personally i think the quantum blaster is a awesome weapon for ripping ships which lost their armor and shields
in other words… a useless mod in most cases
we need more tech in general,so far i find GSB modules rather streamlined with no real possibility of tactics mix
we need more flexibility here,and perhaps more EWAR stuff
and one suggestion to that… along the lines of Homeworld ion cannon frigates,imagine a ship built around a single huge weapon system,like a extremely large plasma cannon
edit:
most weapon classes seem to have like 1-2 useful weapons… only good missile is multiple warhead one and so on… MOAR VARHIATHIONZ!!!
maybe weapon mounts would help,mount a cruiser beam laser on a huge mount -> low tracking,incredible damage,awesome big beam effect,high requirements?
Also, perhaps allow changes to the deployment rules, so that certain ship classes can be deployed further forward, or enter after a time delay.
I think I’ve also seen elsewhere a call for spatial anomalies being present on the board eg if there’s a blakhole that means you can’t use fighters, it should be there, pulling missiles off course and claiming ships that don’t have enough thrust to avoid getting nom nom nom’d =]
I understand - my implication was that the anomalies themselves should be visible entities on the field that can be interacted with. Perhaps rather than make eg fighters non-deployable, make it so that deploying them is effective suicide (everyone loves a fighter pilot hero that makes it through under impossible odds to fire his last missile at the bridge of an unshielded cruiser…)
For the “all ships must have engines” missions, perhaps there could be a nasty cloud of space termites that nom stationary targets for their precious metal and squishy organic crew (making the “keep moving!” order more important).
Also had another thought for tech - boarding torpedos!
A “simple” method of employing them would be to treat them as a slow moving missile which can only target frigates and cruisers.
An additional “energy bar” representing ship’s crew could be given to the stats for each ship, once crew reaches zero, ship switches IFF for the duration
To avoid massive imbalancing, the boarding torpedos deplete the crew compliment of the ship that fires them, so the boarding ship can no longer fire them once it reaches skeleton crew strength.
Also, the enemy ship being boarded will most likely be having the shit pounded out of it by other attacking friendlies, so the hulk you’re left with might not be up to much without some sophiscticated orders before deployment (eg only boarding ships target cruisers)
This would also make it surplus crew a design feature when putting together ship builds - do you go for heavier crew compartments for more marines knowing that it’ll make your fat-arse easier to hit by the boarding torps? Or do you sling another point defense turret on and shoot them down before they reach you?
As someone who’s dabbled in the dark arts of coding, I appreciate that some of these ideas are just complete pie in the sky with the current game engine - I’m just throwing them into the general ideas pot. Tis’ a great game already!
Regarding the boarding torpedos… I’d rather it actually be a very fast frigate, maybe a new corvette class or something. I like the idea of having to add crew modules, but I think you would need a special Marine Barracks module. This and some sort of boarding hull structure would be the requirements to accomplish a boarding.
On the other hand, a ship could add a Marine Barracks with no boarding hull structures, and in this case, in the case of boarders, the marines in the barracks take the casualties instead of your regular crew. Basically if you have reason to believe boarding actions might be eminent in a game, you might want to make a ship variant that can withstand the boarding action. The thing is, boarding should take TIME, and your small boarding ship will need to withstand the punishment dished out to it while approaching. Once within the minimum ranges of the targets weapons, the boarding ship is essentially safe, UNLESS an exttremely close range(anti boarding) turret is available, in which case you could have a chance of repelling the boarders before they can make their way in… (A ship involved in a boarding action should be easier to destroy since it’s pretty stationary as well…)
Restricting the boarding torps to frigate weapons makes sense - prevents cruisers loaded with marine/crew modules from spamming them.
Also like the idea of loading a barracks module for defending against boarding (this would be a good way of keeping track of “personnel ammo” without having to add a new status bar as previously suggested - it would function in a similar way to the repair modules I guess).
K, so current idea runs like this:
Each fired torp depletes the marine reserve from the marine barracks module (ie you have to take a barracks module in order to fire a boarding torp at all)
The torps themselves should be really heavy - anyone fielding boarding frigates essentially needs to sacrifice all other offensive and most of his defensive ability in the name of speed - and taking more than one of the launchers should be a risky business (although I suppse you could to ensure that your disruptor bombers reach the target first and bring the shields down ready for boarding - see below)
Torps should be very short range, low speed and tracking and high reload times but have flare decoys so they can not be countered by a single point defense turret.
The boarding frigate’s only job is essentially to sacrifice itself and rob the enemy of a ship - once the boarding torps are fired, I don’t think it should gain any survival bonuses. It should also therefore be relatively cheap to field, otherwise it’s not an attractive cost effective option.
Boarding torps should do zero damage to shields, but damage armour AND hull (ie they vaporise on inpact with shields, killing all marines onboard - but should they hit the ship, they make a dirty great hole in the side!) this should prevent quick ship capping as you have to bring the shields down first.
Each boarding torp could carry say 20 marines capable of taking out 40 crew or 20 marines on the target ship (plus or minus a little either way to make it more random) this way, larger ships take longer to capture and also require more successful boarding torp hits. Depletion of marines takes time as well - it shouldn’t be an instantaneous drop of 40 men!)
So essentially they should be a risky tactic to deploy (rocket fighters and bombers would rip the shit out of the frigates before they got into range and that’s before the poor buggers in the torps crash into shields or point defense lasers) BUT if they hit, they stand a good chance of taking out a single enemy cruiser (making them an especially good counter to armour tanks).
I still think the boarding should be done by the frigate, not a torpedo fired by the frigate. Either way, shields should have no effect on it. (Fighters fly in and out of shields without damage all the time.) Also, it’s usually easier to defend than it is to attack. If the enemy has marines, I think it should only cost 10 marines to destroy the 20 attacking marines, or however many make it in. If the frigate does the boarding action, it should attempt to unload all marines available until they’re gone, or the ship is destroyed. Once all marines are deployed, the frigate will detach and may use any offensive and defensive capabilities to aid the fleet for the rest of the battle, but no more boarding actions will be possible.
If the marines are able to take out the enemy crew and any defending marines, the ship will switch sides, but only for purposes of calculating final honor for the round. (Essentially the points for the ship switch sides, but the ship doesn’t fight, being that it’s now full of marines who have been tough how to shoot people, not how to fly their own ships, let alone another factions. They can point the ship and move it away from their enemies, but that’s about it.
seconded!