Balancing

The original five weapons and five modules from Zap remain mostly unchanged. The original weapons/modules were unbalanced, and should be changed. Better now than later/never.

The following is my opinion on the originals:

Phaser is over powered.
Shield is over powered.

Burst is balanced.
Boost is balanced.
Repair is balanced.
Cloak is balanced.
Armor is balanced, but it's function is strange. It makes more sense for it to block a certain amount of damage per hit, so that you need big hits to get through it. But that's another topic.

Triple is a little underpowered.
Bouncer is under powered and mostly a clone of phaser. Maybe it could be a non-rapid weapon, so it fires two per second.
Sensor is under powered - it requires way to much energy. It should be a completely passive module like Armor. It's already taking up an entire module slot, it doesn't need to penalize the player more.

Just my 2 cents.

[karamazovapy]

You can call shield overpowered, but I'm of the opinion that it's easy enough to die already.

Anyway, my thoughts -

Phaser - fine as it is, but I wouldn't cry myself to sleep if it did slightly less damage.
Burst - fine as it is.
Mines - fine as they are, but definitely tactical weapons with a specific function.
Triple - cloakers don't need an instant-kill weapon so I think they're already powerful enough, but I wouldn't object to modifications that would make it a more effective "shotgun" weapon.
Bouncer - worst off, balance-wise. Could be replaced with some kind of tracer, or enhanced by some kind of targeting help. In the past I suggested a line extending from the ship that shows bounce trajectory like lots of games use for pool cues.

Shield - fine as it is, for the most part.
Repair - fine as it is.
Cloak - fine as it is.
Sensor - I'd be open to making it passive. It's not easy to use effectively in its current state.
Boost - fine as it is.
Armor - I'm still not used to this one. Not sure what to say.
Engineer - I think I'd be more comfortable with eng if force fields were outlawed. Other than that, it generally drives me up the wall every time I play an engineer level.

I'm not a fan of the shield.

Most fights consist of both sides waiting for the other's shields to run out of energy, then opening up with phasers at 0 energy. After you kill your opponent, you're out of energy. If you don't have a shield but your opponent does, you're basically screwed in a straight up fight. I'd rather ships have a lot more health without shields being used all the time so that fights can actually be more about dodging and aiming than waiting to see who has more energy at the time. I have no clue how to fix the shields, I'd almost in favor of just scrapping them altogether. Maybe have the shields be "overloaded" and drain an extra amount of energy when they take a very low amount of damage - they suck at blocking normal fire, but they can still block mines or bursts.

I'm fine with modifying or replacing other modules/weapons, but I think the phaser and shield have become integral parts of the game, and I think changing those would have a dramatic effect on the gameplay.

It is important to have one basic weapon that delivers a punch without costing too much energy.

It is also important to have a defensive system in place in case you need to retreat or defend an objective.

[Skybax]

I think it would be cool if the mapmakers could put in what weapons and modules could be used in each map. The intelligent map makers would be able to use it to do a lot of cool stuff.

I'm for each player having more health instead of a heavy-duty shield.

@Skybax - I don't agree. Over-customization and over-complication is already becoming a problem with the game.

@sky_lark - That's just my point. Phaser and shield have become the most important weapon/module by so far that you cannot go without them easily. Of course it would have a dramatic effect on the gameplay to change them, that's why we need to do it earlier rather than later.

@Helmic - That's exactly what I am talking about.

@karamazovapy - I agree with all of your statements except for shield and phaser.

I'm going to look into modifying the source code and proposing actual values.

[sam686]

Here what i say.
Phaser use too little energy, it can always be fired without slowing down firing rate.
Bouncer use too much energy, when out of energy, firing rate slows down to about 3 fires a second.
SpyBug might use too much energy for adding a tiny radar that don't help much, and spybug is useless on small levels.
Engineer forcefields in some levels is too easy to make forcefields that the enemy cannot destroy. Engineer makes it instant full health turret and forcefields, where Repair takes time.
Cloak is balanced, but could be unfair if a player use hacks or cheats to see or hear cloaked ships, either by changing sfx/ship_cloak.wav or by changing the game itself.
Sensor seems to be fine the way it is for finding cloaked ships. Not sure how passive will work.

Other weapons and modules seems to be fine the way it is.

[karamazovapy]

If shields don't effectively shield you, why have them at all?

[sam686]

Shield is useful. Shield could be changed so that it takes up extra energy every time shield gets hit.

[Skybax]

What if shield has a cooldown time? Or a time limit as to how long you can have it up instead of making it cost energy? (or both?) Or make it so that it can only be used for defense and not offense by not allowing any weapon to be used while shield is up?
Just brainstorming.

I'd rather ships have a lot more health without shields being used all the time so that fights can actually be more about dodging and aiming than waiting to see who has more energy at the time.

I strongly agree with this point. That's how I play as is.

[bobdaduck]

I think it would be cool if the mapmakers could put in what weapons and modules could be used in each map. The intelligent map makers would be able to use it to do a lot of cool stuff.

Absolutely no. No. No.

I modded the game to balance things. Here are some of my main changes:

Triple: Shoots ten shots with extremely low damage, but which will instakill if fired at point blank. Hard enough to use that it does not actually screw up the game in practice. (Point blank when noone ever stops moving is ridiculous) It also consumes a healthy amount of energy.

Shield: This was not actually "unbalanced" in the first place, but I do acknowledge that complete invulnerability is a bit cheap. I increased how much energy shield drains so that it lasts for about 3/4ths as long as it used to.

Sensor: I don't have the programming skills to rework this, but it definitely needs a reworking. I don't think making it a passive is a good idea (I find it slightly harder to play with a higher sight radius) but it uses up too much energy to be effective. I have a few fixes...
- Replace sensor completely, and make cloaking easier to detect. Perhaps make a semi-loud noise when a cloaker is near, or perhaps make it so that they do not cloak completely.
- lower energy cost. This does not fix the problem, but it does lessen it.
- Increase sensor's power. We could maybe make projectiles -slightly- homing, increase sensor's sight radius, or some other thing.

Cloak: Uses less energy. While you can't just wander around invis forever, its also less dependent on timing.

I also made loadoutzones regenerate your energy (A new mechanic that works beautifully, I wish you guys would give it a chance) but that's not really something of balance as it is solving the bitfighter energy crisis.

Look, we don't want to make it TOO hard on the average player. Almost every game with varying classes has some sort of basic, default class that has a weapon and powerup that you can rely on. For Bitfighter, that's Phaser. Purposely trying to make it less effective is a bad idea in my opinion.

[ZoombeR]

Look, we don't want to make it TOO hard on the average player. Almost every game with varying classes has some sort of basic, default class that has a weapon and powerup that you can rely on. For Bitfighter, that's Phaser. Purposely trying to make it less effective is a bad idea in my opinion.

Sky_lark couldn't have explained it any better. The default classes are the default classes for a reason, are they not?

[karamazovapy]

There's a fundamental difference of opinion here.

Opinion A)
There is a default loadout. These weapons and modules are your basic tools for survival. Everything else should be used strategically.

Opinion B)
All weapons and modules should be essentially equivalent. No weapon or module should be objectively more powerful or useful than any other.

I'm in camp A.

<shrugs>
All right, if we want the phaser/shield to be a solid default, I guess that's OK. However, the bouncer and sensor still need to be powered up to the point where they are useful. We can all agree on those, right?

P.S. Yes to loadout energy recharge. It works great, I agree with bobdaduck. Give it a chance you guys.

Total idle recharge is another idea I've tested. If you stand still and do nothing, then your ship's energy accelerates from gaining a low percentage per second to a large percentage per second. If you are only idle for a second, it doesn't do much, but if you are idle for a few seconds it recharges a lot.

[karamazovapy]

I'm not saying I'm right or that everyone should agree with me, I'm just making it clear that I'm a camp A kind of guy. I also agree that everything should be a valid choice, though. I'm think a minor energy charge advantage to idling is completely reasonable. I'm slightly more wary of applying the change to loadout zones, since it impacts gameplay on all existing levels.