Aethercraft Hulls

Enyalida

How high do org ship aethercraft hulls go? I thought we had a big ship with ~4200 hull, and that Deepnight was massive at 7200 hull, but I'm hearing that the bigger ships exceed those numbers by a factor of ten.

Munsia

Enyalida said:

How high do org ship aethercraft hulls go? I thought we had a big ship with ~4200 hull, and that Deepnight was massive at 7200 hull, but I'm hearing that the bigger ships exceed those numbers by a factor of ten.

Factor of 10 is going a bit far, but our future plans do put that about 5x the size of your estimation. 

And before you start bitching about this, 1: My ship is mine and Ari's, not Mag's. 2: My characters life savings were dumped into it.

Enyalida

I'm actually looking at commune finances and working out how huge of a ship we could reasonably afford, and how that would measure up. It's really big, brushing 40000 hull.

Kaimanahi

Not really trying to complain or detract from your e-life's work, but limitless hull is making aetherflares pretty absurd!

Munsia

Enyalida said:

I'm actually looking at commune finances and working out how huge of a ship we could reasonably afford, and how that would measure up. It's really big, brushing 40000 hull.

Plus artifacts? The ships are only good as walls and worthless elsewise. Anyway, The Aetherbasin final hull size is over 2500 rooms. The original intention was to make the aetherbasin, and in the meantime...well why not? 

They've existed for about 1 RL year now though and it's funny how complaints are only coming in just now...

Enyalida

Unlimited hull (with no downsides) is absurd, yes.

Arimisia

we could add a lot more right now, but we are not going to due to certain expectations. We have worked really hard on getting the gold and credits it took to build our ship. there are 2 others that I know of one is privately owned like ours and the other is owned by the organization. As today has proven though, you can easily outrun a ship like that, we cannot do anything about it. There are other tactics too! Boarding anyone? then again that may be a bad idea too >.>

Enyalida

You can't board until the ship is down below a certain percentage of hull, and chasing means... nothing in the context of aetherflares.

EDIT: Also, boarding is a total joke. If you're down that low, you can just be killed, and it's very easy to make unassailablefortresses or deathtraps in a manse. Like reinforced magically locked doors all over the place, or loops - players aren't really meant to fight in manses.

Ayisdra

While a minor point, largest aethership does give family honour for Houses of Blood. So having unlimited hull would make sense for this one thing.

Enyalida

Even if hull were capped (hard or soft) or there were some real downside to having such a massive ship, one would still have the most rooms.

Belibi

2-3 smaller ships with skilled crew members (call it 3 each - 1 turret, 1 grid, 1 pilot) should be able to take out any ship, even one as big as Blob. Have one clarionblast the grid while the others marmuckle/marworble. Without grid, can't heal modules without docking. A ship like that is so slow naturally that with muckle/worble (plus turret shock if you feel the need) you should be able to stop them from getting back to a dock. Hull might be huge, but you can still cripple it module by module and pick it apart at your leisure. Or even ignore it.

Unless, of course, my understanding of the mechanics is totally wrong. In which case please correct me.

p.s. wtb aetherfighting not stationary over a dock. It's boooooorrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnggggg. Change the way aethercraft influence bubble politics (change bombard, basically) to something that encourages active aetherbattles instead of lame affairs that go on forever.

p.p.s. to clarify what I mean by "skilled crew members" - for this strategy to work, at minimum one turret needs someone transcendent to man it and another needs someone at least up to Bosun (expert) or, ideally, Secondmate (fabled) in aethercraft. More skill is better for all the rest, especially empaths... but if they know what they're doing, could technically be done with all other crewmembers at apprentice or so.

Enyalida

Can't clarion the grid.

You could theoretically clarionblast the chair to try and stop docking (who are we kidding, they're going to be sitting on a dock, there is no 'getting to a dock'), while murkle/worbling to try and hinder curing the chair, but its still going to take so tremendously long to blast down their hull that you won't ever destroy the ship, if the empath has a system for empathing. With enough tiny ships/crews you could also clarion the orb to help boost damage against the ship, but ultimately all the peripheral tactics are just that... peripheral. (Not to mention that you can regenerate two modules for the cost of clarion'ing one). Unless aethercombat is rebalanced or changed in some fundamental way, it's a PvE esque damage affair in the end.

EDIT: I agree, aethercombat is pretty boring. Either it's a flare and totally stationary, or your ability to run away will ALWAYS outstrip chase ability. Always. The majority of the extra abilities are borky and lame, costing power even when they fail (or have NO CHANCE of working). The optimal method of doing so involves a large number of people being afk, with full automation, and it comes down to a math on damage versus health pool only. Hindering is minimal, afflicting is minimal.

Munsia

Nyx got blown up, so it's entirely viable.

Karlach

If you've enough focus fire and co-ordination the giant ships can be killed. Even Nyx got dropped this time.

Ssaliss

Isn't grid the one module you can't clarinblast, on account of it being the only thing that can repair clarionblasted modules?

Belibi

I didn't realize you couldn't clarionblast the grid - someone told me that you could. If that's so, you'd probably be better off just alternating which of the attacking ships uses turret shock to keep them stunned. If they dock, so what? Jinsunjolt to knock them loose. If they disembark and prevent you from doing that, then you've won! Just bombard.

The point remains. With proper management of ship power and coordination, a fleet of smaller ships can take down a single giant ship if it doesn't have any support.

Karlach

Grids can't be clarionblasted, they can however be shot to hell.

Most of the giant tank ships also have the power diverted from the Chair to the Grid, so command fail is already high, all you need to do is seal the dock and that prevents them docking up.

Enyalida

Yes, if you have enough focus fire. At the point where you need three times the turrets of another ship to reasonably stand a chance, you have a problem. For a long while there, it didn't seem like Nyx was firing back or acting, their empath wasn't clearing statuses or something.

Karlach

Enyalida said:

Yes, if you have enough focus fire. At the point where you need three times the turrets of another ship to reasonably stand a chance, you have a problem. For a long while there, it didn't seem like Nyx was firing back or acting, their empath wasn't clearing statuses or something.

Actually the second time you killed it no one was on board. We'd already docked up and moved to focusing a construct, the ship was so badly shot up we abandoned it, as the last person was ascending off you jinsun'd it right back out and started shooting an empty ship.

Which did repair it for us, which was nice. Has saved me half an hour of doing it now.

Enyalida

You can clear shock very quickly, it doesn't really keep ships stunned if they're wanting to get away.

It's balanced when it requires several crewed ships to take down one unsupported ship?

Belibi

Enyalida said:

Yes, if you have enough focus fire. At the point where you need three times the turrets of another ship to reasonably stand a chance, you have a problem. For a long while there, it didn't seem like Nyx was firing back or acting, their empath wasn't clearing statuses or something.

Why is that a problem. You can buy three times the number of small ships for much less than the cost of one giant one. The difficulty is getting competent people to man them - and numbers of people seem to largely be the deciding factor in any kind of conflict

EDIT: and the point of turret shock isn't to keep them from running away, it's to keep them from fighting back effectively. The thing keeping them from running away is the fact that it takes them something like 6 seconds for their chair to regain balance after moving

Enyalida

At a certain point, organizational buyin (or huge single person investment of $$$) eliminates cost. When all other things are equal (skill, personnel, artifacts), the giant ship has such a massive massive advantage that should be reigned in.

Karlach

Enyalida said:

You can clear shock very quickly, it doesn't really keep ships stunned if they're wanting to get away.

Seal the dock and they're going nowhere, have you even tried piloting one of those things? It's like trying to navigate a drunk whale through the desert.

Enyalida

Shock doesn't stop turrets firing or the grid from acting, I don't think.

Running away has no functional meaning in flares. The big ship should never be running away, they don't have to.

EDIT: Unless faced by a much larger force or a ship of equivalent insane size.

Belibi

Has that ever been demonstrated? Has blob ever gone up, unsupported, against a fleet of skilled, coordinated, and well manned vessels and won? Because that's not what happened in this most recent flare.

Enyalida

There is no such thing, because size and damage spam win aethercraft combat. 

Regardless, you're saying: It's fair because when faced off against the perfect opponent it is possible to take this ship down?

EDIT: To clarify, this isn't a rant because we lost the flare. I was the only person alert in Serenwilde who had any idea about aethercraft (one of two people alert period). Hallifax had one, Celest had a few, that's fine whatever. But we were a fairly skilled ship and had a tremendously difficult time 1v1 (or 1v2, with a lesser crewed but bigger gunship, armada'd to save having to man the chair) with even the smaller ship, having to continually hit and run for a long long time and dying many times to even make headway. That is, we were throwing all kinds of afflictions, stripping, using tactical moves to avoid damage, and everything against a ship that was sitting still and doing none of those things with equivalent crew... and were still very outpaced. The problem wasn't crew or tactics, it was sheer size of ships. Once we were actually outnumbered, whatever, it is what it is.

EDIT: And not even the mar versions. We were tactically targeting specific modules with muckle and worble, when chased I threw out some sludge to slow pursuit, there was stripping going on to try and break through shields better, and module targeting to slow curing. We weren't just pissing in the wind, heh.

Tacita

Enyalida said:

Yes, if you have enough focus fire. At the point where you need three times the turrets of another ship to reasonably stand a chance, you have a problem. For a long while there, it didn't seem like Nyx was firing back or acting, their empath wasn't clearing statuses or something.

You guys did really well, the grid was down to heavy damage by the time I got worbled (if that's the 'aeon' one - I always mix up their names) - I managed to flush the first time by sheer power of spamming, but after that I was down to critical, then got worbled again. Never managed to recover because when I got flushes through they were all nommed by module damage. 

My combat empathing triggers need some work, largely because of that one damn affliction I have an issue to find in my curing prios too (I was curing the shield orb before the grid, I tried to fix it on the fly but didn't find the problem at the time - which helped you out a lot because I was so behind on healing the grid! - thankfully I worked it out now). 

Healing ships like Nyx is also very different to other ships, so I need my stuff to be more flexible. Prioritising the hull becomes significantly less necessary when you've got so much.

Arimisia

Karlach said:

Grids can't be clarionblasted, they can however be shot to hell.

Most of the giant tank ships also have the power diverted from the Chair to the Grid, so command fail is already high, all you need to do is seal the dock and that prevents them docking up.

I have never changed power from the chair, too many oh shit moments to do that. We rarely have 3 people on turrets so if we do need to divert power it is usually off a turret. I dunno, different people,/orgs different tacts there!

Tacita said:

Healing ships like Nyx is also very different to other ships, so I need my stuff to be more flexible. Prioritising the hull becomes significantly less necessary when you've got so much.

Biggest difference is the hull priority, should try and get that set to a % of max and make sure it actually works (I know some are set like that but do not actually work so need some tweaking). Other than that, everything else is the same. I will say, the actual hull heal is considerably larger as it is based off % hull. So.. you could get one of these large ships down to an inch of their health, and if their empath manages to get a hull heal off.. well, you will not be happy. I think my ship is healing for about 6k right now least we tested.

Belibi

I was just saying that it seemed to me that if Blob was staffed by incompetents it would go down to determined clever opposition. I don't see how it's different than any kind of conflict - someone with the right class and lots of artifacts can take down a group of powerful opponents if they don't coordinate well among themselves. Alternatively, a single clever fighter without artifacts can take down a flailing arti-whore on their own.

I don't know enough about aethercombat to talk directly about whether it's all balanced, I guess. It just seems to me that if anybody had the opportunity to practice it the way people can practice regular combat they'd learn how to do surprising things.

Munsia

In the end I don't care what happens just as long as room size is never capped. I've spent too much time/money into my project 

Chade

Arimisia said:

Karlach said:

Grids can't be clarionblasted, they can however be shot to hell.

Most of the giant tank ships also have the power diverted from the Chair to the Grid, so command fail is already high, all you need to do is seal the dock and that prevents them docking up.

I have never changed power from the chair, too many oh shit moments to do that. We rarely have 3 people on turrets so if we do need to divert power it is usually off a turret. I dunno, different people,/orgs different tacts there!

Tacita said:

Healing ships like Nyx is also very different to other ships, so I need my stuff to be more flexible. Prioritising the hull becomes significantly less necessary when you've got so much.

Biggest difference is the hull priority, should try and get that set to a % of max and make sure it actually works (I know some are set like that but do not actually work so need some tweaking). Other than that, everything else is the same. I will say, the actual hull heal is considerably larger as it is based off % hull. So.. you could get one of these large ships down to an inch of their health, and if their empath manages to get a hull heal off.. well, you will not be happy. I think my ship is healing for about 6k right now least we tested.

I just finished building a combat empathing system and about 6k for a hull heal sounds right for Blob. Testing on two ships I was curing for 20.75% of health on each hull heal. On Kari this was 5186 hull per heal. The script starts curing health at around 77%, focuses on grid, chair and turrets in that order if the health is higher than 77%.

Flushes on the first Marwurble and Clarity's the Grid/Chair/Turrets if it's done again to cure the aeon effect. I'm pretty happy with it. Also detects the ships max hull on module lock.