Continuing the discussion from Alpha test feedback May 3, 2014:
Hey folks! I noticed a significant change in the hit detection, and I was wondering what it was. To me it feels like the server was unlagged or something, but I noticed myself not needing to lead nearly as much. This made it easier to lead people, but I bet it made it easier for people to lead me. I found that at short to medium distance, firing practically at the target would be sufficient to hit them.
My recording software didn’t work this time unfortunately, but today I pushed my kill:time ratio instead of my kill:death ratio. Ended up at 68/11. Because there was only maybe half as many players around as I noticed last time (most of whom I think were on my team), I found it easier to be a lot more aggressive. I also used the mousewheel to adjust my speed.
I don’t know if it was because of me getting around so much or if it’s just emergent behavior, but I noticed a pretty annoying and effective anti-romeo strategy forming. I noticed it most from players syco and Practical Chrome. When I would engage, my standard maneuver would be to put a stream of bullets into them, streak past their face, outturn, drop my speed, and bring in the kill. What I noticed is that after flying past them and while turning in, these players would stop dead, and bring their guns around. At that time I had a choice, I could probably win a zero speed duel with them, which is fine if I wanted to secure the kill, but my goals were not to secure the kill, it was to secure the kill and the next ten kills. I couldn’t sacrifice that much of my health to take out that one player.
I began to combat that technique basically hunting in different locations than them. Sometimes that lead to me accidentally wandering into a swarm of five reds, which was unpleasant. More than once I found myself being whittled away by the incredible accuracy of the bots.
Another strategy that seemed to work would be to push my speed to it’s upper limits and do a few circles around them. After they were good and lost, I could come to a stop, and hope that I could put enough bullets in them to make them switch to more traditional high speed maneuvers, an area I could usually out perform them in. In this case, the inability to track their target was the weakness of an otherwise great counter strategy.
Logged into my score page, excited to see how things change from week to week.
I wanted to make a comment in the flight recording I wanted to make, but since I botched that I’ll make it here: Today I learned a great deal about using target distance to assist in your aiming, specifically indirectly affecting your turn rate. When someone was using maneuvers that would force me to turn really hard, I came to the understanding that by dropping my speed I was not only pushing my turn rate:distance, but I was also increasing distance from my target. As the distance from your target increases, their maneuvers end up making a lesser impact on your screen, meaning that you don’t have to turn your ship as much to keep your cross hairs on them. Because leading the target was so much easier this time around, I noticed that gaining distance to avoid bullet fire was actually a much inferior tactic to turning into your enemy and flying past them, the strategy I mentioned I was using earlier.
Anyway, had a blast, can’t wait to see what changes next week.
Top five! Woot… Much credit should go to Psycho Romeo for the great video last week. I am really getting the hang of the the Tactical Map too, because of his video.
Also I noticed that the speed of the ship appears to have gone up by as much as 50%. Before it felt like I was crawling when moving past the capital ships, and now I am really moving.
I do apologize PsychoRomeo. I will have to hold myself to a little more constraint. You are the best, so in the battle I want to beat the best. I am a simple space shooter, this is the only game I currently play, and the blinders do come on when I am going after someone. I do believe though that your tactics are superior by not putting blinders on… I just need some time and study of the good players.
No need to apologize for being awesome Practical Chrome, hah. To my great surprise your in game score says otherwise - but based on my observation, you and syco were the strongest elements of your team. That observation is based on both you guys shooting at me and you guys shooting at my allies.
Last week I tried again and I was still blind in Firefox. I heard cool sounds as I got shot down. Something new happens every week.
For once Internet Explorer worked better than Firefox. I could see zillions of ships, but had trouble controlling mine and could not fire any missiles or control that at all.
I wish there was a tutorial to teach you how to move your ship and fire at targets with it.
If I get home in time, I will try again tomorrow.
Holding space should fire, and the flying currently works by holding the left mouse button down and dragging. I’ve attached the rest of the controls below:
Those controls are real handy right in the screen and you can fold them up with that center tab, too.
I will try holding the space bar time I log in (two weeks, I think) and if I kill a ship, then I will spend the rest of the time practicing maneuvering my ship.
I have been giving quick presses to the space bar.
When all this works real well, you could spin it off, I think, for short dogfights when people had the time to play it. That would also be one way to build interest in challenging that record again.
