Combat delta-v conundrum

[joonicks]

What Ive been told is that the issue with high delta-v is that it makes combat too difficult, so, my thoughts on a possible solution:

New module: Higgs Projector

reasonable range, spin-up, duration, cool-down

Increases the mass of a target by an amount that drops delta-v to manageable speeds.

How to defend against it? Some options;

1) Warn that a higgs is spinning up with you as target, give time to hyperspace out, once its active, hyperspace is impossible or takes much longer than usual.
2) Activating a projector also gives you drawbacks, equal to, lesser or greater than that which your target suffers.
3) (New module) Higgs Projection Mirror: gives your agressor drawbacks, equal to, lesser or greater than what you suffer.
4) (New module) Higgs Decoy: eliminates or diminishes drawbacks of being targeted by a projector.

Any or all defences could be mixed in.

Modules could come in (many) different flavors with different bonuses and drawbacks, costs, etc.

Will this solve your combat Dv so you will leave my trader Dv alone?

[bszlrd]

I think there is a misunderstanding. DeltaV shouldn't affect close combat that much, apart from long range interceptions. Acceleration is what's important, because it directly dictates the speed of the combatants relative to each other.
When I did some testing a while ago, combat was a lot more enjoyeable with accelerations topped at around 7G. Ships weren't speeding around at ludicrous speeds next to each other, and it felt closer to I-war 2 for example.

DeltaV is more important, when you want to intercept a ship at long range, because if your top speed is lower than the target's, even with only a meager 1 m/s, you will never be able to catch up with it. As far as I know, there's no long range interception in Pioneer as of now. iIm not even sure the autopilot is capable of it.

In theory lower accelerations won't affect travel times as much as a nerfed deltaV, because most of the time you are coasting without thrusting anyway.

And my idea about nerfed deltaVs aren't just because it's more realistic. If you recall, I talked about it in conjunction with an in-sys jump capability, and my main point with it was better gameplay by moving the player closer to the places where things could happen, and providing narrower passages, so there's more chance for ships to meet each other.
Without insys jump, nerfing deltaV won't have point game-play wise. On the other hand, higher deltaVs from before the last rebalace pass shrinked the systems quite a lot, and ships felt like toys too.
Sure thing current stats are far from perfect, but at least they strenghten the sense of scale.

[joonicks]

ok, make up your minds. whats the problem?

close combat or interception?
acceleraton or top speed?

I thought Pioneer was a game of exploration, combat and trading. But you seem eager to nerf exploration and trade into oblivion just to have combat
Pioneer was clearly based on Frontier and as I recall Frontier didnt really exhibit any of these elusive problems you talk about, inspite of having high acceleration and uncapped top speed.

[FluffyFreak]

You don't remember the "jousting" in Frontier?

[joonicks]

yes I remember the jousting and I dont think you can ever get away from that by capping delta-v and restricting G-forces. what you want is non-newtonian physics. which in my opinion can be done with a "combat-module", alter the physics during combat, not during the whole game.

I dont think it matters if G forces is capped at 100, 10, 1 or 0.1, if your opponent is operating under the same laws, newtonian laws, youll always have jousting.

[bszlrd]

No, eith lower accelerations jousting can be mitigated, because you actually have time and room to react and maneuver because your opponent didn't swinged by you at ludicrous speed to a huge distance, just to start over. Like imagine jousting as very elongated ellipses. The lower the acceleration, more circular those ellipses will be.

Also I don't have to make up my mind, because I just presented my observations.
And as I said, lower acceleration most likely won't have much impact on travel times, because the acceleration and deceleration phases are like 10-20% of any transfer, especially on longer trips.
And having enjoyable combat should't be mutually exclusive to trading and exporation, if we put in the needed planning end experimenting.

Also we already have a "combat module" because you can set your frame of reference to the opponent (ctrl+left mouse), to utilize Set speed mode against the other ship.

[bobtheterrible]

You don't remember the "jousting" in Frontier?

Nope..... Pause - move turret - unpause - click - pause - repeat.......... yes, I was a very dull boy.... :)

As I lack the math am not even going to try and enter a discussion about delta-v other than I find it hard to conceptualise trying to catchup with something very fast moving only to start dancing around it when I 'arrive'. My understanding of space is that once spotted it is very hard to hide and thus avoid incoming fire. One way to mitigate this in game is to have "very" limited effective weapon ranges requiring ships to close to a range where manoeuvrability is meaningful/fun. One other option might be to give ships something to fight "around" - asteroid(s), large ship debris, space stations etc.. trying to keep an eye on where your opponent is and avoiding that rather large rock(s) could be quite fun. Heck if it is big enough it could also have a significant gravitational field which the pilot would need to be weary off. Missions could be used to bring players into these situations. This would require no need to change the physics engine other than to perhaps reduce the rates/thrust to prevent the play catapulting themselves back into open space. I dont know if any of this would work?

[DraQ]

Ehm... a few points:

• Delta-v has pretty much no impact on combat if it's already in the range allowing casual interplanetary travel.
• Likewise acceleration has negligible impact on travel or exploration since delta-v is the limiting factor.
• Limiting delta-v is solely for realism's sake* - which IMHO is important for Pioneer, because otherwise there is ED with it's bullshitted-up (oh, sorry, "tweaked") Newtonian
• Proposed device would break physics pretty hard - see above.
• Proposed device would also do nothing to combat we can't accomplish in a much saner and simpler manner by tweaking acceleration.
• If we do want delta-v limited enough to affect combat despite also needing it much higher than that we can have different "gears" to our drives - low thrust, high exhaust velocity, efficient for travel and high thrust, low exhaust velocity fuel guzzler for combat, takeoffs, landings, etc. This would yield desired gameplay without harming realism in any way (it's actually one of the key features of currently developed VASIMR drive).

Finally:

• Game-time and real time are already decoupled in Pioneer via time compression. If something takes too much time but otherwise makes perfect sense we should deal with it by adding extra time compression level, not by breaking thi thing in search of some misguided compromise where we need none.
• We also need a delta-v budgetting tool allowing us to lock the amount of fuel we want to conserve for later and keep it out of autopilot's hands.

We may not be aiming for diamond hard sci-fi, but, again, IMHO, having pew-pew space opera but still going great lengths to not get stuff wrong (Niven style) seems like a reasonable goal.