to approach the gunships to start killing them using the DO. Even to the extent of having particular pilots that they want to target and having a good guess as to how those pilots will react when targeted.

 

Experience also lets you change your plans much quicker in response to how the opposition reacts to what you're doing.

 

That initial period though, where you don't know what to do, and haven't practiced doing it as fast as it needs to be done in the thick of combat, is a place where going up against groups of gunships and bombers is a rough slog.

 

Gear does matter when dealing with gunships and bombers, and it especially matters if you don't know much about dealing with gunships and bombers. In low experience vs low experience matches teams with gunships and bombers will consistently slaughter those without.

 

In the long run though, skill will pretty consistently beat gear by a large margin. That's why all the GSF old-farts in this thread are telling you to seek education about GSF mechanics and then spend a lot of time practicing in game. In GSF skill is always dangerous, but particular ships and gear are only situationally dangerous.