Given your remarks about boarding, I really doubt you have fought even one battle in a full scale war in this game, let alone the 100 implied by your 'for every one there is 99' simile. Boarding has been exceedingly, excessively, massively common in almost every big conflict in the game so far, and I was with syndicate since the west galactic federation. I have single handedly destroyed an entire tl32 empire in less than a day, and helped destroy a couple dozen more.
A huge part of attacking an enemy empire is stealing their equipment, or overpowering a superior fleet by momentarily knocking a ships shields down and murdering the crew. If that aspect of the game turns into an arms race of who can make the most horrible ship to board in a world where the designers control every polygon of the display and collider meshes, then that would be utterly miserable. You would have extensively terrible ships specifically designed for the purpose. (as had existed in the past, except on steroids. people have already proven to be willing to spend days on these things, the WGF fracture design took weeks in total). You would have a requirement to at least match the enemies ability to build such abominations lest you be at a huge disadvantage due to the boarding threat. Yes, horrid ships existed previously, but that mainly had to do with making lots of doors. At least you could generally blast your way through that with C4 instead of it just being a wall of fuckery.
Downloading the enemies designs in advance, even if that were for some reason allowed for proper combat designs, would hardly ensure that you knew how to board said design if it was just a confusing mass of lines in the designer where you don't know what to look for. Especially since they could fairly easily add a variety of decoy files that aren't actually meant for use, just enough vertexes to make the file size plausible. Dont patronize me and assume I just don't know how to look at CAD drawings, I will prove your ass wrong and show you exactly what I mean if provoked.
Also, most designs so far have very evidently not been designed with any intent at vigorous competition in mind. If any two groups of people get even mildly riled up when trying to destroy eachother, then one will inevitably push the boundaries of whats acceptable in a ship design, and force a cascade of retaliations in kind.
I agree you could for instance beam to individual crewmen and pick them off, but that would be a worst case scenario and would be a really miserable slog, especially if they had plenty of backup control stations. Beam to crewman, suicide bomb him since there is nowhere to go from that one guy, beam to next one, do the same. All while swirling around in a star system for hours on end trying to get their shields knocked down again. Which is perhaps something else that needs to be pointed out. Spacecraft fights can easily turn into multi-hour jousts, I have been tapped into a fight that had been running for eight hours straight by the time I arrived and joined in. Forcing people to beam over repeatedly massively drags things out.
I could edit this into a more elegantly arranged post, but I frankly don't really expect to be taken seriously and am mostly posting here on the off chance that I'm wrong on that, since talk is cheap. Especially typing something up on a forum. What I am trying to say is evident in whats written here, you quite simply take me seriously or you dont.
A huge part of attacking an enemy empire is stealing their equipment, or overpowering a superior fleet by momentarily knocking a ships shields down and murdering the crew. If that aspect of the game turns into an arms race of who can make the most horrible ship to board in a world where the designers control every polygon of the display and collider meshes, then that would be utterly miserable. You would have extensively terrible ships specifically designed for the purpose. (as had existed in the past, except on steroids. people have already proven to be willing to spend days on these things, the WGF fracture design took weeks in total). You would have a requirement to at least match the enemies ability to build such abominations lest you be at a huge disadvantage due to the boarding threat. Yes, horrid ships existed previously, but that mainly had to do with making lots of doors. At least you could generally blast your way through that with C4 instead of it just being a wall of fuckery.
Downloading the enemies designs in advance, even if that were for some reason allowed for proper combat designs, would hardly ensure that you knew how to board said design if it was just a confusing mass of lines in the designer where you don't know what to look for. Especially since they could fairly easily add a variety of decoy files that aren't actually meant for use, just enough vertexes to make the file size plausible. Dont patronize me and assume I just don't know how to look at CAD drawings, I will prove your ass wrong and show you exactly what I mean if provoked.
Also, most designs so far have very evidently not been designed with any intent at vigorous competition in mind. If any two groups of people get even mildly riled up when trying to destroy eachother, then one will inevitably push the boundaries of whats acceptable in a ship design, and force a cascade of retaliations in kind.
I agree you could for instance beam to individual crewmen and pick them off, but that would be a worst case scenario and would be a really miserable slog, especially if they had plenty of backup control stations. Beam to crewman, suicide bomb him since there is nowhere to go from that one guy, beam to next one, do the same. All while swirling around in a star system for hours on end trying to get their shields knocked down again. Which is perhaps something else that needs to be pointed out. Spacecraft fights can easily turn into multi-hour jousts, I have been tapped into a fight that had been running for eight hours straight by the time I arrived and joined in. Forcing people to beam over repeatedly massively drags things out.
I could edit this into a more elegantly arranged post, but I frankly don't really expect to be taken seriously and am mostly posting here on the off chance that I'm wrong on that, since talk is cheap. Especially typing something up on a forum. What I am trying to say is evident in whats written here, you quite simply take me seriously or you dont.