Ok, here is another potential piece of the puzzle in improving CR and may help new players.
At the moment if you go above your logistics capability you're penalised on CR and supply usage. How about instead you get a boost if you're
under your logistics rating.
As a new user with a hound I start with between 20 and 44 logistics rating points depending on initial skills, and with the wolf use 3 points only. Let's start with a -1% deployment CR cost per LR rating, and +1% CR recovery per LR, -1% to CR recovery cost
Min. -14% CR Cost per deployment, + 14% to recovery rate + 14% less CR recovery supply cost
Max -41% CR per deployment + 41% to recovery rate + 41% less CR recovery supply cost
You can tweak these values as needed for balance. We could try to tweak it to be free as well. 2%
Min. -28% CR Cost per deployment, + 28% to recovery rate + 28% less CR recovery supply cost (not bad, nearly a third less)
Max -82% CR per deployment + 82% to recovery rate + 82% less CR recovery supply cost (this would avert a death spiral)
As the player grows their fleet they get less fleet logistic bonus and are eased into CR.
This would need to be play tested and tweaked, but I think it may help.
This bonus would certainly give an advantage to smaller fleets, but any small fleet still has the disadvantage of being small and unable to compete with larger ones. Another thought may be to give an extra 1 burn speed for each 10, 15 or 20 LR points unused. Or you get +1 burn at 10, +2 burn at 25, +3 burn at 40 (needs tweaking) So potentially an initial player could look at:
Min. +1 to burn speed, -14% CR Cost per deployment, + 14% to recovery rate + 14% less CR recovery supply cost
Max +4 to burn speed, -41% CR per deployment + 41% to recovery rate + 41% less CR recovery supply cost
What effect this may have on the game is
- Slowly eased into the game
- Smaller fleets are still competitive with larger fleets in terms of Return on Investment due to fast CR recovery and burn speed
- Player keeps larger ships at still kept at abandoned storage until needed to take on defence fleets (bad, micromanagement to change fleet composition all the time)
- Large enemy fleets will have more difficulty keeping up with your burn speed (good?)
- Effectively sets most efficient fleet size ROI fleet as less than 100 point LR fleet (bad? disempowering?)
Thoughts? Comments?