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« on: July 02, 2023, 06:59:37 PM »
I like how converted cargo holds increase the cost of deploying your ships. It makes sense because fighters are mini-ships. They require a lot of the same fundamental components as larger ships with drives do. When it comes to gameplay, I think this also makes sense. Some fighters are drastically more powerful than even a frigate; others are even better as infinite rocket launchers and fluxless PD drones. This has been meta for the past couple years to prioritize fighters in converted cargo bays over mounts of many ships.
On the other hand, we see many dedicated carriers struggle. Many of whom have received consistent buffs but haven't quite found their niche. They are either just floating platforms or underpowered jack-of-all trades. The most recent example is the Legion, whom after many buffs is finally up to par with its peers.
This balance between fighters strength, carrier loadouts, and non-fighter combat ability is difficult. I think we should all tie them together into deployment points. I strongly believe carriers should be somewhat viable on their own without being a full blown battlecarrier like the Legion, but shouldn't be hamstrung on lacking ordnance points like the Astral pre 0.96a. In exchange, we make deploying these ships without these fighters much cheaper.
Therefore, my suggestion is this: We take the concept of deployment penalty from converted cargo bays and apply them to the cost of the ship. This means that any ship with a fighter bay and uses fighters will cost deployment points. Every 5 ordnance points a fighter costs, the ship cost 1 more deployment point with a minimum base deployment point of 1 per fighter. This means a broadsword would increase deployment points by 2 because it has 8 ordnance points. That's a fair trade, because one set of broadswords every X seconds are stronger than some frigates and certainly some civilian ships.
This will gimp ships like the Conder so we make the Conder cost 8 DP from 10 DP. This means it's as effective as before if it had one wing of broadswords but if you choose to use it without fighters, it will still be more competent per DP at 8 instead of 10. Battlecarriers whose effectiveness relies a lot more on its mounts could use a proportionally less impactful DP reduction. For the Legion, that could be 36 DP. This means they are most DP efficient when using low OP fighters but you could build them without it and it would make the Legion cheaper to run. I think you can argue that this is a pretty effective change since a Legion without fighters at 36DP is a comparable warship to a Retribution at 35DP. On the opposite side of the spectrum, an Astral without fighter decks is just a sitting duck and may even lose to certain cruisers. Therefore, a more significant DP cost reduction is needed. The base DP should be a reduction from 50 to 38 DP or -2 DP per each fighter bay it has. A 38 DP Astral may seem OP, but adding all the bombers could easily exceed 3 DP per slot, meaning the DP cost of an Astral could easily exceed its original cost.
Let me know what you guys think. I really do think this has potential to better balance the game and spice up the gameplay.
