With V1.27 comes the addition of supply limits. What are you thoughts and experience with this new game addition?
Thus far, I do not like the addition. I have to mess around creating a lot of temporary, throw away, designs and repeatedly adjust my fleet strategy and re-add orders.
It like all the pieces for building my fleet are in a box and I have to keep walking across the room to take a look inside. Then I have to close the box and walk across the room to the design area. Oops! I forgot there were only a few iPoint Defense modules in the bits box. Across the room… open the box… hmm, 3 of those. Close the box… across the room again… rethink strategy… place a couple of ships… hmm, I hit the supply limit but need more of those… make another design with similar components… across the room… look in the box… Not enjoyable. Not fun.
The ship design screen needs full integration with the supply limits. Otherwise, I would scrap the idea altogether. Restricting supplies works in games where you have a single ship/character and also in games where you have a small squad. But not in full fleet battles. Restricting individual components would work better as restricting certain types of module. For example - I want to restrict missile use. So restrict the type: Missile. Currently, one either restricts every component of a type individually or one just forces a player to use one of the similar alternatives (e.g. Fast Missile instead of Cruiser Missile). This brings the question: Why not restrict the players’ fleets through additional ‘Spatial Anomalies’, rather than a hard limit on components?
Maybe save supply limits for another game mode which includes persistent fleets? The increased effort to redesign one’s fleet for every battle sucks enjoyment out of the game.
What about if the player begins with a standard set of supplies? And gains supplies from a progressive list that awards supplies based on the honour max ever achieved for that map. The best supply awards require the highest max honour. Each awarded one time, of course. That way, the player will progressively redesign their fleet as they play through the game. But won’t have to constantly redesign it with every mission. Also, the player will have an incentive to replay missions, in order to obtain the best supplies that require a high honour score.
Here’s a tacky concept image for persistent fleet supply limits:
The player got over 10,000 total honour and received the awards on the list up to that value. The 12,000 honour reward hasn’t been revealed and the player only gets each award once. The gained supplies go into the persistent supply store for use throughout the game. The 8545 honour is for unlock points as normal. So on the previous best winning play the player got 10,002 - 8545 = 1457 honour.
Oh? I didn’t realize that was put in. I’ll have to check it out. New map, I guess?
Conceptually I agree that setting up a fleet on a supply limit map is going to take more time. But in the end I think it may be a far more interesting “tournament setting”.
I don’t see how you can have a reasonable tournament on a regular map. It seems like it would be fast frigate spam versus missile spam versus plasma spam versus fighter spam and how well your fleet does just depends on how far you can get through sheer luck before you run into the type of spam that your spam doesn’t work against.
With supply limits, we should be able to make some interesting tournament fleets that can’t rely on one type of spam. It should be a game of cleverly laying out orders and building what you can with what’s available. It’ll definitely take more time to construct the fleet but that kind of reminds me of decking building strategy games (like Magic: The Gathering). Throwing some stuff together is easy but working within the confines of the tournament rules is harder. In the end, the tournament rules are designed for better gameplay, though, and more diversity.
I think that the complaint is primarily about user interface: the supply limit information should be directly built in to the ship editor somehow. You have to juggle too many screens and/or too much data in your head at once, currently.
I’ve gave Gravity Well a try last night and it didn’t seem to bad. Of course I was only playing against the computer since I couldn’t find any challenges with supply limits. To an extent you can just continue to do the same thing by replacing weapons you run out of with similar weapons. For example, my Tribe assault cruisers now use 2 cruiser lasers, 2 howitzers, and 2 of whatever that crap short range gun is which I can’t remember at the moment. Anyways, The mixing of similar weapons in order to circumvent supply limits wasn’t as out of control as I expected it would be. I still only got six short range cruisers.
For me the most interesting aspect so far has been looking at what you have left after building your usual fleet and figuring out a way to make something useful with it. Another example; after I had my line of cruisers and support frigates and a carrier I still has money to spend so I built long range plasma frigates. I ran out of plasma launchers and then had to augment those frigates with torpedo launchers. Besides adding to the visual diversity of the battles I think this will be good since it will require people to give counters more thought.
Integrating supply limits into challenge mode will be fine for tournaments. But for individual challenges I forsee terrible battles. Battles in which the effective counters have all been intentionally limited to make it extremely difficult to succeed. Really, both fleets in a challenge should have to conform to the same supply limits.
As far as I know, they do. I don’t think you can set separate limits for each fleet. I don’t think you can even change the supply limits for your fleet.
This is definitely the case, and when this stuff gets integrated into a future scenario editor for custom challenges, those limits will be checked against the challenge fleet before it gets posted.
I feel the same exact way about them. The UI would require a pretty large overhaul for it to work acceptably with supply limits. The worst thing is that you can’t see the limits from the design screen. I really don’t like them and would like to turn them off at least in single player.
