How to promote/reinvigorate smaller ship usage amongst the billionaires?

Space is pretty large and I can't see many places that a cutter can't get too. Why would a mission giver restrict the type of ship you use? Sounds kinda daft to me. Can't a player decide how they are going to play the game rather than being told how they have to play it?

LOL! Again, no one is being "told"... Take a traditional/existing assassination mission then if you want your Cutter. We're talking about more variety not less?

But these small number of "ship type" specific missions would offer a more "geared" experience. eg: What would you prefer?
1) Turn up in your cutter to find a T9 protected by 3 Eagles to destroy? How challenging would that be?
2) Turn up in an Eagle (as a pre-requisite) to find a T9 protected by 3 Eagles to destroy?


As regards reasoning, that's easy... In the above scenario they're expecting an Eagle to be joining them. Turn up in your Cutter and they'll immediately jump.

ps: And who wouldn't like the notion of a CZ with Eagles only, or Vipers only for a change surely?
 
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I have small ships and big ships. Big ships are slow. Small ships are fast. Going fast is fun even when its not the most efficient thing to do so I still fly small ships a lot. Slap some engineered enhanced thrusters on there and have a grand old time.
 
Who said anything about "pushing"? It's "offering"?

eg: A mission pops up for an assassination mission (of one or more other ships) to be completed in a Sidewinder?

Would be far too easy to simply take an FDL along, but with the pre-requisite of it being a Sidewinder the CMDR would turn up in, the opposition (missions) could be more logically balanced.

Sure, but if you want a challenge there's nothing stopping you from picking a smaller ship, right?

The game already scales the types of ships it throws at you based on what ship you're currently flying, and this applies to most (although admittedly not all) mission-specific ships too.

I may be biased here because I fly a Keelback and am routinely annoyed that I rarely get anything bigger than solo Asps thrown at me because of said ship scaling. :) It'd be nice to be occasionally interdicted by some scarier NPCs.
 
Who said anything about "pushing"? It's "offering"?

eg: A mission pops up for an assassination mission (of one or more other ships) to be completed in a Sidewinder?

Would be far too easy to simply take an FDL along, but with the pre-requisite of it being a Sidewinder the CMDR would turn up in, the opposition (missions) could be more logically balanced.

With all respect, we can already choose to engage this as a personal challenge without risking inserting the ideas of these devs that love to add meaningless annoying wrinkles and crowd the mission board that they have chosen to limit already.

The 1st thing that comes to mind that in addition to the MB populating 12 mining to zero other missions, now we have limiting assassination missions at the expense of normal ones.
Then, I can see them imposing that you use an eagle, then challenge your eagle's jump range and fuel tank to get there ...(insert more annoying wrinkles here)

In 2.3 it seems they have experienced the healing crises at least with respect to the annoying redirect location wrinkle --asking them to come up with even more at this point is like asking a flu patient just after experiencing the crisis to run a marathon.
 
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LOL! Again, no one is being "told"... Take a traditional/existing assassination mission then if you want your Cutter.

But these small number of "ship type" specific missions would offer a more "geared" experience. eg: What would you prefer?
1) Turn up in your cutter to find a T9 protected by 3 Eagles to destroy? How challenging would that be?
2) Turn up in an Eagle (as a pre-requisite) to find a T9 protected by 3 Eagles to destroy?


As regards reasoning, that's easy... In the above scenario they're expecting an Eagle to be joining them. Turn up in your Cutter and they'll immediately jump.

ps: And who would like the notion of a CZ with Eagles only, or Vipers only for a change surely?

It just reaks of telling players how the game 'should' be played which goes against the whole blaze your own trail ethos.

As fo CZ with just small ships it would be boring. I take my viper into CZ's all the time and it's fun.
 
Making 'ship specific' this, ship specific that only forces people to fall back to ships they do not like or want to fly.
I am quite skeptic how it would 'reinvigorate' small ship usage at all. I can even hear the complaints already.
 
Making 'ship specific' this, ship specific that only forces people to fall back to ships they do not like or want to fly.
I am quite skeptic how it would 'reinvigorate' small ship usage at all. I can even hear the complaints already.

Agreed.

I say if you want to add to the cmdr statistics of small ship use...go for it. I wont be part of it thanks.

They populate the field like mosquitoes in Africa already including if not particularly in Anarchy systems wherein seeing even one fed ship on your scanner is like winning a small jackpot.

Now we want cmdrs to all hold hands and fly eagles? man o man
 
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I use my smaller ships because they're fun and I like to build them for specific tasks. If I need to up my stack or use jump range, I'll use a larger ship, but if it's not important for me to get the maximum credits per/hour I'll use anything.

Forcing CMDRs to use something though, because other players aren't as advanced yet, that's a bit ick.
 
I'm a billionaire, and fly a Cobra Mk3 as my daily driver. Also enjoy the Viper Mk4 for similar roles. The Keelback is my favorite explorer. The smaller ships are great fun for me.

How to promote playing these ships, I don't know. Some players I know would seem to view the big ships as status symbols. I don't know if they would engage with content that required them to fly something that they may see as garbage.

But the closest we have to a reason to fly smaller ships is outposts, which lack a large pad. I'd be interested to see some of the tiny surface outposts (the ones that are currently not landable) get only a small pad, and maybe offer some bonus there, such as a "Materials Market" where the common types of materials could be bought and sold. This would both encourage small ship use, incentivize SRV surface play while out collecting materials, and simplify the gathering of the more common materials types for the lower tier blueprints.
 
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Maybe i don't understand but here are my thoughts.

Just because i'm a multi-billionaire does not mean i don't fly smaller ships. Perhaps it seems that way because nobody assumes i have a lot of credits when i'm in my Vulture. i only appear to be a rich player when someone sees me in a big ship.
Veterans fly smaller ships all the time, people just don't notice that. Should the game show you credit balances when you scan a target?

It does not matter what credit balance someone has, people will fly ships they enjoy flying. if there was a requirement to fly a smaller ship, people simply wouldn't play that part if they just want big ships. when i want to fly my Anaconda, i will, same for my Vulture, or Asp, or Viper, or.... still never set foot in a Cobra Mk. IV (not sure why really, i should get one)

In essence, requiring someone to fly the ship YOU want them to fly, would remove content from a game that desperately cannot afford for that to happen.
 
In essence, requiring someone to fly the ship YOU want them to fly, would remove content from a game that desperately cannot afford for that to happen.
As optional extra variations in missions and other gameplay elements... So by all means do what you've always done. But if you want to undertake one of the proposed alternative ship specific missions or CGs for example... Off you go ;)

No restrictions... Not less... More variety (if you wish to utilise it).


Why do we need to force small ship usage... what happened to blaze your own trail?
It just reaks of telling players how the game 'should' be played which goes against the whole blaze your own trail ethos.

As fo CZ with just small ships it would be boring. I take my viper into CZ's all the time and it's fun.

That's made my day!

So:-

1) Offering the additional opportunity to have missions/mechanics geared towards smaller/specific ships - if you so wish to undertake them - is somehow reducing options? Still don't get that!?

2) And you telling me that liking the notion of going into a combat zone in a Viper, against NPC or CMDRs also in Vipers - which affects you not one jot (don't do it then) - isn't infact going against me "blazing my own trail"? And all because you think it sounds boring!

Absolute off the chart classic! Can't I "blaze my own trail" doing something that doesn't affect you one bit?
 
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Agreed.

Add fun specialist tasks which is much easier / quicker using small ships. Where size matters. Emergency good transferal between planetary bases.

Entering into the 'city' of a coriolis station to scan POIs for reasons


My main has the big toys. My alt has the smaller ones. Vulture, Cobra and engineered Sidewinder.

Because I don't suffer big ship envy anymore (the price for this was the cost of a second account!) I spend pretty much all my time in the alt. Thinking about swapping the Vulture for an engineered Viper. I prefer small ship gameplay - not hunting profits.

I don't know if I would say the same without the main though...
 
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As optional extra variations in missions and other gameplay elements... So by all means do what you've always done. But if you want to undertake one of the proposed alternative ship specific missions or CGs for example... Off you go ;)

No restrictions... Not less... More variety (if you wish to utilise it).




That's made my day!

So:-

1) Offering the additional opportunity to have missions/mechanics geared towards smaller/specific ships - if you so wish to undertake them - is somehow reducing options? Still don't get that!?

2) And you telling me that liking the notion of going into a combat zone in a Viper, against NPC or CMDRs also in Vipers - which affects you not one jot (don't do it then) - isn't infact going against me "blazing my own trail"? And all because you think it sounds boring!

Absolute off the chart classic! Can't I "blaze my own trail" doing something that doesn't affect you one bit?

No I go into high intensity CZs in a viper as the game currently stands. I don't need the game to tell me I need to take a Viper and like the fact there are larger ships about.
You are asking for the game to be changed, that isn't blazing your own trail in a way that doesn't affect me.
 
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Ship's aren't game progression. They are tools in which the player uses to achieve the goals they set themselves.

What I would favour are game subtypes that favour different sorts of ships. For example races, in which the smaller ships would shine.
 
How to get the rich kids to use the small ships again...

Make it so the big ships have no ability to run silent. Make smuggling a thing again... :)

Well, as I mentioned in the OP it would be nice if stealth actually was more involved in the game. In Kickstarter when videos and information came through of ships cold/silent running you can imagine there was talk of missions trying to senak through asteroid fields trynig to get from A-->B undetected to achieve some goal...

But as it stands now 2-3yrs on, it's alll a bit nothing.

If stealth was more a true mechanic, and line of site (eg: as in CQC) was in the core game, we could begin to imagine again how small ships might be employed in stealth related missions/activities...
 
I think small ships already have a few things to offer:

1) Way more fun to fly
2) Reward skill far more than corvette and such, which is basically just drift, shoot and scb.
3) Ungriefable in open: insurance is trivial, and one boost immediately puts you out of weapon range. You can do all the CGs in Open without any real risk in small ships.
 
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