Starhawk

[CalumN]

Honestly, I think people just need to get used to the game. I play ground all the time and I've felt my fair share of base ravages so far, but I believe the only thing needed to stop base ravaging is a shield. Fair enough, it costs 10 Rift points, but you get that pretty quickly if you're at the base, even quicker if you have a skill that allows you to get more rift.

Hawks are actually pretty weak, they're just fast. It takes, I think, 2 rockets to destroy one? Even if you don't have any rockets, they're easy enough to take out with grenades and mines. Don't even get me started on flak cannons and beam towers (or whatever they're called). I feel that if anything needs nerfing, it's the speed that they walk at.

As for balancing teams, I think that should be mandatory for all servers. What's the point in joining a game to be outnumbered 3 - 1? There is none.

[Shifty_Geezer]

Unbalanced teams is necessary for parties to stay together. If you have 6 on one side and 7 on the other and 3 people in a party want to join the game, you need to end up with 9 v 7. Warhawk was pretty miserable when I wanted to play with my friends but we'd be forced onto opposing sides. Although as Warhawk's chat was broken, teamwork on the same side was imopssible anyhow.

I think the solution to ravaging comes from balancing tweaks, rather than wholescale behaviour enforcers. Cheaper outposts and slight damage tweaks should be enough. We need a system that supports a fair amount of imbalance to allow one side to win.

[tophit101]

You can't just balance the teams by taking players of the winning team and putting them on the losing team, it's ridiculously unfair for those players as their work helped their team push ahead, and now they're shunned onto the losing team, starting from square one again. The only reason there is going to be massive imbalance is when there are lots of people on one team quitting at the same time, and that would only happen if they're being baseraped. It all comes back to the same problem, some weapons being ridiculously overpowered (torpedo) and some being underpowered (shield generator). The shield generator is underpowered, yet it costs 10 rift bars when a hawk which costs 4 rift bars (or only 2 if there is a hawk pad already built !!) can come and blow the whole thing up with a torpedo !!! And once shields are down, worst case scenario, the base gets swarmed by tanks, all your turrets are destroyed, and you get spawnkilled for the rest of the game. Best case scenario, some good person comes along and rebuilds the shield using their saved up rift. What a nice chap. Yesterday, me and bro were playing splitscreen and we created an incredible defense in the map Basin. About 9 laser turrets had been built in our general main base area, and hawks and tanks alike can't touch us. We still lost, but i went away feeling good about myself all the same. That's the best way to lose. The worst way to lose is when the enemy creates a hawk pad, many of their team call down hawks and speed over to our base and start spawnkilling before we've created a sufficient defense. Shields couldn't save us, even if the enemy didn't have a torpedo, they would shield/cloak themselves and destroy it and everything else. The shield needs to be able to kill any enemy hawk trying to get through, shielded or not, just like the APC shield in Warhawk. That would solve base reaping in a few situations. And get rid of the torpedo's too, it will encourage a team to actually come up with a strategy to get it down another way instead of just shooting a torpedo at it.

[Captn___Awesome]

Thats a good point.. I agree that could definitely help solve the problem by restricting hawks from being able to enter shield area. Have it so they would explode if they touch the barrier.

That sounds like a fair and simple fix for balance.

[Zorak_79]

Its a tough one because you dont want to make the base too impenetrable else in CTF games no one would be able to get the flag.

Whilst I definitely think something needs to be changed to stop the spawn killing. Perhaps just by extending the range of where players can spawn would help? I definitely think removing the marker for where a drop pod lands is a good idea.

Someone also suggested in another thread if a player is killed twice in quick succession they spawn with full rift bars.

[MrJimmy]

there are a lot of sensible ideas in this thread, I'm sure LB are fully aware of the issue and will come up with a good fix/fixes. I just wish they'd get a point update our sooner than later, anything to stop the worst of it would be a start.

[saberdragon]

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Captn___Awesome wrote:
Thats a good point.. I agree that could definitely help solve the problem by restricting hawks from being able to enter shield area. Have it so they would explode if they touch the barrier.

That sounds like a fair and simple fix for balance.

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I dont think they should be kept from going into the shield area!!!!!

I agree they should'nt be able to fly straight into them or transform & drop into them....

The should have to go to Mech mode & walk into the shield area....

And the same for getting away if the hav'nt disabled the shield they should'nt be able to fly through it out but walk out then fly.....

[LAILIEL]

Passing through enemy shields could simply slow down Hawks.
it won't stop them from being dangerous or from transforming but it would make them more vulnerable.

[thenoobkiller]

I think the most important thing is for LB to do something rather quickly. The biggest threat to this game is low player numbers. Empty servers are no fun.

[DozyHole]

It's a tough one.

Base ravaging is not completely a bad thing, if one team is much superior then they will dominate and hopefully the game will end sooner and the teams will be balanced for the next game. Trying to 'force' a solution might do more damage than good.

I think the reason starhawk/warhawk have this problem more than other games is the fact that all the weapons are pickups so you are at a disadvantage as soon as you spawn. Starhawk suffers even more due to the B&B for similar reasons.

One good thing about warhawk was a single player, knife in hand, could sneak to the other side of a map, take a base and have all the vehicles that base had to offer, if your team was clued up they would spawn there and a fightback was possible. Compare this to starhawk were you sneak away and build a spawn point only to find it very hard to defend since you have no rift left.

I will take a quick stab at a solution.

The first spawn beacon costs 2 fift, the next 4, then 6 then 8. 

The same with turrets and everything else. This makes it harder to dominate the level with stuff but makes it easy to throw new stuff up quick if everything has been destroyed. It might also have the side effect of having more variation in buidings rather than having 10 turrets and 10 laser beams and not much else.