In real life, aside from ammo racking, ships rarely rarely sink, what you're expecting is pulverizing a 600 ton ship, but vanilla cannon turrets are much better in that it'll disable a ship but still leave it repairable, as it should, this is a much better option than what modded weapons offer.
I don’t know where you get this idea that ships don’t sink. Plenty of ships sunk during WW2. Sometimes it took multiple hits, but all ships were quite sinkable. Anti-ship missiles and the removal of armor from modern ships has made it even easier. The Russian cruiser Moskva was recently sunk with allegedly two missile hits. It caught on fire and the crew was unable to save it.
@@QualityPen Spaceships won't "sink" like wet-navy ships do. Damage that would prove sufficient to sink a surface vessel will just leave a spacecraft drifting, with the specific exception of detonating ammo/fuel stores.
@@ikillstupidcomments Maybe you can count it as sunk if the work needed to repair and salvage the craft is more extensive than simply building a new ship?
@@CMTechnica oh ok thanks. I do not have that much experience in PvP/survival (I usually play creative to create ship to use in survival then dislike what I did and therefore don't play survival 😅)
@@GetBrocked would those autocannons make for a good heavy flak against bombers? (I'm not talking about some fast destroyer with one or two, or even 10 or 20. I'm talking about the air-defense of a massive dreadnaught with hundreds of player-made quad-turrets and huge amored gatling-turrets with 12 guns in each of them).
Absolutely understand why someone from a modded server would find these guns to be a downgrade. Compared to the variety and power available with mods they are. From the perspective of someone playing in a well established meta with modded weapons they just look weak. But for someone like me who basically only plays vanilla, these and the turret control block have opened up the possibilities a lot. I think the point of them is to make fights take a fair while in vanilla, while giving more variety. If it takes longer to fight, then you get more fun out of the ship you spent hours mining and building for. Also if there is a lot of holes being punched through your ship it makes it more rewarding to make a well designed interior.
@@ThatOneAudioTeam but in the space of one railgun you can put two artillery, it has the same range and has better rate of fire. IDK why everybody has a hard-on for a railgun when Conventional Weapons can be just as devastating.
In the video I had the feeling that the new weapons were compared to the modded weapons. I don't think that's fair at all. But I think I could understand the core message of the video. There is a lack of alternative HE ammo as an option in the turrets to deal area damage. Just flip a switch and explosive ammunition will be fired. The length of the video could have been much shorter. But the fight in the background was very interesting.
it's sorta both Vs even reasonable modded weapons they suck. And since most servers have some sort of modded framework already, it's important to think about how it does. However, this'd be fine, but the 2nd issue is that these sorta suck against themselves. Meaning they don't work well in isolation as well. Yeah you are correct, this was a tad scatter brain, and I didn't really script this beyond key talking points. I'll do better in the future. did this before work
@@GetBrocked I think keen want them to "suck against themselves" though. They don't want people to be able to lose or kill ships quickly, considering the amount of work that normally goes into a large survival ship. I think its fully intentional that these new guns take a while to take out a combat ship. Of course they won't be as damaging as modded weapons. Modded weapons are made largely for pvp players who want quicker fights with more stakes. There's two different goals here.
@@GetBrocked You can try to compare them with modded weapons, but that was probably never the goal of the developers. I'll have to see how the new weapons fare in large Vannila battles with "slow" ships. I don't like fast fights with big ships anyway, that should only be the case with fast fighters.
@@GetBrocked Something completely different. When you fight each other in Space Engineers, do you do it in Survival? So you only have limited hydrogen or unlimited? We played creatively ourselves back then, but then everyone switched to using only small tanks and only a few. This has led to the subsystems being very small. Now we switched to battles in survival mode to make fuel management really important and have the tanks available as a target when using Hydrogen Thruster. This has now led to the fact that a mixture of engines has prevailed. btw we only play with the default weapons in the game and have removed our tiered thruster mod to reduce too fast movement of large ships.
We did a bit of both. We had fights with only Warfare 2 first, and then the battle after would use the same ships, except one group would get modded weapons. In the end, it mostly came down to pilot skill, with the same group effectively coming out on top each round regardless of what their ships were equipped with.
I've found that having a small main battery of artillery turrets set to only target power systems, then having mixed splash damage secondaries set to go for weapons rounded out by extensive CIWS is an absolutely murderous combination. You won't be necessarily outright destroying ships, but you'll be crippling and reactor killing them.
The issue is the main metric of where the rounds hit isn't what you choose to target, it's how good the hostile pilot is. Most people in testing went after weapons (the easiest system to hit) BUT In practice all ships were just evenly peppered across the hull. And most weren't even weapon stripped (just conveyer lines severed). I think sub system targeting works for slow civ, or large cumbersome capital ships. But against fast movers. It's nearly useless.
@@CaptainRhodor yeah, but then comes the question. (at least for outlands) would you just rather use 220mm? I could see a cool meta of a destroyer designed specifically to close to point blank, snipe the reactor, and the leave (causing a post battle loss of the ship) In practice im sure how well this would work
I get your point... but the take away is very close to modded weapons are better than the new vanilla weapons... your gonna get alot of flak for that. No pun intended
His point is that because they have to design their ships for surviving those modded weapons, because the server player design tech has advanced so far, the weapons pack weapons are too awful to use
I'm only disappointed by the vanilla weapons range. That and the fact exploding blocks don't seem to damage other blocks around them as much as they probably should. A battery of hydrogen tanks tightly packed together should all explode if one goes, imo.
The new artillery can hit up to 2km, gotta have a hotbar binding to tell turrets to copy target after locking onto enemy and then if done right they'll attack up to 2 km away
While I believe I understand where you're coming from and also have a similar thought to other comments that you're partially comparing them to modded weapons, I actually think that in a purely vanilla context, PvE or PvP, the new weapons all fit in a good position IMO. I even made a spreadsheet for myself not long ago listing material costs for ammo, statistics and various damage units and seeing it + using the weapons sheds some neat light. Gatling: Still one of the best damage-per-minute statistics despite how small it can be. Has higher per-ammo unit damage than the autocannon and works well as a point defense for missiles and small grid crafts no matter the grid size it's on. Valuable for it's mass-of-fire, reducing the cost of missed shots from manual and automatic aiming. Also best damage per magnesium used. Autocannon: An inbetween for the gatling and assault cannon, it has an efficient per-block damage value and has a higher DPM than gatling. Ammo is inefficient space wise compared to gatling, though. Good for getting more scrap out of a fight. Second best damage per magnesium used, slightly more iron and nickel efficient than gatling. Assault Cannon: I think it's more valuable for paramilitary and civilian use as it has a higher fire rate than artillery and higher damage than autocannons: affords a better chance of downing weapons in a hit or two without as much delay. Devastates lighter small grids in one go. Nothing very outstanding about its stats. Artillery: The highest DPM from what I've gathered. Best use of uranium vs. other ammos for damage. Long range helps get preemptive strikes on less attentive small grids and does considerable damage to large grids no matter the armor. Railguns: Pinpoint accurate and very fast (large grid fires at twice the velocity but takes a whole minute to recharge vs. 20s for small grid.) Best use of iron and nickel for damage by quite the longshot, less than stellar for silicon and uranium. Missiles: If I had to guess, it's the highest damaging weapon IF you can hit either a flat surface or even inside a hole in a grid; just depends on how well you can use your shots. Vs. a single block it's the worst in every category other than damage per silicon. Safe to say that while I think things could be adjusted to get a good balance (I still think the deviation is kinda crazy for most weapons), the flexibility in purely vanilla ship designs, especially with the targeting options available now, at least provides a very real reason to be more dynamic with ship and station design. Of course at the end of the day though, it's always going to be a tradeoff between burst and consistent DPS, especially in a game where 3 dimensional combat is really the *only* combat, ignoring stations: every weapon serves a role. Edit: I should also add though that I do think more AOE or other HE-like ammo or weapons would be a good idea in the future of vanilla SE.
It's worth noting I do address how they work in pure vanilla. Maybe you missed it. but they suck there too. Outside of roleplaying, WF2 weapons struggle to kill other WF2 ships. And it always basically ends in a draw. with both sides weapon stripped
I will say, you certainly have a point about the lack of any kind of HE or APHE option for the weapons, as well as the somewhat excessive recharge time on the railgun given its size and charge based drawbacks, and even missed a major negative that the range being the same on the artillery turret as it is for the gatling and missile turrets really works against its theoretical intended role, but there were certainly also some points where the way in which comparison was done between modded and vanilla weapons was done was a bit unfair, seeming almost to dismiss certain benefits of some of the weapons simply because mods often do it better using the looser constraints they can work within. All in all, a usefull analysis but also one to take with a pinch of salt.
disabling the speed cap with ai pirates enabled is always amusing because they don't know how to handle it and 9 times out of 10 will just smash into whatever their trying to shoot at several hundred m/s, ironically doing way more damage then their guns might have
It seems to me like KEEN's idea behind these weapons was to offer, in part, a way to get through enemy armour before unleashing hell with the missile mounts / turrets. Vanilla already had HE explosive weapons. The buffing of armour to make missiles less enemy-deleting seems to support this idea.
I think your complaints are understandable but this update is a point in the right direction. Ship combat is much more interesting now with bullet deflecrion and penetration. They should add an ability for ammo type next
I mostly PvE but it's really interesting to hear a different perspective on the new weapons. I'm going to have to take another look at those gatling turrets I think, thanks. (:
yeah, something to consider that i didn't mention is material cost, and damage. AWP, and other mods like it suck for recovery of the kill target. While a AP style weapon has far more of the kill target remaining for salvage.
The fact that everyone is wearing a spacesuit to protect against decompression kinda hurts AP weapons. If your hull being breached suddenly means the crew is dead, then they get ALLOT scarier.
If you know you're going to be in combat while in space, your entire crew will be wearing spacesuits to do otherwise would be like shooting yourself in the foot
The thing I really don't like about weapon mods is that there are so many different kinds. If I design a ship to work with mexpex on one server and then go somewhere the uses okim, the turrets aren't going to fit flush with the hull and I have to learn how to shoot all over again because of the different weapon stats. These new vanilla turrets may not compete with mods but they are consistent between servers. I think Keen was trying to play it safe with the way they designed the assault and artillery turrets. They were more concerned with a backlash over power creep than pleasing the weaponcore community. I agree with your comments on the railgun though. It's definitely a siege cannon. I spent half an hour shooting at the red ship using a single railgun and did mostly cosmetic damage. I think you could compensate for the narrow wound channel by stacking a couple of them in a diagonal cross arrangement.
Exactly. I got tired of constantly redesigning my ships after switching because mods and decided to go fully vanilla. Between needing to design ships better and making PMWs, vanilla is a lot more fun personally.
For me, the railgun is a hit-and-run destroyer/corvette weapon. Swoop in close enough for a shot, turn your tail to them, and moon them as you run away for a minute and recharge. Helps to balance out a large boom ship in vanilla and force it to have escorts.
So basically the Railgun gives a Corvette the same niche as a WWI-WWII submarine that has to surface before firing so everyone can see coming from a mile of but it's "torpedoes" can cause heavy damage IF they hit before it "dives" to get out of the engagement before the Frigates and Destroyers wreck it's shit.
I quite like the new weapons, tbh. Currently, my server runs the AWP, which serves as entry grade armament, and (somehow, but unsurprisingly) does less damage than the new artillery. One of the newer factions just got done building the first battlecruiser using weapons 2.0, and it fits nicely in our little power scale of balancing. Explaining it to a guy who didn't understand why I green lit the battlecruiser for server use, I put it this way: "think of the AWP weapons as WWII HE shells. They explode, they pierce armor, and don't do an obscene amount of damage. Contrast that with the battlecruiser's armament of artillery: it's got more armor piercing capabilities, and none of the benefits otherwise offered to HE. That makes it perfect for use on cruisers and larger ships.
My experience has been the exact opposite. The WF II turrets do a lot of damage, but 95% of the time it's meaningless damage. While the AWP turrets typically do less dps (especially factoring accuracy), but their damage is far more meaningful.
@@GetBrocked that would be the HE, would it not? Just by running tests, and the entire reason we didn't shelf the AWP, the splash damage from the explosive impact was the biggest factor. I can't personally speak for anti heavy armor uses since the server has restrictions on ships being built out of HVY, but the new weapons seem to do more penetration damage and less explosive damage, which is where the WWII ammo type comparison cane from
I think the railguns could have a place when paired with subsystem targeting. Mounted on a more agile ship, follow the tracer fire from your turrets to see where you need to land the railgun shots.
Watching the battle in the background I start to think you should think about implenting a thruster cap as the ships more and more just are thruster spam.
@@GetBrocked Yeah, I always thought that in order to be realistic there should be maybe 1/2 of the forward thrust (in kN) as maneuver/breaking thrust at max.
@@Cainite To be realistic it's the opposite, almost all thrust on spacecraft are forward thrust with scattered small thrusters to change orientation and slightly move the shuttle for docking. IRL they'd rather have maximum forward thrust and flip the entire shuttle to slow down. Various small thrusters and gyroscopes are used for stability.
I personally like the northwind weapons a lot, a great variation of weapon size and speeds. large 500mm turrets (and different ammos) can wreck a ship with cluster shots, HE or AP shots but have such low velocity that they can be shot down with PDC, it really makes for interesting battles. Large ships with large cannons only can be completely deleted with smaller weapons if they have none.
The issue of gatlings is that they spread damage over and have low burst damage (while having top-tier sustained DPS). I have experience in coding combat drones of various sizes and I can say that a large grid drone can be absolutely invulnerable to pre-W2 vanilla turrets - rockets can't hit it, and occasional short-term gatling stray bullets get completely negated by welders behind frontal armor. Meanwhile high velocity weapons like railgun are probably the most effective automated way of dealing at least some damage to Draugr series of drones because of small ETA and penetration. During pre-w2 times I had hours of testing and vanilla turrets could not do any damage unless I set some aggressive CQB behavior like PMW jabbing or shortening preferred distance to 200-300m. Gatlings are like lasers - if you focus enough of them on point, you can melt heavy armor in a second, but the issue is that you have to keep them on point - enemy usually won't let you do it.
honestly, the railgun has some first strike use, like you just put one on your ship on a merge block, then when you and your enemy are first moving towards each other it should give you an easy shot on them, after that you can just discard the railguns and start the fight propperly.
i think it would be cool if we had an option to load guns with armor penetrating or explosive rounds and either have some way to quickly switch between them, or make it be a thing you do before a battle, forcing you to think about which one will give you more of an advantage against the particular ship you'll be fighting.
I’ve always played with mods on my personal server so it’s pretty easy to see why the new warfare weapons don’t really match up especially when your use to mods that give you a whole assortment of weapons each one with their own damage levels. It’s funny you mentioned player made customized weapons. I literally got kicked from a server after the rules got changed. I had a base that had Customized missile silos scattered around the base. I wasn’t willing to dismantle the silos so yea I had to leave. It wasn’t that it degraded the server performance it was that they were OP. As long as someone could place a gps coordinate I could hit any base no matter how far. I literally spent 5 months perfecting a intercontinental ballistic missile for the silos. It functioned exactly like what I was hoping for. But I did understand why they wanted me to dismantle my weaponry but it would take forever to dismantle all the weapons I designed myself. Was no hard feelings because in the end I realized it gave me an unfair advantage even tho if you had good base defense most would be shot down. They were especially good at downing incoming ships. But it cost a lot to maintain and weld up those types of weapons. Not to mention all the testing it took me to get it right and operational. Nothing better than testing you missiles on a team that’s always harassing your base😂 The hardest part was getting close enough to set gps coordinates. If successful the missile had a variety of stages with timer, remote and programming blocks applied to it.
Comparing Vanilla Weapons to modded ones is kinda pointless. You can just program a mod with ultra fast high damage dealing weapons, which will beat anything else. There is no limit, just add zeros to any value. The Warfare 2 Turrets may not kill that fast but fixed Artilleryguns with a rapid firing program can.
Issue with this is you judge the entire vanilla pack based on assault cannons. And i have utterly different experience with artillery cannons and player-made railgun turrets. They can easily hit even the most maneuverable of small ships, and snipe out major components. And “unsatisfying” combat is brought by adaptation for splash damage, because hard-counter to new weapons is not spacing, but redundancy and armoring of limited amount of compartments/conveyor systems on the inside of a ship. Earlier you would never use heavy armor as an inside layer since it negated splash and bullets, so you would skin your ship into it. Now you are way better off conserving that weight and armoring just the most important compartments, and placing decoys properly, so enemy weapons take longer time getting to your most vital components then you destroy theirs, or their weapons. The playing field has changed. And making a light armor hulk with ton of redundancy and conveyors just doesnt work anymore, now you have to actually protect your magazines and reactors, or they will get penetrated with no effort at all.
I actually have a video coming up. The shift to WFII mag detonations is actually not too difficult of fix Also in our comparisons we were using WFII turret, and 10min fights between WFII ships were not uncommon. Even the gun spam variant using mostly artillery turrets. I did most of the "talking" on assault turrets, but that's because at the end of the day, it's the same turret to the arty turret with modified values Frankly if there was a WFII meta. The gattling guns might actually be superior. Higher damage uptime, and it shreds exterior systems. And the accuracy is high enough to take use of the subsystem targeting; so it actually works for weapon striping.
Some great points. I think i only use subsystem targeting at the end of the fight when a target is almost dead and I want to loot it. so taking out the last guns or jump drive when it can no longer maneuver is worthwhile.
I've noticed especially in severs the new combat locking system doesn't work good it act like it's trying to target different areas of a ship at once making it harder to shoot and not aiming or shooting at all
The default targeting system targets the closest subsystem to the gun. This shouldn't make it harder for the turret to shoot or stop it from shooting. Alternatively, you can change the targeting system off of default, and or share targets You have fully locked onto with your guns
Comparing a mod to weapons that are meant to be balanced with vanilla doesn't seem fair... If the new guns had HE there would be no use for missiles...
you might have skimmed past it. By my argument was two fold it sucks within the framework of conservatively balanced mods Which is fine they worked in isolation BUT: Warefare II turrets suck as a standalone option. We did testing of WF II unmodded ships WF II unmodded ships, and if you use smart ship design, they're basically able to dance for like 10min until both ships run out of ammo (conveyer failures) This is still a big improvement over the OG 2 turrets, but I'm offering critique in that these turrets still have a bit to go before people are going to be leaving behind modded weapons for fair/satisfying/competitive PVP gameplay
There are really good pvp options when using custom made warfare 2 turrets. But yes the standard turrets i felt the same that they are missing the explosive splash dmg. They went more for slow prolonged battles. With large slow ships it is really scary seeing a dead ship with tons of holes in it. Also the sounds, projectile ricochet and penetration opens possibilities for new modded turrets.
I think a good idea might be that rocket launchers shoot pretty fast and do a lot of damage, while cannon weapons like the arty turret or the assault turret should do less explosive damage but still have some explosive damage and have more kinetic damage and a way higher accuracy then the rockets, and the rail gun should either be a super high fire rate and good kinetic damage and no explosive damage weapon that takes a ton of energy to use so its very draining so that smaller ships with less power have to use it in bursts Making the Weapon kind of like a super sized Gatling gun, or like it is now except it has a way better recharge rate idk what is recharge rate is exactly but if its 60 seconds currently it should be instead 10 or 20 seconds, and instead of just making a tiny hole, it should every time it hits armor spread kinetic damage damaging the area around it so it makes a big hole, and the hole it makes get smaller and smaller as it goes and it sends energy or damage through the armor so around the hole it makes the armor weaker around the hole and the effect of this weakening gets weaker as the energy goes farther away from the hole so its kind of like a armor softener so it can make a big holes and do a lot of damage while at the same time making it way easier for other weapons to get to the insides more easily and do a lot of damage.
I did a lot of testing with one of my cruiser designs and that ricochet caused a lot of random effect. Sometimes the round deflected into the blocks sideways, carving a long trench into the surface but not even penetrating the Hull, other times it would go deep but not hit anything vital, other times it would zig zag through the ships internals and take out several independent sub systems on the way. Pot luck basically.
I don't play in those epic space battle servers so my experience may be different, but the new turrets are great. In survival pvp, nobody wants a direct engagement. Everybody is quietly skulking around in space to gather resources and only occasionally does a faction come out with some big cheek clapper of a ship. Generally we use gatlings for direct engagements, because they are objectively better, but the range on the new arty and rail guns allows you to pick turrets off an enemy ship or base before going in with grinders. Auto cannons are a bit meh but if you have 4+ in a custom turret they can melt a small grid in no time. Gatling is still preferred for a fight against an enemy that's ready for you, but if he's not then the extra range, penetration, splash are better.
So, how would you fix the weapons that you use, to make each weapon sit "perfectly" within your server? Would you say, having different mac weapons with different reload speeds be viable? You mentioned using them on fighter craft... is that viable in itself if used correctly? Would you slightly weaken the gatling weaponry to make the assault turret more feasible, or would you rather slightly enhance the assault turrets damage?
If those railguns (hell any of those new weapons) had longer range and did heavier damage than just punching through the hulls, then I'd be ecstatic about them but...eh...As for targeting system...Weapon Core frankly did it better XD
I would say, dont forget about rover/tank fans, all the railguns and artilery turrets will be good enough for their less manuvrable and somewhat sluggish engagements where targeting inner systems is easyer and more guaranteed to hit.
for sure. But I'm not really that familiar with ground combat outside of very very tailored encounters. I'd like to change that. but im not qualified to talk about that for now.
I think all the turrets are good personally, gotta learn how to fight all over again with the max distances for new turrets now, auto cannon is my favourite like you can make so many cool things
Rail guns, don't just penetrate armor... don't just penetrate detonate a hydrogen tank... a ship thats mostly light armor... a railgun will go right though and come out the other side. it doesn't hit a hydrogen tank and explode and stop there, no... it passes THROUGH the tank, sets it off, and keeps going. 1 railgun shot will pass through 14 light armor locks, ignoring spacing, if it hits a convayer... it might take out 10-12 blocks long of that convayer. Thats where the railgun really becomes scary... its no "of there is something squishy behind that block" its "if there's something squishy down the entire path of that" in some cases you can hit the front of a ship, go through several layers of armor... enter the ship, hit a convayer and if it were an explosive round... thats where it would stop... but no, this thing keeps going. Thats the actual reason they made it so slow firing. BUT employment. I can see this used on light destroyers or corvettes. Much like a MAC gun, 2 of them in the nose, then used to "charge" at static bases. Asteroid bases, mining bases. where the pilot then targets set locations, gun emplacements, takes their shot, breaks off to let the next ship make its attack run... punching through heavy armor and weapons emplacements... to do damage to disable guns.. before the light cruiser comes in with the assault cannons and begins a heavy bombardment.
@@GetBrocked well the multi-block penetration factor does work... again, you might have your fuel tanks spaced out with armor between them and such... but... when you are hitting 14-20 blocks + empty spaces in a straight line... the chances you hit something important jump. BUT they do need to be employed on smaller, faster, lighter ships, because you need to be able to position yourself in the right place to get that shot, while hammering away with your rapid fire cannons, and having your PDC's block missiles. Remember, humans will find a way to A: make it work, and B: Abuse it all to heck and back in a PVP situation. LOL.
@@GetBrocked OK, competently on a comical side note. in PVP Battles, you REALLY need to watch your fire with railguns. as shots pass right though the target, but the target ships only "9" heavy armor blocks wide. so... the rounds keep going and hit a second ship, on the far side of the first, ripping though it as well. Yeah.. Friendly fire... Isn't.
Question; what’s the most effective way to armor for (PVP)combat? Going full heavy armor makes it very hard to get the needed agility in my experience, but what’s a good balance?
heavy armor on the critical places, like around the main reactor. spaced armor/layered armor are still the best "regular" armor combination without sacrificing agility.
Spaced armor, heavy armor plates over light armor blocks, using heavy armor and blast door blocks to cover outer areas. Using interior blocks inside the ship.
There is one thing that you can do: small grid railgun Player Made Turrets. Less pen, but you can make a quad or even octuple barreled turret with a decent damage cross-section. Additionally, the reload is 15 seconds at max recharge, not a minute. Add in the turret controller making Player Made Turrets vanilla now, and I think that these might have a niche somewhere in the meta (on servers that allow sub-gridding).
funilly enough, I've heard these same arguments about how the real life US Navy's railgun is useless. Armour penetration without explosives to back it up is not particularly useful against ships that are hundreds of metres long with plenty of empty space.
Compared to the atlas laser, the new vanilla weapons are all pea shooters. But that says nothing about the new vanilla weapons. This video was not very useful, sorry to say.
@@GetBrocked you can be all defensive, that is one option. Or take the comment as the feedback it was meant to be. I wanted to watch a video mainly about why the new weapons are not very good, but got a video about why they are not amazing compared to the weapons you guys have on your server, since you are running a modded server. I guess I was looking for some facts, not an opinion from a somewhat meaningless perspective. But sure, have a good day
You talking about how your community has pretty much settled on HE (high explosive) is king reminded me of when I used to play War of Warships and almost every dumb ass would only use HE because why use AP and skill to go for that citadel hit taking a good 2/3 the ships HP off in one hit from one shell when I can just use HE to catch the enemy on fire and let a dot tick away your HP using minimal skill to hit the entire ship. I guess the difference with that and SE is its harder to hit ships in SE specially on a server like yours, so getting that "citadel" hit in SE is harder. But from watching a few of your videos of yours, everybody loves spinning, because its a good trick. But assuming you know your enemies ship lay out some what or just can tell roughly where stuff should be based on hull design, even a spinning ship will have a railgun pierce right through if its light armor. In your world I wouldn't expect the factions to invest in putting a single or double ventral large weapon system in ships that are more than likely gonna end up mid to close range. But a few dedicated "sniper" frigates with good pilots might make a difference in battles. If they are left alone to position and take multiple shots and land them then they could be very effective. And like in a lot of times sniper ships are used as first strike then brawlers jump in or move forward. While my personal sniper ship's hull is based on a Naga from EVE Online, I keep thinking about the idea of a ship sniper ship designed in reverse. Basically making it have more reverse thrust than forward so that if can rapidly get up to speed and with good side thrust also strafe while running from a pursuer while still firing its main center line weapon. With a good pilot that could be highly annoying to fight. Specially if they start using micro jumps to reposition. Also having 1-2 of this type of Frigate would be nice when besieging a base as you can have pin point shots on the weapons leaving the base mostly untouched for reuse or salvage.
One of the mods I downloaded was "the 2cm laser." It basically allows you to build a circulating/charging laser system and have your own death star laser. I could really see how it could get stupid op real quick because the ammunition is the reactor core or the fuel supply. It's just not going to be as difficult to supply the slug throwers. I think that really shows the flaw with any laser weapon and trying to balance it. The velocity is too high and it's too cheap to operate.
Back during direct x 9 days i was hitting random pirates with my cannon (single shot) at 4k meters with about a 1 in 3 hit ratio. At that distance it was devastating to hit an engine so 3 to 6 of those in an engagement could turn the tide knocking out or forcing a retiring 1 to 2 DD class vessels or possibly a CL before everyone began brawling.
So this boils down to, new weapons bad because we have mods? That can apply to any update to any game… modders usually do better content than the devs, because there is way more of them.
Also in vanilla user group. My complains about custom turret control is that there's no crosshair. The tracking doesn't show required elevation on planets when shooting static targets.
I think the main issue with SE has nothing to do with anything involving gameplay. It all has to do with multiplayer with large numbers of players (Beyond 20) being completely nonviable.
You missed the best part, The Assault cannon and Artillery cannon AP shots have explosion particles... so it looks like you are doing something but your really not.
Dude... compare AWPs ability to strip turrets and target thrusters to vanilla assault cannons ability to "punch little holes in a ship"... target the same systems you're talking about and that 20% hit ratio will actually work for you. Not to mention AWP ammo is heavier and significantly more expensive. Lol. Vanilla is finally in a good place. So help me God "targeting subsystems is pretty much useless"
I think youre comparing this a bit too much to actual ship combat and i think thats a bad idea. Space engineers combat is more akin to tank on tank combat. With the tanks being 20x larger and can move in 3d space. Its always about destroying the ships/tanks systems, aiming for its critical systems. What i believe should be done to make this more accurate is require certain ship systems for a ship to function. Like requiring a central computer to control the ships AI turrets, cooling systems that are required for the engines not to blow. Would be very good for making that ship explosion you really wanted. Making ships more volatile will make ship combat fun too. Personally i think one of the biggest issues to space engy combat are the turret and AI systems. I mean, if you you want to have a large enough ship that has ai turrets do its job, fine. But ship combat is far more fun when you have multiple people commanding blocks st a time. Far more interesting too. If you want a 1 on 1 battle with large ships i think the ships should be designed with direct, portside, or starboard fire instead. I design my ships like this a lot. AI turrets are bothersome and boring.
But it's worth noting: I'm not talking out of my ass. We do actual pvp and this is the result. This is "actual space engineers combat" Tho most ships generally only get 2 (pilot, gunner + systems) Also check out the series. The largest ship in the series is roughly a 6 man crew on a undermanned day.
So we're back to pre-planets where gatlings chewed ships to nothingness and missiles ripped away weapons? Keen really dropped the ball on this. The assault cannon and artillery feel way to slow and the railgun just can't hit something moving. The assault cannon should feel like an autoloader and the artillery should have nice chunky damage.
Thank you for this video. Would you consider doing one or two more videos based on what you've shared here? One breaking down in more detail how ships are built within your server setting/ community as you've mentioned here and how that interacts with the in-server weapons and Another video (perhaps?) how you'd do as similar as possible in "vanilla" as the game sits now? The amount of experience gathered by your community about this game has to be massive, a glance at that knowledge would be wonderful for the larger game community.
@@GetBrocked hello! Sure, I'll try. You mentioned how PvP ships are built differently so that has two branches: The Outlands and the "vanilla" SE. Things you said: conveyors, armor, thruster placement, weapon placement, how these are placed and distributed, and so on. Your video showed fantastic samples of how ships move during combat and some damage so post combat ship dissections? Really, my in-game experience is deeply limited so I don't even know what I'm asking for I just know that Outlands is probably one of the best source for SE PvP experience there is for players seeking "vanilla" ish SE gaming. How different Outlands ammo and regular interact with ship grids to deliver damage would be great, and also how the builds of the ships can mitigate.
I agree that having no splash damage with the new vanilla turrets kind of sucks, but I'm glad they are penetration based. I think Keen was worried about how good the new artillery turrets would be because of their range, and ended up making everything a little underpowered because of that. Also, above all else Space Engineers is what you make of it, and I definitely get the feeling that the main drive behind having the turrets deal no splash damage is to make them not cause a big splash in non-pvp areas of the game.
@@braunsch4901 I’m interested in seeing some very light shielding for static grids but I think anything more than that would ruin an important part of the game which is the volumetric physics and block deformation
I just put the extra time in to program a couple of turret controllers cause in the end it makes a more protected, better looking and far more powerful turret. The ultracarrier I’m building now has 2 raising platforms with 4 turrets on each which adds up to 24 Gatlings 12 auto cannons and 6 small railguns. Doesn’t drop the performance even on experimental mode until you get into the gravity of a bigger planet so I keep it outside of their field
I have a question. I'm an OLD timer, I go back to the early days when using turrets as anything other that point defense was a silly exercise in dying gloriously cause your ship got wasted and lost it's ability to fight back. In most of your video's I never see fixed broadsides in a row of salvos. I never see undernose racks of heavy weapons meant to punch through a ship in a devastating display of "Why you shouldn't play silly dogfighting games with well designed ships made to not lose their guns". While I am glad to see PVP ships are still hotrods favoring super high delta for maneuverability, why do yall not seem to favor knockout broadsides, or undernose sunken emplacements for the forward firing ship? Why does every video seem to feature some variant of surface turrets I woulda swept off a hull years ago? Looking to get back into pvp, used to be an assault cruiser designer back in the day (my version of a cruiser is the modern day equivalent, not the horrid classification people use thinking they're battleships). Back when I pvp'd...anything on a turret on the surface of your ship was "A bad idea" (Tm). Especially if you were using it to engage anything armored. Cause you'd just get hull swept and be done for, and using turrets period was just a good way to lag a server, but sunken fixed broadsides attached to a remote control, a camera, and a fixed group to fire in one big boom would CRIPPLE even the hardest of armored ships. Admittedly last I played weaponcore wasn't a thing, so curious to know how it's all changed, and why....to this....dogfighting turret play that makes my brain scream "Bad design". Your idea about AP vs HE, I disagree with. Here's why. If I fire 10-20 cannons that can pierce all your armor in a 3X10 or 3x20 doubleset of rows, at the same time...I can promise my build is far more likely to hit something important, and given I see a lot of yall are clustering thrusters into banks, I'm at the bare minimum stripping your delta V. Eventually a hard slugger that uses heavy armor and sunken emplacements to protect its firepower is gonna rip so many holes in your survivable ships that nothing will remain. Put this weaponry on a hotrod chassis with enough delta V to maneuver its canons into play more rapidly, and it's gonna make piecemeal of everything you throw at it. Sure, if it missses a secondary system the lack of HE will suck, but HE is notoriously bad getting through armor. Use the canons to rip a hole to the guts inside, and let the point defense HE turrets blow what gets exposed. This was the meta I used back when I used to pvp. My designs never relied on turrets to do anything outside of shoot at incoming rockets and so at best had 6-8 in total keeping the server less bogged down. But one click of a fire group, and I could KO even the more heavily armored of ships. Is there a reason these design principles are no longer used?
for the HE vs AP discussion. We have a turn based system where you can only attack a grid location once per "turn" Thus. Winning a battle just means forcing the hostile forces off. Since ships/time are the biggest resource in our game. Simply weapon stripping a hostile ship (rendering it ineffective) does more to win a fight, then going for a kill. Weapon stripping a ship from a kill perspective is useful which then allows you to close to point blanc and wipe it out. You're not wrong in your assement. Getting a full salvo will wipe these designs out. Or massively cripple them (though actually not with the new WFII turrets, most the salvo, pens, and then hits nothing of value). But that's true of all designs to varying degrees. For a fixed gun broadside. I have never ever, even seen someone pull that off against another a experienced human. It's insanely difficult against a moving ship. If you can pull that off, that's more a credit to your skill, and not the inherent design.
@@GetBrocked I will happily show you how I do it, without sacrificing my maneuverability in combat. it revolved around using remote control blocks in the broadside facing direction, and using camera zoom set dead center of my firing group (which usually was protected by a window, which itself was sunken, and armor structures further hid it from direct attacks), you however HAD to make the design have equitable newtons of thrust in all directions, but usually more side-to-side delta V was favored for these designs. You also need to know how to lead a target, and use broadsides with a tolerable rof, as long as max M/S isn't modded all a ship has on it's side is the ability to change directions quickly, to protect it. What you'd do is enter "slugging" range, keeping your nose, or your broadside tipped, exposing a thin side angle, then, at about 600m out, you'd hit the remote control pointed in the direction of your broadside. Suddenly all rcs controls are flipflopped in the direction of the broadside, making getting a firing solution on point VERY easy. In essence, the entire ship has become a turret for the broadside. You unload the salvo and basically rip her guts into space, then remain in the blind spot you created, in as much as you can...letting point defense turrets rip open the juicy exposed insides, when reload is up you bring up your nose or broadside again, and you fire again, always tipping your broadsides down to expose a heavy plate of shielding in between reloads. I also had up close slug designs that had salvos set to sensors stretched to max range, each set to trigger the guns without the pilots interaction as long as 2 conditions were met 1. the ship was in sensor range and 2. the enemy ship was unfortunate to get spotted by the sensor. The basic design of these ships was to use massive forward facing banks at longer ranges to cripple the engines of the target, then slide on up alongside and "hug" their enemy much as a tiring boxer might lean on his opponent. Then sliding past their hull the broadsides open up at near point blank (because otherwise the abysmal sensor range wouldn't detect your target). the result was a cascade of explosions that would leave a ship a crippled hulk. I used to LOVE 'gentlemans' pvp on SE servers back in the old days. I do however agree, if your weapons or engines are stripped the fight is over, unless they have warp capacity. my designs were always built to use fire groups and broadsides to allow me to utilize a heavy class ship that would make an opponent rethink close range engagement, and consider short hops to escape my longer ranged forward facing underslung and sunken emplacements I used for sniping engines. Slugging designs meant to cripple an enemies ability to retaliate by ripping their guts into the black was always my agenda. Admittedly the reason for these designs was to put down a fight in an era when we didn't have guided targeting that could focus on subsystems, and in an era where server admins would flip out on you for having more than 10 turrets on one ship. My design principles might be too old to be useful today. But like yall I built my cruisers to be lean and mean, favoring designs that put guns on point while exposing the thinnest profile available for the enemy to shoot back at. No missiles to get shot down, no turrets to cause lag, just you, and firing groups for port or starboard or bow camera's and remotes. And really lets face it my cruiser designs only got more efficient with two others in control seats, one on each broadside. Good times man, I had loads of good times all those years ago. It's fascinating watching others do so in this day and age.
I would love to know what mods yall use on your server though, I'm curious to see if my design principles are even viable using what yall do. In my day, Azimuth, and the S-Modular engines were the kings of the road when it came to modded delta V and we used the oooold battle cannons mod for the pew pew.
In my experience the assault cannon does almost 0 damage. It just seems to push the things its hit. Like i used a large grid assault cannon and hit a light armored fighter and it got knocked away around 1km and when i checked damage it was minor hull damage and some easily fixable conveyor systems that had a secondary line that was still undamaged.
A longitudinal penetration from a railgun will pierce a ship from bow to stern. It will be very difficult not to cause high damage in those cases. Also, once you know a type of vessel, and know where specific systems are, you can target those areas to cripple them. Each weapon has a strength and a weakness and if well employed, can be devastating. Imagine a railgun equipped Eternity against the Leviathan. You could outrange it, while jumping out to keep the distance. With the size of the leviathan, it would not have taken too many shots to make it combat ineffective. …and would have avoided the devastating damage the eternity sustained.
Rail guns are good if you have enough of them as a frw battery (4+) I use them to try to get shots at rear engine compartment. I figure i might hit the hydrogen, and often do. Art turrets imo are only good if you can ppace enough to get a salvo. Same for auto cannons.... i can imagine using them in a big ship but thats it.
For your uses I very much understand why you wouldn't find them adequate and that's fair, but the assult gun has become one of my favorites for smashing drones and small craft, they seem to reliably knock out something on fighter sized ships with each shot, and I had the opportunity to lob shells from an artillery turret at a freighter from range and it deleted a good chunk of its engines and a turret. I'm also partial to the "pick 'em apart" combat, i prefer the struggle until the bitter end instead of spontaneously exploding, but that's just my opinion. TherrorNight suggested HE ammo, I think that would be a fantastic and solve a lot of problems outright. I was also disappointed that I couldn't put autocannon turrets on my big ships, and that there weren't single barrel variants of these turrets, but this is minor stuff, but adding a four barrel artillery turret could help a bit too...
The biggest single problem all of the new weapons have if we ignore the damage and all that is how much they cost to fire. If its PvP or PvE the material cost of each round is way too high when you think of how many weapons you need on a ship and how long will combat last. Lets say the avg combat lasts 3-5 minutes between large grid ships there are probably going to be about 15 weapons if we assume these are artillery which shoot 2 rounds every 15 seconds this means in those 3 minutes we fire 2*4*15*3 = 360 rounds which first of all is a lot in weight and second that costs 7.2k iron + 96 nickle + 600 magnesium + 10 uranium which while ain't the craziest costs you have to take in account how much of each shell you can store and the fact you need to find all of those resources plus the costs of each turret and so on.
very good point. I mostly ignored the topic of survival economy because it's such a tough discussion. (and generally ends up with Gatling > all in terms of material cost per damage)
the anti tank and arty turrets aren't made to go against mods or made for small ships and comparing them to mods isn't a good thing conisdering that mods are made to be better
This very much mirrors what I've been seeing, as during testing I was also finding that when I took two otherwise identical ships and swapped several of the original gatling turrets on one of them for some of the new assault and artillery turrets from the warfare 2 update, the ship that uses the all gatling arrangement seemed to be outperforming it every time, especially in terms of damage inflicted on moving targets. I love the new combat mechanics but the new vanilla weapons seem to be a little disappointing, I originally thought this might be a release day bug/glitch or that I'd missed something in the new turret's settings, but it sounds like you guys have experienced something similar too.
yeah, and that's ignoring the material cost as well. I didn't mention it here, but you're very right. The gatling turrets are actually somewhat strong. When you add in the material cost (gatling ammo is dirt cheap vs WFII turrets). And the discrepancy gets worse.
If you're using them as Gatling turrets, that is your problem. Its like comparing a sniper rifle, a pistol, and an automatic rifle. They all have their uses, and are really good when used correctly. If you run in the middle of a battle with a sniper rifle, you're gonna have a harder time against someone with an auto rifle.
You need either ships with multiple different weapons, or multiple ships with different weapons. And each weapon needs to have their targets planned. Armillary is really good for piercing into the target., and so are good for taking out reactors and batteries. Gatling is good for all round damage, meanwhile the auto turrets would be great for taking out the propulsion.
I'm sorry Gamer Geek, I'm confused as to where you're coming from. In none of the comments made in this thread or the video shown by GetBrocked is it suggested that the ships used during these tests were fitted with Gatling turrets only, or that you should treat all the other weapons the same as Gatling turrets. All the tests appear to have been done with a mix of weaponry and the findings were given in a fairly logical and analytical manner, much like my own that I did off-camera. If I missed something that was said or shown in this video, then please feel free to quote and/or timestamp it though. Alternatively if you've found your own testing contradicts what GetBrocked has shown, and what I have found that backs it up, then please upload your own video about it, so that we and everyone else can review your footage and see the evidence for ourselves, as it may be that we just missed something important?
You certainly could be completely wrong as like the rest of us you're just a human but it seems unlikely that with that much experimentation and play-testing you'd be anything close to completely wrong. Even with the 20/20 hindsight of how it played out it seems like you were pretty much correct
It is not, that the new guns are bad, they are just for a different kind of PvP, in official servers ( if you can run them ) they take a while to kill but the better ship will win, and sometimes its down to agility and flying more than the guns themselves, and kinetic torpedos can down cruisers in in 2 or 3 hits, sometimes just one. its about what we are looking for don't try to see them from your own pvp perspective try to figure where they fit into their own. admittedly they are underwhelming when used on large large grids, but from a corvette or frigate they are fun, accurate, and sometimes POP the enemy gunboat or frigate and its very satisfying especially after a heated in game text war, or someone being a tyrant, and you want to get them back. either way kinetic torpedos rule, always, and can be fired from 50km away.
Any new weapon is SE is a complete waste of time. give or take 95% of people who own the game spend most if not all of their time in single player only and for that the missile launchers and gat gun were enough. Perhaps if Keen stopped being so lazy and completely neglecting single player survival and added some new random encounters and cargo ship that justified a new weapons system then i'd be on board with it but right now all the warfare updates are doing is placating the squeakiest wheels in the SE community at the cost of everyone else.
So this is on a server allowing scripted weapon target systems, and has some modded guns this is about right. Honestly the Autocannon seems to be the most used now from the pack but the vanilla gattling guns tend to be the go to non modded. But the magazine rack has been devastating, we tend to have smaller ships for rp reasons and some mod reasons, and the fact that the surrounding blocks go down have been painful. And I don't think hard killing isn't that good to compare to, and soft killing tends to be the goto for us.
I also note you dont have fighters, bombers, and multi block missles either this is why DDs became king as a swarm of 6 to 12 fighters and bombers could mission kill a DD via stripping engines and guns.
I don't have Space Engineers so my opinion isn't very valuable here, but it sounds like the Assault Turret could be used to eat some armor so other weapons are more effective.
I think they should make the railgun more viable by simulating the slug breaking apart by adding a damage cone that spreads out after drilling a hole through a few blocks of armor
This is based on a false analysis, unfortunately. Your data is primarily accumulated in a modded server, specifically with the tiered engines levels mod. This mod, by its nature, reduces the number of systems that can be damaged on a ship by reducing the number of engines required for high delta ship designs. More engines means more power generation requirements (ion) or more fuel and conveyor components (hydrogen). So, yeah, in a server where mods are running that reduce the number of valuable components needed on a ship, you will have a harder time finding valuable components to hit on a ship.
Nothing is ever good enough eh? They made this update because everyone demanded it... then made sure to remind everyone that SE is a creative game focusing on builds and engineering and not on warfare.
I literally said the frame work was mostly good, but in the context of pvp it isn't good, specifically referring to the turrets. The turrets are made to blow up other ships, not being good at that is a valid critique
I think, (im biased here) these weapons would compete quite well if they had more velocity + higher default range. Thinking at least 2000m with targeting getting it up to 2500-3000. These would be great standoff weapons against lighter ships at extreme ranges, where slower firing weapons are far less effective. IF we want to stick to their current ranges. a small HE component (not even that big vs standard vanilla rockets values) would give it a good niche.
In the real world, armor-piercing shells do explode after contact. There's just a brief delay so the shell can punch through the armor first, then frag once inside the ship. I wonder if it'll help these new turrets with their damage output if they were set to explode after going through so many blocks, and no tiny explosion either.
@@avzed1789 depends on the shell, HEATFS is all chemical and APFSDS is an entirely kinetic penetrator. APHE shells with an explosive filler have been more or less made obsolete for main tank use, Autocannon sill uses them though.
I love the sound as well. Yeah I think a range increase + velocity increase makes them very good stand off weapons vs brawling weapons (which have that HE upside)
They would also be good if spelling and frag was a thing. For example when a block is overkill. Subtract how much is left and multiply that by 20%. Create a small amount of fragments depending on the armor type and let those fragments do more damage, acting as additional projectiles
First of all for PvE 1 man piloted large ship is standard. But for PvP u should have at least gunerrs. Ai controled turrets always lack . An u talk about dog fights. Its brute force. What about more tactical aproach? U use railguns at first from max distance. Than u go in missile range an u use gatlings for missile defence due to their massive speed. In closer u use 2 types of turets, and finaly when u are close u can use again reloaded railguns. If u always got 1 man piloted ship it will no do. 1 man is good for fighters or small ships like corvets.
So essentially with a more realistic requirements for ship infrastructure in the future these weapons would become more effective or if they were given, say an option to choose between both AP and HE rounds and we still need a bigger boom gun for bigger ships. Also personal gripe with the update, we got bullet drop but indirect fire is still not possible, angry ex self propelled howitzer man noises.
@@GetBrocked an other options that comes to mind would me some kind of spall simulation, like the shell breaking up to smaller projectiles upon impact to spread the damage
Anyone know of a weaponcore mod that gives the vanilla weapon set an approximation of their original settings? So I can build sound vanilla ships on the same server I tinker with mad mod weapons/gadgets on? :)
In my opinion, the idea that all ships should be dancing around like hyper maneuverable drones and less like large ships or fighter aircraft kinda takes the wind out of the sails of anyone expecting that. How quickly a ship can move, how much inertia it generates, how it's weapons function... it's all set up in a way that it just isn't conducive to a good PvP experience unless the meta drastically changes to something that does work, just like it has. But now the problem is that said meta makes any idea of ship designs outside of the norm of hyper maneuverable turret farms spamming splash damage kinda null and kills any design outside of that norm. The idea that a railgun is a bad weapon in ship combat or that weapons designed to armor pen aren't good against armored targets at range is just kinda silly and I get that... but conforming to this norm will also make anything decent seem like a terrible idea in comparison. I get that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" but given this game has been in development for 9 years and anything short of a new engine and more developers won't really fix the game's problems, I doubt that keeping to a style that looks nothing like what one would assume a battle in space to look like is going to do anything that keep expectations in a very narrow corridor.
