Pod Wars Feedback Thread

[getbrecked]

I briefly played a round yesterday, and I had no idea what was going on but still enjoyed it.

To solve the issue of accidental teamkilling, I think team icons (such as the S that syndies can see over other syndies' heads) should be visible while in a pod. This does present one problem; it would be much easier to spot people who disguise as the other team. Not sure if that's a bad thing, though.

[Mouse]

A few years back someone was working on these giant pods (like, Y-drone sized and comparably robust) designed to be used by multiple people.  You could move around inside them, and you'd have one person piloting the thing, one or more people using the weapons systems, and people doing other stuff I can't remember.  It wasn't overly functional but if any of the code is still around and salvageable it would be a good fit for this mode and could probably deal with some of the criticisms made.  (Too many people, too few pods, most of the fighting being outside of pods)

I can't for the life of me remember who was working on it though.

[Eagletanker]

Crusiers, and they are broken at the moment. That is what I was suggesting they should use for the superweapons that both sides work towards. Cog also has turreted Pods that could be cool to see added in

[Eagletanker]

Alright, 3rd round.

So, I'm going to say that it's still like what I said before. Syndies got the early cap rush. even when NT was holding two points and had people attacking their base, they still lost points

speaking of the base. tone down the health. please 10k is too much

[GORE]

One can go undercover by getting into the pod of the other team and then ambushing them. Not sure if that is a desired outcome...but earlier today a teammate of mine hid himself in a Syndicate pod whilst we were NT. So I annihalited his pod and only realized my mistake after his pod got destroyed.

I like the undercover aspect of it...but it would surely help to identify teammates somehow even in enemy pods,...
Perhaps that is a trade-off between danger and undercover actions which has to be discussed further,...

Just a thought of mind.

[BatElite]

Having played most of a second round, I echo the finding that holding points seems to have little relative impact on scoring. At the same time, and this might get easier as people get more experienced, organising a group is hard and thus it's also hard to attack a point that has multiple people defending it.

Pod production seems bottlenecked by bohrum more than anything else (dense metal for the armor kits mostly), which I think might need to get bumped in abundance a little.

I think some people mentioned the blasters being pretty dang powerful and it certainly seems the case that many defenders just go akimbo blasters if they can get a second one. I don't have hard data is the thing, but they seem a little off-balance.

---

Also good news is that I gave Kyle some red pod sprites, so hopefully syndies can stop bonking their teammate's pods so much once those get committed.

[kyle2143]

There's a lot of suggestions in here and I really appreciate it, I'm trying to keep up. Right now I'm mostly focusing on fixing bugs and making tweaks to make the the mode is solid and playable.

There's quite a few things that we've planned for it that we just haven't gotten around to coding because we wanted to release for testing and while adding the more niche features is important, we wanted to be sure that the mode was playable and that players were interested. To name a few things we wanted to do: improving pod sensors, adding a new type of teleporter with a GUI on the base ships to support people from there, Adding long range guns on ships that fire from hundreds of tiles away. I should probably write up a detailed design document so that anyone who wants to contribute is on the same page with us.

Currently I think the biggest problem to address I think is the issue of travel times. They are too long have everybody do repeatedly if they are coming from their base to an enemy control point and then dying. We eventually want to make a sort of troop carrier pod, but sooner than that I'd like to make destructible/deployable warp beacons that anyone can deploy and only their teammates warp to it. Being destroyed from enemy pods or overuse without maintenance.
___________________________________________________________

Specifically, one suggestion I've seen a bunch here in this thread and on discord too is to add a sort of "Squad System" like you might find in a MMO tactical shooter game. I haven't played one of those in a while, so I wanted to get some feedback on my idea before starting down the path. (I only spent like 10 minutes on this so just about everything is up for change except the first point):

- I don't want to "gamify" the system too much for the sake of simplicity, I want things to use existing ss13 mechanics as much as possible.
- let some players spawn as lieutenants via roundstart job selection.
- Lieutenants and the Commander can form their own squad of normal pod-pilots via some sort of computer on their ship.
- The computer gives em a list of all the team members sorted by what squad they're under, if any, click names to move people into/out of their squad. Let em name their squad too, why not?
- Cap squad size it at like 3 -5 not including the squad leader, maybe based on the amount of lieutenants they have, the more lieutenants, the lower the max amount.
- Each officer has a 3rd secure radio frequency for their squad, When moving a player into their squad it adds that officer's squad frequency to their secure frequency list.
- Maaaaybe give a special overlay to your squadmates so they can pick them out easier. idk, this might not be worth the trouble.
- Also keep track of the squads on the pod_wars_team datum for some stats maybe or for handling putting the squad frequency on a player's radio when they respawn with a new one.

[GORE]

Oh - one thing I have noticed,...

The PDA messager gets cluttered bad real fast.

[cyberTripping]

syndicate comms are real hard to parse between all the other red messages. Plus, red on dark is straining on the eyes. Someone in the discord suggested making their comms a brighter pink.

Kyle: Just changed it to a Pink colour. I actually thought this myself, but I didn't see any complaints yet I have really bad eyes so I thought maybe it was just me.

[Eagletanker]

Pod wars on RP

How did it go?

Awesome that is. The better organization of both sides really helped. The Syndies did a full offensive with a nuke they captured. (sadly OBS didnt record it. I thought it was but it didnt ).

Organization won the match, along with the strong Syndie hold of fortuna, which was sized by NT when Syndies pulled back to attack the NT ship in Operation Beach Party (Yes we called it that I was panicked) and even then Syndies retook the point. Also, none of the NT systems where actually destroyed even when the nuke part of operation party failed and all focus was on blowing up the critical systems. Please, lower em to 5k health. Some players want a higher contrast Syndie Radio, the current one is hard to read, which I agree with. As for the current Squad outline, you should have them be 8 people max with 1 commander who has access to a speical command comms with all the other commanders and the captain. A way to give order to these squads individually would be nice too

[Mopcat]

recent pod wars round on rp: it actually worked, somewhat? the syndies at the very least were fairly organized and cooperative, and of course general comms were filled with the expected trash talk and banter between teams. overall it was a lot of fun and pretty refreshing from the standard rp affairs. a few things i noticed, however:

-one tactic i noticed being employed was using plasmastone chunks to plasmaflood enemy fortifications, which was almost impossible to recover from without making a hole in the room since, well, none of the stations seem to have any atmos supplies whatsoever. adding a few air scrubbers and hvacs to the map would at least let players fight back against goobers lobbing plasmastone in their bases.

-10k for critical systems is waaaaayyy too much, multiple pods attacking one with spes-12 ballistics barely even made a dent in that insane health pool. right now destroying them is long and tedious and long and tedious equals not fun, and it's especially long and tedious when you have to constantly fend off the other team's turrets, pods, and spacewalking pilots. bump it down to 5k, but also allow pilots to repair these after fending off attackers (aka hit with welder and/or other tools until shiny and new), and it'll probably feel actually doable without basically disabling the other team's pod production.

-bohrum is definitely a huge bottleneck when it comes to production of bigger and better pods, as is space and availability of other resources such as tools and wiring

-a lot of people would basically just go outside a pod with akimbo blasters, which seemed pretty strong as not only were they outmaneuvering most pods (in spots where they COULD maneuver around, anyways), but they were also outgunning them, which was a bit... insane, seeing as how the blasters are seemingly meant to be used exclusively against other pilots while boarding/defending from boarders, and not outside of fortifications against their pods. just having blaster bolts deal less damage to pods but still do decent against pilots would probably mitigate this.

-this is 100% personal preference, but i would like to see some more handheld weapon variety instead of everyone having the same knife and blaster. variety is the spice of life, or something (idk i just want More Gun's). same with pod weapons, actually, having more weapon systems at the same "tier" as current weapon system options would not only encourage some Tactical Thinking or something, especially with 'specialist' weapons, but it'd also be cool. again, 100% personal preference/opinion/h

[Mouse]

The length of the mode really needs to be scaled down.  Onslaught mode in UT2004, which this reminds me a lot of, had the cores take damage in proportion to how few nodes were controlled after a certain time period to force an end.  An analogous system here would presumably be reduction in the maximum health of critical systems (as opposed to damage since they can be repaired), or simple point drain.

God I want to play UT2004 again now.

[Froggit_Dogget]

the systems at each main base are impossible to kill; unless the other team is ignorant. One welder can outheal two pods shooting it. Either they should have way less health, or you shouldnt be able to repair them; otherwise ignorance is going to be the only way one breaks. For reference, we sent 12 miniputts after one, and were stopped by two bigpods, and a few people with jetpacks and welders.

(Edit)Kyle: During testing, critical systems were way too easy to kill, it seems I overcorrected far too much. Right now iirc each one welder hit heals 30 health, and their max health is 10,000. Not sure what I was thinking making it that high, but they were all dying too fast when they were at 1,000. I think that maybe 4,000-5,000 would work, if I change the damage alert to tell you roughly how close to destruction a system is.

[GORE]

People with akimbo blasters pick up at least five more blasters from their dead teammates and wreck max-armor pods in a few seconds. Kinda horriying.

(Edit)Kyle: Yeah, we're trying to change the way blasters work to make akimbo blasters less of an S+++ strat. Got a few ideas on the table. Currently they do only half damage to pods, but with the dual wielding, well you know.

[Sov]

the systems at each main base are impossible to kill; unless the other team is ignorant. One welder can outheal two pods shooting it. Either they should have way less health, or you shouldnt be able to repair them; otherwise ignorance is going to be the only way one breaks. For reference, we sent 12 miniputts after one, and were stopped by two bigpods, and a few people with jetpacks and welders.

(Edit)Kyle: During testing, critical systems were way too easy to kill, it seems I overcorrected far too much. Right now iirc each one welder hit heals 30 health, and their max health is 10,000. Not sure what I was thinking making it that high, but they were all dying too fast when they were at 1,000. I think that maybe 4,000-5,000 would work, if I change the damage alert to tell you roughly how close to destruction a system is.

I was one of the big pods that chased you off and had robust armor, hermes 3.0, and spes shotguns. Rather than fighting me your team scattered allowing me to pick off the little pods uncontested and with ease

I then flew directly to your base and shot the bridge system 100 times for 100 damage each hit and won the game for NT. I was completely unopposed for several minutes while your team watched from inside the bridge