What I would like from the proponents of the first CR iteration is more understanding of our perspective, we're often dismissed as simply not playing the game correctly.
Speaking frankly? I'd say that really is the problem with a lot of the complaints about CR (though by no means all, not necessarily even a majority), which either required only mild adaptation of playstyle to fix, or involved things that have no business being viable in the final game anyhow.
But anyway, to get to the point:
What I'd like to see is understanding, compromise or suggestions that can make CR better than it is so that both parties can be satisfied.
Right. I haven't done this before, so I'll list the specific problems I, personally have with the current CR implementation (I don't necessarily think these are
large problems, which is part of why I haven't complained about them, but I'd like to see them fixed regardless).
1) Supplies are too expensive, which means that if you forget to save up enough for repairs and recovery, you get into the infamous death spiral. (newb trap)
2) CR recovery times are long to the point of being difficult to believe.
3) Ships can be completely rendered helpless by being brought down to <10% CR, which breaks suspension of disbelief.
4) The cost of fielding a ship is decoupled from what actually happens in the battle it's sent into. This manifests itself in two ways:
-4a: Ships cost a flat amount to deploy regardless of how much fighting they actually do.
-4b: The "hard-foughtness" of a battle (as used to calculate CR recovery from the stand down option) is based linearly on the DP value of enemies destroyed, which results in the "5 Hounds sent one at a time renders capital ship completely helpless" problem (it's actually way harder than that, and the AI will never realistically use it, but the fact that it's possible suggests a problem nevertheless)
(1) and (2) are a matter of twiddling knobs in the definition files, so I won't discuss those.
Alex suggests a planned fix for (3) in
this post, so I'll leave that aside as well. That leaves (4).
Okay, (4a). This one's a real pickle, because while it's obviously "wrong" , it's also awfully easy to come up with a "solution" that makes things worse by promoting gamey behavior in order to minmax CR. Like the popular suggestion of using ammo consumption as a factor in the calculation; during 0.6's development, Alex actually came up with the idea of hitting ships with a CR cost for using missiles. Yeah... I think you can see the problem with that one. Damage taken on armor/hull, another popular suggestion, is already modeled by the current repair system.
That said, on consideration, I think the idea of taking the "peak active performance" concept from the 0.6.1a patch thread and applying it to all ships (in addition to a reduced form of the current flat deployment cost) would probably be the best solution here. It seems to me to be the "best of both worlds" option, since the distinguishing state is "in combat" versus "not in combat" , which makes it a) sensible, and b) difficult or impossible to game (and c) encourages efficiency without promoting bean counting). Additionally, depending on the values used it could also alleviate the previous problem #2.
(4b) should be largely covered by the fix to (4a), but here's an additional idea. Currently the recovery factor seems to run from 100% at no kills to 0% at (killed DP value == own deployed DP value). You could add a constant to it, so it instead scales from (say) 100% at (KDP == DDP*0.5) to 0% at (KDP == DDP*1.5) - this establishes a minimum value to commit in order to whittle down a capital's CR with wave attacks.
...Okay, where was I going with this post? I'm sure it was
somewhere, but I can't figure it out. Anyway, there you have it.