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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
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
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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.
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.
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
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?