Just like the title suggests. Adding an additional way to warp. Instead of having to align directly to your destination in a system you can just have an option to immediately go to warp without being aligned to destination. This will cause your ship to get up to it’s proper warp speed and then enter warp. After achieving max warp speed your warp path will then curve around as to arrive at your destination.
This can create new gameplay and tactics. This can also increase capacitor usage for warps and make the “Warp Drive Operation” skill much more relevant.
Never mind the amount of coding that this would require to add it would also be pretty imbalanced. If you can enter warp in a panic no matter what direction you’re facing you’ve basically completely removed the value of fighting while aligned and the tradeoffs and planning that go into that.
If you don’t think the Warp Drive Operation skill is relevant you haven’t seen enough of this game yet. There are warp distances in this game during standard play that are enough to cap out a lot of ships normally, never mind the fun of fighting at half cap after a long chain of warps or the exhilaration of entering warp with 10GJ to spare as you mash the Warp button between neut cycles.
In short, no, not needed not wanted and not an improvement.
I can see some opportunities for interesting gameplay here, especially in terms of fleet maneuvers, evading capture, making safespots, but the possibilities for abuse seem absurdly high so I think it’s a bad idea.
Not so as curve warping would not be advantageous in every situation. Only when it’s faster to do a curve warp than an aligned warp would it be advantageous. One of the best times to curve warp would most likely be when one is in the process of aligning for a normal warp. If one is already pre-aligned there would be no advantage to a curved warp. A curved warp can reduce some of the time used for aligning during the warping process.
The other advantages to a curved warp are it’s unpredictability and faster combat engagement/disengagement. A curved warp can be unpredictable given that you can be aligned towards a certain destination when in actuality warping to another. Of course CCP could always add warp paths to d-scan so as to make this a non-issue. In terms of engagement curved warps can be advantageous in that once a target’s location is determined one can immediately enter warp to catch the engage the target. This can cut down on the time the target may have to escape given the enemy’s reaction time. As for disengagement imagine an entire fleet warping out simultaneously while aligned all over the place. They may get to their destination(s) slightly slower, but it increases their pursuer’s required reaction speed as to their decision to bug-out.
Although curved warping can be slower it also increases the players reaction speed while engaging/disengaging. This can give combat a greater feeling of intensity.
I believe I have.
I have also encountered a number of systems in which additional warps were required and have also had to consider cap usage during warp while pvping. Curved warping still makes the Warp Drive Operation skill more relevant as stated.
Not really. Most of the time catch bubbles would still catch those curve warping directly to their destinations. I don’t think the angle change due to a curved warp would be severe enough to negate catch bubble effectiveness.
Well, once in warp the ship must turn at warp speed to re-align with the target destination so naturally that’s where the curve comes from.
Sure there is, but just because the warp is curved doesn’t mean the warp angle will be steep enough to avoid a catch bubble. However, if the warp destination is close enough (say 1 au or less) then the warp angle could very well be steep enough to avoid the bubble. It’s all about the angle
That would be really wonky and seem really unnatural. I think a warp curve is much smoother.
Perhaps state the negatives and positives you see to add to the conversation
Turn at warp speed? So the rotation of the ship changes at warp velocity? That’s instantaneous then, even for slow warp speed ships. That seems more unnatural than anything.
Not trying to be a dick. Maybe you meant something else, but 1 AU is literally the distance from the Earth to the sun. If you can warp at that speed (or faster), then how many turns through 360 degrees can you perform in 1 second if you’re rotating at your warp speed?
Think of when you’re aligning for a warp normally. Your ship starts to turn as it speeds up. It doens’t necessarily turn on a dime it travels some distance while getting aligned. The distance traveled while turning creates a curve or arc. Imagine that only while at warp speeds. It would still take the same degrees per second to turn (don’t want to tear your ship apart).
CCP can always attenuate the warp curve algorithm to help keep things smooth and balanced.
A small mobile warp disruptor I has a warp disrupt range of 5km.
Even if the warp is only 1 AU long (1.496e8 km), the angle of warp to still be bubbled is 0 degrees (so small that you need to go out to a couple of dozen decimal places to see anything.
The warp itself is straight (space is big).
So if the ship will still be bubbled, then the only thing this is, is a change in the angle required before align state is achieved.
Instead of being within 15 degrees, you are saying it should be something bigger.
and no, ships don’t move in an arc. They move straight towards the warp point while aligning. The requirement is their angle of rotation is within 15 degrees of the target and they are at 75% of max speed, but the travel is always straight. I get it that you are saying this should be changed, but why? What practical purpose does it serve when it isn’t a curved warp at all. It’s still perfectly straight as it is now.
Curved warp is a good model when the path let you in normal space with full collision mechanics, you can’t go to warp if ships / items / planets are on the way. It’s too early for this game.
I believe the curved warp can be limited to a + or - 30 angle of degrees. Or if doing an 180 angle degrees then the ship cant go at their full warp speed and only do .05 to 1 AU warp speed given the space that need to do the turn, giving the time to attackers to track them down and wait at the end of the warp path.
Pie slices represent the angle needed to slide past the edge of a small anchored catch bubble if warping to a gate. Labels added to show distance from gate. This is for the angle of entry. I’m making the assumption that the curvature of the warp is consistent the entire warp.
At 50km from the gate, the angle subtended is a mere 5.7 degrees. Right around 150km, you cut in under 2 degrees. These are tiny angles that you’re barely going to perceive. If you can’t perceive them, then why advocate this change?
If the above assumption is not true, and the curve followed something like a the PDF of a Rayleigh Distribution, then all bets are off. For long warps, the curve would only matter at the start, and wouldn’t matter at the end. Then for short warps, it becomes increasingly difficult to actually calculate the correct path. For really short paths, you can approximate it by a arc of constant curvature (see earlier).
You’re misunderstanding me here. The goal of warping in combat is (barring tactical warps on-grid), pretty much without exception, to get your behind off grid quickly before someone blows it off. With what you are proposing there is literally no downside, because I can maintain an orbit against whatever I’m fighting and warp off at pretty much any time towards anything. That it will take me more time to do so is no disadvantage since the enemy has no idea what I’ve just warped to, has no way to follow me, and has no way to touch me while I’m in warp.
This is purely making people harder to catch, there’s basically no downside for the person trying not to be caught.
There’s no reason for a buff like this to escape mechanisms, it’s already quite easy to avoid being caught by a third party while PvEing or often even PvPing. This just exacerbates that.
Again, I reiterate, if you don’t think Warp Drive Operation is useful you haven’t seen enough of the game. It is, you’re just not familiar with the ships or situations where it comes up.
Which is a tiny and questionable valuable benefit on top of the massive issues it creates when trying to actually catch someone while PvPing.
EDIT: Oh and the whole warp bubbles thing. Considering a bubble can be as far as 500km off the target you’re looking at tiny changes in approach angle to completely miss any bubble that isn’t practical on top of the thing you’re trying to warp to.
To add to the above math posts. At 100km a T1 Large bubble only needs a 15 degree change to miss the bubble completely. At 150km it’s 10 degrees. At the limit of 500km it’s 3 degrees for a T1 and 4.6 degrees for a T2.
Taking more time is a disadvantage even if the enemy doesn’t know where you warped to, which would be an advantage. If you’re trying to run, the enemy could probably make a good educated guess as to where you could be warping to. Also, CCP could also add non-cloaked warp paths to d-scan or some other part of the scanning system.
Maybe someday we’ll be able to effect each other in warp, but it would probably require slower warp speeds.
And I’ll re-iterate that I have seen enough of the game to understand the skill’s usefulness during certain circumstances. I didn’t say the skill was useless or irrelevant, just not as relevant as it could be.
Kind of a moot point considering someone could warp to a different celestial and warp to the target destination at an angle that would avoid the bubble entirely. If you want to prevent people from getting to a certain place you need to bubble it in it’s entirety. A curved warp won’t help someone get to a destination that is thoroughly bubbled like it should be.
Curved warping is not a way to avoid bubbles or avoid capture. It’s just a different or perhaps more convenient way to warp.
That’s barely a downside when the enemy can’t tell where you warped to follow you nearly instantly, and if the warp path straightens out pretty quickly the time difference will be tiny.
For reference a 50 AU warp that goes off at a completely 90 degree angle to the destination, which would probably be the longest possible path here assuming no sort of correction, so you make a full half circle to your destination, would still only be about 75AU, which would take at worst an extra 12 seconds in a battleship on a warp where your align time is probably 12 seconds or greater.
So for this to be any sort of time loss at all in a Battleship you need to be warping to something more than four times your align speed away in AU, give or take.
I’m not certain you understand what a huge buff this is to ratting ships and to their safety…
Which would be a pretty significant time investment on their part, all for something that would still end up being a buff since any time you might gain from their warp will be lost in actually aligning to the path and getting into warp yourself.
Plus, as already demonstrated with math in this thread, the actual time increase would be relatively small.
It would require a complete rewrite of the game engine and its code. It’s actually possible to kill someone while they’re warping right now with smart bombs, but it’s just short of being a bug or exploit and it’s certainly not intended. It’s an artifact of the game engine.
Okay, but you could say that for any skill or ship or module. That doesn’t make it a bad thing or a problem, let alone something that needs this kind of drastic change to basic gameplay.
Bouncing between celestials is both easier to cover against and more time consuming than an angled warp path would be under literally all circumstances. As it is not warping directly gate to gate is standard practice.
What you’re suggesting would still pretty much invalidate drag bubbles by making it even easier to avoid them and it would absolutely be used as a way to avoid bubbles by anyone with an ounce of sense since it’s the same align time off a gate either way and it’d be shorter than bouncing to a celestial.
They’d be all but gone with these changes. Maybe bubble camps in very large null systems, but lowsec good luck catching anything with a camp. They just spin up their drive and warp away, no need to align to anything, just go.
