It would be nice to be able to have more flexibility with weapons/hull mods.Already in the suggestion, though I phrased it as "maintenance cost" rather than "logistics cost". Same intent, though.
What about increasing the logistics cost instead of reducing CR though? That way you'd have to choose between a smaller number of really good ships or a larger fleet of good ships.
The positive influence of 50% more OP would far outweigh the lowered combat performance of having 50% less CR. At least as long as that doesn't bring you into the malfunction area, you'd just need 70% CR or more to stay above 20% CR. The tripled maintenance cost might work as a deterrent for big fleets, but small or solo fleets can easily spare those.I'm not entirely sure of that - remember, reduced CR means less speed, less autofire accuracy, more damage taken, and fewer sequential deployments... it really does factor into everything. (Aside: Being able to *see* what bonuses / penalties your CR is giving you would be very nice, rather than just the "You're getting some bonuses from CR" status icon that's there now. Unless maybe there's a tooltip somewhere that I've failed to notice?)
2. Another way to do it is to implement hull mod that actually provide extra OP, but otherwise hurt basic functions of a ship. eg. slowing ship, reduce flux cap/vent etc. I can see it useful for making specialist build, and make "cramming everything in" via such route less probable.
Do not forget Leadership. Player starts with 20 Logistics, not enough for a single battleship with maximum crew. With maximum Leadership and Fleet Logistics, Logistics is 100, five times higher than base. This is a much greater increase in power than Technology can give.And you'll note that I mentioned the +OP skills aren't absolute first priority anymore. The problem isn't that +OP skills are the top priority; the problem is that they're always the best choice after you've gotten whatever your top priority was.
2. Another way to do it is to implement hull mod that actually provide extra OP, but otherwise hurt basic functions of a ship. eg. slowing ship, reduce flux cap/vent etc. I can see it useful for making specialist build, and make "cramming everything in" via such route less probable.Hull mods with negative cost don't work right - known feature, unlikely to be changed as per last time someone tried to report it as a bug. That was a couple of versions ago, though, and I haven't tested it myself, so there might still be some way to do this... but it certainly wouldn't be easy.
as it curently is, geting 30% OP eats up 20 skill points and 10 stat points (wich could be beter spent on more usefull skills like PEW PEW
a graphical explenation wil be given by my lasher
my x5 helbore lasher!
1. If it's a percentage, everything's down to base OPs. That's fine, so long as there are enough OPs to start with. OPs would have to get re-adjusted across the board. Which is really fine, since that's needed to happen for quite a while now.I'm not quite sure what you're saying here?
2. The effects of Optimized Assembly are so sharp and obviously-powerful largely because it's a flat cut. Given that OPs for weapons aren't flat balanced per size group, it does some really funky things to what can be mounted. If it was a percentage skill, say 50%/40%/30% reduction... it wouldn't be quite so sharp or funky.The effects of Optimized Assembly are - like the percentage OP skills - powerful because they scale with ship power; the better ships tend to have more and larger mounts. Aside from single-shot missiles that you wouldn't mount without this perk, it can be thought of as simply bonus ordnance points that scale with number of mounts instead of total OP of ships. I don't think changing it to a percentage cut off weapon costs would be meaningfully different than the current implementation. That said, there's certainly still room for discussion here; do you have some examples of "funky" things the current implementation does?
3. Having a soft cap on OPs is, yet again, another issue where it's either balanced perfectly or it's inherently broken and pushes a lot of ships further out of balance / usefulness. We've already seen this come true with Frigate speeds vs. CR deterioration.I don't agree. As long as the upper end (say, +50%) is basically unusable due to penalties / supply costs, and the lower end is where we're at now, there's an inherent balance point somewhere in the middle. It won't push ships out of balance / usefulness any more than the current skills do.
4. The current system is straightforward and amenable to simple buff-nerf; what the OP's proposing will be a lot harder to measure and would require some UI adjustments to give the user feedback about what's happening to the ship's performance envelope in terms of CR / CR-erosion-time.We've got a CR bar showing at the top of the refit screen already; I don't see that this would be any harder to buff/nerf/measure. Would require a bit of UI work, but all the relevant info is already being displayed.
If I were Alex, I'd be very cautious about changing this core system; I think think he's got his hands full right now dealing with the general problems of CR.Fair enough. If there were some way to mod this in, I might test it myself; as-is, the best I could manage is just making every aptitude grant some +%OP - essentially making bonus OP depend on level instead of where you put your points. Which is not the same thing at all, but would also fix the underlying problem.
For example, if it's some percentage of CR eroded per OP mounted past base OP, then it will do some very strange things to various ships' balance profiles. I think it'd benefit Low Tech the most; they'd have a lower wall on CR hits. This might be balanced with higher base OP for High Tech so that they're roughly even.I'm not so certain on that - my suggestion was reduced max CR, not increased deployment costs, so with elite crew & +50%OP, you'd be looking at max CR of 30%, which is still quite deployable (even if some ships would drop to 0CR after a single fight). If anything, it'd benefit beam-based builds, since they're the ones where autofire accuracy isn't a vital statistic. And personally, I think that's okay.
That said, there's certainly still room for discussion here; do you have some examples of "funky" things the current implementation does?Sure. Check out which Medium weapons become much more attractive if you can shave off those 2-OP costs. It's most interesting in the Mediums rather than the Lights or Heavies.
I don't agree. As long as the upper end (say, +50%) is basically unusable due to penalties / supply costs, and the lower end is where we're at now, there's an inherent balance point somewhere in the middle. It won't push ships out of balance / usefulness any more than the current skills do.If it's actually unusable from a a practical POV, what's the point? If, on the other hand, "basically unusable" is merely risky / specialized... meh, that really would tend to tip things a lot, and it's basically a player bennie.
We've got a CR bar showing at the top of the refit screen already; I don't see that this would be any harder to buff/nerf/measure. Would require a bit of UI work, but all the relevant info is already being displayed.IIRC, that bar doesn't show TTL information, given % chances of random failures, etc., etc.- there's a lot of data not being displayed that would then have to be presented. Moreover, as we've already discovered with the new UI and CR, player tolerance for bars that don't really tell them much in terms of context while shoving them a lot of data is problematic.
We've got a CR bar showing at the top of the refit screen already; I don't see that this would be any harder to buff/nerf/measure. Would require a bit of UI work, but all the relevant info is already being displayed.IIRC, that bar doesn't show TTL information, given % chances of random failures, etc., etc.- there's a lot of data not being displayed that would then have to be presented. Moreover, as we've already discovered with the new UI and CR, player tolerance for bars that don't really tell them much in terms of context while shoving them a lot of data is problematic.