Do you have any plans to force support ships into the line of fire? As I understand the way things stand, there is never any reason to deploy them into a battle. Their downside purely comes from the FP they use up and the amount they slow the fleet down. Just thinking about the general setting, it seems like targeting support ships would be a pretty logical way to weaken a force over the long run. I'm imagining being able to set or fall into ambushes somehow and one side having to deal with the vulnerability of their tankers.
Yes. I'd like to see these ships in battle more, though not because of some in-combat benefit they might provide. I'm more or less settled on support ships having their benefits apply outside combat. The campaign needs more interesting mechanics, while combat is already chock-full of stuff.
Something I just thought of, how does CR interact with armor repair after battle? Will armor be fully repaired at the cost of a proportional amount of CR, will armor repair progress at the rate it does now, or will it be something in between?
It doesn't, those are separate.
Also, as for the kiting thing, since what has a player stepping on the thrusters is all the starting/stopping that kiting requires, what about something that would act like fuel, but for combat, such that they could only kite for so long?
Erm, you've basically just described CR, but called it fuel
Yeah, not
100% identical, but...
Why not just put easy to read sign, like a life bar for CR for all of your ships on tactical map? It's not like tactical map is anywhere near crowded.
Yeah, that's already there, right next to the life bar.
Besides, bigger problem would be command point shortage anyways. Command points are already so scarce yet so negligible in their positive effects (outside of most generic order of 'capture nav point A') that I am already encouraged to ignore command point system and to simply outfit AI ships to be more defensive so that they can just brute force their way out of the idiocy they sometime dwell in.
If frigates were to become this liability that require a command point per single frigate or else put my elite pilots in jeopardy, I imagine I for one would simply stop using frigates because it's already hard enough to justify frigates once cruisers come into play (outside of hyperion flagship).
Or take this approach... if players are suppose to order retreat to frigates/ships with low CR... shouldn't us players already be keeping an eye out for CR on all of our ships? So where would this extra burden come from if retreat were to cost CR instead of command point? You mentioned something about optimal order but I don't see how the optimal timing for retreat change because of the resource change since the cause/trigger for retreat remains identical (low CR).
What I mean by "optimal" is "optimal play". If retreat orders are unlimited, then "optimal play" requires you to order retreats for damaged ships at precisely the right moments, and to do that, you'd have to constantly watch the map. If it requries a command point, though, you're going to batch up orders anyway, so when you decide to give some orders, you'll also look around for whatever makes sense to retreat, and do it then. So it's a mode of interaction that doesn't intrude on the piloting portion of the game as much.
I hope that makes sense. In the early versions of the game, you had completely unlimited orders... which made microing everything as much as possible "optimal". That just doesn't let you focus on the piloting nearly enough. Given how that worked out (or, rather, didn't), I'm extremely wary of allowing unlimited orders for anything.
As to whether frigates are "worth it", honestly, that's a side issue to this discussion. Making sure that they are would be a balance issue, whether it's from something they do in combat, or a way they behave in the campaign, or a combination of the two. There's nothing inherent to this mechanic that's going to make them worth it or not, and it's not like everything else about frigates is being held static - they're actually getting a speed buff to go along with this.
I could easily see frigates being stronger on the whole just because they regain CR out of combat faster.
I assume this means there's going to be a new Leadership skill for improving CR regeneration. Or reducing the hit you take when deploying ships. Perhaps both!
Probably at some point, but not initially. I'd like to get a good feel for how the basic mechanics of it work before mucking with skills that muck with it. Muck.