Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Linnis]

So currently the the idea of OP and ships is that there should not be enough to grab all the weapons, vents and hullmods one wants. If one could, it would dumb down the outfit process alot more ie. just throw them all on there. But what happens is when the player is low levels the struggle is really hard to match up to AI fleets and when the player is maxed on technology, all their ships are easy no brainer equipped.

So how about what technology does is it allows the player to spend resource (or not) to upgrade the max OP an ship has. But an max (or near max) OP ship can be bought for an high price. So this allows non technology players to spend extra resource to get max OP ships that perhaps would lose their max OP stats when refitted. Or something similar that would degrade the ship and put restrictions on the non tech player.

This could open up alot of game play options such as finding an pristine high tech ship (from various sources) with more OP than possible with a certain load out, and once on destruction or refit would lose their stats. Also

Lore wise it could make sense as most if not all ships are degraded and no one has the know how on putting them in tip top shape. And auto factory built ships don't often use the best efficiency and power flux magics that is available currently.
 
Im sure people have thought of this before. Thoughts?

[ChaseBears]

Well, are abnormally high OP ships a good thing for gameplay?  They do confer an endgame reward, but there's ways to do that without the problematic impact on outfitting balance and player-vs-AI balance.

[Takion Kasukedo]

Only if the AI can utilize this as well, otherwise you have a lot of unfair gain and advantage over enemies.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Only if the AI can utilize this as well, otherwise you have a lot of unfair gain and advantage over enemies.

SS+/ Dynasector gave high level fleets higher OP through hacks and magic numbers IIRC

[Sy]

the skill revamp of 0.8 will greatly reduce the OP differences between base and skill-boosted ships, so i don't think this will remain much of a concern. currently, a high level player ship has 30% more available OP and roughly 20% decreased weapon OP costs. in 0.8, a skill-boosted ship will only have 10% more OP than base, and no weapon cost reduction at all. base OP of all ships will be slightly buffed to partially make up for this, but that will of course affect all fleets equally, not just high-level player fleets.

and i gotta say, i don't like the idea of buying ships with a fixed loadout, where to change any part of the loadout (besides weapon groups) i would have to give up a significant power boost. and sure, i could just not buy those ships (and i really probably wouldn't), but since those ships would be objectively more powerful than player-configured ships, not buying them would mean i'm intentionally gimping myself. that's assuming those loadouts themselves actually make good use of their OP.. but if they don't, being both suboptimal and unchangeable would completely defeat their purpose.

and just making them more expensive than buying the unfitted ship and the used weapons individually is not a good way to balance their power, if that's their only drawback (from a balance view).

[Megas]

Well, are abnormally high OP ships a good thing for gameplay?

YES!  I tried both unskilled OP and max OP.  Max OP is much more fun (because it enables fast-paced arcade-like shump action that I enjoy), and some ships have room for luxuries.  Much rather have AI get max OP than player OP get gutted to unskilled OP.  (I am aware that baseline OP will likely if not certainly be raised.)

Even at low OP, you may have no-brainer configurations too.  You just leave mounts empty, especially missiles.  If you cannot vent at an acceptable speed due to OP shortage, you just leave out the heavy weapons and get much cheaper and flux efficient smaller weapons.  Having underequipped ships because you do not have enough OP is not fun.


P.S.  Is the OP referring to elite ships like XIV ships?  Those probably should be reserved as faction specialities or maybe something the player skilled in Technology or Industry could do if he could build ships.  If randomly-found elite ships are common enough, they could become the new baseline, and degrade standard ships into undesirables like (D) ships.

Nevermind, after rereading the OP, it basically wants to train ships much like crew now (which will be gone).

[Midnight Kitsune]

I have to agree, low OP ships are NOT fun and it just forces you to use more broken ships *coughenforcercough* instead of ships you like due to how OP starved they are. Higher OP levels let you experament with builds and use ships you couldn't or wouldn't before
Hell, look at the screenshot of the Astral for the carrier rework! That had FOUR empty mounts, no mods and ONE damn vent just to have a decent group of fighters and bombers. If that is the baseline for carriers then F*** that!