03-15-2022, 02:05 AM
(03-14-2022, 09:14 PM)QuakeIV Wrote: I’ll note that the ‘we need a variety of ship sizes’ problem is as old as time, more or less, and that speed/dodge chance tends to always be a dead end. It either ends in big ships still being better, or little ships being invincible due to dodge chance going too high and the opposite problem happens. The issue here is there isn’t much trade off, one class of ship will inherently be superior to the other when playing purely with dodge chance, and speed in this case doesn’t matter much because the fights tend to be over fixed targets like high ql resource worlds.
In the real world, the only reason people don’t show up with 50 aircraft carriers every time the police pull someone over is economic. I would suggest dealing with that problem is indeed for the most part fundamentally an economic one.
It’s not impossible to deal with the issue at hand by fiddling with combat mechanics but it’s not usually a simple answer there either.
Although economics remain an interesting factor to address for fixing the issue, the fact is that there is absolutely no disadvantage of building as big as possible, aside of building time. Which in itself, is unrealistic as the bigger you build, the less stable your framework is going to be, and the more sensitive to damage and speed it will become. It also is detrimental to the game, for reasons I mentionned above (building time vs. subscription time, meta ships being plain and simple giant cubes).
The buffs and debuffs I'm suggesting are relatively slight (as in, you could still have a well-armoured titanic ship if you're willing to sacrifice some of your weapons' power, and their shields would still render them very resilient anyway), and these changes are in no way meant to let a small craft obliterate a huge one in 1v1. Rather let a couple of well-fitted, armoured, mid-sized crafts stand a solid chance against a big-ass cube, and, in most cases, allow well-fitted light ships to harass bigger ones longer before they either fall or retreat. It's all about making titanic ships less worth it. Make it less worth it to send a ship that took one month to build into battle with no escort, by making them more vulnerable and less optimised. Not rendering them obsolete, as they would still be able to pack an obscene degree of weaponry, but rather forcing fleets of more compact and manoeuvrable vessels to form around them.
An additional suggestion I'll edit into the first message, would be to give smaller ships some degree of evasion from weapon locking systems, according to range. The smaller the ship, the closer you'd have to be to lock it and fire at it, or at least fire at it with acceptable accuracy, which would make more sense. Small frigates would be able to play on that to harass big ships, without causing an alarming rate of damage, but still being able to get some good shots on the big ship, and withdrawing before being caught in its range, thus forcing the enemy fleet to dispatch their own interceptors to chase down yours. The big-ass ship in itself would not be useless, as it would still be a solid countermeasure against medium-to-large enemy ships, and military buildings planetside, but they would be dependent on a more diversified fleet (medium, tanky warships like destroyers, light, speedy interceptors like frigates, and so on), just as any genuine capital ship should be.
Put simply, I'm advocating for changes that ought to promote an "Artillery/Heavy Cavalry/Light Cavalry" type of trinity, which in my opinion would make space battles waaaay more tactical and interesting.
When it comes to military buildings, I do maintain their stats need to be drastically buffed. A max-sized military weapon system and a max-sized spacecraft, both with nothing but power plant and weapon bay, should at least deal identical damage. Same thing for armour, shields and sensors. Otherwise you're just giving the attacker the upper hand by default, which is ridiculous.