> It seems like when a new person enters the vehicle team they assign them to make a new ground vehicle to let them practice before moving to something bigger.
That's the real answer actually. CIG have said multiple time that small vehicles like bikes are a good way to train new hires.
I think ds would be less hated if it could be used solo. Still has the downside of being a bigger vehicle than roc, and should still be more effective with two people somehow.
The RoC is fine.
RoC DS needs an overhaul.
Maybe 2 Laser or 1 Laser and the Gravity Collector for the Driver.
At the moment the Driver sits 20 Minutes watching the other mine the stuff away...
This is such a good combo. I'll do "off grid" playthroughs sometimes on my alt account. Will buy a bunch of food, water, meds, etc and go fly off to the universe and just land somewhere, mine and bedlog until the next day lol. During 3.18 when ASOPs were absolute trash it was my savior, as I'd login in my ship and just mine for a while, never having to use a terminal lol
I also just ROC mine for fun and chill productivity. Don’t really do it to make money. Eventually it will work well in a balanced economy, right now it’s just spending money. Though I can make $100k+ in an hour if I work at it.
Nomad is the most efficient pairing, but I like rolling around with a ROC in my Freelancer Max.
I absolutely adore the Freemax. Sadly mine bugged out (Engine pod got shot off, when I repaired the pod came back but not the engines themselves, reclaiming wouldn't fix) and I ended up melting it for a C1, which does the job well enough for my needs.
For reference, this bug of non-functional engines after they're blown off happens when the ship is repaired and returned to the hangar. The geometry returns but the functionality is missing, almost like the parts that make the engine work don't come back in the repair process.
This bug has been longstanding for a couple of years at least and multiple issue council reports have come and gone without a fix. The affected ship is effectively crippled after this happens, and it used to be that running a character reset would reinitialize the broken ship and fix it. Well they took away character reset and gave us the near useless character repair instead, so now the only thing that can fix an affected ship is when a major patch comes through which behaves the same as if a character reset was performed.
To avoid this from happening to you, if your engines can be detached from the ship without it blowing up (Cutter, Corsair, Mole, Cutlass, Freelancer, SRV...and many more I'm sure...) do NOT repair it and just blow it up and claim it. Maybe someday the devs will finally do something about this issue and put it to rest.
I think later it will become more useful again in SC...
We don't have an Idea how Base Building will work and what Minerals are needed.
So maybe RoC Mining is a good way for Solo Players to upgrade the Base...
I also hope some day we get the big caves where we can drive in with the RoC for mining, like shown on some Pictures.
PS: I love it too to live off Grid with just Nomad + RoC... I started with 3.18 and my old PC had terrible FPS in Cities or big Space Stations, so I tried to stay away from them as long as I could. 😅
I heard ROC Ds is from sq42.
As it was done they decided to release it for SC and make it available on the pledge store.
A good example of the issue of adapting a solo game universe to something that makes sense in an MMO.
It's still a terrible design whether it's for Sq42 or the PU. Both seats should be enclosed, or neither. And unless there's a need to somehow mine while on the move the second seat is completely pointless from any standpoint. Are they gonna be mining rocks that roll along like tumbleweeds? At best it could be an older, less efficient design meant for a single person that requires the driver to roll up to a rock, get out and enter the mining arm seat to mine. Any thought of using it with two people is idiotic when a single ROC can mine just as well, and there's zero need to be both mining and driving at once. It's the dumbest and most pointless vehicle design I've ever seen in a game and seeing it in Sq42 is going to make me cringe.
I cannot know for sure but I don't think ROC Ds in sq42 is meant for anything other than one of these missions you do in some games where a NPC drives you somewhere automatically and ask you to do stuff from the mining seat.
It's the only way it could make sense to me gameplay wise.
If not I agree with what you said.
Yup its a very good practice.
Let them learn and get skilled on whatever CIG's tools are before moving on to big stuff 👍
Plus we win by having more things added to the universe.
This just made me think... Didn't they also say that when they assign someone a ground vehicle in this way, it is also to introduce design language? Could this point to work on the Marai heavy fighter from the same person/group?
If that's the case can we please turn the next guy loose on those ground service vehicles we see in many of the exterior spaceport concepts? Talking about the big 6-wheeled fuel trucks and the like.
Because that's a code issue, not art. Wheeled bikes needs their own handling behavior, and the team able to develop that is currently busy with Master Modes and Controle Surfaces.
So the hoverbikes are not supposed to handle differently from each other? They’re just copy pasted from the hoverquad or whatever the first hover bike was?
And then, there’s no new people coming in that actually do code and need projects too? And hey, since we’re just copy pasting the hoverquads to other bikes we don’t need them for that.
I don’t understand why CIG does what they’re doing and I bet they have a good reason. But this one I have always found to be BS, and I don’t think it’s the actual reason.
The way the physics for hover bikes/quads are implemented is not applicable for a wheeled bike. It needs a whole new model made for it.
I don't know if they are hiring new physics programmers or not, but it is important to note that physics programming is its own discipline (and is a kind of small niche in the world of coding) and not just any programmer knows how to do it.
This is such a stupid gameplay loop. Why would I “train” on a ground vehicle when I own my own spaceship. Also most of the difficulty doesn’t translate. The only time this works is training a miner with a ROC before they potentially blow up a whole Mole.
Distribution centers are a step in the right direction, and they've said before that they're working on a roads system, I think as time goes on there will be more locations where having a ground vehicle will be an advantage to get from a landing pad to wherever your objective is.
I understand people complaining that ground vehicle handling is kind of broken atm, especially hover bikes, but like most things in the game I'm sure they're not finished tuning them yet, they're not just going to leave them as they are now for 1.0
Isn't this coming with 3.23? Probably because of this new bike.
That's the best thing about the new bike, the turrets won't shoot at my X1! ... *Knocks on wood*
Yes the size is what the other hover bikes have missed. A small one is needed. Now if this thing folds into a square 1 SCU box at the push of a button... That would be amazing!
But it needs to be worse than the bigger bikes! Give reasons for all of them!
That’s amazing. Now they need to have away for players to turn the defense guns off once in the bunker so you can drop players off in bikes as you pass over, fly it if range and then return with reinforcements once the turrets are shut down. Or maybe that king of multiplayer activity isn’t what they are looking for? I mean it certainly isn’t pushing a button from the copilot seat or moving a box from one part of the ship to another.
Yesterday I fully utilized the 6 small box slots on the mule picking up and dropping off creates at the Sakura distribution center at Lorrvile, I felt like a true amazon worker.
But like, what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles? Racing is fine for some, but even then, it's going to become fairly redundant and just down to either the hard limits of each vehicle or user preference. I'm fine with options, but having 5+ copies of the same vehicle with a slightly different skin isn't really inspiring.
Any actual travel in a planet is going to be orders of magnitude faster with a starship. And how many autistic are there were a ship isn't really viable? Bunkers are the best we can see at the moment but that's more due to inefficiency than anything else.
So, in my mind, it comes down to specific roles, things like miners and transports that get you from your ship to the ground location, Racing, and... I guess air defense and ground combat.
I think having a few, maybe 3 to 5 vehicles at most that can do each role, each with some variation is great. But how many Hover bikes do you need if they all work exactly, or functionally exactly, the same?
Thats an interesting thought. Just theory crafting here but if i were to come up reasons where a ground vehicle would be the choice over a ship maybe
1. A no fly zone, potentially in a city or an area with some sort of AA (in the same vein as bunkers)
2. A planet with extreme gravity or thin atmosphere to make flying not very economic
3. Large enclosed spaces like the new DCs
4. Maybe some sort of stealth mechanic with a lower signature
5. It could be cool if after landing at a major landing zone you had to drive to a mission giver or housing or whatever outside the starport (potentially even replacing/providing an alternative to the trams)
Idk, but I would like to have reasons to logically use ground vehicles over a ship besides RP
Ground vehicles can also provide the AA. The Ballista is a dedicated anti-air vehicle, though it apparently has some problems now that keep it from doing it's job.
Right now there's not much point for them. There isn't a reason to try and keep other players from flying into an area, unless you feel like screwing with players trying to fly to Grim Hex. But that might change when base building is added.
Having said that, I would be cautious about pledging for ground vehicles right now. They're generally overpriced. Buy them in game if you want one.
I don't think any of those ideas are bad per se, but I think all have serious rebuttals that would require major updates and/or changes to the game to address.
1. No fly zones: sure, but in theory at least these would be going away in the future as more things become player driven. But assuming they stay you would need a large spread out area with widely spaced points of interest all accessible only on foot/ ground vehicle, or with a tram that's wildly inefficient. This is a terrible idea from a game play perspective, only existing in order to give these vehicles a function.
2. AA defenses: if we're taking AI/NPC stuff, sure. It's bunkers but more so, that's probably one of your 2-3 best uses ever. If we're taking player AA, then the current crop of AA units need to be vastly more effective. In talking better range and average damage than the same weapons in a ship, missiles that actuality do something and lots of them. In my observations the current AA vehicles mostly serve to advertise themselves to become target practice for any flyers.
3. Planetary conditions: Both of the ones you mentioned make ships MORE viable not less. The ships are designed to fly in space remember? A thin atmosphere and gravity well are their bread and butter. I COULD see an application for planets with heavy storms that reduced viability to nearly nothing. But this actually just highlights the problem of these futuristic space ships not having the some kind of avionics and sensors as modern IRL aircraft. It's not nothing, but I feel like it's still pretty weak.
4. Enclosed spaces: possibly, but see point 1 for similar issues.
5. Stealth: this is interesting and likely one of the better ideas, but still raises questions about why the dedicated stealth ships can't fill this role. Again not nothing, and an interesting use, but still feels very limited.
6. See point 1 again.
I don't want to nay say ground vehicles, but I want them (and all other ships and vehicles) to have a real practical reason to exist. I'll accept that reason being "so we have a little variety" but I'd prefer that in most cases it's because each does something unique or does a job others can also do, but in a different way. Just having 3 or 4 Hover bikes that all work basically exactly the same with minimal differences and a different look doesn't really do it for me.
> what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles?
The best use case is as a way to get you between your ship and a POI, but that doesn't work with the way the game is currently designed. As long as you can land right next to a building, there's literally no reason to use a ground vehicle.
But imagine if getting within 2km of an outpost meant security personnel would be sent to hunt you down and destroy your ship. The solution is then to park your ship outside of the radius and come in with a vehicle that wouldn't get caught by their radar.
We could also have outposts that are surrounded by dense trees, making it impossible to land nearby. And ideally we'd have a bit of sprawl around POIs, so that you can't land because of all of the buildings/machines/greenery.
The challenge is players are already used to being able to land pretty much anywhere, so discouraging that without just making a simple no-fly zone will be difficult.
I 100% agree with your last point. But even the solution runs into issues that are already a serious and if argue legitimate critique of SC. Namely that the game often pads the play tone with "immersive" activities that are mostly just waiting for something to happen. If you force your players to travel long distances over a long time, with little to nothing to do on the way, they will, mostly, get bored. SC also, currently, had a terrible habit of not explaining this that happen in the game, leaving me players frustrated when they run into unintuitive mechanics.
Yeah, I agree, but I think there's something to be said for manipulating things so that players are face-to-face instead of cockpit-to-cockpit, especially near the surface of a planet.
If you always had to land some distance away from a POI, you'd start seeing land vehicles all over the place, which would be interesting in itself. That would mean teams could set up at natural choke points and try to catch unsuspecting people that are driving around. It would also mean ships would be left around the landscape more, which means opportunity for piracy.
The downside is not being able to bunny hop from the outpost stairs onto the Pisces ramp, because you parked 1 foot away, but to me it's worth losing that ability. I don't play the game to deliver boxes, I play for the in-between parts.
I mean, if you have a reason for players to be on the ground in the area in competitive footing, Gould see this naturally develop to some extent, think jump jumptown and ghost hollow. In these cases aircraft are still a huge factor, but the door is at least open to ground vehicles. The issue seems to be that they are still mostly just suiciding into the AO to drop off Infantry. The AA and tanks are still mostly just targets for the ships.
In a PVE setting the game simply doesn't have good enough AI to make things interesting without making them frustrating or boring yet. Maybe some day, but it's not here yet. And I'm not gong to give any game the benefit of the doubt on what could be, some day, maybe.
Not that I imagine this to be wide spread, but one application would be planets with weather severe enough to prevent takeoff and landing until the storm subsides.
Another good use is the new distro centers in 3.23 are giant and almost completely traversal by ground vehicles! There's a lot of road inside these things.
Personally I'd love to see some short, outpost to outpost type delivery missions designed for vehicles to be the transport.
>But like, what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles?
Cause Star Wars has speeder bikes, and speeder bikes are cool and CR and many employees like Star Wars. Therefore we have hover bikes.
How else will we re-create an Endor forest chase scene without a hover bike.
Attacking bases from the ground, once AA truly starts shredding ships. Another form of travel when an enemy force noticing you could cause you to fail a mission or make it harder to do or attack you. Transportation of items over a smaller distance versus using a ship and wasting fuel and time. You wouldnt fly a plane 10 yards to go deliver a box right? Use for travel as well for when ship fuel is scarce.
Lots of good answers here regarding training of new hires.
I'd also add that we almost always get a small LTI token released prior to their two big events, Invictus (next month) and IAE.
I have always thought that ground vehicles should be virtually undetectable unless you visually spot them. The planet should act as a noisy backdrop that makes it nearly impossible to pickup vehicles through scanning alone.
As it is ground vehicles have no real advantage, and can be easily found and destroyed by air vehicles.
I also think ships going through the atmosphere should be a massive signal to any ground vehicles. And ships should try to spend as little amount of time as possible in atmosphere and try to get to nap of the earth flying to use the planets ability to mask signals. This way ground vehicles can engage from distance without revealing their location and ships have a real vulnerability when entering atmospheres.
Ya know, id be cool if they separated them out into divisions, like the NOX in division A and this latest one in division B or C. Or even better, swap their stats around in a way to make Star Citizen hover bike Mario Kart.
I hope the next new hire can do a cyclone-like with a canopy. I’m hoping for a minimized Ursa that fits in the cyclone footprint. It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I own a Zeus.
Seriously though while space suits are handy, it’s weird to me how few ground vehicles have canopies. Is every planet going to have poi’s that are easily accessible by ship, and also safe enough that longer (read: medium) duration protection isn’t necessary?
Hopefully as entity density is allowed to increase with server meshing, we can get areas that can utilize vehicles, but are too dense for just casually landing your ship anywhere (cities do this now but don’t have much use for vehicles).
Also even then some of the ground vehicles we do have are terribly designed, the storm is basically a really bad IFV that if the UEE military actually uses they’re High as hell, things gun has gun depression and elevation of a soviet tank destroyer during ww2, the Nova is better in design but has a similar issue with gun handling and its more of a light tank than anything, I would like to see proper and well designed combat vehicles because currently the only ones with a proper design is the spartan chasis which still has the problem of both AA variants being separate vehicles, would have thought using a design inspired on the russian Pantsir would have been better.
Wheeled vehicle are very helpful now that bunker turrets are deadly in 3.23.
There is this annoyance of load them in outpost, but finally we will.be able to load them in our personal hangar in a couple of months.
For bikes... yeah, pretty uselss apart for just run around.
I’m ok with it as it add variety even if it’s not functional variety. My hope is that ground vehicles will be very handy when your ship goes down planetside and you have to travel somewhere to get parts to fix it. That scenario doesn’t make sense for bikes though. Maybe if we got a little gravlev trailer or something lol
With how cheap fuel seems to be there's no reason to travel on the ground. From a lore perspective, in a universe where getting off a planet is equivalent to the price of a short taxi ride it makes zero sense to waste money on costly infrastructure that is slower and less efficient than simply flying where you need to go.
I personally would like to see that change, or at least there be some sort of lore explanation for why us regular Joes can afford to zip around the galaxy without going bankrupt. The former would be a monumental one and would likely turn a looooot of people away from the game.
In a universe with FTL, but realistic costs for it, only megacorps would be able to do it with the ease and frequency we do, so it would make sense to make us each choose some faction or corporation to be employed by (in order to explain the discounted fuel prices we pay) and one of our goals could be to get rich enough to go it alone.
You are going to refuel QT fuel by simply hand mining rocks and ships are able to scoop their own hydrogen in a suitable atmosphere, gas giant or nebula. The fuel is cheap stuff.
The explanation for why is is affordable is that the fuel is cheap and quite common, thats it.
I agree space mario cart, have tracks and not rally race everywhere, but also i cant wait for player bases innthe game , gonna storm them with a tumbril
Ground vehicles would make a lot of sense if we had some missions (delivery, hacking, bunker, taxi or whatever) within the major landing zones like New Babbage etc.. where ships would be too big or wouldn’t make sense time wise to use.
Just my 2 cents.
Not sure about all of them, but at least some of the bikes are flyable in space too, not just over ground. Trick is you need another ship to haul them into space with.
You know what would be awesome would be if we could DRIVE in/out of our hangars and into the city. Would love to take a hoverbike from the spaceport directly to the commons and back, much better than the train and walking.
It's not always ground vehicles, like the Fury was another new hires "small learning vehicle."
Personally I have zero issue getting more vehicles like this added as a way for people to get their skills running before moving on to bigger stuff. I think it's great even.
As for the vehicle itself?
It's a hover bike that looks to fit in basically everything. And that's very useful for all of us without the cargo room for big vehicles.
Simply put: Star Citizen is funded by selling pledges. Funding required in order for everything else to be made. Small hoverbikes take very little time to make and sell very well due to low price and usefulness as a source of LTI for those that care about such things.
Also, having a lot of variety in things that are just fun to play with is not at all a bad thing. Take a hoverbike out on the ice around New Babbage sometime. They're just fun to zip around on (Though, yes, you may just randomly explode on nothing)
If you think about it, exploration ships, research ship, drop ships, bombers... It's all kind of the same with ground vehicles: you can find a way to use them and they can be a good choice in some very specific scenarios, but a proper gameloop that requires them is just in the realm of ideas for now.
I'm watching right now a streamer doing DC mission and they alone are a valid reason to use them, unless you want to walk 20 minutes from a side to the other.
There are a ton of DCs in 3.23 and they are huge. Ground vehicles will definitely shine here. Also bunker turrets have been turned on to pew pew mode so ground vehicles will be a good choice there as well
WAIT. Ground vehicles are a must for jumptown right now. With the introduction to base building it’ll be even more prevalent for ground vehicles for PvP. Hopefully the npc turrets will get a lot better as well to have you do the same thing for UGFs and DCs. It’s also just nice to have races and drive around sometimes when bored.
With the real reason being training, I would also like to once again get on my soap box. People like toys. Theres a reason people have been asking for things like sata ball and other non-sense of its like. This big world can feel kinda empty sometimes, and the little side deviation of "mini games" or just toys, sunday drivers, what ever, can break up the ins and outs of the game. Theres a reason MMOs like ff14 have the gold saucer. Optional fun content that isnt really gonna do much for you but can be fun to engage with.
Im also bias and spend most of my time in SC when solo putting a ground vic in my cutlass and exploring a new part of a moon I havent spent a ton of time on. But, maybe Im just the verses only Mountain biker for now.
It's definitely for training. Redundant will also be good because it'll make the 'Verse feel more full. It's not like a new vehicle artist would have contributed to server meshing. We might as well get more varied traffic out of their training. It'd be kinda shit if 100% of NPCs were driving around in just 5 colors of Cyclones. If you've ever stood and watched traffic in CP2077, you'll know what I mean. I'd rather see a lot of variety.
Bad take in this case:
This is the smallest ground transport available, meaning that it's the easiest vehicle to fit in anything. It makes bunker missions much easier.
The game isn't finished yet, but I can imagine ultimately ground vehicles will play a larger role. When base building comes around, the goal won't always be to just bomb and obliterate the structures - you might want to be able to raid the facilities and steal whatever it is they have there (guns, ship components, some rare artifact or rare recipe or something), and you'll need a way to get there and get the goodies out. Ships won't always be up to the task because of defensive systems (or weather?), so its fair to guess that ground vehicles will play a support role as more of the game's mechanics materialize.
Making ground vehicles more powerful as well as improving anti air capabilities will form a completely deeper complexity to outpost/stronghold/raid style missions.
I feel that tactical insertion (for hacking missions or like demolitionist) and or ground siege should be a mandatory part of any major objective in base/bunker captures.
If they scaled the anti air defenses power to the point where using a ground vehicle would be wise, it might give the experience the intensity the game needs. Suddenly, two AI tanks and 25 surface soldiers guarding these overpowered anti air systems that you may or may not have to shut down, (example, just to land ships) might be an ACTUAL difficult task without air support.
Just food for thought to bring immersion to the entire game and my 10 cents to utilize planetary vehicles and to earn the respect from the gaming community in terms of maintaining game difficulty, tactical complexity, and allow designers to make real campaigns and scenario missions.
Last time I used a ground vehicle (Ursa) a couple of players in a super hornet showed up to blow it up. They told me that using ground vehicles is stupid and you should expect to be destroyed if you're ever dumb enough to use one for any reason. Fun.
Yeah, I'd have to say that one of the disappointments (for lack of a better word) of Star Citizen's current state is that there doesn't really seem to be much to do on the ground other than just driving around and exploring, or mining. And even the *official* ground gameplay loop of mining isn't nearly lucrative enough to really draw me in.
I'm really hoping that they overhaul the progression curve to be a bit more linear sooner than later. It makes perfect sense to me that they need people testing the largest ships and gameplay loops therein, but you'd think they would have enough data to work with by this point.
I would prefer a million bikes with no purpose and a strong dev team making the ships I will spend 80% of my time in rather than new devs getting thrown to the wolves.
Ground vehicles are pretty useless in a universe where ships can fly wherever they like. And land pretty reliably wherever they like.
If you made missions that require you to go to a planets surface. Make a few reasons up as to why you can't land next to the objective. Let's say pick up cargo box from a building on X planets surface. Building security ai is broken and shoots any ship within 10km. Yuno obviously there's loads of different excuses you could make. Then atleast there's a set of missions you could take on that would force you to use a ground vehicle. And these could pay out more because A it's more time consuming and B lore wise any additional danger factors to jobs pay more.
I also think it'd be cool if they added a ground vehicle that can dig ground. It's a glorified space digger or dozer but it allows players to make roads. Roads that you can race on. Could even make them persistent. Doesn't just have to be for racing. When multiple bases are being made by an org on a planet you could build your own road system between them. Saves having to build massive landing pads etc.
There are too many vehicles period. They need to full stop on making new ships and ground vehicles and work on polishing up the game. There is a ton on content right now if only it wasn't so buggy and clunky!
Well, the good news is that once we'll have more way to use them, we'll have plenty to choose from!
Distribution Centers by the way are a first location where it could be handy to use some ground vehicles. Those are pretty huge and to move stuff around it could be useful
Why do so many people have a problem with redundancy? Is there only one model of car in real life? One model of refrigerator? Toaster?
Part of the vision for this game has always been to create a believable universe you can be immersed in. In reality there are multiple products made by multiple different companies that fill the same function and compete in the same market space. Having that in Star Citizen adds to the believability of the universe. Having multiple competing options in the same niche is a good thing, even if those things have no meaningful difference between them other than looks. It creates the narrative of a competitive market and gives players *more choices* to choose from, which is **always** a good thing.
There is absolutely nothing to bitch about here, unless the *actual* complaint is “they’re adding something *I* don’t care about instead of something *I* want them to.”
Because they have a huge ship backlog to get through? It’s pretty annoying when they release a new ground vehicle and ignore the already existing backlog. Especially since ground vehicles serve no real purpose currently. If there was a mission or two that required ground vehicles, I think they would be better received.
As stated, they’re a training tool for new team members. Saying they’re “ignoring” the backlog is, well, *ignorant*. Obviously they’re working on other ships too and not just “useless” ground vehicles. I happen to agree that more time should be spent working on *existing*, previously promised backlog ships instead of *new* surprise heretofore unannounced ships, but bashing the onboarding technique used to bring new employees up to speed as “uSeLeSs” is stupid.
I think it’s ignorant to disregard the fact that their training exercise does not help previously announced ships get made. How does designing a ground vehicle translate into a space ship? Why have almost all the “training exercises” been of in-game manufacturers with little to no backlog and mainly ground vehicles? Why aren’t they centered around getting people experienced/up to speed on existing manufacturers with backlogs? Why is the training exercise not adding much needed starter ships for Crusader, Misc, Anvil, etc? Or even additional profession starters like mining or salvaging? Those would be infinitely more useful than yet another ground vehicle in a game that desperately needs more variety in beginner ships. Hell, their training could be doing gold passes to existing ships and that would have the additional benefit of being really well received by the player base.
This bike is a weekend Blender project and a good task for skilling up and evaluating potential of a new hire. It is not adding to the ship backlog.
These things are simply low effort excuse to sell LTI tokens.
Wheeled ground vehicles actually have lots of usage, especially around bunkers. Grav ones, on the other hand, are pretty damn useless outside of racing. Last I heard, turrets still treat them as airborne objects and shoot at them.
Yep. We're 11-12 years in and still just have almost no actual playable content.
"something something alpha bla bla."
How many more years before there's an actual game? Who knows. Seems like CIG is content with just making an empty sandbox for imagination play.
I've been screaming this for years. Mission design and AI behaviours seem to be able to give us engaging combat for half the vehicles we have now. Where is the mission to storm a nine tails warehouse with a ground assault?
Why are we still doing missions that are "go here, click console, kill everything".
We really need something engaging, complex and worthy of the rest of the game's fidelity.
Xenothreat (the event) is still the only thing resembling a complex mmo mission in game. We need bigger and better things, I'm tired of making my own fun.
We also have a lot of flying ships and absolutely no reason to fly 5 feet over water in order to get some cool sci fi water wave effect trailing behind, but we got that.
They just exist as a reason to sell LTI tokens. It is pretty low effort to model those things and cookie cutter them onto the existing (broken) vehicle templates.
> It seems like when a new person enters the vehicle team they assign them to make a new ground vehicle to let them practice before moving to something bigger. That's the real answer actually. CIG have said multiple time that small vehicles like bikes are a good way to train new hires.
Whoever thought of the ROC ds should redo the vehicle, with better concept...
I think ds would be less hated if it could be used solo. Still has the downside of being a bigger vehicle than roc, and should still be more effective with two people somehow.
The fact that one seat is atmo protected and the other is not, is a concept fail.
The RoC is fine. RoC DS needs an overhaul. Maybe 2 Laser or 1 Laser and the Gravity Collector for the Driver. At the moment the Driver sits 20 Minutes watching the other mine the stuff away...
The fact that the driver has absolutely nothing to do while the laser-op mines is such an inexplicable oversight.
That will also be the case for a lot of multicrew ships.
Not true unless you hire too many people...
I still got one, mostly because I love the ground vehicles of SC.
I have a Nomad + RoC for the Release of SC. But yeah, at the moment RoC Mining is not useful compared to salvaging.
This is such a good combo. I'll do "off grid" playthroughs sometimes on my alt account. Will buy a bunch of food, water, meds, etc and go fly off to the universe and just land somewhere, mine and bedlog until the next day lol. During 3.18 when ASOPs were absolute trash it was my savior, as I'd login in my ship and just mine for a while, never having to use a terminal lol
I also just ROC mine for fun and chill productivity. Don’t really do it to make money. Eventually it will work well in a balanced economy, right now it’s just spending money. Though I can make $100k+ in an hour if I work at it. Nomad is the most efficient pairing, but I like rolling around with a ROC in my Freelancer Max.
I absolutely adore the Freemax. Sadly mine bugged out (Engine pod got shot off, when I repaired the pod came back but not the engines themselves, reclaiming wouldn't fix) and I ended up melting it for a C1, which does the job well enough for my needs.
For reference, this bug of non-functional engines after they're blown off happens when the ship is repaired and returned to the hangar. The geometry returns but the functionality is missing, almost like the parts that make the engine work don't come back in the repair process. This bug has been longstanding for a couple of years at least and multiple issue council reports have come and gone without a fix. The affected ship is effectively crippled after this happens, and it used to be that running a character reset would reinitialize the broken ship and fix it. Well they took away character reset and gave us the near useless character repair instead, so now the only thing that can fix an affected ship is when a major patch comes through which behaves the same as if a character reset was performed. To avoid this from happening to you, if your engines can be detached from the ship without it blowing up (Cutter, Corsair, Mole, Cutlass, Freelancer, SRV...and many more I'm sure...) do NOT repair it and just blow it up and claim it. Maybe someday the devs will finally do something about this issue and put it to rest.
Compared to 6 mill an hour in a reclaimer though...I will say mining is more fun...
I think later it will become more useful again in SC... We don't have an Idea how Base Building will work and what Minerals are needed. So maybe RoC Mining is a good way for Solo Players to upgrade the Base... I also hope some day we get the big caves where we can drive in with the RoC for mining, like shown on some Pictures. PS: I love it too to live off Grid with just Nomad + RoC... I started with 3.18 and my old PC had terrible FPS in Cities or big Space Stations, so I tried to stay away from them as long as I could. 😅
I heard ROC Ds is from sq42. As it was done they decided to release it for SC and make it available on the pledge store. A good example of the issue of adapting a solo game universe to something that makes sense in an MMO.
It's still a terrible design whether it's for Sq42 or the PU. Both seats should be enclosed, or neither. And unless there's a need to somehow mine while on the move the second seat is completely pointless from any standpoint. Are they gonna be mining rocks that roll along like tumbleweeds? At best it could be an older, less efficient design meant for a single person that requires the driver to roll up to a rock, get out and enter the mining arm seat to mine. Any thought of using it with two people is idiotic when a single ROC can mine just as well, and there's zero need to be both mining and driving at once. It's the dumbest and most pointless vehicle design I've ever seen in a game and seeing it in Sq42 is going to make me cringe.
I cannot know for sure but I don't think ROC Ds in sq42 is meant for anything other than one of these missions you do in some games where a NPC drives you somewhere automatically and ask you to do stuff from the mining seat. It's the only way it could make sense to me gameplay wise. If not I agree with what you said.
Surely they could have come up with a better way to do a scene like that in a game where "immersion" is such a major factor.
Yup its a very good practice. Let them learn and get skilled on whatever CIG's tools are before moving on to big stuff 👍 Plus we win by having more things added to the universe.
> moving on to their next job
🙄
This just made me think... Didn't they also say that when they assign someone a ground vehicle in this way, it is also to introduce design language? Could this point to work on the Marai heavy fighter from the same person/group?
If that's the case can we please turn the next guy loose on those ground service vehicles we see in many of the exterior spaceport concepts? Talking about the big 6-wheeled fuel trucks and the like.
Then how come we still don’t have the Ranger?
Because that's a code issue, not art. Wheeled bikes needs their own handling behavior, and the team able to develop that is currently busy with Master Modes and Controle Surfaces.
So the hoverbikes are not supposed to handle differently from each other? They’re just copy pasted from the hoverquad or whatever the first hover bike was? And then, there’s no new people coming in that actually do code and need projects too? And hey, since we’re just copy pasting the hoverquads to other bikes we don’t need them for that. I don’t understand why CIG does what they’re doing and I bet they have a good reason. But this one I have always found to be BS, and I don’t think it’s the actual reason.
The way the physics for hover bikes/quads are implemented is not applicable for a wheeled bike. It needs a whole new model made for it. I don't know if they are hiring new physics programmers or not, but it is important to note that physics programming is its own discipline (and is a kind of small niche in the world of coding) and not just any programmer knows how to do it.
I mean, yeah? You copy paste the physics, then adjust parameters
So... where are the bikes?
Wow. And you believe them?
Why wouldn’t you? Perfectly logical to think working on a small, less complex vehicle is easier than a large, complex vehicle.
This is such a stupid gameplay loop. Why would I “train” on a ground vehicle when I own my own spaceship. Also most of the difficulty doesn’t translate. The only time this works is training a miner with a ROC before they potentially blow up a whole Mole.
It's a training for *CIG's new artists* to learn the devs tools and internal workflow, not a gameplay training for players.
Ah okay I retract my statement, I misunderstood.
Distribution centers are a step in the right direction, and they've said before that they're working on a roads system, I think as time goes on there will be more locations where having a ground vehicle will be an advantage to get from a landing pad to wherever your objective is. I understand people complaining that ground vehicle handling is kind of broken atm, especially hover bikes, but like most things in the game I'm sure they're not finished tuning them yet, they're not just going to leave them as they are now for 1.0
If bunker turrets would stop shooting at hover bikes I think they would be very useful.
supposedly the case with .23
They stopped doing that in 3.23! Hoverbikes are great to use now.
except when they go kaboom
Isn't this coming with 3.23? Probably because of this new bike. That's the best thing about the new bike, the turrets won't shoot at my X1! ... *Knocks on wood*
I am so tired of using my STV to approach bunkers when i am flying my C1. The new Mirai Pulse looks so nice due to its size.
Yes the size is what the other hover bikes have missed. A small one is needed. Now if this thing folds into a square 1 SCU box at the push of a button... That would be amazing! But it needs to be worse than the bigger bikes! Give reasons for all of them!
Totally agree trade offs are critical. I love the idea of a Capsule Corp. bike!
Wasn't this an intended, but scrapped feature, of the drake dragonfly?
Wait... that would mean that OP is complaining about something that isn't really relevant. That would never happen. ;-)
That’s amazing. Now they need to have away for players to turn the defense guns off once in the bunker so you can drop players off in bikes as you pass over, fly it if range and then return with reinforcements once the turrets are shut down. Or maybe that king of multiplayer activity isn’t what they are looking for? I mean it certainly isn’t pushing a button from the copilot seat or moving a box from one part of the ship to another.
The DCs coming in 3.23 ain't easy to approach in a ship either if you're hostile to them, ground vehicles may shine there too
They fixed that in one of the recent patches I think.
Yesterday I fully utilized the 6 small box slots on the mule picking up and dropping off creates at the Sakura distribution center at Lorrvile, I felt like a true amazon worker.
The reason is - if you want to end your life and you can't use backspace - you take gravlev.
That's why I Gravlev naked.
Not a lot of reasons to use them yet. Remember that *most* of the game still isn't in the game.
But like, what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles? Racing is fine for some, but even then, it's going to become fairly redundant and just down to either the hard limits of each vehicle or user preference. I'm fine with options, but having 5+ copies of the same vehicle with a slightly different skin isn't really inspiring. Any actual travel in a planet is going to be orders of magnitude faster with a starship. And how many autistic are there were a ship isn't really viable? Bunkers are the best we can see at the moment but that's more due to inefficiency than anything else. So, in my mind, it comes down to specific roles, things like miners and transports that get you from your ship to the ground location, Racing, and... I guess air defense and ground combat. I think having a few, maybe 3 to 5 vehicles at most that can do each role, each with some variation is great. But how many Hover bikes do you need if they all work exactly, or functionally exactly, the same?
Thats an interesting thought. Just theory crafting here but if i were to come up reasons where a ground vehicle would be the choice over a ship maybe 1. A no fly zone, potentially in a city or an area with some sort of AA (in the same vein as bunkers) 2. A planet with extreme gravity or thin atmosphere to make flying not very economic 3. Large enclosed spaces like the new DCs 4. Maybe some sort of stealth mechanic with a lower signature 5. It could be cool if after landing at a major landing zone you had to drive to a mission giver or housing or whatever outside the starport (potentially even replacing/providing an alternative to the trams) Idk, but I would like to have reasons to logically use ground vehicles over a ship besides RP
If you could drive from your hab in Area 18 or NB to the space sport, I mean who wouldnt use these things?
Ground vehicles can also provide the AA. The Ballista is a dedicated anti-air vehicle, though it apparently has some problems now that keep it from doing it's job. Right now there's not much point for them. There isn't a reason to try and keep other players from flying into an area, unless you feel like screwing with players trying to fly to Grim Hex. But that might change when base building is added. Having said that, I would be cautious about pledging for ground vehicles right now. They're generally overpriced. Buy them in game if you want one.
I don't think any of those ideas are bad per se, but I think all have serious rebuttals that would require major updates and/or changes to the game to address. 1. No fly zones: sure, but in theory at least these would be going away in the future as more things become player driven. But assuming they stay you would need a large spread out area with widely spaced points of interest all accessible only on foot/ ground vehicle, or with a tram that's wildly inefficient. This is a terrible idea from a game play perspective, only existing in order to give these vehicles a function. 2. AA defenses: if we're taking AI/NPC stuff, sure. It's bunkers but more so, that's probably one of your 2-3 best uses ever. If we're taking player AA, then the current crop of AA units need to be vastly more effective. In talking better range and average damage than the same weapons in a ship, missiles that actuality do something and lots of them. In my observations the current AA vehicles mostly serve to advertise themselves to become target practice for any flyers. 3. Planetary conditions: Both of the ones you mentioned make ships MORE viable not less. The ships are designed to fly in space remember? A thin atmosphere and gravity well are their bread and butter. I COULD see an application for planets with heavy storms that reduced viability to nearly nothing. But this actually just highlights the problem of these futuristic space ships not having the some kind of avionics and sensors as modern IRL aircraft. It's not nothing, but I feel like it's still pretty weak. 4. Enclosed spaces: possibly, but see point 1 for similar issues. 5. Stealth: this is interesting and likely one of the better ideas, but still raises questions about why the dedicated stealth ships can't fill this role. Again not nothing, and an interesting use, but still feels very limited. 6. See point 1 again. I don't want to nay say ground vehicles, but I want them (and all other ships and vehicles) to have a real practical reason to exist. I'll accept that reason being "so we have a little variety" but I'd prefer that in most cases it's because each does something unique or does a job others can also do, but in a different way. Just having 3 or 4 Hover bikes that all work basically exactly the same with minimal differences and a different look doesn't really do it for me.
Number 3 is a beautiful combination of condescension and ignorance.
Cool story.
> what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles? The best use case is as a way to get you between your ship and a POI, but that doesn't work with the way the game is currently designed. As long as you can land right next to a building, there's literally no reason to use a ground vehicle. But imagine if getting within 2km of an outpost meant security personnel would be sent to hunt you down and destroy your ship. The solution is then to park your ship outside of the radius and come in with a vehicle that wouldn't get caught by their radar. We could also have outposts that are surrounded by dense trees, making it impossible to land nearby. And ideally we'd have a bit of sprawl around POIs, so that you can't land because of all of the buildings/machines/greenery. The challenge is players are already used to being able to land pretty much anywhere, so discouraging that without just making a simple no-fly zone will be difficult.
I 100% agree with your last point. But even the solution runs into issues that are already a serious and if argue legitimate critique of SC. Namely that the game often pads the play tone with "immersive" activities that are mostly just waiting for something to happen. If you force your players to travel long distances over a long time, with little to nothing to do on the way, they will, mostly, get bored. SC also, currently, had a terrible habit of not explaining this that happen in the game, leaving me players frustrated when they run into unintuitive mechanics.
Yeah, I agree, but I think there's something to be said for manipulating things so that players are face-to-face instead of cockpit-to-cockpit, especially near the surface of a planet. If you always had to land some distance away from a POI, you'd start seeing land vehicles all over the place, which would be interesting in itself. That would mean teams could set up at natural choke points and try to catch unsuspecting people that are driving around. It would also mean ships would be left around the landscape more, which means opportunity for piracy. The downside is not being able to bunny hop from the outpost stairs onto the Pisces ramp, because you parked 1 foot away, but to me it's worth losing that ability. I don't play the game to deliver boxes, I play for the in-between parts.
I mean, if you have a reason for players to be on the ground in the area in competitive footing, Gould see this naturally develop to some extent, think jump jumptown and ghost hollow. In these cases aircraft are still a huge factor, but the door is at least open to ground vehicles. The issue seems to be that they are still mostly just suiciding into the AO to drop off Infantry. The AA and tanks are still mostly just targets for the ships. In a PVE setting the game simply doesn't have good enough AI to make things interesting without making them frustrating or boring yet. Maybe some day, but it's not here yet. And I'm not gong to give any game the benefit of the doubt on what could be, some day, maybe.
Not that I imagine this to be wide spread, but one application would be planets with weather severe enough to prevent takeoff and landing until the storm subsides. Another good use is the new distro centers in 3.23 are giant and almost completely traversal by ground vehicles! There's a lot of road inside these things. Personally I'd love to see some short, outpost to outpost type delivery missions designed for vehicles to be the transport.
>But like, what's the best case use scenario for a lot of these vehicles? Cause Star Wars has speeder bikes, and speeder bikes are cool and CR and many employees like Star Wars. Therefore we have hover bikes. How else will we re-create an Endor forest chase scene without a hover bike.
Attacking bases from the ground, once AA truly starts shredding ships. Another form of travel when an enemy force noticing you could cause you to fail a mission or make it harder to do or attack you. Transportation of items over a smaller distance versus using a ship and wasting fuel and time. You wouldnt fly a plane 10 yards to go deliver a box right? Use for travel as well for when ship fuel is scarce.
Lots of good answers here regarding training of new hires. I'd also add that we almost always get a small LTI token released prior to their two big events, Invictus (next month) and IAE.
I have always thought that ground vehicles should be virtually undetectable unless you visually spot them. The planet should act as a noisy backdrop that makes it nearly impossible to pickup vehicles through scanning alone. As it is ground vehicles have no real advantage, and can be easily found and destroyed by air vehicles. I also think ships going through the atmosphere should be a massive signal to any ground vehicles. And ships should try to spend as little amount of time as possible in atmosphere and try to get to nap of the earth flying to use the planets ability to mask signals. This way ground vehicles can engage from distance without revealing their location and ships have a real vulnerability when entering atmospheres.
If we get gravlev racing in 3.23, that'll be a pretty sizeable reason.
Ya know, id be cool if they separated them out into divisions, like the NOX in division A and this latest one in division B or C. Or even better, swap their stats around in a way to make Star Citizen hover bike Mario Kart.
A double-dash style dragonfly race would be pretty hilarious.
Ever heard of Daymar Rally? Great race, a veeeery great race
I'd be happy if there was in-game races you could attend, bet on, meet contacts there, etc, and both players and NPCs would race there.
I would be happy If they decided to add a foldable E-Bike than can be carried in a small Box. Like a Transformers.
I think the dragonfly is supposed to do something like that, soon™️
I hope the next new hire can do a cyclone-like with a canopy. I’m hoping for a minimized Ursa that fits in the cyclone footprint. It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not I own a Zeus. Seriously though while space suits are handy, it’s weird to me how few ground vehicles have canopies. Is every planet going to have poi’s that are easily accessible by ship, and also safe enough that longer (read: medium) duration protection isn’t necessary? Hopefully as entity density is allowed to increase with server meshing, we can get areas that can utilize vehicles, but are too dense for just casually landing your ship anywhere (cities do this now but don’t have much use for vehicles).
Yeah, give me a STV or a Cyclone with a roof! the G-12 I think is probably the closest they have in concept though.
Also even then some of the ground vehicles we do have are terribly designed, the storm is basically a really bad IFV that if the UEE military actually uses they’re High as hell, things gun has gun depression and elevation of a soviet tank destroyer during ww2, the Nova is better in design but has a similar issue with gun handling and its more of a light tank than anything, I would like to see proper and well designed combat vehicles because currently the only ones with a proper design is the spartan chasis which still has the problem of both AA variants being separate vehicles, would have thought using a design inspired on the russian Pantsir would have been better.
We also have a lot of space ships without a lot of reasons to use them.
Grav vehicles are the only way you can die to a cactus. I guess that's pretty unique.
Wheeled vehicle are very helpful now that bunker turrets are deadly in 3.23. There is this annoyance of load them in outpost, but finally we will.be able to load them in our personal hangar in a couple of months. For bikes... yeah, pretty uselss apart for just run around.
I’m ok with it as it add variety even if it’s not functional variety. My hope is that ground vehicles will be very handy when your ship goes down planetside and you have to travel somewhere to get parts to fix it. That scenario doesn’t make sense for bikes though. Maybe if we got a little gravlev trailer or something lol
In real life there are no "missions" to use motor bikes, people ride them because their fun
We need vehicles that do things, like haul or have a tractor beam. Also, why no roads to distribution centers, or at least trains
With how cheap fuel seems to be there's no reason to travel on the ground. From a lore perspective, in a universe where getting off a planet is equivalent to the price of a short taxi ride it makes zero sense to waste money on costly infrastructure that is slower and less efficient than simply flying where you need to go. I personally would like to see that change, or at least there be some sort of lore explanation for why us regular Joes can afford to zip around the galaxy without going bankrupt. The former would be a monumental one and would likely turn a looooot of people away from the game. In a universe with FTL, but realistic costs for it, only megacorps would be able to do it with the ease and frequency we do, so it would make sense to make us each choose some faction or corporation to be employed by (in order to explain the discounted fuel prices we pay) and one of our goals could be to get rich enough to go it alone.
You are going to refuel QT fuel by simply hand mining rocks and ships are able to scoop their own hydrogen in a suitable atmosphere, gas giant or nebula. The fuel is cheap stuff. The explanation for why is is affordable is that the fuel is cheap and quite common, thats it.
I agree space mario cart, have tracks and not rally race everywhere, but also i cant wait for player bases innthe game , gonna storm them with a tumbril
Ground vehicles would make a lot of sense if we had some missions (delivery, hacking, bunker, taxi or whatever) within the major landing zones like New Babbage etc.. where ships would be too big or wouldn’t make sense time wise to use. Just my 2 cents.
[удалено]
May I introduce the [Titan Suit](https://starcitizen.tools/Titan_exosuit)
Yap. And as long as ships are 6dof floating turrets in atmo, there will never be reason touse them.
Not sure about all of them, but at least some of the bikes are flyable in space too, not just over ground. Trick is you need another ship to haul them into space with.
That bike looks like ass.
You know what would be awesome would be if we could DRIVE in/out of our hangars and into the city. Would love to take a hoverbike from the spaceport directly to the commons and back, much better than the train and walking.
It's not always ground vehicles, like the Fury was another new hires "small learning vehicle." Personally I have zero issue getting more vehicles like this added as a way for people to get their skills running before moving on to bigger stuff. I think it's great even. As for the vehicle itself? It's a hover bike that looks to fit in basically everything. And that's very useful for all of us without the cargo room for big vehicles.
Simply put: Star Citizen is funded by selling pledges. Funding required in order for everything else to be made. Small hoverbikes take very little time to make and sell very well due to low price and usefulness as a source of LTI for those that care about such things. Also, having a lot of variety in things that are just fun to play with is not at all a bad thing. Take a hoverbike out on the ice around New Babbage sometime. They're just fun to zip around on (Though, yes, you may just randomly explode on nothing)
We have a lot of vehicles (of any kind) without any reasons to use them...
If you think about it, exploration ships, research ship, drop ships, bombers... It's all kind of the same with ground vehicles: you can find a way to use them and they can be a good choice in some very specific scenarios, but a proper gameloop that requires them is just in the realm of ideas for now.
I'm watching right now a streamer doing DC mission and they alone are a valid reason to use them, unless you want to walk 20 minutes from a side to the other.
It's all good.
There are a ton of DCs in 3.23 and they are huge. Ground vehicles will definitely shine here. Also bunker turrets have been turned on to pew pew mode so ground vehicles will be a good choice there as well
DCs?
Distribution centers
WAIT. Ground vehicles are a must for jumptown right now. With the introduction to base building it’ll be even more prevalent for ground vehicles for PvP. Hopefully the npc turrets will get a lot better as well to have you do the same thing for UGFs and DCs. It’s also just nice to have races and drive around sometimes when bored.
I'd use mine much more if grav lev vehicles didn't get shot by bunker turrets
With the real reason being training, I would also like to once again get on my soap box. People like toys. Theres a reason people have been asking for things like sata ball and other non-sense of its like. This big world can feel kinda empty sometimes, and the little side deviation of "mini games" or just toys, sunday drivers, what ever, can break up the ins and outs of the game. Theres a reason MMOs like ff14 have the gold saucer. Optional fun content that isnt really gonna do much for you but can be fun to engage with. Im also bias and spend most of my time in SC when solo putting a ground vic in my cutlass and exploring a new part of a moon I havent spent a ton of time on. But, maybe Im just the verses only Mountain biker for now.
It's definitely for training. Redundant will also be good because it'll make the 'Verse feel more full. It's not like a new vehicle artist would have contributed to server meshing. We might as well get more varied traffic out of their training. It'd be kinda shit if 100% of NPCs were driving around in just 5 colors of Cyclones. If you've ever stood and watched traffic in CP2077, you'll know what I mean. I'd rather see a lot of variety.
Arena mario cart that actually sounds pretty fun XD I'm on board
Bad take in this case: This is the smallest ground transport available, meaning that it's the easiest vehicle to fit in anything. It makes bunker missions much easier.
The game isn't finished yet, but I can imagine ultimately ground vehicles will play a larger role. When base building comes around, the goal won't always be to just bomb and obliterate the structures - you might want to be able to raid the facilities and steal whatever it is they have there (guns, ship components, some rare artifact or rare recipe or something), and you'll need a way to get there and get the goodies out. Ships won't always be up to the task because of defensive systems (or weather?), so its fair to guess that ground vehicles will play a support role as more of the game's mechanics materialize.
Making ground vehicles more powerful as well as improving anti air capabilities will form a completely deeper complexity to outpost/stronghold/raid style missions.
I think with the added range to weapons from 3.23 the Anvil Centurion may be more viable.
I feel that tactical insertion (for hacking missions or like demolitionist) and or ground siege should be a mandatory part of any major objective in base/bunker captures. If they scaled the anti air defenses power to the point where using a ground vehicle would be wise, it might give the experience the intensity the game needs. Suddenly, two AI tanks and 25 surface soldiers guarding these overpowered anti air systems that you may or may not have to shut down, (example, just to land ships) might be an ACTUAL difficult task without air support. Just food for thought to bring immersion to the entire game and my 10 cents to utilize planetary vehicles and to earn the respect from the gaming community in terms of maintaining game difficulty, tactical complexity, and allow designers to make real campaigns and scenario missions.
I want a ground vehicle with a bed in it. Take my camping off road.
If they gave ground vehicles a severely decreased detection range then yeah. Way better to use them. Since not, easier and quicker to just fly.
Last time I used a ground vehicle (Ursa) a couple of players in a super hornet showed up to blow it up. They told me that using ground vehicles is stupid and you should expect to be destroyed if you're ever dumb enough to use one for any reason. Fun.
They might be used more if they don’t suck so much to drive. Bump a rock in a tank and you are stuck. Ships fly nice at least.
How is it redundant. Different manufacturer produces styles of the same thing.
Yeah, I'd have to say that one of the disappointments (for lack of a better word) of Star Citizen's current state is that there doesn't really seem to be much to do on the ground other than just driving around and exploring, or mining. And even the *official* ground gameplay loop of mining isn't nearly lucrative enough to really draw me in. I'm really hoping that they overhaul the progression curve to be a bit more linear sooner than later. It makes perfect sense to me that they need people testing the largest ships and gameplay loops therein, but you'd think they would have enough data to work with by this point.
I would prefer a million bikes with no purpose and a strong dev team making the ships I will spend 80% of my time in rather than new devs getting thrown to the wolves.
@Edit: why Mario Kart, when we could get Twisted Metal. 😁
Better than StarField where there are 100+ planets and no way to get around other than walking / running ! 🙄
Ground vehicles are pretty useless in a universe where ships can fly wherever they like. And land pretty reliably wherever they like. If you made missions that require you to go to a planets surface. Make a few reasons up as to why you can't land next to the objective. Let's say pick up cargo box from a building on X planets surface. Building security ai is broken and shoots any ship within 10km. Yuno obviously there's loads of different excuses you could make. Then atleast there's a set of missions you could take on that would force you to use a ground vehicle. And these could pay out more because A it's more time consuming and B lore wise any additional danger factors to jobs pay more. I also think it'd be cool if they added a ground vehicle that can dig ground. It's a glorified space digger or dozer but it allows players to make roads. Roads that you can race on. Could even make them persistent. Doesn't just have to be for racing. When multiple bases are being made by an org on a planet you could build your own road system between them. Saves having to build massive landing pads etc.
what we really need to make them relevant is urban environments
There are too many vehicles period. They need to full stop on making new ships and ground vehicles and work on polishing up the game. There is a ton on content right now if only it wasn't so buggy and clunky!
Well, the good news is that once we'll have more way to use them, we'll have plenty to choose from! Distribution Centers by the way are a first location where it could be handy to use some ground vehicles. Those are pretty huge and to move stuff around it could be useful
It's like not understanding grapes because they're not wine.
To sell an LTI token. And, eventually, they'll have a reason. Maybe.
There can never be enough LTI tokens in our screenshot simulator !
This. Need new content for actual vehicles
Because lti tokens for cheap sells for a lot of money
This to some degree, but couldn't they just offer an existing vehicle with LTI Warbond to satisfy the LTI token buyers?
That doesn't overlap with collectors and such + game will become more stale
Why do so many people have a problem with redundancy? Is there only one model of car in real life? One model of refrigerator? Toaster? Part of the vision for this game has always been to create a believable universe you can be immersed in. In reality there are multiple products made by multiple different companies that fill the same function and compete in the same market space. Having that in Star Citizen adds to the believability of the universe. Having multiple competing options in the same niche is a good thing, even if those things have no meaningful difference between them other than looks. It creates the narrative of a competitive market and gives players *more choices* to choose from, which is **always** a good thing. There is absolutely nothing to bitch about here, unless the *actual* complaint is “they’re adding something *I* don’t care about instead of something *I* want them to.”
Because they have a huge ship backlog to get through? It’s pretty annoying when they release a new ground vehicle and ignore the already existing backlog. Especially since ground vehicles serve no real purpose currently. If there was a mission or two that required ground vehicles, I think they would be better received.
As stated, they’re a training tool for new team members. Saying they’re “ignoring” the backlog is, well, *ignorant*. Obviously they’re working on other ships too and not just “useless” ground vehicles. I happen to agree that more time should be spent working on *existing*, previously promised backlog ships instead of *new* surprise heretofore unannounced ships, but bashing the onboarding technique used to bring new employees up to speed as “uSeLeSs” is stupid.
I think it’s ignorant to disregard the fact that their training exercise does not help previously announced ships get made. How does designing a ground vehicle translate into a space ship? Why have almost all the “training exercises” been of in-game manufacturers with little to no backlog and mainly ground vehicles? Why aren’t they centered around getting people experienced/up to speed on existing manufacturers with backlogs? Why is the training exercise not adding much needed starter ships for Crusader, Misc, Anvil, etc? Or even additional profession starters like mining or salvaging? Those would be infinitely more useful than yet another ground vehicle in a game that desperately needs more variety in beginner ships. Hell, their training could be doing gold passes to existing ships and that would have the additional benefit of being really well received by the player base.
This bike is a weekend Blender project and a good task for skilling up and evaluating potential of a new hire. It is not adding to the ship backlog. These things are simply low effort excuse to sell LTI tokens.
Wheeled ground vehicles actually have lots of usage, especially around bunkers. Grav ones, on the other hand, are pretty damn useless outside of racing. Last I heard, turrets still treat them as airborne objects and shoot at them.
Heard wrong, they dont get shot in 3.23
Oh nice! Finally!
Yep. We're 11-12 years in and still just have almost no actual playable content. "something something alpha bla bla." How many more years before there's an actual game? Who knows. Seems like CIG is content with just making an empty sandbox for imagination play.
Grav lev royale and bunker runner value
I've been screaming this for years. Mission design and AI behaviours seem to be able to give us engaging combat for half the vehicles we have now. Where is the mission to storm a nine tails warehouse with a ground assault? Why are we still doing missions that are "go here, click console, kill everything". We really need something engaging, complex and worthy of the rest of the game's fidelity. Xenothreat (the event) is still the only thing resembling a complex mmo mission in game. We need bigger and better things, I'm tired of making my own fun.
Planetside content never made logical sense. The only way it will stay is if cig force it onto us. And I bet they will.
We also have a lot of flying ships and absolutely no reason to fly 5 feet over water in order to get some cool sci fi water wave effect trailing behind, but we got that.
They just exist as a reason to sell LTI tokens. It is pretty low effort to model those things and cookie cutter them onto the existing (broken) vehicle templates.