Sigh... Exactly as pointless as I feared they would be. They're just the current in game Megaships, with a limited choice of on board vendors / engineers as an excuse for having certain "roles". But there's just something about space games that make the audience unrealistically positive; a very few people in the thread spot the actual detail, but I've no idea where the rest of you are getting such exuberance from.
"Commanders can choose a number of loadouts for their Fleet Carrier, governing services/module and ship availability to support a number of different activities, such as: "
There it is; do you not see it? The carriers aren't taking the role for themselves, they're supporting your load outs on your own ships. In other words, they're just going to have different vendor choices inside.
Now go back and watch the announcement video more closely;
at no point do you see them moving relative to the background. There's a suspiciously truncated clip of the engines lighting up; I'll wager here and now that's the system jump animation, and they cut it short to hide that's what it is. You won't be flying them personally.
Schedule jumps from the Galaxy Map when you want and from wherever you are in the galaxy.
Being able to move them when ever you feel like would be "Movement on Demand": "Movement on a Schedule" means you can give the order to move, but it won't execute until a certain time, the scheduled time. They're tied to the server ticks or some other limitation, just like Megaships.
Now think about what that really means; even if you can somehow set the target location (Around Planet 1b for example), it won't be automatically updated by the server until the scheduled time. If it did more than one move, you could do more than 500ly. Thus you're only going to get a single executed move per tick, up to 500ly.
And it's quite possible that at schedule time, Planet 1b is going to be sitting right where the Carrier was requested to be moved too, so it can't allow you to move any old where either, because you likely won't accuratly know the future state of the galaxy either. You'll only be able to schedule it to where the game knows it'll be safe to be.
You're not going to get the freedom you think you're going to get. At best, you'll get a fixed selection of orbits for it to sit in and not move from between each scheduled tick.
Commanders require a unique resource to fuel the Fleet Carrier in order for it to jump.
And there's the grind the more realistic of us were expecting to be tied to this in order to string out the players for months more with the same content just repackaged again, just as Frontier have been doing for years now. That's what's so, so depressing about the state of the game's development now... I personally can almost certainly afford to buy a carrier outright when it launches. I've done the same old gameplay enough over the years to be rolling in money (and Triple Elite too). But what's the point of logging in for a Carrier when...
One Fleet Carrier per Commander. Available for base game and Horizons players.
It's just a personal vanity pet. That's all it is. It has no "fleet" component, except for only allowing certain people to land on it or not. There's no teaming up to build one. It's not tied to the in game "fleets" either, that in turn were just a new page in the UI and have no other functionality either, because it's tied to personal Commander accounts. It has no gameplay mechanisms at all except, maybe, cutting down the journey time for people in very, VERY limited circumstances by dropping effectively a private station somewhere. Maybe.
Why? Well you might think you're going to be exploring with one? But let's say that at best case scenario, it's one Schedule per day. Heck, let's be extremely generous and say it's 1 schedule
per hour. How much distance can you actually cover in an hour? More than 500lys? An actual explorer build can do nearly 4 times that per hour now. But the Carrier can't.
Let's be insanely kind and say that not only is it one schedule per hour, but you can remote plot at least 24 leaps in advance, and it moves even if you're not online; in a day, a Carrier can then do 24 hours x 500ly, or 12,000ly total. That might actually be useful!
Except oops;
Commanders require a unique resource to fuel the Fleet Carrier in order for it to jump.
You're going to have to be with it to keep re-fueling it, remember? So unless it also allows you to store those unique resources in bulk aboard itself before sending it off...
And you
know it's
not going to be 1 schedule per hour. The current update for moving the Megaships is in fact once per week. 500ly per week. If you've fueled it. You're
not going to be having your Carriers out in the deep black with you very easily. But hey, the challenge of getting one to Sagitarius A* will be enough to get the dedicated grinding the same content yet again! And all kinds of stories in the press about the first to arrive, no doubt!
Maybe we could all move them to a single system and say "Hey look at my billion dollar impotent space willy?" Especially if there are skin add ons for it in the store, eh?!
Which is why I sighed right at the start. We've already done this dance a hundred times before.
Meanwhile No Man's Sky has an entire player controlled fleet, where you can treat the capital ship as a moveable, customizable base, and send your smaller ships out on simple missions; sure, I'm not playing it right now, because one of the bugs with the latest patch has bricked my save; but when I get it back again, at least it'll have something genuinely
new to play with...
I never thought I'd see the day where I was saying NMS was far better than E : D, but yet here we are.
