First of, its great to get playing the sequel to one of my favorite games! thanks for that cliffski! (And everyone else who is helping him in some shape way or form)
Now onto the business of encouraging combined arms!
I think you guys (and possibly gals) are on the right direction in the “The fixing-dreadnoughts thread” In short focusing them on carrier duty and anti capital for dreadnoughts, while making destroyers a good chassis for support equipment as well as anti fighter systems.
But I think one key component is missing. To ilustrate my point I will borrow an example from another great space battle game that will soon grace my screen again… Homeworld 2; A battlecruiser in HW2 two was death incarnate and afraid of only one thing… the lowly bomber. Though bombers were a horrible choice for actually killing a capital ship, they were exceptional at disabling them. This forced the player to try to contest the space around the capitals against the small buggers because otherwise you were doomed in the long run.
How could this be accomplished in GSB2, Without making super buffed torpedo bombers that just sweep the enemy fleet aside? EMP bombers: Give all races access to an EMP bomb for fighters, a bomb that rather than EMP an entire ship takes down single components (They should also be good at wearing down EMP shielding to threaten Dreadnoughts)
I understand that depending on on how your code is set up this could be everything from “relatively simple” to “way a big of a change for a beta”. But I honestly think that this single change combined with a strengthening of frigates in anti fighter roles would be the single thing that can have the most impact on on game-play, simply because it would allow a lack of control of the “small ship space” around the big boys to be detrimental to the effectiveness of your fleet without inviting total destruction from a swarm of small fighters bringing down big ships (which is what would happen when player spam them if they are allowed to threaten capitals in a conventional way)
If you give this some consideration to the gameplay impact of this (especially in combination with the general direction from the “The fixing-dreadnoughts thread”) you should receive the eureka feeling I got when I was struck by this idea
I personally think this is a great idea! However, I think it needs a bit more development than just ‘gunships have emps’, in order to give them a few more options for this proposed ‘dread disabler’ role. Maybe guns that can target specific enemy weapons and disable them, or have either shield/armour penetration be their specialty?
I’m not sure they should be gunship only (that might not be what you meant either), the component should be light enough to not cripple the fighters speed like a torpedo so that they can stay allow to create a disadvantage to the player who doesn’t attempt to control his “smallship space”
As to your other sugestions. Well if you ask me the beauty of the idea is that the relatively small inclusion of component EMP bombs for small ships makes combined arms way more relevant for a successful fleet. Your suggestions aren’t bad at all, but they would be very hard to balance properly. It would be very bad for gameplay if a match just started out with with waves of small ships suicide against the opposing fleet and then leaving it in a crippled state and that is something that can easely happen if you give small ships a simple way of permanently taking out components or damaging big ships through defenses. Especially since an initial charge followed by slowly getting picked of is how fighters behave right now when not escorting. With EMP’s you would still have to damage them in other ways if you want to take advantage of it so that initial charge would not be a problem. OFC you could use them in conjunction with fighters and torpedo bomber to get roaming swarms, but that would be a serious investment of resources and pilots that would still be threatened by, say multitracktorbeam destroyers with flak or other anti fighter weapons.
Oh, I totally agree that combined arms should be the focus here. I just meant that the existing fleet roles are stuff like ‘defense and support’ or ‘heavy-hitting leviathans’, and those roles are enabled by a number of different modules and buffs. If one of the potential roles for a fighter is facilitating, but not directly causing the destruction of large capital ships, having only one module that can actually do this seems too narrow in scope and doesn’t leave enough options open to the player for how they want to achieve this. Also, I should have specified that the ‘targeted disabler’ would not be permanent, only for a short period, kind of like a micro-emp.
I’m still pretty sure that this duty should be delegated to gunships, though. Not only is acting as anti-capital ship bombers their intended job, both in-game and in the kind of space opera battles GSB 2 is trying to emulate, but it would also give the gunships some usefulness they’re sorely lacking at the moment. Gunships can be nippy little buggers anyway.
Okay now I understand you better, I agree it might seem a bit simplistic to simply have one module for the intended “role change” that would bring with it the positive and desired combined arms. But at least it clear what it does, small EMP disables just like the large EMP only on a smaller scale. And making weapons in general work different on small ships (with penetration and temporary damage) might end up confusing…
You might be right about gunships, tbh I haven’t really figured out their role yet. I’m still building fighters like in GSB 1 (light and cheap), not sure that the craft that only works as the facilitator should be the one that is on a more expensive chassis using more modules (therefore even further driving up the cost)
I’m not dead set on the detail like what class should carry it or how it should be handled fluff wise and what number of components should represent it.
The big thing is simply: Letting the small crafts temporarily disable individual components on larger opponents (entire ships would be op) would be very good for encouraging combined arms especially in a balance where frigates/destroyers are the best counter vs them. In my mind the simplest way of achieving this is by including a small localized EMP bomb module, but its the general idea that is important.
But just as an example another way to accomplish it, would be to give fighters a separate order that allows you to focus different component types on opposing ships and then also give them the possibility of a rare disable “crit” (maybe possible to score through armor and/or shield) that temporarily disables the hit module for 15 seconds or something along those lines.
