Walt Disintigration damage after a player manually respawns is credited to the last person to hit the ship. (Not sure if I should do this or not.)
If a ship is destroyed by RoD, disintigration, fire, or self-damage, then the remaining points are credited to the player that last hit the ship.
Walt Though if last-hit damage expired after a certain amount of time, that'd reduce the amount of times you get points and don't know why.
I'm not in favor of last-hit damage at all actually. IMO you should only get points if you're directly causing damage to an enemy, either with weapons, chain explosions, or fire - that's both simple and clear. If a player manually respawns and nobody shoots their wreck, it doesn't make sense for someone to randomly get points when nobody bothered to destroy it.
Walt RoD and self-damage are currently handled identically, in that the point value of ships is not lowered with the damage. I could lower point value with self damage, but that might be abusable.
For self-damage or RoD damage, what about both lowering the ship's point value and also lowering the self-damaging player's point value? So there's never any incentive to damage yourself, since you'll lose 100% of the points you deny. That could potentially be abused with sumo ships (say, I'm in last place and don't care about winning, but I'm going to sumo the first place guy out of the ring so he loses points), but it could easily be avoided if the guy getting sumoed abandons ship and respawns.
Dalas120 What if arena used the FFA ring, or even smaller? Smaller ring = more action, more chaos, and less waiting
nop There were some cases where players quit and somebody could intentionally not respawn to keep the lead in 1v1
SpaceCat But - could i wait in the respawn menu forever when i have more points and win?
So here's a... radical idea. What if you remove the ring of death, but add some sort of "king of the hill zone" in the middle of the map. Anybody in the zone gains X amount of points per second, divided up among players based on how many $ are in the zone. So if I'm the only player in the zone, I get a LOT of points per second. If there are several players, we each get a few points per second. That way action gets more concentrated, 1v1 respawn exploits are removed, and we don't have to figure out how RoD damage is allocated (because there is no RoD!).
Walt
Dalas120 Start full should be required for arena. Starting empty both puts the respawner at a huge disadvantage, and also slows down the gameplay a lot.
I think this is another vote for nixing that option entirely.
nop Each part starts full if it is connected to a means of producing its reservoir.
I 90% agree with you, but there are potential ways to abuse this with energy storage. Even if you do nop's idea to prevent abusive compartmentalization, mass energy storage laser walls + central ion beams can be a surprisingly scary strategy. I don't know if it would be overpowered or not though (probably more OP for less skilled players). Back before the missiles/PD rebalance you could also do a lot of damage with a 1-shot missile launcher rack, though that's probably not an issue now.
But there are definitely a lot of good reasons to get rid of start empty. It makes no sense, is imbalanced for arena, weakens cannons (since they take longer to fill), and allows for abusive crew quarters destruction.
So here's another really radical idea, that I first thought of when we were discussing blink drive. FTL drives are planned to have AOE energy drain, right? So what about getting rid of the "start full/empty" option, and instead have an "all ships require FTL to get to the battle" option. Ships would spawn off-screen (full of ammo/power), charge up for an FTL jump, then jump into the game and have to deal with whatever energy loss comes from the jump. That way, ships mostly start full, but it's more difficult to abuse mass energy storage. It also means that your FTL placement/efficiency matters, since ships with better FTL will 1) get to the battle in better shape and 2) get to the battle sooner, allowing for better positioning.
I also like this idea because it integrates spawning across all modes, so warping into battle works the same way in elimination, arena, bounty, or creative. Integration 1) helps the game feel more cohesive (rather than a bunch of unrelated game modes with different design requirements) and 2) means you don't have to solve the same balance problem twice. For example, in arena it's annoying that enemies spawn without warning or indicator. In the future singleplayer campaign, it would also be really annoying if enemy fleets could warp in without any warning. So if both modes use the same FTL warp-in mechanic, then the "warning" problem only needs to be solved once instead of separately for each mode.
And it means that bounty ships with FTL would still be useful in multiplayer, even if blink drives end up as a different part. Finally, I also think it makes sense from a lore perspective - how do no-FTL multiplayer ships even GET to the battle anyway?
