(Thinking about things, some quick-ish responses/thoughts.)
With BT, what about fighters?
Also, seems like there's an opportunity to roll command points into it - say, issuing an order reduces BT by a minute due to, uh, more comm traffic for enemy EW systems to analyze.
Does the penalty apply when you transfer command right before battle? Between battles within the same encounter? If not, that makes no sense! Does this also apply when I change flagships out of combat in space, like changing hullmods (such as toggling Augmented Engines)?
In-combat only, though I'm starting to rethink it for different reasons (i.e. if you legitimately want to deploy a second wave because things got bad, you'd have serious trouble with it.)
P.S. Minor accidents cause -15% CR. Are my crew so incompetent that they cause accidents when I transfer to one of my ships? This is bad comedy.
Jeez! It's easy enough to explain just about anything if you want to; for example here: CR represents both crew state and equipment state. So, the 15% from an accident is a different type of thing than 10% from a change in command. One is "equipment malfunctions" and the other is "establishing a working relationship with a different set of officers on a new ship". Both seem sensible in terms of affecting the "combat readiness" of a military ship, no? And doing it mid-battle would be a bigger deal than outside of one. (Please don't take this as an ardent defense of the
mechanic; I'm just trying to make the point that objections on in-fiction-sense grounds can be overcome for most things, and so - imo - aren't a super productive way to go about making the argument.)
Best lore explanation I can come up with is EW: Electronic Warfare - it's how long it takes for your opponent to start hacking into your systems and degrading performance / overloading power conduits / etc; makes sense that that's fleet-wide, otherwise how could you coordinate your ships / give orders / etc? Then the "hardened subsystems" hull mod becomes "blanket ECM", and you could maybe introduce a counterpart hull mod that reduces the enemy's timer if it's deployed - perhaps as a built-in for specialist ships like the Omen or Shade.
Hmm. That could make sense, but the feel of it is weird - like, all of a sudden, the "real" fight is taking place on a playing field you don't have access to.
Then give the player access to it! Influencing that could be a good use for, say, the old comm array battle nodes - hold the node, and you get a significant advantage on the time pressures of EW. It could also be a good use for command points - maybe you can spend a command point to buy yourself a bit more time, trading off the ability to give individual ship orders for greater security as individual ships lock down communications.
Mh, I like it. Most fights will be ended via physical weaponry long before BT has run out, so I would not call that the "real fight". Otherwise you could argue that your crews maintenance battle against the failing of the ships systems is the "real" battle now.
And you do have access, although limited, via the amount of ships - or processing power - you deploy. This could easily be thematically expanded.
As Wyvern said, hullmods would be renamed to something more fitting. A BT expansion skill for solo ships could be cyber warfare training. You could introduce officers who are expert hackers and have related skills. You could clearly explain it in he BT tooltip. Or introduce slow moving mainframe ships that can interrupt BT/hasten enemy BT until destroyed, acting as a major target that has to be protected (like a carrier).
Hmm, yeah. I think I'm starting to come around feel-wise. It still does feel like a very major change, though.
On the topic of command transfer causing loss of CR timer: The only problem I have with the current suggestion is that it's a hard limit, not a soft limit. It basically says "you can't transfer command from a frigate to a new frigate, at all, ever". I'm not sure what a good alternative would be, but I'd rather see a situation where it's not a totally stupid move to do that once - maybe the new frigate just loses time based on half of how long your flagship(s) have been in the battle, and at worst just starts CR degredation immediately?
Maybe, yeah. Another option is to remove the peak time penalty and just apply the CR one, maybe making it a bit stronger. It makes more in-fiction sense, but then it might not be enough to address chaining.
@Velox: I think you've got a good grasp on it, and stepping back to take a look at the larger picture is a good idea. Also solid point re: more complex -> more exploitable; an ideal solution would simplify things. ("Battle time", I think, passes this test - it seems simplier compared to what we've got now.)
About your specific idea, making being outnumbered harder to deal with: it seems very heavy-handed in terms of not allowing for skillful play. I guess that's part of the idea, to be heavy-handed enough that there's no way to game it, but it also would make single-ship play impossible. A timer, on the other hand, rewards skillful and aggressive play. It just has some other issues.
(Thinking again about the idea xenoargh brought up in another thread, namely making it so that you only get to pick what to deploy once, and don't get reinforcements past that. That gets around some things nicely, although BT + reduced BT for reinforcements is actually very similar, isn't it? Just a soft boundary vs hard boundary. Another idea here might be to just increase the CR cost for deploying reinforcements the longer a battle goes on, which I suppose is just a variation on having "peak time" tick down for reserves, but less harsh as the effects wouldn't be felt until after the battle.)
Definitely lots to think about here
Thank you for all your feedback and ideas! (And please keep it coming, if you're so inclined.)
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Topic: How to get a non-exploitable time pressure on combat (Read 41624 times)