@Pentakill: Right; what others have said. I'll just add that I'm very much aware of the dangers of tinkering, and this is most assuredly not that. I appreciate your candor and concern, though.
Soooooooo, with this update, what will mod ships from the previous versions have their CR set to? Is it an individual rating for each for each ship in the .csv, or it it determined by ship class/tech level? Will non-updated mods still work?
They're individual ratings per-ship, but there are some reasonablish derived defaults if those columns are missing.
Since the combat in the campaign is getting reworked, is it possible to make AI battles last a few days instead of getting immediately resolved? Like Mount&Blade, you can then come and assist in battles and so on. You could have a small window above showing how the battle is going. Would make the world feel more alive, right now all we see are small coloured circles going *poof* when they fly into eachother.
I'll just reply to this (instead of quoting lots of other posts on the same subject). I'm definitely not going to do this now, but might take another look at it later. One of the reasons is that it's decidedly non-trivial in many aspects, both UI and mechanics-wise. So, not something I want to devote that much time to now, until the rest of the campaign takes shape.
edit: Oh, and Alex NOW is right time to give us that 0.6a version to test it for you We gonna find bugs... and stuff... scout honor! It's more of us then you, we will test it faster
Nice try
Also i think it would be better to remove battle objectives completely.
agree
+1 I guess.
I like what they do for making battles a little more strategic and spread out, rather than one giant furball.
I'm sick in bed at the moment and this made me feel much better
I've got questions, though!
I've got answers!
Maybe it is because of my condition, but I don't really get it. How can there be several head-on engagements? The "After a head on engagement"-options only seem to allow for an escape scenario next (assuming that "harry" is a pure text scenario).
After you pick one of those options, the fleets are back in stand-off range, and can choose to engage or disengage. But yes, generally there'd only be one head-on engagement because, unless the enemy is suicidal, if they retreated from the field once, they're not likely to want to reengage.
Is it correct that ship deployment will no longer be staggered? Is there anything preventing us from deploying the whole fleet at once (aside from CR considerations vs. inferior opponents)?
Isn't that a huge blow to the usefulness of fast, small ships?
Correct. You can deploy everything (provided it's still within the battle size - 200 total for both sides by default).
A lot of fleet (er, "deployment") point values have been adjusted - some frigates are a little cheaper, some larger ships more expensive. I don't think it's a huge blow - capturing objectives is still important, and small ships have much more important role in escape scenarios.
Anything to counterbalance this? Missiles are not exactly overpowered at the moment, why would I want to choose them after this nerf?
Here's how it works: say you have 10 OP worth of missile weapons on a 50 OP ship, and that ship has a base deployment cost of 25% CR. If you fired all the missiles in an engagement, you'd get an extra 10/50 * 25% = 5% CR loss.
So, not a game-changer for anything but dedicated missile boats. And those could have a reduced base deployment cost to counterbalance this. It's not inherently a nerf. If missile-heavy ships get a reduced deployment CR cost as a result, it would actually be a bonus.
@Xareh: Right. Two points (one of which I think I brought up in the CR thread...)
It's too early to make these kinds of conclusions about how it plays out. All in all, the higher CR regeneration rate could make frigates more powerful in the grand scheme of things, even accounting for the in-combat drain (which takes a while to kick in).
I'll have to adapt, and that's something I feel I simply should not have to do.
I strongly disagree. The game's still in development, and things change. Not everyone is going to like all of the changes, and I have to be ok with that. So; my apologies if you don't like something, but I have to do what I think is best long-term. Still open to feedback, of course, and did read what you said carefully.
As somebody who prefers frigate swarms over any other type of fleet, I very much share xareh's concerns. I do however believe that Alex knows what he is doing and will be able to find a better solution than to eliminate a way of playing.
FWIW, I suspect a frigate swarm would still be viable. Although it might run into issues with sustainable logistics, due to limited cargo space - frigates are, after all, not intended for lengthy tours of duty without some support.
Anyway, it needs more playtesting. I obviously don't want to make frigates useless, so let's all work from that as a base assumption
Objective placement rarely does... but nebula placement already can! Drop a random nebula on your spawn point, and suddenly it's vastly more difficult to get to nodes, deploy new ships, etc. And vice versa. May be less of an issue with being able to deploy more stuff up front, but, at least in the current missions, (most notably "the last hurrah"), the random nebula placement can easily swing the battle in either direction.
Right, fair point.
(What I meant was IF objective placement was completely random, it would also occasionally decide battles - not that it already does.)