Re: Sabots - I think where they're at now is pretty good. I don't want to move towards more missiles with unlimited ammo, as limited ammo is kind of their thing, mostly. So, "hard-to-counter-with-PD burst damage with a decent chance of overload" seems like a distinct-enough niche. Clearly not something you can rely on as your only source of kinetic damage, yeah, and whatever early variants make that assumption will just be changed as I spot them.
i'm fine with not having a respec option in general, but one of the skills shown in the blogpost seems problematic to me: Strike Commander (in the first screenshot) does not give any bonus whatsoever if my flagship doesn't have flight decks. the hullmod that adds a single inferior flight deck allows to get some benefit from the skill, but iirc that flight deck is especially inferior to normal ones when it comes to using bombers (which is what the skills seems to focus on). not to mention that simply not every loadout will want to use that hullmod.
so investing into a skill that will become completely useless if i ever switch to a flagship that doesn't use fighters doesn't seem fun, even if the skill is quite good for when i do pilot ships with fighters. other skills that increase the combat power of the flagship will have at least a small benefit even for dedicated carriers (i assume). a missile skill might not do anything for a ship that doesn't use any missiles, but there are a looot more ships without a flight deck than ones that don't have a single missile mount. ^^
i do like the idea of being able to specialize into piloting carriers though, so i don't really know a good way to solve this. :/
On the flip side, if you were to invest in other flagship-boosting skills, they'd feel a bit like a waste in a carrier. It's not that they'd be entirely useless, but say improving the flux stats of a carrier isn't exactly the same as doing it for a direct-combat ship.
I do get exactly what you're saying, though. In my mind, "piloting a carrier" is going to be a pretty specialized thing that you'll want to stick with for an entire playthrough. It'll also save you some points from not speccing into combat - it's a point-cheap way to get good combat capability. Probably a bit more efficient per-point than combat skills, but the ceiling is lower since it's just 3 ship fighter-skills plus 1 fleet-wide.
These are also good skills for officers to have, if you want them to command a carrier.
... might also have to add a few more carriers along the way, to make this more appealing.
maybe it could be a hybrid skill that gives fighter bonuses to ships with in-built flight decks, and other bonuses to ships without them? not at all ideal, but at least it would prevent feeling like 3 skillpoints are completely wasted whenever i switch to a fighter-less flagship. or fighter skills could include both decent bonuses for flagship carriers and small bonuses for all other carriers in the fleet, rather than being split into flagship-exclusive and fleet-wide skills.. although that would somewhat go against being able to specialize into carrier flagships in particular, even if those get stronger bonuses than the rest of the fleet.
Plus, you'd still feel like you had to use a carrier yourself to get the most out of it, since that's where the bigger bonuses are.
Maybe those drawbacks can be lessened or removed with carrier skills?
huh. yeah, i think that could work. still wouldn't make a difference for loadouts that just don't wanna spend the OP on fighters, but making the hullmod closer to a normal flight deck, or even requiring the skill to unlock such a hullmod in the first place, could help quite a bit. i think it's better than my two suggestions, at least! ^^
That'd make sense, but that hullmod doesn't have enough drawbacks for 3 separate fighter skills to remove
Although, I doubt that having one fighter bay on a battleship would be consolation enough for 9 point spent.
Huh, it's hard to add a new weapon group? If I may ask to have my curiosity indulged, is this a UI thing, a code thing or both?
I wouldn't say it's "hard", but there's a lot of places I'd need to check, both UI and implementation-wise.
The Ship & Weapon Pack hullmod that adds OP readds itself if it was present before and the player takes it off after making use of its added OP (thereby putting themselves over the limit). A vanilla implementation would presumably just not allow removing the hullmod if it would drop max OP below current OP (possibly with warning message), the inverse of not being able to add a weapon, hullmod or vent/cap if it would go over the limit.
The failure case that occurred to me (other than newbies briefly wondering why they can't take off the hullmod) is when a variant in a mission has over-limit OP and the player could accidentally install a +OP hullmod that ends up giving them drawbacks for no benefit. But this can only normally happen in missions (where it can be fixed by the Reset button) and the same thing can already occur if they remove stuff and can't put it back on.
I mean, that makes sense, but that's not necessarily everything. It probably covers most of it, especially right now. But suppose there was some way for a ship to lose a hullmod, for example... or any code modifying a variant's hullmods would need to check this, really. Not to discount the idea entirely, but I don't want to go there without a compelling reason.
