OK, so for the final acts this week, huge game-design changes. This stuff has been coming for a while; I feel like the overall combat balance is considerably better than where it was before the Great Fighter Rebal builds, so it's time to deal with player power-creep and make the late-game harder.
These changes are broken into a few parts, and probably for this next build, I won't have added a fancy explanation into the Newbie Guide yet, so if you're a regular Alpha-tester, please take the time to read this.
No More Free Lunch.
Players now owe their poor benighted Red Shirts some cash for the hard work they put in every day.
Every week, players owe their crews wages, that will be deducted automatically from their accounts.
If they run out of funds, there will be penalties, as yet undetermined- either crew will abandon your fleets or I'll go ultra-harsh and let them mutiny and take a few of your ships with them.
Player fleets are (almost) immortal, and the way that CR works is changing fundamentally.
If the player doesn't lose every last ship in their fleet, they'll keep their ships, even if they've mainly been turned into radioactive cinders, and will be able to repair them for a price (expensive, but less than what the ship cost originally).
They will not heal unless they're repaired, and they can only be repaired (if severely damaged) by putting them into "dry dock" at a Station, where the player will owe a big chunk of change to revive them.
Advantages?
1. There are no huge changes in the uses of Supplies-per-day after combat to rebuild CR or repair ships. Supply costs will be quite flat, other than the standard penalties for going over on Crew, storage, etc., which work.
This is something I already pretty much nerfed to oblivion in Vacuum; now it's gone entirely.
2, Costs to repair physical damage to ships is untied from CR. There's no "build up CR, then have another type of cost to actually repair the ships".
I think this is appropriate; "readiness" represents doing the best one can with what one has available; it's makeshift repairs at best, or just checking that the guns are loaded at the worst. In the real world, a lot of damage means a trip to the dry dock for extensive work; now that's going to be a factor in the game design.
3. Everybody, no matter what their crew mix is, can have 100% CR. However, the advantages of same are changing pretty dramatically (see the last bit below)... but the penalties remain. This works entirely in the AI's favor; they're always going to have 100% CR.
Disadvantages?
1. Supply consumption per day represents food and routine maintenance, and is a cost on top of paying wages; expect to have to carry around more Supplies (but they'll probably be cheaper).
2. There will probably be a secondary resource that is used up for any physical repairs, if ships are damaged but not severely; not sure about that one yet and it probably won't make this build.
3. Ships who aren't at 100% health will get automatically penalized at the start of combat, just like ships with low CR do.
Crew Leveling is going away. Welcome the four Horsemen of the... er, four types of Crew.
I realize most players of Vacuum have probably noticed that their Crew don't ever level up for some time now. This was actually a goof on my part that turned into a feature; I didn't give out Crew experience for battles in my after-battle code, which you have to do, since that's not the same as character experience.
But after playing it a bit, I decided that was a feature; having to buy all-Elites had a lot of appeal, in the sense that it slowed down power-creep a bit while otherwise being pretty harmless.
It made me think that I should replace all of the Crew leveling system with something else again.
I've mulled that one over for well over a year now, and I've finally decided what I want to try out.
Crew will have four distinct types; each gives the player some advantages, which are determined at the start of combat:
1. Gunners make your ships more shooty, by adjusting the dakkas, or something. The higher the percentage of Gunners you have, the more damage your ships' weapons do.
2. Pilots improve your ships' speed and handling. Have a need for speed? Improve your ratio of Pilots. They may also influence strategic-map speeds.
3. Flux Technicians will improve your ships' performance in a variety of situations- passive Flux drain, Venting speeds, and resistance to EMP and Neutron weapons (more on that later; basically, they're getting a semi-nerf).
4. Engineers repair ships, both in combat and out of combat. Without Engineers, you cannot repair anything but CR. Engineers do a smallish amount of in-battle repairs, stacking on top of other bonuses.
This is, imho, a much more interesting presentation of crew; they actually have differentiation and there are good reasons to have different types... and, once it's balanced, it should be very interesting to play out. Different Factions will get different ratios of the four types, depending on how they're geared; that gives me another balance tool to help make each Faction unique without giving the player a great way to be OP.
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Anyhow... that is the plan. The only part that isn't done is that the new Crew system is just a bare sketch, otherwise it's functional.
Balanced? No. I've tried to keep it easy right now, but I'll probably get it wrong in various places and have to revamp later. Player feedback on this stuff would be very, very helpful; I want to get this big part of the difficulty curve set up right.