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[Shadowlord]

It turns to be very easy to skip through the levels without having to spend any much effort on it, if you edit the server config to give carriers 0.01 armor, remove the carrier weapons and bots, start up the dedicated server, connect to 127.0.0.1, and just fly through with a fast ship and blow up the "enemy" carrier repeatedly for ~120 credits every time and a bonus 100 occasionally until you hit Super Admiral (6000 credits).

[Paul]

You could, but where's the fun in that? Working your way up the ranks with improvised ships is half the fun.

[Duriel]

Had a really fun game today, as there was 8 people on a server at the same time. I got to repeatedly blow up Wayward Device, until he blew me up by ramming into my ship, after it was heavily damaged.

Here's the ship I used to blow up Wayward Device if you're interested:

Spoiler: Ship (click to show/hide)

FAKE EDIT: Somehow, I totally forgot that the design had liquid rocket motors installed. Oh well...

[Wayward Device]

So you're Klilidiplomus! That was a fun battle, but I really shouldn't have been ramming you. That ramship, the WDI-Mk. 7 Vorpal, can't really kill any of the "big 4" hulls if they're armored. Well, it can, but only with a ton of low speed impacts. That, coupled with the fact that accurate 120mm is the hardest of the hard explosive counters to ramships ('cos even if you can survive it and hit, the knockback kills your speed) meant I should of just stayed the hell away and concentrated on ramming the ships I could actually kill. But damn, it was so satisfying when I finally got you. I guess the only way to deal with an "armored, turreted 120mm's" situation in a ramship is to wait until the killy doom box is distracted or damaged and go in for the kill, but every run I kept thinking to myself "this time, this time Klili won't notice", but nope. Heh.

Anyway, can anyone give me any advice on getting bombpacks to detonate when damaged? I can trigger them just fine, but contrary to their description and what I've heard a few people say about them I just can't get them to work in a kamizake ram role. I've only fooled around with this in the arena, in case that has any relevance.

 

[Aqizzar]

Well, this sure dropped off the first page in a hurry.  After eight days, my PayPal purchase finally cleared, so I've finally joined the party after everyone else got tired of it.

Was having quite a bit of fun until some guy started camping the newb server with an anti-newb device.  I don't know what it is, but it destroys anything in one hit and never misses because its shots have a hitbox bigger than the average craft.  It's probably an AI given its impossibly good aim, but I prefer to consider it a person so I don't feel like an idiot for being mad at it.

[Shadowlord]

He's probably using the ballistic CPU, and thinks he's hot stuff because he's "winning." (It costs around $1100 to install on one turret, and basically lets you point at a target and click to shoot at them with any guns on that turret without having to predict where they're going to be or really aiming, as long as it can tell you want to shoot them). It doesn't automatically shoot everyone, and it isn't perfect, so a sufficiently armored ship or a sufficiently fast and evasive ship could evade its shots and potentially take the shooter out. But if you're just starting, it's not really a very fair competition (especially since he could armor up and take several seconds to kill, and you might not be able to yet).

[Girlinhat]

Ballistics CPU is an expensive exploit.  It gives you extreme accuracy in exchange for extreme cost, money that could be spent on more guns or engines or armor!  For that matter, the same applies to turrets.  Anyone good enough with ship engines could mount a lot more fixed guns for the same cost.  But personally I suffer slight lag, and love taking insane-long-shots, so the ballistics with railguns lets me snipe like crazy.  Railguns tend to fail against armor, but most ships actually don't mount much armor.

[Aqizzar]

Ballistics CPU is an expensive exploit.  It gives you extreme accuracy in exchange for extreme cost, money that could be spent on more guns or engines or armor!  For that matter, the same applies to turrets.  Anyone good enough with ship engines could mount a lot more fixed guns for the same cost.  But personally I suffer slight lag, and love taking insane-long-shots, so the ballistics with railguns lets me snipe like crazy.  Railguns tend to fail against armor, but most ships actually don't mount much armor.

This is more or less what I was trying to do, with a flying brick with five medium engines and a bazillion guns on the front.  The problem is he could knock me out in one hit from about 0.8mi, so it basically a fruitless effort.  I think I tried my fast laser-turret on him, but it can't dodge any better than the brick.

[Girlinhat]

For that you'll need armor, simple enough.  If you don't have any armor, then swap servers, or speak on the server and be like "Hey, you're being a dick and I'm just a noob."  It's worth a shot, a lot of players are genuinely courteous when approached and told they're being a dick.

[Shadowlord]

I was just flying this ship (for a couple hours) - there was only one server up, that I saw, so that's where I was (the Goon Haven server):



I built it on the Louse platform, and used a ballistic CPU to control the 120mm cannons (on a platform on a large turret). The mini-gun's turret has a robo-targetter and mouse-aim (so it has to be manually aimed but gives guidance), since the ballistic CPU can only aim one type of ammunition accurately (and is super-expensive; I could control multiple turrets and railguns with it, but I wanted to try putting a minigun on for dealing with more evasive targets - there were people dodging my cannon shells  ).

The armor plates seem to be exceedingly effective, although I haven't been hit by any missiles, torpedoes, or the like yet to really give them a test (someone was ramming me at one point, and only finally killed me after I had taken heavy damage from weapons fire and multiple previous rammings).

I'm using the new input slavers to provide pivoting and directional control of the engines. They seem fairly effective. (I have it set up with 180-arc turrets under two of the thrusters, with multiple input slavers assigned to each engine and one to each of the turrets (I could skip the turrets and assign them normal keys, of course, and it's not obvious whether an input slaver is pointing to a turret or something mounted on it unless you move the thing mounted on it, which unlinks it from anything linked to it, currently, but it seems fairly effective. Actually, it spins a bit too fast.).

I may fiddle with it more tomorrow and add turrets to the other two engines and see if I can configure it to strafe as well. The problem (in combat) would be the latency involved in the turrets pivoting the engines to the strafe configuration, of course, along with the latency already involved in using those engines rather than actual maneuvering thrusters.

P.S. 8 armor instead of the normal 5. I'm not 100% sure if it only damages whatever is hit, or all the armor at once. It seems like it's just whatever is hit but in practice I never see an armor piece go, just the percent going down until the entire ship blows up. Of course, I think this frame's durability is very low compared to the armor.

[Girlinhat]

What exactly does the input slaver do?

[Shadowlord]

You map keys to it with both primary and secondary functions, and then assign it to control things via those functions. The advantage is that you can assign multiple input slavers to a single component, and as many components to an input slaver as you want (well, there may be some practical limit somewhere, who knows).

E.G. You can have an engine that thrusts forward whenever you press a or w, or backwards if you press d or s, for example, with an a/d input slaver and a w/s input slaver which both have the engine added to their devices.

[Girlinhat]

Ah, so in that case, I could have A fire the right engine, D fire the left engine, and W fire both engines?  This way you can change direction like a pod racer (who remembers that game?).  Sounds like it'd also be easy to do engines on turrets, and bind engine+turret to q/e to allow strafing, to turn the engine and fire it, while a/d would just fire the engine, or something.

Very interesting, and mostly relevant to engines I think.

[Wayward Device]

Input slaver is really nice, especially if you're doing silly unfoldy stuff that has multiple configurations. It's also worth noting that the update that brought us the input slaver also more or less eliminated the megalag associated with components stacked directly on top of each other/massively nested, which is great. No more crashed servers from it/massive lag in the designer when moving something with lots of stuff stuck on it.  Finally, as ever, that was me ramming Shadowlord on Goonhaven.

[Girlinhat]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Just gonna leave this here.  Works on tilted engines and input slavers to avoid maneuvering engines entirely.  8x 120mm on ballistics + salvo + plenty of ammo, can tear through ships pretty well with a persistent barrage, making it good at "streaming fire" from a distance and pounding anything close up.  The forward armor gives it quite a bit of protection as well, although since it has no Stabilizer it can sometimes be tricky to face your enemy all the time, especially as the cannon fire tends to rotate you.

A bold frontline "big ship" it can go toe-to-toe against other armor ships and just wail on them.  Despite the small engines, it's also quick enough to reach the battle line eventually, and the "spread" of the engines gives it good turning speed and fancy "swept wings" in flight.