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Space, take two

Okay, hopefully, the forums don't eat this one as well.

Starmourn is the space IRE. The space MUD if we're lucky. We should absolutely lean into that hardcore, have fun with it, and make it a wild, exciting ride. Currently, it's a little anti-social and we should aim to fix that.

What would I like to see?
-A complete re-imagining of the goals of space combat. Let's move away from ships being blown up in 5-20 seconds, and instead move into ships being disabled. Cruisers and Battleships especially, it should be more about disabling them. Actual destruction should take a silly amount of concentrated fire from multiple ships. OR, a boarding action. More on that later.
-Adding in multi-crew options! I think this is really important, the amount of boredom groups have in space is kinda not really a good thing. At all.
---New weapon option, manned turret! Same damage as a massive III, gains 360-degree range. Requires a turret room in the ship (multiple seats can exist in one room). Requires a player gunner!
---Cruisers and Battleships gain engineering nodes in a required engineering bay. Here, players can improve the speed at which subsystems are repaired or brought back online.
---An airlock is placed adjacent to the engineering bay, where the ship can be boarded by aggressive parties (NPCs or players), and if the engineering bay is breached, they can set the core to overload. There should be then a window of time the crew can attempt to reclaim the core before it's gone too far and will explode.
---Battleships can be upgraded with cloning stations! This will allow anyone CREWED with the pilot to reclone at this station if they die within the same sector of space. Can be disabled by boarders, until fixed by the crew.
---Battleships and Cruisers gain the ability to "tank" NPC ships in some way.
---New ship class, Tugboat! Used for towing broken ships from the battlefield, or providing battlefield repairs at a much-advanced rate!

This would open up the sky to epic, fun battles. Battles that can be all space, but also can include things to do for ground combatants! Which of course, need boarding ships!
-The delightfully under-used interceptor can now be used as a boarding craft! Once a large ship is disabled, it can pull up alongside and use some new action/equipment to force its way into the airlock.
-New large mod, ship bay! Cruisers can carry one interceptor. Battleships can carry two, or one corvette.
-New mod, Asteroid Buster, is only usable by mining class ships.


New events! Asteroids absolutely stock full of resources can come barreling across the void. You need to put a fleet together to get out there and take those resources! The Iron Corsairs(and similar parties), of course, would also be doing the same. You get out there, set your mining ship up to drill. This causes resources to break off periodically and need pickup. Can be interrupted by X factor (damage? special attack?). The mining ship would need protection from the fleet! From other eager harvesters. Perhaps the asteroid has its own wildlife that is unhappy at the attack!

Could even have giant space boss battles, huge hulking space squids float in and try to devour a planet, and a massive coalition fleet is needed to get in there and take care of it! Battleships try and entice it to attack them, crews keep things running and guns firing. Smaller ships provide support and repair. Towing broken ships out of range of being destroyed, providing more firepower, etc. Maybe the giant space bosses also have their own smaller support fleet that needs to be whittled down.


I have a very hard time getting people to enjoy the space aspect of this game because it's very isolating. Friends I've played with for years, who love space stuff, get into it and then quickly get bored and stop. Or they sit and watch as the ship they're in takes part in an actual battle, and then declare it's not worth the grind because the combat is super fast, and not very interesting. I would love to fix all of that. I know the above would require a pretty intense over-haul. Most hulls would end up with much, much more health. or like, take 90% less damage from weapons or something. The damage would instead go towards subsystems. It would be a big change. I do think, it would be an extremely fun change that would move people out to do things in space.

Especially when the planet eaters need to be removed :):):)

Comments

  • Overall, I really like the intent behind these changes. As you mentioned, some of these are in the "gigantic overhaul" category. They all sound like amazing systems to work towards in the medium/long term, for sure.
    However, the manned turret option sounds incredibly cool, quite fitting, and easy to plug in in a shorter term. While I like all of these ideas, I LOVE this specific one.
  •  @Rylek What about Destroyer? I say this because I dumped my marks on a luxury Destroyer and nothing was mentioned about them having a dock or being able to dock in anything. 
    (Scatterhome): You say, "Do you like things up your ass? Is your record clean? Are you looking for a job in the near future but not right now? Smuggle drugs for Solus and get stuffed across the galaxy."

  • Here's some other suggestions.

    Accelerate the speed at which SHIP SHIELD (section) transfers the shields.
     -This will enable pilots with active shielding to actually get them in the right location while taking the dps or be in the right place when they are reactivate.

    Interdictor beam: halves the distance you can Skip, Flyby or Overload. (or make it a % and give it to sm med and lrg)
     -Now hear me out on this one... 5, 7.5, and 60 respectively. This is only in effect while the target ship is in the cone and flyby and overload have decent cooldowns. A 5 space skip will be used the most to try and get out of the cone. This is manageable since the aggressive ship will -likely- not be being affected by a beam themselves (although maybe) and can match the maneuver should they wish to chase.

    Damage: Increase the damage taken to subsystems (engine, shield, capacitor, shipsim, sensor) while decreasing the damage taken to hull and shields. Make a damage split for if it hits systems and give it a curve similar to wetwiring and when these subsystems fail all damage goes to hull and shields.
     -This would buff missiles a bit since they can do extra damage to subsystems based on type. Also helps with ship survival rate. Also gives choices to where to heal instead of (ship repair auto off and just ship repair hull). <- that's currently the best option in most cases. (exception being if your aft is facing their cannons your engines WILL tank quickly)
    -I would also posit that missiles could be loaded into small and medium weapon slots with appropriate damage reductions to benefit from their ancillary effects. 

    Ship mod ideas: shorter cooldown on skip based abilities, temp capacitor overcharge, shield buffs (resistances, lower recharge timer on shields, hp, etc) hull buffs, turn speed buffs (locked to cruiser and above), acceleration buffs, quicker targetlocks (could be an artie too), missile pods to increase the amount of missiles per pack to 2-4-6 (missiles be expensive - also have missiles effective range removed and do a flat damage at any distance), make mines more like drones that will seek a target with x range of them not including allied faction ships (similar to current faction armada ships).

    Could also add into GMCP a tricks similar to the ww prio one ship_trick = "sfotr" ship flyby overload reversethrust reflexes

    Perform Reflexes needs a re-work for sure. the capacitor draw borders on the insane to make you pass through debris? Could phase your ship to take reduced damage from any particulate like cannons/missiles/mines etc. Especially at that insane cost.

    Cannons: Massive Cannons remain the same but Cannon 1 & 2 could benefit from a reduced reload time, capacitor draw for the reduced DPS. Making them a better speed shot vs heavy shot from the massive cannons. You would use more ammo but have a better chance of damaging subsystems which could lead to a win!

    Weapons: Similar to SHIP SHIELD allow the ability for medium and small cannons to be mounted port starboard or aft of your vessel. Naturally this would help battleships the most but also small ships too gaining a wider firing arc at the cost of accuracy. Target locking would help with the accuracy malus but still, shouldn't be optimal to do this.

    Weapons are already separated into Small, Medium, and Large modules. Let's say we threw in an option to Sync Small Cannons. Then the game automatically aliased the each "bank" of weapons and combined their damage and reload together it would cut down on how much is thrown as an output (spam). In order to maintain balance it would have to be slightly slower than a normal fire each weapon as it becomes available, especially in incursions where you may only fire 1 cannon instead of the whole bank. But it wouldn't be terrible and might be a nice QoL improvement for screen readers.

    Beacon: For Visually Impaired players can we give others the access to run SHIP BEACON on an allies ship? This
    would be huge for VI players to be able to know what's going on in space while a passenger on someone else's ship since they wont have access to the visual map. Have ship beacon items added to CONFIG COLOR objects, minables (asteroids/gas), targets(pve/pvp), voidgates, stations, etc.

    BBS class (Dreadnaught): A dreadnought class ship available for factions and large dynasty's that requires more than one person to operate. 1-3 (total) pilot, engineer, gunner. Actions performed in the appropriate room would be necessary and could have hacking levels 1-10 done for repairing some systems on the ship for the engineer to hack to fix backfiring or to repair a system.

    If there are more aboard it would speed up the ability to fire or repair major systems. The implementation would be for cosmpiercers or to help those young in captaincy gain experience with a team. Since incursions are best done alone and have no bonus to working with your faction or a friend.

    Just to expand on this idea. I'd like to see this Dreadnaught class of ship be faction/dynasty based. Possible to be
    taken out rarely for either cosmpiercer runs or boss fights in space. After sustaining enough damage it would be forced to 'Flee' the battle and then your faction/dynasty would have to pay comms to have it fixed. This would boost the comm market and be a marks sync. ALSO since the initial cost would be rather large this would keep the faction from having to re-buy it etc. Since many don't do the comm missions for station because of the high cost low reward this might fill that niche.

    EVA: Allow someone who is EVA and not close enough to get to a station to spacewalk over to an enemy ship and hack their systems to reduce shipsim/engines/etc without directly damaging the ship before they run out of air. (not really accomplishing much but hey it's better than NOTHING.)

    Many more ideas but already a wall of text sigh. Thoughts?
  • Solus said:
     @Rylek What about Destroyer? I say this because I dumped my marks on a luxury Destroyer and nothing was mentioned about them having a dock or being able to dock in anything. 
    I kinda figured Destroyers would be the big 'solo' ship. You could still install player turrets on them if you want, but wouldn't require extra crew for optimal performance. And I felt like they provide too much firepower to be launched fighter.
  • Interdictor beam: halves the distance you can Skip, Flyby or Overload. (or make it a % and give it to sm med and lrg)
     -Now hear me out on this one... 5, 7.5, and 60 respectively. This is only in effect while the target ship is in the cone and flyby and overload have decent cooldowns. A 5 space skip will be used the most to try and get out of the cone. This is manageable since the aggressive ship will -likely- not be being affected by a beam themselves (although maybe) and can match the maneuver should they wish to chase.

    Are you saying interdictor beam is always active while your target is within the target cone, or that this is the effect upon firing the beam?


    Ship mod ideas: shorter cooldown on skip based abilities, temp capacitor overcharge, shield buffs (resistances, lower recharge timer on shields, hp, etc) hull buffs, turn speed buffs (locked to cruiser and above), acceleration buffs, quicker targetlocks (could be an artie too), missile pods to increase the amount of missiles per pack to 2-4-6 (missiles be expensive - also have missiles effective range removed and do a flat damage at any distance), make mines more like drones that will seek a target with x range of them not including allied faction ships (similar to current faction armada ships).

    I like the missile pack idea, (most of the mod ideas here actually) maybe more people would use missiles if this was the case. Side note, I think most people don't use them because ship PVP is mostly non-existent.


    Weapons: Similar to SHIP SHIELD allow the ability for medium and small cannons to be mounted port starboard or aft of your vessel. Naturally this would help battleships the most but also small ships too gaining a wider firing arc at the cost of accuracy. Target locking would help with the accuracy malus but still, shouldn't be optimal to do this.

    This would be interesting to test out.




    Lots of cool ideas for sure, I am all for something that adds another avenue for some fun conflict. I really like the huge space monsters ideas, and having crew firing weapons. CP's, incursions, etc would be alot more fun with other people around.
  • aesan said:
    Interdictor beam: halves the distance you can Skip, Flyby or Overload. (or make it a % and give it to sm med and lrg)
     -Now hear me out on this one... 5, 7.5, and 60 respectively. This is only in effect while the target ship is in the cone and flyby and overload have decent cooldowns. A 5 space skip will be used the most to try and get out of the cone. This is manageable since the aggressive ship will -likely- not be being affected by a beam themselves (although maybe) and can match the maneuver should they wish to chase.

    Are you saying interdictor beam is always active while your target is within the target cone, or that this is the effect upon firing the beam?


    Ship mod ideas: shorter cooldown on skip based abilities, temp capacitor overcharge, shield buffs (resistances, lower recharge timer on shields, hp, etc) hull buffs, turn speed buffs (locked to cruiser and above), acceleration buffs, quicker targetlocks (could be an artie too), missile pods to increase the amount of missiles per pack to 2-4-6 (missiles be expensive - also have missiles effective range removed and do a flat damage at any distance), make mines more like drones that will seek a target with x range of them not including allied faction ships (similar to current faction armada ships).

    I like the missile pack idea, (most of the mod ideas here actually) maybe more people would use missiles if this was the case. Side note, I think most people don't use them because ship PVP is mostly non-existent.


    Weapons: Similar to SHIP SHIELD allow the ability for medium and small cannons to be mounted port starboard or aft of your vessel. Naturally this would help battleships the most but also small ships too gaining a wider firing arc at the cost of accuracy. Target locking would help with the accuracy malus but still, shouldn't be optimal to do this.

    This would be interesting to test out.




    Lots of cool ideas for sure, I am all for something that adds another avenue for some fun conflict. I really like the huge space monsters ideas, and having crew firing weapons. CP's, incursions, etc would be alot more fun with other people around.
    Beams: Yes currently Interdictor Beam is active once you hit a target and then maintain keeping them in your targetting cone. You will also be able to re-up it through manual firing along with your other weapons iirc. But either way I think this is less debilitating than the current way beams are working. Especially if a cruiser, sp cruiser or battleship gets you stuck in one. They got lots o guns.
  • The idea of having terminals in engineering to hack defense platforms sounds cool. With enough skill maybe the hacker could even take over the platform and turn it against its former allies!
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