I am saddened to see GSB2 dragged through coals after the launch. It’s not really deserving of the hate being flung it’s way. I think most of the new features added over the past months were to appease them, but the entitled haters have done their damage. It is my humble advice to focus mainly on squashing bugs and removing crashes, then focusing on an expansion. Small new features aren’t going to change the minds of the haters.
I think people are expecting a Galactic Conquest style expansion. That may be the best option since loads of people are still have twisted panties about there not being a 4X strategy component to the game. However, let’s ignore the boring, predictable people and consider my suggestion for an expansion.
I suggest adding Captains as entities that can be assigned to ships to confer bonuses. During the prep phase, captains can be assigned to any ship, costing slightly more honor. Captains have two aspects.
Captains first aspect is a small trait bonus to the stats of ships they are on. Some examples could be “Deadeye” +XX% tracking, “Hotrod” +XX% movement Speed, “Handy” +XX% repair speed, “Focused” +XX% fire rate.
The second aspect is a conditional change in a ships orders. This is hard to explain, so let me give an example.
Kraugerisk Captain Kames T. Jirk is a Hotrod Aggressive Captain. He gets put on a small attack frigate with the “Cautious” Order at 50%. Kames makes his attack run, his ship gets damaged, and he follows his order to fall back. Meanwhile, the battle is going very well, and the enemy forces have have their total health % fall 20 percentage points below his own side. Jirk senses victory, and as an aggressive captain, removes his cautious order, and heads back into the fight to help mop up the remaining enemy forces.
As you can see, the “Aggressive” trait causes a change in behaviour of the ship. The ship will follow orders as expected until a triggering condition is applied. If the ship doesn’t have an order that can be changed, nothing will happen, but good admirals will pair captains with ships they will make best use of with their given traits.
These are all the order changing traits I can see:
Escort Captain: Assigns a new escort target if the current target was destroyed.
Cautious Captain: Changes Last Stand to Cautious 50% to his ship if the friendly side falls 20 percentage points below the enemy team.
Aggressive Captain: Changes any Cautious Order to Last Stand if the enemy side falls 20 percentage points below the friendly team.
Panicky Captain: Changes Formation to Keep Moving if the target of the formation was destroyed.
Gloryhound Captain: Removes Formation and Cooperative, then Adds Vulture if either side has had it’s health total reduced to 50%.
Pessimistic Captain: Changes Protect Order to Retaliate if protected ship has had its health reduced to 50%
Captains can be aquired in the shop for honor, and every race has different combinations of traits. Perhaps special captains could be won by defeating single missions on higher difficulties Captains arent required, but they would allow for different types of orders and emergent tactics employed by the AI. It also gives more chances to showcase your style of comedic writing in the descriptions for the captains. Battles, wins and losses and a list of commanded ships can be tied to the captains.
I think this is a big enough addition that an Expansion is justified, and a cool enough addition that it will catch the attention of players that were turned off by all the negative reviews, and give reason to give GSB2 a second chance.
