Have to say first: Thanks for continuing your work on Starsector, Alex!
But of course
The way I see it CR is sort of campaign level "damage", overall maintenance level of the ship, and damage to non-combat-critical systems etc. Therefore I hope that the few suggestions about having CR being influenced during combat by combat events are not seriously considered. We have regular damage for that. Having two damage systems (on top of flux which is kind of temporary damage) would be redundant and would take away the elegant simplifaction that comes with the concept of CR.
I think this hits the nail on the head, both as far as what CR represents, and for why influencing it in combat is problematic.
But regardless of how you go about it, winning vs losing a battle is a binary condition, so there's always going to be a hard boundary there. Sometimes, you're just going to suffer a very close defeat, and it's going to sting, as close defeats do. It'll probably sting less if the reasons are crystal clear - at least you can learn from it and move on.
I have to disagree with this. Winning and losing are binary only in sports with strict rules. In war and in a long campaign the distinction between losing and winning is not as easily determined. Related to this, the strict limits on deploying 0% CR ships seems a bit artificial and it creates very odd situations as have been mentioned in the forums. It also creates situations where the player can potentially get a hold of very powerful ships (or their loot) by attacking fleets after very large fights. Seeing that there is a huge capital ship, no matter how crippled, should be a fearsome sight for couple frigates.
You could argue that CR of the death star in the return of the jedi would have been close to 0% but it was still pretty fearsome for a certain fish-faced admiral
I think we may be talking about different things. There's degrees of winning or losing, but at the end of the battle, either your fleet is in control of the battlespace and the enemy retreats, or it's the other way around. No matter how much of a pyrrhic victory you achieved, it's still - from that binary pov - a victory.
I don't really like it when I cannot even put up some semblance of a fight... even when the odds would otherwise suggest a favorable matchup. The way I see it, an undamaged 1% CR Onslaught should still be able to fend off a 100% CR Shuttle, however ugly and messy it might be.
Considering how stiff the 0% CR penalties are, I think I can support letting ships deploy at empty CR as long as fielding the ship still costs supplies after the battle.
I still think we should be allowed to deploy non-CR ships with some penalties. I don't care that the shield doesn't work, half the engines won't start, and the guns might blow up when I fire them, I still want to go down fighting. Currently the game simply tells you via some text that you can't deploy your ship, and if the enemy pursues, you once again just get some text telling you the controls are locked because the ship isn't CR. I don't know about you but I don't really consider being told "you lost, tough luck" by some text to be very fun. I'd much prefer to make a desperate last stand with a ship that's falling apart. Go out in a blaze of glory rather than just sit there and helplessly watch an uncontrollable ship be torn apart. IMO that would be a much more satisfying way to lose.
All this talk about deploying ships at 0 CR is giving me an idea. Which I won't talk about until having tried it out! But, I'm very much a fan of managing dwindling resources, (ill-fated) last stands, etc, and if it works, it could be very much in line with that.
I know that there are alot being said by both sides and not only by these two sides. But in the end, if we think realistically, these long threads about new systems in v.0.6 are not very productive. I think that Histidine, despite that we disagreed on some things in several threads, proposed one of the best solutions in this thread http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6790.0 .
Just wanted to mentioned that I saw that thread, and am thinking about it (while fixing bugs and such - haven't had too much time to really think too many things through in the last couple of days!) As far as this thread, I think it's been plenty productive. A few good things came out of it directly, and it's
incredibly valuable just to see people's experiences with CR. I might wish the thread had a different title, especially given its content, but I suppose one can't have everything
Not to mention that it's not even true. Millennium Falcon, anyone? Or Firefly? "Oh hey, our engine broke and we don't have the spare part we need. I guess we're all dead." That episode is even referenced in one of the skill descriptions in Starsector.
I'm curious, which one? I may have stuck that in there subconsciously as I was watching it around that time, but it wasn't intentional, I think