@@elixer88 Not everything should be a rate fighting device for circle strafing furballs. Hopefully the changes allow for the other combat ships to develop and employ their own tactical styles. I know "jousting" is something of an epithet, but boom and zoom is a real life tactic. And may become effective in SC IF you can apply significant damage in a pass sufficient to cause cumulative defeat of your enemy. Heavy fighter with their heavier loadout (I'm thinking cannons especially) may prove effective on certain targets using a boost in boost out approach. But they will have to be skilled at lining up and executing a good pass given their more restricted flight characteristics.
"What's important is that you understand the model in it's entirety BEFORE you start making feedback, so that the feedback that you do put out is educated and informed." Such a good statement. One that I'm sure a majority of players will ignore 🤣
I also think we should take into personal bias. I'll use myself as an example, The change in the pitch model and increase on the forward thrust over all other axis, is a benefit to myself but maybe not other players. This is because I have a omni-throttle setup on dry clutch that I also use for flight Sims like DCS. So a full pitch model is closer to a circle 2 maneuver I'm used to minus the slight rudder inputs on roll for to keep from stalling out. Same thing for the throttle input, this will mean we will be more forward focused in maneuvering, rather than fully 3d. Yes it is still apples to oranges, but this means I won't be doing things completely opposite to nature, instead of throttling down to turn tighter I will have to throttle up, pitch up and use boost like an afterburner to cut in, I will also not be using my pedals other than nose orientation and won't be doing that weird backwards pedaling that is opposite of plane manuevers. That stuff is really mind fucky, if you don't know what I mean, swap how you roll and yaw on your KB&M bindings or your sticks and you'll get what I am talking about. That being said, these benefits for me may not being benefits for the majority of players, so we have to keep that in mind during feedback.
Funnily enough, switching to QCM is pretty quick, and a few players have been using it to easily get out of fights. Of course, the risk/reward factor is that using it lowers your shields so you have to gauge if it's worth it to escape the fight or tough it out.@@StoneCoolds
@@StoneCooldsWhy would the top players want to run away??? They want their target close to them so that they can keep smashing them. It’s always the lesser skilled players who need to run
Thanks for explaining this. Conceptually it sounds like this system might make it easier to balance as well, since you could just tweak the rof boost between lock and gimbal till everyone is happy. The lack of reticle and pip however is ridiculous. How am I supposed to test without it. Not sure why they pushed this test with the basic UI needed.
It might be easier to balance, but it also makes it alot more boring. I think these changes take away any semblance of a space "sim". This new master mode makes it less sim than the arcade mode in War Thunder. No yaw + pitch? In space? Really? Even airplanes today can pitch and yaw. Is there any reason to not have gimbals on any hardpoint now? If you can simply lock it to get the full benefit as if you had fixed weapons. I understand Chris Roberts desire for WWII combat. It's kinda cool. However, in atmospheric flight you have more factors to take into consideration. How fast a plane can climb. How fast can it dive. If you're higher up you have an advantage because you can transform your altitude into energy (speed) and control the engagement. None of that exist in space combat. In space you don't go faster down than up. There is no advantage of being "higher" than you opponent, cause there is no up or down in space. All we have now are 2 objects moving at roughly the same speeds being hard limited in their movement (yaw and pitch) for some arbitrary reason. In space...
@@latjolajban81 the space sim argument is a bit silly, you want an actual space sim combat? ok, take potshots from max scanner range in a way only a targeting computer can as you pull a bunch of lateral Gs to avoid the fire from the other guy.
@@quantuman100 It's not silly. CIG themselves said they wanted to make the best space sim. Those are their words. And that's what I backed for. I recognize there's a balance between fun and sim, but prohibiting yaw + pitch, and forcing a bad version of WWII dogfighting is VERY much into the world of bad arcade. Did you see much nose to nose strafing in WWII dogfighting?
@@latjolajban81"CIG themselves said they wanted to make the best space sim." they want to make what they believe is the best space sim. Not yours. There are humans working behind this.
With the closer distances, I am excited to think about stepping away from repeaters to scatterguns and cannons. I'm incredibly encouraged by this, and I hope CIG nail it this time with constant improvement. It was a great idea to start master modes testing in its own AC and I think that demonstrates CIG's interest in getting this right, with dedicated dogfighters. Please, let's get this right!
CIG has had the very difficult task of keeping 6 DoF movement and adequate travel speeds, while having a flight model that is fun in combat and doesn't push fights into boring situations like jousting, while also making larger ships viable in fights. MM seems like a good step. There's a lot you can do with the new boost. Could use that to do a lot of tuning. Works a lot like how boost in Elite Dangerous works, but having a boost reservoir like in SC now is better and allows for more tweaking. The gimbal change is also amazing. Genius idea.
Boy try it yourself first. You don't need a pip at all. The aimbot is so strong that even with fixed you only have to look in the direction of the opponent. You don't need any skill for that.
I love this change! Kinda reminds me of patch 2.63 back when I started. I love the lower capped scm, that gives each ship a unique feel. I also like that boost is like a big reservoir that slowly recharges vs the way it is now
1. A1 non-pip aim is hilariously good. 2. Ships in the speed graphic are wrong way round. 3. I’d really like a video on how well you can get and stay within 100-150m with this new model
this first look at master mode, im liking it. anytime i would play ive always made it a habit to keep my max flight speed at the SCM mark and not going over it as often as possible. it has always been a pet peeve of mine that we were able to go past SCM and remain there as though it was the norm. im so happy master mode is going to be the new standard. also the no pips is kinda brilliant to be honest. it adds yet another skill level that would no doubt elevate a players combat capability. i would want it to stay off OR maybe we could have the option to turn it off if a player prefers no pips.
@@0Metatron I realize that and I believe some of the greatest realizations throughout history were accidents. this current bug could be one of those realizations.
@@4ortytoon absolutely not, you can barely see the ship beyond 700m and that’s in good visibility. It looks and flys terrible with no targeting like that
@@0Metatron that just supports what i was saying. that it would elevate combat capability. you may not have them with a visual pip but you would have them on radar a that would indicate their relative position to you. and there is a engine trial as we saw in this video that would illustrate their flight direction.
I know that you have diffetent priorities in tha game than me do my take on that May be intetesting view from the other side. I know you prefer gameplay over everything but i dont. For me the why stát citizen is better that other space games was always immersion. Sadly this Master mode solution of gameplay problem ruins immersion for me terribly because its absolute rape of verse physical laws and there isnt any valid reason in the verse why would these mods exist. We are talking about speeds of jet planes and they dont need Quantum buble to go faster. In terms of space speeds >1000m/s is nothing..
just seeing the Mantis have 2500 rounds made me happy, hope that rolls over to the PU eventually but doubtful they'll keep the ammo that high would be nice tho
That braking after the boost in scm mode seems stupid to me, youre in open space. What they shouldve done is make it so that boosting takes away power from the weapons until you let go of it and let it have a cooldown/bootup of the weapons. Thats seems to make more sense to me
It is, because you'll be now very close to your target and speeds are 1/3 of what they were. Master mode restricts the dogfight bubble to a very confined area.
Thanks so much for the explanation on Master Modes. I was doing some PvE bounties last night, and wished that the speed limiter worked just like Master Modes (although at the time I didn't know MMs had this). So I'm happy to see we'll eventually get there.
God I hate to be the hater but I just don’t like this at all, I know speeds have been an issue for pvp but damn max speeds of 250ish is killing me inside
1:00 Sorry but CIG has shown one thing, once something comes into the PTU other than minor changes, It is there to stay. IE. Inventory. This is the final flight model because this is what being used SQ42. But Let's see what it can do!
I'm actually really excited by the Master Modes. It gives a degree of flight control that I've always felt was lacking; namely the ability to QT speed somewhere above the planet rather than the jank of powering down, up, praying to any deity you can think of that your ship doesn't become the server's newest physics toy, and then slowboating to the point you REALLY wanted halfway between QT targets, lol. The idea of going into a pack-up-and-scoot mode vs everything online duking it out sounds great. My only concern is getting away from faster ships when you're in a slower one, but I believe the balance for that will have more to do with shield/component size vs what they're able to actually keep trained on you. So a light fighter might be able to keep a Hull C locked down forever, but once the actual shield and component mechanics are implemented properly it shouldn't be able to actually dent it without help from something with more firepower. In fact if the ranges for weapon usefulness on some fighters are now so short it definitely opens them up to turret fire and requires the pilot to do more work to engage turrets than just hover around.
Solid video, A1. Much appreciated on the first take of MM. Were you boosting the front shields? I haven't seen much use of that, but it makes sense that if we're committed to a nose-on fight, we'd put the power to the shield segment needing it most
My body is so ready for MM I just hope that a few ships get their time in the spotlight and not just the Gladius and the Arrow. I'd love to see the 325a get a rework and get that POS yoke thrown out for a really nice stick and throttle and direct access to the pilots chair like the Avenger. I'm totally looking forward to finding you out there for a rematch. As a combat pilot it's pretty much my No. 1 goal to beat you in a fair 1v1 keep it up A1
chris roberts has always said he wanted WW2 dog fights in space. the confusing thing is that for the first 5 years of the project, they were instead going for a super realistic flight model with physicalized maneuvering jets, complete 6 degrees of freedom decoupled mode, and combat was looking like it was going to be far more awesome than just WW2 in space. And for a while, it was perfect--fun, fast, and unpredictable. The ships moved wildly and in all directions. Honing in on a single light fighter was really tough, IMO, as it should be. Ever since then, they have slowly nerfed space combat, dumbing it down bit by bit, as they developed SQ42. My guess is that they have lots of space combat in Squadron where they need a certain outcome, and they are using the PU and arena commander as the test bed in order to see how much they need to dumb it down by. My only hope is that once SQ42 is done and released and the PU is mature, they move back towards more realistic space combat. Don't get me wrong, the flight model in WC: Privateer 1 was absolute shit and I still loved that game. Realistic space flight is not necessary for a game to be fun. But seriously, CIG needs to "keep it simple"--pick a top speed for all ships that keeps hit detection possible on servers. Below that, make "mass" king....the lightest ships accelerate the fastest in all directions all else held equal. I really could not care less for making a gladius-on-gladius dogfight feel like WW2. I'd be happy if light fighters could use their speed and 6 degrees of freedom to dodge turrets and other ships for as long as they want. If that unlocks an unsustainable meta, then fix it by decreasing their offensive armament, not by nerfing their flight. It's a space sim--space flight is supposed to be the fun/important part, IMO.
I think it looks great overall from the bits ive seen, Ive always enjoyed fighting at scm speed against npcs, its much more enjoyable than the 1200m/s ripping around, although im not 100% sure i like the weapon changes, seems odd to just have to sit there and stare at each other while you wait for a recharge
Thank you Avenger for this overview of the future of flight in Star Citizen, it's nice to hear the opinion of an experienced pilot like you, the dogfight is going to close combat and it's much better, the fights squadron and all the rest of the things to do in the verse are going to be more enjoyable. fly safe o7
"Old gimbal system of weapon size going down one to accomdate gimbals has been replaced with a flat 20% reduction in firerate on the same weapons, allowing fixed and gimbal on size 3 for the Gladius" If its twice the rate of fire then something isn't working as intended
I love the boost change. It makes so much more sense. Sure kinda sucks I won't be able to just point at something stupid far away and afk there at top speed. This definitely will make combat more reasonable even for rookies. And just running won't be a great idea.
How does it make sense? There's no drag in space so when your capacitor is empty, it forces your retro thrusters on? Maybe it makes combat "more fun" but i'm struggling with the suspension of disbelief.
@@aaronhunyady Maybe it's a "safety feature" built into the computer, to slow the ship down when it knows it doesn't have the resources to brake properly at those speeds? Use your imagination.
@@aaronhunyady Honestly, I am willing to sacrifice some suspension of belief to have a more engaging/enjoyable experience. However, I agree with gilbert. Honestly, I could see there being a specific function if there was nothing within sensor range and the ship would just cruise at full tilt. The second it detects anything within certain parameters, it hits the safety switch so you are able to respond in a reasonable amount of time. I could see something like this happening irl if we ever get to that point of privately owned ships that any joe schmoe could get. Also such a feature would reduce required training for operating the equipment with the sensors failure being more of an emergency training thing rather than your daily driving class.
If you remember from when they first announced master modes, there's a new mode between SCM and quantum for traveling shorter distances. I think they said roughly 20,000 m/s. You have to shut off your shields to use that mode though, so you can't just bug out of a fight.
Looking forward to give this a go. I also wonder how there going to balance this with the other archtypes, racers, medium and heavy fighters and maybe the most interesting the interceptors
The speed feels great and going back to standard mode after felt very sluggish BUT!!! At the moment it is very aim racing and way less positional knife fighting. No roof to roof sliding round each other No cool, satisfying prenose moves. Very very worrying to me because that’s what I enjoyed the most about the current model
I have mixed feelings about this, maybe just because I am really attached to movement and tracking in the current model as a space game. But even if I end up liking it less I don't think there's any denying it'll probably be better for the games balancing and long term life cycle since I think this new model will be more in line with how new players expect the ships to fly.
Cheers for the diagrams, I know they take a while to make, but it really does help explain it clearly. Every weapon able to be gimballed? That would be so good if true (delete that stupid puck thing!!! just nerf the rof!!!)
I find all changes exciting. I have preferred flight model from many years ago; so long ago that I don't even remember which patch, but the game is what you make it, and none of them have been that bad that I've not enjoyed myself, so unless they changed it to NMS style, I'll be fine.
I understand that this will bring more balance to the game but I feel there are other ways to balance combat that don’t compromise immersion. I want to feel like I’m fighting in a futuristic spaceship 900 years in the future, not a WW2 plane with a space themed map and skin. I would be much more happy if they made maneuvering and high G turns much more difficult to do while allowing very fast or even infinite acceleration in space. This would make the skill gap much larger imo. Infinite acceleration would be balanced in that since you’d be going so fast, you might not be able to slow down and you’d be out of the fight. Not being careful when trying to maneuver your ship at super high speeds could make it go out of control, causing massive amounts of G forces that can incapacitate the pilot. This means the pilot would likely choose to fight at lower speeds anyway to avoid the risks of higher speeds. However, the door will always be open for the most skilled players to push themselves. Another problem with master modes is that it almost completely favors combat over running away. New players or players who don’t wish to fight or who are in the wrong ship will be forced to fight. If you want to escape by going fast or quantum traveling, you have to turn off your shields and turn your ship into the health equivalent of paper. Overall, if players like the new system more, that’s fine by me. I just hope if people grow to find it boring over time, CIG change it instead of doubling down on balance over immersion.
Fundamentally, if CIG does not allow anyone the overall decision to escape instead of engage an give 90% chance to escape, then this will not be an overall good option for change. If CIG allows the aggressor all the power to force other players to play the game they want. Ultimately, this will be a huge negative. The option to escape should weight more to success than the option to engage, as that puts the vision of "My toons life matters" to the core of the product as CR intended.
Currently I love how all the gun spread and power management stuff like shields going off in the quantum controll mode. But the way they have limited the speed when boosting in SCM mode for example feels kinda odd in my opinion. But i will give it some more chances at some point. Dogfights look way cooler tho and look more difficult but i havent tested and dont know any other star citizen players who like dogfighting
Based on your descriptions and watching the video (I won't have time to test myself for a few days), I generally don't like what they're doing conceptually (Yes, this Fortress of Text is less time-intensive to write than spending an appropriate time testing): 1) I don't like the disparate speed limitations between SCM and NAV. I don't like _any_ speed limitations in a space game, but I understand that some has to exist for technical reasons and for meaningful human interaction. It never made sense to me, however, to disable shields _and_ weapons to try to disengage from or avoid a fight. Hard acceleration or high aero drag forces might affect shields and certain weapons, but otherwise, it presents a break in immersion for me. Spooling the quantum drive could absolutely disable shields. Maybe speeds generally need to be brought down a bit across the board. But having that mode-based speed change doesn't sit well with me, and disabling weapons and shields just to Go Fast also doesn't feel very good. 2) I don't like the pitch-focus as it feels like they're pushing it more towards a Star Wars/Elite Dangerous feel for broader market appeal. It doesn't necessarily change the skill demands, but it certainly feels like they've been considering disproportionately the feedback from _aircraft_ pilots, both real and simulated (Malakie Tesarn, asserted to be a former navy pilot, was an Evo tester when I was in that group and was adamant our spaceships should handle more like planes or jets), instead of recognizing that the ships in SC are _space_ ships. Individual ships can certainly have different handling characteristics, but I feel they're trying too hard to homogenize things at the moment (granted the test is only for a modified and heavily buffed Gladius, maybe we'll see more soon). 3) I don't like the higher dispersion. I get wanting to bring combat in closer, but again, that feels like trying to have that more cinematic experience (i.e. Ships Not Pips which is stupid imo) in the vein of Star Wars as opposed to an immersive experience like ARMA or DCS. To be fair, though, slowing down combat does mean that combat distances should necessarily decrease, otherwise it just turns into sniper battles all the time, so I can't say it's all bad - I just don't like it generally. That metric especially develops holes when one considers Capital battles on the same metric - two half-kilometer warships slugging it out at an absolute maximum of 50m/s (maybe 100m/s boosting?) even with the maximum range of 2.8km on large weapons (currently) seems pretty silly. The ships simply won't be able to evade fire at those ranges and speeds, even with the slower velocity (700m/s, 4 second time to impact max) on Big weapons. It really dumbs down large/capital combat to the point of simply applying more fire to the enemy and maybe spinning to equalize damage to shields. Really big guns should have really long range, higher velocity, but understandably wide dispersion. However, even the biggest guns still have less than 1 degree of total dispersion (iirc the 16"/50 on the Iowa class had somewhere around 52-53 MOA, landing their shots in a 500m circle at 32km). For comparison, your Gladius at 600m is about 1.6 degrees of angular area, while a Javelin broadside-on even at 2800m is a whopping 10 degrees. Open-choke shotguns aren't that inaccurate, and even full-choke shotguns manage around 1.5 to 2 degrees of spread, depending on load. For further comparison, the old rifled 105 on the original Abrams could achieve 1.5 MOA levels of accuracy with its (non-finned) HEP shells (about a half-meter area at 1500 meters, and I'm even estimating generous on the area). 3a) Summary, because I got wordy: Short range bad, high dispersion for fighter-size weapons bad, doesn't make sense. Small weapons should be precise, dispersion increases with size. Range needs to increase much more with size, and velocity needs to go up a tad with size. Cannons need more velocity than repeaters, but at a 4:3 ratio instead of this goofy-ass 1:2 ratio. Repeaters and gatlings should rightly have poorer dispersion than cannons, but shouldn't be at 1.6 degrees unless you're talking an S10 or somesuch. 4) I don't hate the changes to Boost mechanics and think that could actually work very well with a higher speed limit. While it does remind me of Elite Dangerous, it can have a bit of justification: I've always justified speed limits as a measure of performance envelope - the greater acceleration on the main chord a ship has, the higher its top speed, the theory being that it can effect turns and stops within a certain distance to avoid obstacles and terrain. Again, maybe speeds generally need to come down with the Boost speed being the old Top speed while speeds generally come down about 25-33% from Live.
I will amend this by saying: If Master Modes was intended purely for an _arcade_ style arena combat environment for fighters, it's fine. I might even be fine as an _option_ for a single-player game like Squadron. But for an immersive, 'high-fidelity' (wording typically coupled with Simulator games), expansive space flight experience as found in the Persistent Universe of Star Citizen, it doesn't feel very good so far.
Yeah these changes they are making... so much for "space sim". So many ridiculous limitations that we simply shouldn't have in space. Or at least, they are implementing in really stupid ways. I totally get that changing directions at 1200m/s like an insect makes for bad and janky and twitchy gameplay. But instead of limiting yaw and pitch, how about simply nerfing directional thrusters? Instead of these master modes, how about making boosts and highspeed movement require way more power. That way you still have to choose between high movement + weapons. Or high movement + shields. Or weapons + shield. But you can't have all three because the power requirement is simply too big.
what annoys me is that the deceleration doesn't make any sense, in a physical way. You use boost fuel to reach a high speed, but as soon as you let go of boost you immediately slow down, very quickly, even though you dont use boost fuel to decelerate. That worries me from an engineering perspective. If numbers can be fudged like this then there isn't a unifying underlying system for engineers to manipulate. Edit: I suppose it would be possible to unify the boost-meter with the heat mechanic, but deceleration should still be at no boost speeds. Alternatively, limit this behaviours to atmospheric flight, where air resistance is a factor.
This raises the question on larger ships and how they take the change. Does anything change for medium and heavy fighters? What about larger ships like the Constellation? Or the Hammerhead when the spread reduces the effective range? Or the industrial ships that are even more vulnerable now that their speed is limited and CIG insists on gigantic blind spots?
If i had a customer like Avenger One that have spent so many countless hours and have such a high understanding of my product, i would hire him immediatly. The amount of knowledge you could bring to CIG would help them out incredibly. Really great video!
Does the spread increase affect all weapons equally or you're mostly just talking about the typical repeaters when you say we need to be real close to deal real damage? What about cannons? Btw, is it just me or TTK is really long?
You didnt say anything about 2nd mode. About switching them. How in your opinion will it apply to bigger ship? Or to trade ships (bigger ship trying to run from 2-3 smaller ships). Can we spool QD in combat mode?
What about Travel mode? Are shields still disabled in it? If so, what is the point of having them in the first place on C2 or similar ships, time is money, travel mode saves time...
Am 100% okay with CIG testing this. It needs testing. The current model is flawed. Whilst this one may not be ideal, its attempting to solve some of the more agregious current issues. Jousting will be a hard habit to break but there is promise. This will never be perfect but they have to try. Giving up just isn't an option.
Weapon spread! Finally! People are gonna be super butthurt about the decoupled change to speeds, though. I kinda think no lead pips might be more of a feature than a big, but that may be just me being a dick 😅
I have never seen such cumbersome, artificially limited, totally inexplicable flight model. Go fast, lose shields. go fast, lose weapons, fix your gimbals you fire faster. It is a hodge podge of strange rules that make no sense...There are even cool off penalties for changing speed. Everything about this thing smells of desperation, despair, and just throwing every idea in there and see what sticks.
Yeah it feels like it’s just hard bottlenecking player skill. Not to mention it ruins immersion when I feel like I’m flying a WW2 plane in space with how the slow the combat will be
It would be interesting if pip was only on during 'auto' targeting as a learning aid. Then when you go Lock its full skill, no pip. and based off your previous combat knowledge/experience.
Many thx for look into this. We do not know how MM end and what exactly it'll be, but I have only one "but": It's space, so where is "sim" part there? What I mean, in space, we should increase speed always when we turn on engines without any drag, and only force reducing that speed should be G-force during turn which should cause damage if we do it with too high speed. So "slowing down" after shut off boost? I know, I know, this can give us better and more even combat experience, but again SC is "arcade" type of game or "space sim" type?