Ouch , unless you have bar skills maxed or a primal rhino charge this will effect monkeys quite alot. Using PRE and PRH my ships already heavy as fuck. RC struggles as it is to keep my ship turning at a decent speed lol.

Well my sheilded Venu Motor is now usless before it was 400 vis so i would get 200 with mod, now the base vis is 875 so i actually get more vis with the mod than the base vis before -_-

dare I ask how poor my *shielded emp propulsor is now?

Enough fucking with Engine Vis.
This is a all-round nerf....

Just nerf the Rhino Charge down to where an OS FT is, and add a vis tag to the scaled dogfighting dps boost.

Keep PRC the way it is. Add the new engines.

Jeff has a flaw in his formula to determine engine visibility, I'm going to talk to him to get it fixed.

Edit: It looks like the old formula was thrown out the window already.

What engines do you guys as snipers currently use, and how heavy are your sniper ships?

Ive seen ULTs LTs VMotors and that shit used...

Generally snipers will use lion thrusters if they can, vmotors otherwise, and occasionally in pvp they'll actually use stealth engines such as the qua vazuk(but almost always in combo with ace in a pill tweaks). I personally use an unholy lion thruster.

My sniper when fully geared weighs about 5 million weight.

i think my ShM ward might be lighter than that would need to verify though >.<

This is what I was thinking the Snipers might like:

name / weight / space / turn / thrust / vis
Thrust in Shadows / 1m / 91 / 225 / 8335 / 90 (500k more weight, 18% better stats, about the same vis)
Bule Blackness / 28k / 63 / 104 / 2607 / 30 (roughly 3x its old stats)
Fine Tuned Qua Vazuk / 168k / 25 / 74 / 1857 / 30 (little bit more vis, stats beefed by 9%)
Oversized Moral Emphasis / 889k / 185 / 230 / 6331 / 90 (nearly 5x the stats)

I'll reduce the visibility on Venusian Motor and FT Venu Motor to 90. Not sure about Lion Thruster... It was 300 vis before, so doesn't seem exactly like a candidate to be made even somewhat stealthy.

I'm a little surprised to be hearing engines with 200-300 visibility being mentioned for sniper. Perhaps we should add a new catagory for engines that are just barely stealth and have about 250 visibility?

Edit: Note that Oversized Moral Emphasis is now better in every way for snipers than the Lion Thruster used to be.

I think actually the engine stats might be too good now, and I may have to back everything down about 15% from where it is. Still looking into it.

on Snipers using high vis engines:

This only works because the engines used are high vis and have really high thrust + turning, so they only need to tap thrust to move forward at a good speed.

On Engine stats, if engines get beefed Tractors need a beef, particularly Engineer tractors, either that or SD needs a major nerf to turn + thrust... Maybe a -weight as opposed to +turn and thrust, that way they can be tractored but still retain agility. without needing to beef engi tractors.

Normal Vis Engines:
Light Engine
Medium Engine
Large Engine

Stealth Engines:
Light Stealth
Heavy Stealth

LS is very small, and is very stealthy, but have poor agility(which is balanced out by ZoA/ZoT and Recon Focus

HS is larger, medium sized, and have much better agility, but a reduced stealth bonus.


There, you have stealth engines.


As for the Rhino Charge, it costs like 500m MAX, yet is the best engine for Freighters that can drop. It may be T20, but any nitwit can get eng20.

The issue is not that it can drop, but it can drop often. Giga FT is as good, but it comes from like DF400 dgs, which can be harder to do for a squad than Big Rhino..especially since the UZ is in freaking w0 and DF400 is well, past the drops, grim, and battleship swarms...then through a dg full of nasty ai.

Rhino has a nice chance of dropping a RC, but the DF400's...not so much.

Another thing, the Bule MPD Force has terrible stats, which I know will be rebalanced, but keep in mind that its another candidate engine for freighters.

The final engine is the FT IID, but thats 5k less turning than a RC. It's a Fine Tuned engine....

Yeah, the reason we use these is because its extremely nice to be able to actually move when we want to or need to, but if we need to be stealthy we can do that, as well, by simply tapping rapidly on the thrust key. This cuts our acceleration way down, of course, but we're also undetectable.

The reason giving engines over, say, 300 vis hurts snipers, is because at that point even tapping brings you up to 50-100 vis each tap, which is easily visible to ANY class.

The way it is at the moment, a sniper can use just about any engine, so long as they do it skillfully(it actually takes a little bit of effort to get good at tap-moving), with these changes many engines will simply be off-limits to snipers.

In addendum to this, there really is no practical difference between 90 vis max and 300 vis maximum; Both are high enough that it requires tapping to move stealthily. This might not seem to make sense, but you also have to consider that the difference between 1 and 3 visibility is the difference between many AI having to be on top of me to see me, to seeing me from a good distance...it becomes more apparent.

A SD can ping and see me while i'm completely stealthed from at least 500 distance, and some can even see me at up to 1000 distance away. The difference between 1 and 3 vis becomes the difference between being seen at 1000 range and being seen at my maximum range. At 90 visibility, you're visible to anyone.

In light of all this, i think that you should just balance all engines to have high visibility, EXCEPT for the specific small engines that didn't have high vis before, such as the qua vazuk, etc. Balance ALL the other engines however you want to, but then give snipers something like -90% engine visibility; On a Unholy Lion Thruster, they'd get 90.9 visibility, which is almost exactly what stealth engines have at the moment.

That way, everyone is happy, because all engines are potentially useful to ALL classes.

I think just tweak the vis on LT/PLT/ULT....So endgame snipers get the finest gear, til then, suck it up.