Lots of good points! Let me talk about how some of these currently work:
Tracking:
Gun weapons right now are either 'gimbal' mounted or 'straight' shooting: The 'gimbal' weapons if you have the target within your circular retical will track within the retical. You still have to maneuver to get the target inside your circle, but then the auto tracking will help. Gimbals for different ships will have different tracking rates, you will be able to modify your ships tracking computer, etc to affect these stats.
The gimbal mounted tracking assist weapons tend to be the 'high frequency / low damage' ammunition. Good to help you finish off someone or help strip shields but they don't have the punch or the range for most of your work.
The 'straight' weapons function like you'd expect, you have to lead your shots and don't get much help. These tend to be your high damage weapons.
They are trying to find a comfortable balance between both of these, and how effective to make the tracking. They are likely going to give a 'small' assist for the straight shooters to help focus your fire a bit, and will continue to adjust the gimbal trackers.
Oculus Rift people can have all their gimbal weapons tracked to their line of sight, so you can fly straight, look to the right, and your gimbal weapons will auto-track wherever you point your head. VERY COOL.
Damage Model
Shields and Armor. Weapons are into two different camps, some do more damage on shields and some do more damage on armor. Some weaopns will travel through shields at a higher rate to strike armor directly, etc. Lots of variety.
Shields will eventually be adjustable with modules to focus on higher recharge rates or overall higher buffer, similar to eve. Right now they are working on overall strength, recharge rate, all that stuff. The next patch will give us a lot more flexibility on energy management, so directing your power output to say, the rear shields and engines instead of weapons, etc. There are weapons being worked on that are also more 'disruptive' similar to a sort of neut gun that damages ship systems, etc.
Missiles will primarily be Infrared, Image Recogniction, and Friend or Foe. You have several different types of countermeasures to use as well, so launching a flare against an image recognition missile won't do you much good. In current patch only heat-seaking missiles are available, but you can still shoot off a chaff and get nailed by them.
Larger capital ships will essentially be invulnerable to fighter-sized weapons, you will have to either use other capital ship weapons (long-axis railguns, etc), or bomber-carried torpedoes, which of course they have special ships for. Basically they are treating it like a WW2 battleship game in space, the carriers launch fighters and bombers, etc.
If you are commanding a destroyer or a frigate you could kit your capital ship to pew pew up close like old ships of the line, or more stand offish, etc.
Also all ships are fully destructible, so you can lose specific parts of ships, thrusters, weapons, etc, changing how the ship performs, where it's center of gravity is, and how it maneuvers. Highly important for disabling larger ships later on, you can actually blow off the thrusters to disable them, or shoot the wapons, etc.
Flight Model
It's a full 'newtonian' flight model, meaning if you turn off your computer-assisted flight controls, you will fly in a straight line until you apply thrust in another direction. All of the ships have something like 8-16 manuevering thrusters aside from the rear thrusters, (that can be destroyed) So if you remember shows like 'Babylon 5' you can absolutely fly your ship like a starfury if you choose to. The ship computer can be set to fly more like an airplane, where you point the nose where you want and the ship figures out how to fire the manuevering thrusters to point you in that direction. It's sort of a slider, so I often fly with it 'half off' meaning you can do more of a 'drift' turn, that is fly in a direction, change directions while maintaining your original vector for a bit, and then push off with full thrusters in that direction. You take G-forces like a real ship, if you leave the G-limiter on you never have to worry about it, but you can turn it off for tighter turns and you start to black out if you push it too hard.
They are adding in updated 6dof (6 degrees of freedom) for the next patch, meaning basically 6 direction 'strafing' whenever you want. so to make it easy to change your z-axis, things like that. They are also doubling flight speeds for the next patch, which will change combat quite a bit. They are adding 'afterburners' for the manuevering thrusters so you can make tighter turns. With the speed being doubled they are making sure to tell you that it will be much, much harder to turn going full speed, so not to be raging on the forums when all of the sudden going full speed means you can't turn fast.
PVP/New Player stuff
A long topic, but basically similar to eve they will have areas where misbehavior is severely punished, and they will have areas where it is not. They do not have a CONCORD mentality though, so if you shoot someone in high security space you are extremely likely to be seen as they have high military police presence and constant monitoring.
In the less patrolled areas, the developer attitude is more that if no one sees you commit a crime, then there's no evidence. IE you don't take a security hit for blasting someone if there's no evidence. It would be on them to seek retribution.
They are also really trying to make it 'immersive' in the sense that unless you have the proper scanning equipment or whatever, you probably won't even be able to tell if you are shooting at an NPC or a human player. They aren't planning on an icon above that random ship displaying your name and announcing who you are. Don't like the way they look? GTFO.
Keep in mind though that PVP is not the only focus of this game, they are spending equal time developing full careers for trading, hauling, exploration, mining, all the goodies. Since there are no 'skillpoints' it's more up to your equipment and interest, not if you have the 4 years in the game to sit in the ship. If you've got the ship you can fly it.
There's no subscription either, it's like guild wars 2. You buy the squadron 42 single player game, and you get MMO access forever. After you make it through squadron 42 (depending on your choices), you'll start in the appropriate area and be off.
They will have cash for credits (similar to plex), for busy adults without the time to spend 20 hours a week doing things.
They are 'trying' however (and this never works), to insist that you won't consider the missions and adventuring as 'grinding' though.
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Topic: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander (Read 131155 times)