I'm very much in favor of making fleet combat more attractive but I'm not sure the planned changes are the best way to do so. Electronic Warfare sounds particularly rough and in combination with Coordinated Maneuvers it may actually have the opposite effect. When facing a considerably larger enemy fleet a skilled player would probably be able to work around the range and speed limits but the AI not so much, so unless I'm on a somewhat equal footing I might be better off not bringing any allies to the fight.
It also seems like it would make hard battles even harder and easy battles even easier. I guess we'll see how it plays out. If it's strictly about the number of ships and not the total tonnage then frigate spam may become the new early to mid game meta.
I see what you're saying, but my feeling is that's not how it'll play out. It's much harder to abuse the AI when you don't have a range and speed advantage to do it with, but having a few hard-to-kill allies deployed could open up all sorts of opportunities to out-play the AI on a more tactical level than just "stay barely out of their range and shoot".
I'm not sure how I feel about the fleet bonuses. I prefer the stately fleet actions of older versions of Starsector and things definitely needed to swing back in that direction from the ultra-lethal officer combat of the current patch, but I've seen things end badly when developers try to push their vision of the right way to play their game too hard and it seems like having a bonus attached to raw ship hulls is going to be prone to being gamed. Will have to see how it plays out in practice, though.
Yeah, that's definitely been on my mind - I don't want to
force people to play a certain way, and am very much of the same opinion that things wouldn't go well if the design tries to have the "one right way to play". But that doesn't mean that it can't do things to make one way or another more or less effective, right? It's all a question of finding a good balance.
So, for example, the bonuses cap out at 20% with skills, and they make good in-fiction sense. Hopefully it's not so much as to be hamfisted, and not so little as to be trivial - but if those numbers don't pan out, I could easily see lowering them.
As far as combat skills, there's also plenty of offensive skills to be had. It's, again, gray instead of black and white. It's not like things went from "all offense" to "all defense", just shifted some in that direction.
If people are upset about having their range crimped in fleet actions, you could always try repackaging the effect into a range bonus for the fleet with stronger sensor strength. It makes slightly less thematic sense, but people historically respond much better to conditional bonuses than penalties even when the functional outcome is literally identical (see: rested XP in WoW, which was initially an experience penalty for grinding).
Yeah, the initial version was actually that, but the game *really* doesn't need more weapon range. Still, an option to keep in mind.
Are there any turn rate bonuses at all?
Yep, under another skill. Also, Auxiliary Thrusters is available at game start.
skills that focus on improving the fleet’s performance in the campaign. Bonuses to abilities, sensor stats, movement, etc.
This is a bit vague, does it mean new campaign abilities are unlocked via skills? Or just upgraded?
Probably both. There's one case where I'm a bit undecided.
hitting the level cap isn't particularly time-consuming
This worries me a little bit. Is it just a acknowledgement of the current missing content, so your growth ends when you've done everything (and the span can be extended as the game growths)? Or do you also expect a play-through in the finished game to be a fairly short affair? Or do you plan for character growth to end before a player has finished a play through?
With the caveat that things could change: gaining levels isn't something that's necessary for the entirety of a play-through. Getting to the cap or close enough to it could be preparation for late-game, for example. And there could be ways to gain character points outside of gaining levels.
+50% acceleration is too much in my opinion, why not just +25%? +50% is such a huge boost that it wont even resemble the base handling of the ship at all. Especially when combined with hullmods...
I don't know, a Venture still feels very much like a giant tub with that. And if there's a hullmod, there were OP spent, so it'd better be something tangible. But: we'll see. Again, a lot of playtesting to be done on this still.
I guess what I'm asking is that, Is this a direct nerf to the overall ammo count on small missile launchers? If so, I would love to see more interesting hullmods for missile systems on small ships. For example a +1 missile ammo hullmod, or a Hull mod that changes ammo launchers into slow recharge launchers like how salamanders or pilums currently work for things like small single harpoon launchers.
Ah, gotcha: yes, yes it is. As much fun as +1 missile ammo was, it was also, if we're being honest, quite broken for a lot of weapons.
Regarding missiles in general, I'm aware there's an opinion that they're not quite good enough, but I'd like to see where it goes once deploying more ships is a viable way to go. If a ship's goal goes from "solo entire enemy armada" to "score 2-3 kills", then all of a sudden having a couple of racks of Harpoons is a whole lot more attractive.
hmm, I wonder if the way CM and EW bonuses are calculated encourages frigate swarms since they have a lot more bonus per supply/cost than larger ships
For CM, probably not too much since it's not very hard to max out the bonus with larger ships. EW, that could get more interesting. But I'm not sure the bonuses are large enough to make going for a frigate swarm worth it unless it's also good for other reasons, which it very well might be.
and from what has been said, it seems the bonuses may update in combat when you destroy a ship
Just to confirm, they do. This also means you can't do something silly like deploy a bunch of cheap shuttles, retreat them, and then keep the bonus.
