Ammo changes on SISI
I had an idea for ammo when I was working on boosting projectiles. I looked at many factors involved with projectiles to try and get a good overview of where they were lacking and how they could be improved while still fitting in with the overall design philosophy. I made many spreadsheets, created many graphs and spent a lot of time on the test server shooting at other devs. One of the things that stands out about the projectiles is the ability to change damage types when you swap ammo. This feature is offset however by the fact that when you change ammo you also change range. So what I was thinking about -- and what I want everyone to test out on the test server -- is this tweak to ammo that takes the eight ranges and cuts them down to three. Three short, two medium and three long range ammos types. A graph will help see the different in the damage verse range of the new ammo. The charts will help you see the the different damage types.
Here is a graph of 280mm Arties at the three ranges:
And here is the chart with the old and new ammo stats:
After coming up with the new concept for the projectile ammo ranges it was decided that hybrid ammo could possibly benefit from the same type of adjustment. I've created test charges for them also and I'm interested in your feedback about the change in gameplay. (Note, this isn't the place to whine about specific Gallente ships sucking):
Since lasers can swap crystals quickly, it was decided that they would keep all the different range/damage/cap use crystals and let that be part of their flavor. I was going to give the radio crystal some thermal damage but people around me protested, said that was part of the radio crystal's character and changing it would suck. So here is what we're thinking about for Lasers:
Another thing that is getting fixed with this potential change is the discrepency between the damage output of certain ammo types at various ranges. An example of this is Carbonized Lead S, Iron Charge S and Radio S which do 5, 6 and 7 damage respectively. This will also help balance out lasers somewhat and I will discuss this in more detail in a thread in ships and modules. This is one thing I would truely like to fix even if these other 'funky' changes never make it in.
Update: There is a thread on the forums about this now so check it out.
