• From: Dublin, Ireland
  • Registered: 2007-10-01
  • Posts: 1,308

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

Taloraan is plenty balanced for public play, where its hard to get players into capital ships even if you offer to mail them free money. They all go fighter for kills.
During a standard game some or all of those ships will be parked for the first half of the round.

My Favorite Taloraan tactic is taking a lancer or corvette and moving perpendicular to the enemy ships, taking out the repair ship first. Any players that frantically spawn into capships to defend usually end up moving away from me by default so I can move into blind zones.
This usually nets you at least 1 or 2 ships at the cost of 1.


Rebel and Imperial fighters are designed very differently ingame and we cannot expect them to perform the same roles. The Imperial fighter's role in Taloraan is defending the capships, not strike.
One thing I've always liked about Taloraan is the reversed focus o the opposing fighter groups:
Reb- (AW) - Offense fighters/Defend caps (XW)- Offense-fighters/caps (BW) -offense caps
Imp  (TF)- Defend bombers/caps (TI) Offense-bombers Defense caps (TB) Offense caps/Defense caps (ion blast)

The Imps TF/TI have an advantage in any dogfighting situation with an xwing or bwing- both of which ships have a strike role, meaning they are easy to pick off.
If you remove the strike role from the xwing, the ties have no reason to hunt xwings,and the Rebs have less reason to use them.
The Tie Bomber finds it incredibly difficult to get across the map by itself because of the speed of the rebel interceptors and the multirole nature of the rebel bombers/space superiority fighters. It does well in a defensive role, moving with TF support and the capital ships, effectively demping enemy ships that are already engaged and then bombing them while they are more worried about turbolasers.

Torpedoes
Torpedoes need to be looked at, not just removed wholesale from ships that makes sense to have them.
They do negligible damage from just under a kilometer away and incredible damage at ranges of 500m or less- point blank being preferable.
This is completely counter intuitive to the way people expect torps to work- they are warheads and not fuel rockets and are not supposed to be consuming their payload.

The other thing is that a bomber that successfully completes its mission (B-wing, or far more rarely- a Tie Bomber) is now likely very far away from resupply.
It's more effective to suicide or get killed than try and rearm, which is not really what we want from a gameplay point of view. Roleplay fanatics will make the attempt but its a long haul and is not fun.
Balancing torps for gameplay is what is needed.
I'd be in favour of a Yavin like solution where the Reb fighters get a cap on the ordnance they can launch at one time, but which slowly recharges.
Say a Bwing fires off 6 torps instead of 12. He doesnt get to radio mission complete and die, he has more torps loading in the tube.
Its incentive for him to try break off and come back for another pass or fly around the ship shooting at/ getting shot at by ties. In other words, it encourages more dogfighting and participation and less 'torp spam,I'm done here'

Conversely, to give the Tie bomber a leg up, it could get more torps to launch in one salvo (the full 12? 10? 8? ) and rechargeable ion torps. Make it truly a threat to ships and rebs will have to really watch out for them and not just swat them when the opportunity arises.


TLDR:

Fix torps so they do decent damage at decent range
Fix bombers/MRfighters so that they fire less torps in one go, but recharge so they have more reason to stick around and play
Boost TB so it is capable in the 'B' department

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  • Twigs
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  • Registered: 2007-09-28
  • Posts: 4,233

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

RSF Angel wrote:

My Favorite Taloraan tactic is taking a lancer or corvette and moving perpendicular to the enemy ships, taking out the repair ship first. Any players that frantically spawn into capships to defend usually end up moving away from me by default so I can move into blind zones.
This usually nets you at least 1 or 2 ships at the cost of 1.

...............

If you remove the strike role from the xwing, the ties have no reason to hunt xwings,and the Rebs have less reason to use them.

My favourite tactic is engaging the mag locks on my X-Wing or A-Wing, giving Ties a reason to hunt me even if I don't have torps tongue

Bite my shiny metal Tie Fighter!
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10 Reply by evgenidb (edited by evgenidb 2011-08-03 00:00:06)

  • Registered: 2011-07-31
  • Posts: 28

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

Research done!

Well, if you want Cap vs Cap fight (then it'll make some sense to have players in the caps as well), then the solution will be to have something important to capture that only the caps or other big ships can do (just like it was suggested earlier).

But unlike a CP that can be hardly seen, a better solution will be a neutral space station. Maybe a relatively weak space station in the sense of firepower but to have a role - launch a few NPC support fighters/bombers every minute. Not to release too many ships in one go to change the tide of the battle, but still to have some small impact. This way the Caps will be forced to close in and fight for it or be forced to fight against additional ships every minute. And if they don't kill them in time, the station will just add and add, and add more.

I know it's still not perfect and have some issues, but I'll think about more it. For now it sounds a little bit like Parmel and I don't like that.


EDIT: Just to say that I think I solved some of the biggest problems (like two ships near the station - who's gonna take the CP), but you'll have to wait a little bit - I have some other stuff to do right now.

Oh, and I thought of a new Mode! Yep, yet another one! That thread is getting quite big (at least the first post!). But I hope that it'll be relatively easy to implement (compared to some of the others...).

11 Reply by evgenidb (edited by evgenidb 2011-08-03 06:55:51)

  • Registered: 2011-07-31
  • Posts: 28

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

So, here's the idea.

In the middle of the map we have a neutral space station. Nothing too fancy, maybe a civilian one. It has two docs (at least): in the first starfighters and bombers could land in the docking bay; from the second, a couple of starfighters are spawned every minute when the station is captured.

In the first docking bay, there is a rather special CP that can be captured by any team, but can't be used for respawning after someone dies. To (re)capture the CP three things must be present:
- a unit near the CP;
- no units from the opposite side;
- at least one ally capital ship near the station (it doesn't matter if the caps from the opposite side are near the station as well!).

When the space station is captured it can do two things:
1) attack the enemy's ships in the vicinity of the space station with the few cannons lasers and turbolasers it has (they can be destroyed!). So, the station's defense system is rather lax.
2) spawn a new couple of fighters or bombers every minute to join the ally's force and attack the enemy's ships. Those fighters are outside the ticket system, so if they're destroyed, it won't matter. Also if for some reason in the next minute they're not destroyed, the space station will release the next batch of fighters. And then the next one, and the next one. So, one of the sides might be fighting against a number superiority.


This way, in this map we should have a small ground battles, fighters and bombers against the enemy ships, and cap vs cap battle from the very start. Since the space station is very important (even with its poor defense), because it adds new ships every minute, it's very essential to capture it and have it for as long as possible.

You can even make the station destructible if you wish.

No hyperspace beacons are needed, no other hard (or impossible to capture) CPs.


So, how does it sound?



P.S. Since the station will just continue to pour new ships every minute endlessly, you can set an upper limit for the NPC fighters it can release. Just to be sure it won't become too laggy.

  • SamZi
  • FirstStrike Tester
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  • From: Finland
  • Registered: 2008-07-15
  • Posts: 447

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

Taloraan works well and is one-of-a-kind map in FS atm as it's a pure capship battle so I don't see a need for any major changes. I would be in favor a simple fighter balance tweak if it seems there really is significant unbalance in how they perform against caps. Can't say that there's been much proof of unbalance, though. The nic event games are difficult to look at, as the teams' tactics seemed different on the fighter front. Imps didn't go heavy on bombers with proper fighter support as far as I could tell. Seemed to me like we just tried to hold off the waves of rebel fighters with our own. I was in an Interceptor both rounds though, and the battle got hectic real fast so I'm not the best person to interpret them.

Although the CP idea is interesting, I'd go with a simple change on the rebel fighters. How about you remove most of the torp ammo on X's and Y's, but not altogether? For example X has one load, Y 2 and B-wing stays the same. This'd accentuate the difference of the fighters in terms of their heavy firepower capability. Also, if need be, you could add one tie bomber to boot.

  • From: Manchester
  • Registered: 2006-11-03
  • Posts: 9,993

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

I do like the idea of having some form of CP in the middle of the map to encourage the teams to move their capital ships forward, we've never had that much of a problem with people needing encouragement to move the fleets forward before in public play because in general people want to engage in an epic space battle and therefore need no additional encouragement, but we have seen an issue arise in the campaign where if one fleet stays at the spawn point it has an advantage, so maybe it is something worth looking at. If for instance it could be coded that once the CP in the centre is taken that your side can spawn fighters that much closer to the enemy rather than at the start point that would be a very strong incentive. Would have to be a massive cap radius though, to be effective.

I'd be resistant to altering the balance of ships and fighters' weapons loadouts though, as there is a balance there when all ships are taken into consideration. As someone has mentioned above the ships just need to be used in a different way using different tactics to each other to get the best possible result.

I think if we can code a CP in the centre of the map to do as I suggest? That would do a great deal in helping to further balance the map, and encourage capital ships to move forward and engage the enemy.

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  • Registered: 2011-07-31
  • Posts: 28

Re: Talooran - make it more tactical ?

Oh, forgot to mention something about the CP in my suggestion about the Space Station.

The CP is with normal detection radius (after all, it's meant for the infantry to capture it). But it's a CP with a hack: when an infantry approaches it, it checks the position of every friendly to the infantry unit's cap ship. If the distance between the cap and the CP is less than some predefined number (meaning that the ship is "near the station"), it will allow the unit to do its job - to start (re)capturing the CP.