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1

Suggestions / Industry Suggestions: Ship Recovery, Hulks and Hull Conversions

« on: July 15, 2017, 11:32:31 AM »

Ship Recovery
There's a few problems with the system as it stands, largely UI imposed. One that gets remarked on is how the number of ships that show up on the recovery screen can be limited by the size of your own fleet, presumably to avoid the player trying to go above the 30-ship fleet size limit.

I think it'd be a lot more sensible if that limitation was abolished and the limit on fleet size spelled out. On the ship recovery window, this could simply be a bar on the bottom of the screen going [current fleet size] / 30. If the player tries to recover more ships than they can have in their fleet, they simply can't click the "recover" button and have to deselect enough ships to go under the 30-ship limit.

The current system works fine most of the time, but it's a serious pain when you realize that the odds of you getting the opportunity to recover particularly nice enemy ships goes down the bigger both your and the enemy's fleets are.

Hulks
A somewhat more radical suggestion: ships that are disabled but not recoverable instead become "hulks". You can still recover these (they show up after all the other recoverable ships with some particular indicator as to their status as a hulk), but they can't be used, acting much like mothballed ships, though rather than consuming fuel, they provide a significant burn penalty (and maybe disable Sustained Burn?) unless your fleet includes a Tug.

Destroyed ships, i.e. those that break apart in combat, never become hulks.

Hulks could later be restored at any station (or outpost?) for a hefty sum, much like a D-mod ship. If a system is ever implemented into the game to permit ship construction (presumably involving the acquisition of autofactories in some fashion) this would be more expensive than constructing a ship from scratch, but would not require the same facilities.

Some Industry skill perk or another might allow you to turn destroyed ships into hulks as well.

Hull Conversions
I have a gut feeling that this is already in a design document somewhere, but I'm going to suggest it anyway.

There are a few ships flying around in the Persean Sector that are conversions of civilian ships, usually showing up in the hands of pirates and independents, though the Kite and Kite (A) are examples as well. As far as I can tell, these are not supposed to require UACs (with the exception of the Condor), being instead manual refits and modifications of UAC/autofactory products.

The player should be allowed to perform such conversions at any friendly station or outpost. This would presumably be governed by a Skill in the Industry aptitude, with Conversions being linked to specific hulls and every particular Conversion having a certain difficulty level, analogous to the current Salvage and Hazard Rating systems. Presumably these would also have some sort of cost in credits, metals, supplies, time (if time is ever to be made relevant) and/or some other resources or requirements.

Since it's part of the background and has an obvious niche (turning recovered civilian ships which may otherwise be worthless into proper clunkers), I'm guessing something of the sort is already planned, even if my suggestion is way off the mark on the specifics.

Law and Order
Okay, so this one isn't industry, it's purely because I'm leery about starting two threads at once. Too spammy.

Basically, much like how having a reputation in the -1 to -24 range makes you more likely to be stopped for inspections by a given faction's patrols, having an overly militarized fleet would do the same, unless you have a 25+ reputation or commission with the faction in question. Overly militarized being defined as having either a high ratio of military to civilian ships (>1:1) and any military ship of cruiser designation or higher.

A rather more extreme suggestion is to count military-grade weapons as contraband if you don't have a positive reputation with a particular faction. Alternatively and less extremely, an inspection catching you with military-grade weapons (if you do not possess a commission or positive reputation with that faction) would reduce your reputation with that faction.

Naturally, pirate and freeport markets wouldn't care, and independent ones probably wouldn't either.

2

Suggestions / Regarding Hyperstorms

« on: June 09, 2017, 11:54:37 AM »

Hyperspace storms are currently widely considered unfun (or so I have gathered from reading the 8.1 patch notes thread). This is contrary to their stated purpose (to make hyperspace more interesting), largely because coming into contact with them consumes supplies at such a ridiculous rate. They should definitively be tweaked so that they're more in line with the original intent. It's been argued about enough that I think a dedicated thread might be needed to discuss the matter, so here we go. If you'll excuse the presumption, I'd like to present some ideas of my own to start off.

Firstly, I think we should clarify what a hyperstorm is. I don't have much of a clue of how hyperspace is supposed to be or how it works in-universe - there may be a few clues in the lore, but I haven't seen them yet. The name is descriptive, however. It seems to involve some kind of energy buildup and discharge in the cloud-like stuff that comprises the so-named "deeps" of Hyperspace. So that's fairly simple. I'd look at it from a perspective seeking to balance what makes in-universe sense and adds gameplay value.

Overall the effect of hyperspace storms on the player's fleet makes sense - it screws with a fleet's drive fields and sensors, thus slowing them down and essentially blinding them. At the same time, it makes the fleet stand out a lot more - presumably it's because the fleet has an externally obvious effect on the storm, whether because of some unusual interaction of the drive fields or some interaction between the storm's energies and the hulls of the ship involved, discharging into or bouncing off of them.

It also reduces combat readiness. One might ask why this is: the reduction of combat readiness is, as I understand it, supposed to represent the crew growing fatigued and the ship suffering from damage, of either the wear-and-tear, maintenance-requiring type, or the kind of damage suffered in combat. The consumption of supplies is supposed to fix this.

As a consequence, one has to wonder of the mechanism by which the storm reduces the combat readiness of the ships so afflicted by it. Does it inflict hull damage? It would not seem to be so. So is the stress the ships suffer of a more mundane type, from being thrown to and from by fluctuations in the drive field, or some other such thing? Maybe, but it still seems a bit odd.

So here's my first suggestion:

* Dramatically reduce the storm's effect on combat readiness and supply consumption, and instead have storms consume more fuel to travel through. While energy discharges still cause some damage to the ship or navigating the storm is a tense, exhausting task, it shouldn't be so much so as to be worse that a day in a storm is worse than fighting several battles in a row. This is the simplest change I can think of. Hyperspace storms would still be bad, but more because they slow you down and blare out your position and fleet composition to enemies. Running out of fuel is also a danger, but one that's a lot easier to recover from (scavenge fuel from the surroundings, make a distress call etc.) than having your fleet be trashed. The fleet would only begin to drift into the nearest gravity-well after the storm passed. There would thus be circumstances under which you might actually consider going into a storm, e.g. to attack a fleet stuck in it.

Some other suggestions, in no particular order:

* Altered combat terrain in hyperspace storms. Energy surges could build up (with much the same indication as on the starmap) and discharge - arcing out to inflict EMP damage on nearby ships, and hard flux if it strikes a shield. Some things could affect the likelihood of these surges building up, such as the use of certain exotic weapons and ship systems, or even shields. (While it feels a bit odd for low-tech ships to have an advantage in such an exotic environment, I like to think that there might be a reason why so many pirate ships lack them - perhaps they can be a liability when ambushing a fleet trapped by a hyperspace storm?) I'm not entirely sure what the relationship is between hyperspace and phase-space, but I can see phase ships either being afflicted by this or remaining unaffected. More diffuse stormclouds could also cause a flux buildup, reduce flux dissipation or prevent flux venting.

* More interactions between hull mods or skill and deep hyperspace and hyperspace storms could be added, or changed. Enhanced Drive Fields might reduce penalties to burn level and combat speed (similar to the navigation skill - it's not unprecedented for skills and hull-mods to synergize like this, as with Safety Procedures 2 and Solar Shielding) from nebulas and hyperspace phenomena.

* With the most annoying effect of hyperspace storms having been removed or heavily mitigated, they could go back to being more sudden. Still annoying, but no longer capable of killing your fleet, and you don't have to ask yourself how people ever get stuck in them (because they're kind of big and obvious as it stands).

* Harkening back somewhat to the idea of hyperspace wavefronts, you could have little "currents" or "passages" that only go through deep hyperspace. Difficult or impossible to detect unless you were right next to it or had the right skill or hullmod, they would offer much quicker passage through portions of deep hyperspace. These could be persistent or arise spontaneously - perhaps both types of current could exist. These could be exploited to move between certain regions of space much more quickly than would otherwise be possible. If the sensor profile reduction is retained, then this suddenly becomes very useful for smugglers. Since you can still get hit by storms in these passages, going into them could be risky. Perhaps going into them (or deep hyperspace in general) with a large, energetic fleet (as indicated by a high sensor profile, burn level or some other statistic?) could even increase the risk of a hyperstorm building up and breaking out?

Speaking of wavefronts, might they be repurposed as hyperspace combat terrain? They pop up randomly every now and then, perhaps more often in deep hyperspace and even moreso in a hyperstorm, and they can push ships around a little while reducing accuracy and disrupting weapons fired through them. Perhaps they can appear on both the combat map and campaign map, being spawned from hyperstorms?