Ship Improvements and Ideas
Hey all!
Morgan here, figured I'd see about encouraging some ideas from the community relating to ships since I've had a few shower thoughts after playing about in space.
The only minor improvement I'd want to see is a message whenever an incursion ends in the zone you're in. Just a small quality of life thing for me!
As for new things down the line, perhaps as a part of shipmods, new artifacts or new components depending how they'd best fit into the game, here's a few things I've cooked up.
Cloaking Field/Stealth System
This would remove you from the spacemap and from scan attempts unless a ship gets in close proximity to you. Downsides would be that in using the system, your shields would be fully drained and would take time to engage once the cloaking field had dropped.
Holographic Projector
This would change the visible appearance of your ship to another, with your real identity only revealed once a target lock has been made.
Passive Hull Regen
I'd love something, either a rare ship mod or even an artifact if it proves to be too powerful, where you gain passive hull regen when out of combat.
I want to hear your own ideas or any thoughts and criticisms you may have based on my own. Lets hear some enthusiasm and spark some creativity!
Morgan here, figured I'd see about encouraging some ideas from the community relating to ships since I've had a few shower thoughts after playing about in space.
The only minor improvement I'd want to see is a message whenever an incursion ends in the zone you're in. Just a small quality of life thing for me!
As for new things down the line, perhaps as a part of shipmods, new artifacts or new components depending how they'd best fit into the game, here's a few things I've cooked up.
Cloaking Field/Stealth System
This would remove you from the spacemap and from scan attempts unless a ship gets in close proximity to you. Downsides would be that in using the system, your shields would be fully drained and would take time to engage once the cloaking field had dropped.
Holographic Projector
This would change the visible appearance of your ship to another, with your real identity only revealed once a target lock has been made.
Passive Hull Regen
I'd love something, either a rare ship mod or even an artifact if it proves to be too powerful, where you gain passive hull regen when out of combat.
I want to hear your own ideas or any thoughts and criticisms you may have based on my own. Lets hear some enthusiasm and spark some creativity!
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Comments
QoL things I'd like to see:
- Some way to tell number of ship deaths for a particular ship that you own, either via SHIP INFO or when your ship is rebuilding (like when you clone). Both would also be good.
- In SHIP INFO, it still displays 'thrust power' for power remaining, a holdover from the old system which I think still confuses people because they think it has something to do with their thrust, which it doesn't. Changing it to just Available Power or something would be great!
- For the Transfers skill in Captaincy, you're able to connect to another ship and store/load cargo just like at a station. Unfortunately, it works literally just like at a station, utilizing the exact same commands, which confuses the system if you happen to be connected to a ship within storage distance of a station. It will store/load at/from the station instead of the ship you're connected to. In addition, because it's literally just using that same mechanic and treating the connected ship as a station, they get 0 indication of what's being loaded or stored unless they sit there and spam CARGO CONTENTS SHIP. This means you could theoretically jack someone's stuff under the guise of giving them supplies or something, then fly off without them realizing until you're long gone. And maybe that part's not a huge problem, but I do think that the ship should at least get a message like 'That Cool Ship has stored some cargo in our cargo bay.' and 'That Cool Ship has loaded some cargo from our cargo bay.'
- There doesn't seem to be any deathsight message for when someone uses SPACEWALK SHUTDOWN (or otherwise runs out of power). It's fine if this is meant to not be a global thing, but you should at least get some indication if you're in the same zone so you know right away that that person you came to rescue is no longer there.
- Similarly, there's no deathsight message for when a ship detonates via Captaincy Detonate, which was a sad discovery. I want everyone to know that I spitefully blew myself up to deal paltry damage to my attackers! (The damage is hilariously low, even for the biggest ships, but that's a separate issue.)
I'm sure there are some things I'm not thinking of right now, so I'll come back to this later. Now we need to talk about skipdrives.Skipdrives are amazing. They work better than I ever could have imagined back when shipsims required 5 million cycles to function. If you have access to Skip, Flyby, and Overdrive, that's potentially a ton of space you can cover in a very short amount of time, which right now is limited by per ability cooldowns and capacitor usage. This is fine outside of combat, when you want to move fast and avoid gatewarping.
However, it completely trivializes ship combat when two big, heavy ships are fighting each other, because if either one is in danger at any point, they can just say 'nah', and use their skipdrive to get away. Interdictor beams do an admirable job of mitigating this issue, but for whatever reason Flyby seems to bypass that, allowing you a get out of jail free card every 30s. If that's not an oversight, then I guess it would be fine, except that you can also potentially Skip right after, which is another 10su, and also overload, which is up to another 120su.
The simple fix here would probably be to make it so that once your ship has entered combat mode, tricks all have a shared cooldown. Maybe some limitation on overload usage in combat mode should also be made, so that you can't just skip across the entire sector. I realize these tricks can be handy during incursions, which will have you in combat mode more often than not, so this may not be the perfect solution, but I definitely think it bears a mention and some attention.
That's all I have for now, I hope it all makes sense! I'm looking forward to other people's ship-related ideas, space is amazing.
I remember when I first got battleship (before skip drive changes) , I went out on an incursion and totally got schooled by Easy mining drones. Not because of the damage, but because I just couldn't even catch them. I then stripped my battleship of supplies and modules, where it just stayed parked until skipdrives were viable to use.
I hope that future ship modding helps maneuverability or even taking a look at current acceleration/turning speed algorithms to see if any adjustments need to be made.
Also, I'd like to see some more component choices for superhaulers and freighters. The only choice for capacitors is super tiny in comparison to the ship size.
Ship stuff mostly. A touch long
Assist XP
OPTION A:
Give assist captain experience if someone hits a ship, takes a shot from it, or uses a support module (pending existence) on the killer. More ad hoc, more active.
OPTION B:
Split all space battle captaincy experience to all ships in the sector that are piloted by crew members. Probably easier to implement, but it would need spawning changes I mention later to prevent easy leeching.
QoL stuff
Add bg colors for ships piloted by people on your enemy list, ships you've hit within X time, and one for the last ship hit.
Targeting incursion mobs by type will default to the closest, ignoring those in your cone if one is closer. It should check for CoF and LoS.
Mark active incursions on the basic starchart with a bg color.
Incursions and NPCs
Add a fourth incursion difficulty - extreme - with 3 spawns geared to cruiser/battleship. Duplicate the spawns for each ship in the area, taking from the total incursion strength normally. Honestly, I would prefer turning down the importance of incursions and doing more 'static' spawns, but this is an easier and faster fix to the upper end being too easy right now.
Add spawns to the npc zones who show up in incursions. This does a few things. 1 - It adds some movement to space, which can feel kind of dead. 2 - Offers a static place to farm at a lower rate than incursions (depending on proximity to capitol, maybe?). The 10-15m flying sessions can be offputting, and the limited number will be an issue if pop goes up. 3 - Creates a zone where indy and combat pilots will want to work together, meaning resources available that nubs roaming with scoops can't easily grab.
Instead of reducing organic value, add in unique combat mechanics and a 50% dr to make ship dps balanceable (since vs ship dps is half at best, whichever ammo you use.). Make Devours try to get close and latch on for some ticks of damage. Have anomalies launch black hole bombs that drag you towards them. Split up binaries into two &s per spawn (and trinaries into 3) and have them do damage when you cross the line between them. That sort of stuff.
Resource Acquisition
Allow ships to dock with unrefined resources and allow them to be traded. It makes the return-trip harvesting less inconvenient, and people can skip the production side of things if they just want to acquire crap.
Increase resource value and/or generation speed in CP areas. Highest risk, highest reward.
Modules:
Both weapon and nonweapon modules are a bit sparse. Not all of these are gems, but the spitballing should highlight the empty space. Roughly sorted into weapon buffs, system buffs, and misc.
+Damage - Make it tiered and only linkable to a same-tier weapon.
Aiming Module I/II/III - Reduces falloff for linked weapon
+Ammo - Increase shot count of linked weapon.
Aux thrusters I/II/III: -cap for a faster turn, per module cooldown
Afterburners I/II/III: -cap for a thrust boost, per module cooldown
Shield Booster: -maxcap for increased bypass resistance
Shield shunt - force a restart of a 0% shield, incurs a 2m+ cooldown.
Relay module - Faster lock time on your locked ship for ships piloted by members of your crew.
Dampening Field I/II/III - -maxcap to reduce the range at which you appear on beacon scans.
Cloak: Constant cap drain for stealth. 10s to activate, damage or moving above 1 u/s cancels it.
Decoy: Activate to deploy a short-lived echo of your ship that moves at your current speed and a slightly veering bearing.
Nanite Clumper - Creates a block of temporary impassable space as the nanites form a barrier.
Phase module - Drain cap to warp out of reality for a bit, visible but untargetable/no collision.
Weapon Modules:
Cannons - Change to 'Autocannons'. Increase ammunition per battery to 30, and tier them to weapon slot sizes. So Cannon 1 small, cannon 2 medium, cannon 3 large.
Massive cannons - Tier to weapon slot sizes, slower fire rate, same dps as autocannon.
Blasters - 6 range, 3 optimal, slower reload, high burst damage.
Railguns - 15 range, 12 optimal, high damage with high falloff, slow shot and reload.
Missiles - Change missiles to 'missile salvos', and give the missile turrets 5 missiles per salvo with a longer per-shot cooldown. Alternatively, increase missile production output so it's closer to ~30 a shot, making it worthwhile for damage/marks.
Rocket launcher - Dumbfires a high damage rocket forward. Could add a spread for larger modules.
Lasers - As autocannon, but higher cap use, more ammo efficiency
Plasma - Blaster version of laser.
Particle cannon - MC version of laser.
Tachyon pulser - Railgun version of laser.
<weirder stuff>
Tether - Turn and move faster towards a target after a hit and as long as you stay within 10 units of the ship.
Bomb launcher - Creates targetable, moving bomb that detonates after moving 15u at 3u/s
Drone bay - Launches a drone that attacks your enemies! Expensive, destroyable, but useful/easy/passive/cool.
Pilot Tricks
Barrel Roll (left/right) - Move diagonally forward-left or forward-right 2 * your speed (rounded up to nearest u/s).
Slipstream - More closely follow a ship's movements from behind for a short while (faster turn forced to target's turning).
Shake - End combat debuff if no enemies are within X range.
Missile salvos would destroy other ships way too fast (or damage be totally negated by how countermeasures currently work). It would be neat to have missile "kits" that have a few more missiles before needing to reload (3? 5?), though it's arguable that it might end up being too OP. I know a lot of people don't use missiles due to their perceived cost, but you get high damage, no misses, and 360 firing, so the cost is worth it. I absolutely love them.
As far as other weapon changes, it would be neat for tractor beams to have an effect on ships. Also, mines could be changed to have a greater area of effect. Right now, you have to be directly on top of them. People might use them if they covered more area.
E - I could have sworn people were saying they could miss.
Adjacent would make sense for mines, 2u at the most. Wouldn't be opposed to some that unstealth and turn into hunter-seekers on the ship triggering it.
Another idea is having a ship arena where you can customize a number of variables to change how the battles are played out, either in a PvP or PvE setting, similar to how we can set different arena game modes in other IRE games.
Here's how I imagine such a system to be:
Loadouts
With the ability to design a ship in the shipforge without purchasing the configuration, you would have the added ability to save the ship as an arena loadout. This will allow you to fly the ship design in arena matches that allow that particular ship and would also allow you to testdrive your creation without paying for it (or paying the entrance fee for the arena). This would also grant the ability to set up custom matches where teams or participants are forced into a particular ship configuration, to test their capabilities or to re-enact fleet battles.
PvE
This would pit a team of players against waves of AI controlled ships. Either admin or players could set the different variables, such as forcing a loadout from above or allowing people to pilot their own ships. Other variables include the following:
Difficulty - Easy, Medium, Hard. Same as incursions, affects enemy stats and AI for a custom tailored challenge.
Enemy Type - Choose from all available incursion enemies, allows practice against them.
Enemy Numbers - Set the spawn numbers at any one time, only allowing one to spawn at once, or two, three, etc. depending on difficulty.
Enemy Spawn Timer - Configure the length of time before the next wave spawns, or set it to manual so a command is sent to spawn them in.
PvE would also gain Captaincy xp but at a reduced rate to other types of content. You would not earn junk from the kills in the arena and if there is an entry fee, it would be a marks sink.
PvP
Again, using the loadout system proposed above, this would allow both admin and players to tailor matches to specific types. All interceptors, destroyers and above, only missiles and mines, for example. Stealing match types we've seen before in other games, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
FFA - Free for all. Every ship for themselves. One life each.
Team Deathmatch - 2 to 4 teams face off against each other in group combat. Winner is team with only remaining ships left.
Juggernaut - Free for all. First kill empowers your ship, granting bonus stats and bonus score for each subsequent kill. Killing the juggernaut makes you the juggernaut.
What do people think about this?
The arena would also give a larger amount of feedback to admin of ship combat in general, particularly ship PvP, which doesn't happen all too much at the moment. It would also give admin a chance at making tweaks/changes to incursion mobs/introducing different types of incursion ships (besides corsair in hard ship incursions and guard ravagers which aren't used too much due to their ineptness) as a testing site without much of an impact outside the arena. This could also serve as a fleet training area.
Basically, I see the ship arena idea as a mark sink/test server within the game itself. Drawbacks include the time consumption of creating it pulling away from development of other areas of the game that might need more attention.
I also think that Admirals shouldn't lose captaincy when their ships explode due to ships being stuck on a cosmpiercer. The ship isn't even being piloted at that point.
As for just a fun thing to have, it would be neat to have the customizable title option of putting "Admiral" in front of your name when reaching Admiral rank