If I'm reading this correctly, there is still a significant RNG component to recovering ships: skewing much more favorably for the player if it's a.) for his/her own fleet ships being recovered and/or b.) if you invest in the specific Industry skills. I noticed that "base chance" is X (numbers may get tweaked) but is that across all ships or do certain hulls or classes of ships have modifiers to that base chance? I.e. a frigate is "easier" to recover than a destroyer (or vice versa) or a phase ship is harder to recover, etc.?
It's the same across the board. "How difficult is a ship to recover" doesn't seem like a great balancing lever, because it'd just lead to the current problems with boarding.
I'm curious if during your play testing if "zerging" larger/better equipped fleets with tons of chaff ships is viable. Perhaps through attrition and re-deployments. It also begs the question if the 25 ship limit affects this kind of play style. I guess it also makes credits more valuable because recovering/fixing ships won't be cheap. This change has a lot of meta-gameplay implications!
It's a good question; I'd imagine at that point you're "zerging" with larger ships, so it should still work. It's not like you'll be stuck on (D) frigates trying to take on battleships. (The limit is up to 30, btw.)
Out of curiosity, does Reinforced Bulkheads continue to give +50% hull or has that been removed now that it's a "get out of jail free" card for ships?
Yep, they still do.
Oddly specific wording, does the game now differentiate between battle and environmental CR loss?
Nope, just oddly specific wording
On a semi-related note, d-mods
do not reduce regular maintenance costs.
How about applying some of the visual damage layer to it permanently? You know, like the weapon impact craters and such. Maybe with some new textures that look more like rust, use and repairs. That would give (D) variants more individuality and would be nice for mod ships, too.
In theory, sure, but the damage decal rendering is probably the most performance-intensive rendering vanilla does, so I don't want to toss it around lightly. It also tends to obscure weapon mounts heavily, so it'd take a lot of tweaking. So, I don't know - if it came to that, I think I'd probably rather have separate (D) graphics for each ship. According to David, that wouldn't be super labor-intensive.
Spontaneous idea: Certain ships (e.g. passenger liner) can "cost" negative crew to recover, i.e. you gain crew from them. Of course all enthusiastic volunteers (after having had a chance to thoroughly inspect the airlocks).
Ha - if things were to go that way, might as well have the crew be available as part of salvage. But I don't know if I want to go there, a bit too grim, isn't it.
Last but not least: Is 0.8a (big-) feature complete now?
More or less, yeah. Still some wrapping up for the ship recovery stuff and skills, but after that, it should be all contenting and playtesting from here on out.
So it's all or nothing on removing (d) mods? Any thought to making that a choice of from 1-4?
Hmm. Not 100% sure, but I think it might get too fiddly if you allowed that. Right now, whether you want to restore a ship is one big decision, and you're not likely to decided to do that very often. If you could choose to remove individual d-mods, I'd be concerned that it would turn into a chore to figure out where it's worth removing and where it isn't, and could become something you do as a normal part of refitting.
Given the above, I wonder how viable it'd be to use SS's ship recovery as a source of semi-disposable cannon fodder, around a core of a few officered and well-maintained ships (the "companion" equivalent). If an individual ship ends up with too many D-hullmods after repeated deaths, just don't recover it, there's always more where it came from.
...I'd expect this'll use up crew at an unacceptable rate, and the player might also eventually run out of weapons to fit the cannon fodder ships. Oh well!
I think it'd work if you keep some liners in your fleet - not just for spare crew, but to reduce the casualties from ship losses, i.e. crew that's not required to keep the ship running but that the game assumes is on the ship anyway because there's no crew room elsewhere.
Also, if you install blast doors on everything and pick up safety procedures, that's crew losses down to 35% of normal. Depends on what you'd define as "unacceptable", but it'd probably be manageable.
- Destroyed Weapon Mounts can't appear as a randomly added hullmod, right?
Right.
- For mods, does this mean we can attach arbitrary hullmods to FleetMembers that can't be removed from the refit screen? Can they be made so the restoration function won't remove them either?
Yes, there's an "addPermaMod()" method or something similar. And a "permaMods" JSON array in the .variant file.
Restoration removes any hullmod with the "dmod" tag, so just not having that tag would be enough.
- The "X ordnance points remaining" text kind of sticks out. It is something that should be drawn to the player's attention, but perhaps the font could be a bit smaller and the message moved to a corner of the ship's box?
Hmm, maybe. I'll keep an eye on it. This really *is* something that should draw the player's attention and be taken care of quickly, though, so I don't imagine it would show up for a long time in actual play.
It might be time for Pirate variants to get their own designation a-la Luddic ships to differentiate them from generic D ships, since they're no longer the same base hull. A Sunder (D) that I recovered from pirates isn't the same thing as a generic Sunder with battle damage, it never will be, and the game should make that distinction as clear to the player as possible before they spend a bunch of supplies and money refurbishing a ship only to find out it still doesn't have its main selling point.
The "do you want to restore this ship" dialog actually has a bit of text to make that clear, but yeah.
For ships like the Pirate Sunder it could be worth creating a new defect like Compromised Hardpoint that say, picks one of the largest hardpoints on a ship and downgrades it to one size smaller*, and make it into a Sunder (D) with that defect so players have the option of restoring it to full working order. Otherwise I fear that the Pirate Sunder will forever remain a garbage mook ship that players never willingly use, and it seems like part of this patch is moving away from that role for damaged ships, though maybe I'm being too pessimistic.
*actually having this as a regular battle damage outcome will probably be screwy since it can either completely cripple a ship or be largely negligible, but it could be something that specifically comes preinstalled on Pirate Sunders since they're already something of a unique case.
Yeah, for regular battle damage, it's a bit too complex. Could probably be made to work but doesn't seem worth all the effort.
Re: (D) Sunder, I don't know - it might be reasonable to use without restoration, just due to the low deployment cost. In general, I'd imagine restoring most ships isn't going to be worth the cost, so it likely never being the case for the pirate (D) Sunder isn't actually a big deal; it's only supposed to be used in special cases.