I think I figured out why guns are a bit too weak.

Energy usage is the price paid for infinite ammo, methinks. Your solution makes sense, but the devs seem to favor simple GUI's.

 

compare melee centric units in wh40k to ranged units. compare wh40k to warhammer classic. refresh yorself on how star wars, dune, and other popular sci-fi properties handled the question of melee.

let's put those different projectiles to use. how about a green shirt that reduces damage from physical projectiles? how about a blue shirt that causes lasers to bounce off of you? i'm talking armor properties, not the name.

looks are unimportant, we have cosmetic slots. many of my characters have not looked to be wearing armor at all.

edit: it could even be just a pallet swap of the current armor, per tier

 

I only played regular Warhammer, and Warhammer Online (absolute travesty for balance at endgame), so you'll have to correct me if the ranged/melee balance was different in wh40k.

In Warhammer, melee units were either very fast (able to close gaps), heavily armored (yay chaos), or had some sort of benefit to make up for not having ranged capabilities. Goblins had extreme numbers, chaos had armor, humans and bretonnia had armor plus horses, lizardmen had dinosaurs, etc.

Unless you are proposing the Terraria style of balance (everyone gets different armor, which gives different benefits) then I don't think that would work. There is only one "Archetype" in Starbound, and everyone uses it. There's no distinction between melee players or ranged players, unless you count that ranged players have less energy available for tech usage.

I don't think that Terraria or Starbound's current style are bad design decisions, but they are mutually exclusive.

If we're talking about different armors that are good for different situations, I think this is very, very risky (I guess I won't say bad) game design. Especially in a non-static game.

Why? Because you still have two choices for balancing: When you have laser-resistant armor, what happens when you have enemies with lasers? Do you have to mix in other weapon types with lasers, since they could be only X% effective to people with mirror armor? If so, then the player really doesn't gain any net benefit from mirror armor. After all, they're taking full damage from the other weapon types.

Do you not mix in other weapon types with the Tower of Only Using Lasers? If so, anyone that has mirror armor has almost no challenge. They simply win, because every enemy does minor damage.

Especially in a procedurally-generated world, it's not like you know "Gamma sector has tons of lasers, so I'd better save up for that type of armor!" Every planet in every system in every sector could be the same, or could be different. You just don't know. So, what armor do you bring along? Everything, every time!

Both enhancements (melee/ranged armor, armor with different strengths) also add even more things to sort through in the crafting stations, or they add additional crafting stations, and while this isn't ideal, it probably needs to be addressed at some point or another anyway.

 

I was about to disagree, but then you said "End Game" and I had to concede. You're absolutely right.

And it SUCKS because I find SO MANY ROCKET LAUNCHERS that are SO cool! I have one that does nearly as much damage as the almighty Timmy (Impervium Tier hammer for humans), but as you said, it practically costs all my energy just to fire it once. And I have Impervium armor! My energy is as high as it's gonna get!

In fact, lemme boot up StarBound here... I wanna get the stats of that launcher...

...

Ah, here it is. The appropriately named "Awesome Exploderizer".
(DPH = Damage Per Hit)
(RoF = Rate of Fire)

DPS: 1236
RoF: 0.31
DPH: 4045 (YES. FOURTY F***IN' THOUSAND AND FOURTY-FIVE.)
Cost: 413 (Yes.)

By comparison, I have another launcher called "The Raidcrusher", and it's starts are...

DPS: 1292
RoF: 0.99
DPH: 1299
Cost: 134

So while being LESS THAN HALF half the DPH of Awesome Exploderizer, it's become my primary launcher because on top of a higher DPS, I can also fire it more frequently and rapidly, which is always nice.

If that sounds fair and balanced to you, remember that Timmy costs no energy to use whatsoever, hits for 4000 per swing, and has a RoF of 1.11. Plus, as a swinging melee weapon, it covers a wide area both above AND in front of me. There's no reason to use a rocket launcher when my boy here can get the job done with less frustration.

 

There's no reason "low tech" starter armor should be less visually impressive, you should strife for good looking armor regardless of tier.
Secondly high tech armor doesn't need to simply be bright colored shirts either, we could have futuristic adaptations of older concepts. Brigandines, Mountain scale, Mail and steel plates were all concepts with their own unique benefits. who knows what's possible with improved materials and technologies.
Or add localised shield generators, stealth components, biomass armor, automated defenses. the sky's the limit.

I mostly have a gripe with the melee weapons though, majority just feel as if they're little else but sticks and stones that somehow developed into weapons of mass destruction without equal.
The weird near magical secondary effects also don't help much to decrease that feeling. magical balls of electricity? exploding bones? instant poison on blunt weapons?
Some nice variety and hi tech abilities would be nice, for example:
-Rocket hammers, Chainsaws, extending blades, air injection knives, electrical currents to stun enemies, acid injectors, some kind of flash bang/ ranged stun effect.

 

Part of the reason why "starter" armor is usually rags or really crude junk, is that it gives players a real feeling of progression. I started out using a Sword of the Rusty Bastard, and now I'm using a bonehammer! I started out wearing the cardboard armor set, and now I'm using Giant BlackRaptorPlate! Etc.

On paper, having each armor set be visually awesome and comparable to each other makes a ton of sense, especially because vanity slots allow you to keep the armor you like the best. However, I think that once you add the human element, having that sense of progression for armor really does help a lot of people enjoy the game more, even if they don't notice it (and most probably don't).
/end random note

So, for armor, is it that you (and possibly D-16) don't like that we have medieval-styled armor that looks straight out of the 1600's? Would you prefer if we had mediavel-styled armor that was re-imagined in a futuristic style? For example, "Copper armor" wouldn't be a breastplate, but it would be a breastplate with some futuristic visor and maybe some neat gloves? Or, Tron-style armor?


I didn't even think about dropped weapons, heh, thanks for bringing that up. Having more advanced versions of the melee weapons for dropped stuff? That'd be awesome. These are still using "starter" skins, so I hope that before too long, GeorgeV and the other artistic folk can come up with some new skins for each of the weapons. There needs to be a visual reason why that dropped T10 hammer is better than a T1 hammer other than the fact that it doesn't have "poop" in the name.

Crafted weapons are a great example, they get visually more impressive from T1 to T10. We just need to do that for dropped weapons. And by "we" I mean "Chucklefish".

 

yes. melee has things that make up for the lack of range. even in a fantasy setting. some say starbound is sci-fantasy. ok, then. star wars. han solo has an applicable quote.

the melee should have benefits that make up for lack of range, the ranged should not be penalized for advantage over melee.

also, it is important to note that discussion of balancing starbound in its current state is pointless. actual progression likely will not play out like it does now, so we should instead focus on discussion of changes compatable with what we know of how things will work. that said (and considering the ability of armor to carry techs now) i think "sidegrades" are a good thing to discuss now. it would play out better if initial design supported the concepts rather than trying to add it later.

 

lol could you imagine?

weird-ass slowfighting in starbound, i'm cracking up

 

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fears path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing......Only I will remain."

 

i'm pretty sure it can be modded in.

 

From what I'm reading in the past few posts, it's not so much the idea that melee should be on par with range is bad, but it feels unfitting due to how low tech the melee weapons look. Energy and laser blades would sure give a feeling of power even with the same stats. Still, if we were to get realistic, someone with a flintlock pistol would be able to beat someone with a laser sword if they kept their distance. I would say Starbound aims more toward science fantasy than science fiction.

I understand how melee would be pretty weak if guns had around equal or even greater DPS. Still, I feel that guns could be handled better even if they do overall less damage. The energy costs could really be toned down especially in later tiers. There is already a formula for that, so a tier 10 gun that did exactly 1,000 damage per shot would cost exactly 100 energy to fire. However, anything like rocket launchers with thousands of damage per hit ends up draining most of your energy, leaving little room for tech. I don't suppose there could be a way as somewhat already mentioned to have a separate cost for guns. I also don't suppose it would be a good or bad idea to bring up how Terraria handled it not so much as "Terraria did it this way, Starbound should too", but as an idea on balancing? Actually, I'm already thinking of a bunch to say about balance between the different combat styles in that game, but I rather hold off for now.

 

I don't disagree. Within the current build, guns are just bad.

However, many people resist the push to improve guns and balance the game because they are super paranoid about the unquantifiable advantage that range provides. I mean, you can't put a DPS amount on how much the range advantage counts for, subtract that from ranged DPS, then call it balanced. A lot of them are also coming from bad experiences with Terraria's bosses which are designed in ways that badly punish melee combat and significantly reward kiting, which makes ranged attacks seem very powerful in those situations, even though the ranged/melee combat versus regular mobs and in PvP situations are actually pretty evenly balanced. I think sharing energy costs on ranged weapons and mobility tech alone balances guns, and IMO they should have equal average DPS values compared to melee weapons. But whatever, we just have to trust that Chucklefish will get around to it.

 

I don't see how people can say ranged is ok atm. It costs too much energy to use, they don't do any good damage even for ranged, and they don't have special abilies like knockback except for maybe a launcher.
Only advantage is the ranged part but then again, bonehammer covers that pretty well lol.

 

wow...
Not only guns are bad atm, I realized we are using a hammer made of bones as an end game weapon in a sci-fi (ish) game

 

I might as well bring up how Terraria handled this. Aside from melee and ranged, there was also magic. Aside from swords, melee did included some other weapon types like spears (that could "double dip", aka hit one enemy twice) and flails that could be quite powerful depending on how they were use. However, fighting certain bosses with melee was very difficult since they tend to keep their distance from you. Fighting The Twins with a melee build was very much a losing tactic, at least for me. This was also before the 1.2 update added melee weapons with projectiles. Ranged weapons used ammo depending on the weapon type. You are given four inventory slots specifically for ammo and they could stack up to 999 a piece. Ammo is dirt cheap, so it's very easy to get at least 3,996 bullets and not worry about running out of ammo. Magic weapons run on mana as expected, but that can easily become a non issue with enough mana potions. Furthermore, you could wear an accessory that auto used mana potions when you didn't have enough mana.

On second thought, maybe Terraria wasn't the most balanced way of handling things either. Well for Starbound, we have what we have now and from what I understand, Tiy doesn't plan on adding an ammo system. Shame that mods can't yet use an ammo system. Would lowering energy costs be enough or would the damage also have to be increased? This is considering that certain melee weapons also have projectiles and don't cost anything to use, although you can't aim them. I know there's been talks about the Bonehammer > everything else, but that's a legendary weapon and probably not something you'll just easily find. I also know the DPS can be misleading on melee weapons that fire projectiles or guns with multiple projectiles.