Normally I write with an eye towards…I dunno…composition? These posts are as much my way of continuously working on my writing skills as they are to entertain and/or inform and/or record information that I might want to look back on later.

Today is not one of those days. I started a post about the armor changes coming to Star Citizen in the impending 4.7 patch, but I just saw something in the recent test server patch notes that was coming at me from a totally different direction, and wanted to write about that as well. So here goes: no wacky prose. Just stuff.

Armor

Armor is new to Star Citizen. Previously, ships had shields, and they had a hit-point pool. Now, they have shields and armor. Armor is basically a way to stop or slow down projectiles from reaching the internal components; if a projectile deals enough damage to critical internal components, then ship systems will degrade, cease to function, and the ship may enter into a soft-death or even complete death state (i.e. explosion).

As of patch 4.6, any ship can harm any other ship regardless of the weapon types being used and the armor of the ship being attacked. It’s really just a factor of TTD — time to disable — and eventually TTK — time to kill. It would be suicide to attack a Hammerhead with a Pisces, of course, but not impossible for the Pisces to do damage to the Hammerhead given enough time.

The changes coming in 4.7 might be a bit more…realistic? I guess? With these changes, smaller-class weapons will deal practically no damage at all to larger ships. This is represented by an increased spread between the classification size of the weapon, measured in “S#” values, and the ships themselves gaining “armor threshold” values against ballistic weapons, and another against energy weapons. Since I don’t speak math, I’m not going to try to explain it any better, but the end result is that cap, sub-cap, and heavy assault ships will become more tanky against everyone else to the point where attacking one of these classes of vessels with anything other than another ship in the same classification is going to be difficult, impossible, or nigh pointless depending on the S# weapons the attacking ship is using.

I think this makes a lot of sense. An Idris or a Javelin should not have to worry as much about a fleet of Hornets or Buccaneers or smaller, agile craft. CIG wants ships to have roles against other ships, and to do so they kind of have to violate the age-old handshake agreement that “rock, paper, scissors” is the best way to keep things honest and balanced for everyone. Cap and sub-cap ships designed for combat should be worried most by other cap and sub-cap ships; smaller, more agile ships should worry about other smaller, more agile ships. Still, smaller ships versus larger ships has a place in gameplay, as once the larger ships duke it out, shields fall, and amor is reduced, then bombers and torpedo boats can enter the arena to act as force multipliers. Smaller ships can perform targeted attack at newly exposed PDCs and manned turrets to take the heat off of the more vulnerable ships.

This is how it should work on paper, but I’m concerned about a few things. First is ship ownership. There are a surprising number of people who own multi-crew ships, but I’d bet that the majority of players own much, much smaller ships if they own any ships at all, because the affordable starter packages are offering ships like Hornets, Titans, and Cutlasses. I fully expect griefers to exploit large-ship ownership against huge swaths of the population once retaliation becomes all but impossible, statistically speaking. This is, of course, paranoia and in truth, a player being able to hit an Aurora from a cap or sub-cap ship should be as difficult as it will be for an Aurora to damage a cap or sub-cap ship (PDCs notwithstanding). Still, players will always find ways to exploit situations to their advantage, and I expect this to be a major one.

The second concern is more ephemeral: is this actually going to be fun? Star Citizen is all about simulation, and this certainly falls into that category. Some players are fapping over these changes as we speak, I guarantee it, but for the rest of us, “can I hurt it?” is going to be a live-fire calculation. More likely, this is going to make mission choice less about payout and more about napkin math, comparing ships we have in our hangars to the possible resistance we could expect to encounter in a mission based solely on the payout amount and the vague flavor text CIG offers. I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole host of missions become un-doable by a wide variety of players simply because they don’t have ships powerful enough to put a dent in their targets. I know that I don’t want to have to constantly be “doing math”, comparing my weapons against my targets, memorizing which manufacturers make weapons strong enough to take on certain armor values, and memorizing which ships carry which armor values. Is Star Citizen sacrificing a wider field of fun to chase obsessive number-crunching and “realistic simulation”? They have in the past; they probably will for the future.

Of course, of course, of course this is a rocky road to 1.0. Nothing is set in stone, numbers will be tweaked, and other systems and play-styles can and will be introduced and encouraged to mitigate these changes. For every official change, there are those who will exploit; for every exploit, there are those who will counter, and so on. Right now it’s a tempest in my own tea-pot, but these are my thoughts. I have released them into the aether in the hopes that they will no longer vex me.

Flipping pay to win on it’s head

Real talk: Star Citizen is pay to win. It’s not just about combat, either; in fact, it’s less about combat than it is any other aspect. Combat can be learned, and exceptional pilots in small ships can school less skilled pilots in larger ships. But players who have spent money on industrial ships like Vultures or Moles can make tons of cash with little effort, while new players with an Aurora or Mustang starter package are limited to entry-level FPS, ground-ops, or space combat missions which might not pay as well pound-for-pound.

This section isn’t about who gets ahead faster, though. I caught some of the PTU notes this morning, and one line in particular threw me off balance. In 4.7 there’s a new mission in the Nyx system called “Operation Rock Breaker”. It’s another multi-faceted op which will require players to enter a derelict mining station, take out NPCs and other players, reactivate the station, and then harvest the materials. It’s being likened to the previous “Align and Mine” mission which was basically the same thing, except Operation Rock Breaker takes place in space.

What caught my attention in the PTU patch notes was this gem:

Reduced overall amount of Rock Breaker mission stations in Nyx. Large increase to buy-in cost for exclusive location access with reduced buy-in cost for non-exclusive.

This is something I’ve never seen in any MMO in all of my 30+ years of playing them, which isn’t to say that no one has ever implemented such a system, but that I have never personally seen it. As Star Citizen is a sandbox, the chance of meeting other players at mission locations is based mainly on public interest in the reasons for being there, and the number of locations where the missions can take place. The ASD Onyx facility missions worked pretty well because each server had over 100 potential locations, and each server could only accommodate 600-700 players at a time. We ran into other players only twice in the dozen or so times we ran those locations, and it was really nice to be able to complete the missions without some bozo making things more difficult for us.

But paying for exclusive access to a location? Charming! To be frank, I am not opposed to this. In fact, I’m kind of supportive in theory; it remains to be seen how the practice will actually work. I suspect that the part about “reduced overall amount of…mission stations…” means that “exclusive” doesn’t mean “completely 100% alone”. Mission-zone instancing isn’t yet in the game, although there’s a small voice at the back of my mind wondering if this isn’t their “tier 0” implementation of such a system. In reality, it might just mean that locations allocated for “exclusive” access aren’t offered as locations in other Rock Breaker missions. What happens if everyone pays for exclusive access? How does that play with a “reduction of mission stations” mentioned in the notes? I am intrigued.

Other stuff

I just remembered that there are changes coming to the radar functionality which is something I’m going to have to see to believe, but those updates concern me less than armor or the pay-for-access updates. Maybe once 4.7 drops and I’ve had a chance to play around with these changes, I’ll cram another wall of text into your eye-holes about it.