Are these applied to AI fleets in any way though? I could see this working hand in hand with bounties, facing some legendary fleets and such.
Currently reputations only apply to player-owned ships, and for the most part that won't change. The problem with NPC ships having traits is that there would be no good way to show those traits to the player, which would lead to random and unpredictable variations in the strength of enemy ships.
However, if I can figure out a good way to do it, I
would like to make it so that the
flagships of bounty fleets have traits sometimes. I would have to be able to list the traits in the intel screen though, so it might not be feasible.
I haven't yet fiddled around with the mod, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think it'd be interesting to have certain good traits associated with getting battle damage (but surviving) and certain bad traits associated with getting through unscathed.
This
could make sense thematically and I do think it could be interesting, but I wouldn't want to encourage players to get their ships damaged in the hopes of getting certain traits. I think players should be rewarded for playing effectively, not ineffectively.
I agree with the hull damage concerns. I tend to fly my ships to their last weld in combat but don't typically actually lose them. Maybe the metric could be number of crew casualties? Or maybe CR degradation in combat, representing over-working?
Using hull damage as the primary metric isn't perfect, but I still think it's the best one. I think the complications for things like crew losses or CR are worse. I think the best way to go about it is to make adjustments based on things like how difficult the battle was (which is accounted for in the current version) and how much damage the ship dealt (which I'll probably add soon).
in my experience, any ship that relies on armor as its primary defense (i.e. the entire low-tech line-up) will usually take a small-to-moderate amount of hull damage in the course of a normal battle.
I agree that low-tech style ships are more likely to take some hull damage, but in my experience you can prevent them from taking massive damage more reliably than high-tech ships. I think the real problem is tanky vs squishy ships. I think glass cannons like Sunders should be able to compensate for taking some hull damage by dealing hull damage.
And then you get into the industry fleet-of-clunkers playstyle where you expect your ships to get battered in combat...
I agree that starship legends could cause gameplay problems for this playstyle, but thematically I think it fits perfectly. The crewmen of a fleet like that would hate their ships, captains, and
lives, and It makes sense that rust-buckets would have bad reputations. From a gameplay perspective I don't think the commonality of bad traits would be too bad due to how disposable ships are in a fleet like that. High ship turn-over means more bad traits, but it also means more ships (with different reputations) to choose from.
Personally, I already skew towards preferring high-tech shield-based ships just because I don't like taking crew casualties. I don't need another thing that encourages that same playstyle.
Same. Overall, I do think that high-tech ships are generally the most powerful, but I don't want to try to compensate for imbalances in vanilla.
I'd suggest that there be a way to wipe the slate clean and start over - maybe treating the reputation mod as a d-mod that'll get removed (and then re-applied clean) after a full shipyard restoration of the hull?
I would personally prefer for reputations to persist through restorations so that it's possible to restore a ship with a reputation you like. However, I am considering adding an opt-in option to make it so that ships in storage gradually lose their traits.