But megaships aren't carriers.
Handling Fleet Carriers in 2018 - Fleet Carrier Concept
A really good concept with some innovative ideas that I like a lot but also fear it is wholly unfair to single players while there are huge benefits to those who would play as a squadron. Unless the same benefits (trading materials and very high mission rewards for example) are also opened to single players, I can't see how this would work other than to further fragment the community creating a bigger divide between those who play in open and those who stay in Solo and thus would speed up the demise of the game. I know you mentioned a SP could buy/build a carrier but could a SP also build their own NPC squadron to complete squadron missions for example? How then would success/failure be measured (RNG?!?). How could an NPC squadron then compete with a player squadron? Would this be possible on an even footing?
I'm 100% behind more (varied) content and would love to see the possibility of owning a base of operations be it carrier or planetary based. Your ideas are very much aligned with my own but the cynic in me believes 99% of carriers would be used for more sinister purposes (gank platform/system blockade came first to mind). I hate to come across negative because I truly think something like this would benefit the game hugely, especially for those who have done most things and looking for new challenges. I just think whatever is introduced needs to provide the same balanced opportunity to all without forcing people to join groups they would otherwise avoid or isolating individual players by providing distinct advantages to player groups. How this is done is a question beyond me.
Rep to you for putting this out there
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I'm 100% behind more (varied) content and would love to see the possibility of owning a base of operations be it carrier or planetary based. Your ideas are very much aligned with my own but the cynic in me believes 99% of carriers would be used for more sinister purposes (gank platform/system blockade came first to mind). I hate to come across negative because I truly think something like this would benefit the game hugely, especially for those who have done most things and looking for new challenges. I just think whatever is introduced needs to provide the same balanced opportunity to all without forcing people to join groups they would otherwise avoid or isolating individual players by providing distinct advantages to player groups. How this is done is a question beyond me.
Rep to you for putting this out there
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They announced it, but it doesn't mean they're nowhere near done with them. They're probably very early in talking and designing. This is the perfect time to submit well thought out ideas like these.
I'd have been happier with a wall-of-text to read, and some still images.
I highly doubt Fleet Carriers will be anything like this at all.
Here's a few things that come to mind:
1. What happens to the ships in a carrier, if the carrier owner/pilot goes offline? (game crash, ISP failure, power failure)?
Are they simply stuck in the nowhere, unable to play until the carrier owner returns? If so, this could put a big dampener on both via their viability and on game play in general.
If they are ejected from the carrier at it's last location, this would simply be terribly annoying.
2. What happens to ships in a carrier if that carrier is destroyed?
Group rebuy would suck, being ejected into a hostile situation would just be annoying to say the least.
3. If Carriers are indestructible, they wouldn't have need of weapons, so weaponizing them (outside of the pacification emplacements common to stations and megaships) would be unnecessary, and prevent issues # 1 and 2. However this would also limit any sort of outfitting, if any outfitting is even possible.
We also know nothing about how Squadrons will work - I'm going to speculate they will be basically a "wing" of 4 Wings, allowing 16 ships to work together. However, given the amount of trouble we've had to this point just getting Wings working (instancing anyone?), adding another layer to this will only further complicate matters.
I highly doubt Fleet Carriers will be anything like this at all.
Here's a few things that come to mind:
1. What happens to the ships in a carrier, if the carrier owner/pilot goes offline? (game crash, ISP failure, power failure)?
Are they simply stuck in the nowhere, unable to play until the carrier owner returns? If so, this could put a big dampener on both via their viability and on game play in general.
If they are ejected from the carrier at it's last location, this would simply be terribly annoying.
2. What happens to ships in a carrier if that carrier is destroyed?
Group rebuy would suck, being ejected into a hostile situation would just be annoying to say the least.
3. If Carriers are indestructible, they wouldn't have need of weapons, so weaponizing them (outside of the pacification emplacements common to stations and megaships) would be unnecessary, and prevent issues # 1 and 2. However this would also limit any sort of outfitting, if any outfitting is even possible.
We also know nothing about how Squadrons will work - I'm going to speculate they will be basically a "wing" of 4 Wings, allowing 16 ships to work together. However, given the amount of trouble we've had to this point just getting Wings working (instancing anyone?), adding another layer to this will only further complicate matters.
Many people are more happy with a video to watch than a wall of text.
Based on the concept shown:
1. The carrier would be in the position it was left in regardless of whether the squadron leader is online. Carrier jumps would be 1 jump regardless of distance with wait times many times longer than the time it would take to travel to that destination manually. 12:09
2. Carriers would never be destroyed, but I suppose could be sold. 10:40
3. They would need weapons if you don't want to have your squadron missions fail.
We know nothing of how squadrons work. Exactly, which is the whole point of this video.
I fully support your ideas Commander
I think these are great ideas.
There is only one thing that puzzles me: how can you sell your commodities to the market? I mean, if the carrier is way outside the bubble, how can you buy or sell commodities to the market?
There is only one thing that puzzles me: how can you sell your commodities to the market? I mean, if the carrier is way outside the bubble, how can you buy or sell commodities to the market?
Like the OP stated, the carriers shouldn't be destroyed. If their hull gets to a certain percentage, they would retreat. Where? What about they retreat to the same system they came from, like when you rebuy? If you're in a war against another squadron, that would be a significant defeat as you would have to start the same long trip to get back in the fight. Just an idea.
Maybe you could not buy commodities but only sell them to the market. If in deep space the market values could assume some fixed balanced value. It would be nice to give traders / miners some love in the carrier concept.
I believe he covered that, it's tied to the local (ie system wide) commodity market. So that particular function would presumably only work in systems that already have commodity trading. That was my understanding anyway.
edit - or not!
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Or perhaps sell within a certain ly range of a system with a commodity market. Maybe range could increase with better modules but nearest system would have to always set the price. That should be flexible enough to help miners mine in un-populated systems.
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Excellently presented!
My only gripe is that the idea is too good, too refined, and too meaningful for the game to be implemented by Frontier. For a devoted group of professional working on their own thing, it doesn't look or feel good to let a single handed amateur (forgive me if you are not!) to tell them what to do to fix their thing. Specially with such a central and game changing idea such as this. Even though listening to good ideas and implementing them should be, ultimately, good PR or whatever, I don't think FD is willing to implement this with the implications of doing so. Because to do so, can be seen as an admittance of them not being able to creatively fix the game. On a psychological level, imagine being a game designer or a team of designers facing the decision of implementing the genius idea of an amateur outsider on his spare time (in contrast to their own professional careers). If they let this advice dictate how to make the game, then why are they, the designers trying to fix the game, necessary to begin with?
Hopefully, personal interests wont get in the way to let this vision set the standard on how squadrons should work.
My only gripe is that the idea is too good, too refined, and too meaningful for the game to be implemented by Frontier. For a devoted group of professional working on their own thing, it doesn't look or feel good to let a single handed amateur (forgive me if you are not!) to tell them what to do to fix their thing. Specially with such a central and game changing idea such as this. Even though listening to good ideas and implementing them should be, ultimately, good PR or whatever, I don't think FD is willing to implement this with the implications of doing so. Because to do so, can be seen as an admittance of them not being able to creatively fix the game. On a psychological level, imagine being a game designer or a team of designers facing the decision of implementing the genius idea of an amateur outsider on his spare time (in contrast to their own professional careers). If they let this advice dictate how to make the game, then why are they, the designers trying to fix the game, necessary to begin with?
Hopefully, personal interests wont get in the way to let this vision set the standard on how squadrons should work.
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I would hope that they are big enough to admit a good idea (assuming this is one), when they see it. For the good of the game as a whole.
EDIT - Also thanks and it's a interesting POV psychologically.
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And if damaged to their retreat threshold in the system to which they retreat? I'm having flashbacks of an AD&D quest to slay a mad god - killing the avatar on the material plane, then chasing it down to a retreat in the Astral plane, defeating it once more only to have to chase it to its Outer Planar lair to slay it there, once and for all.
But where would it retreat to at that point?
From my own perspective, I don't ever see me participating in this way. I don't care for shooting at other players, be they alone or in squadrons or entire armadas. PvP isn't for me.
I could potentially see my own use of a Carrier though to lead research teams to far and distant places to carry out research. I could see taking a squadron of aspiring Xeno-archaeologists out to the Guardian Ruins. But ultimately the usage here would be limited to eliminating a 20+ jump route out to a starting point and a number of intermediate jumps.
Aside from serving as a sort of mobile command taxi, I could potentially see one other use for a Carrier - and that would be to load a fleet of cargo cutters up in a system with cheap goods, jump to a CG system, and offload all those cutters to bombard the CG with materials and mass profit sharing. Add that with the tens of thousands of tons of storage the video makes mention of, and you've got a CG completion machine of epic proportion. Tier 10 in a day? Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. We'd need 100 Tier CG's or more to keep them relevant, or from paying out in the billions.
I can also see using a Carrier as the base of operations for a Mining Consortium - a full Carrier loaded with mining ships, come to strip the resources of an entire planetary ring is a beautiful thing in my eyes.
Again, I think there's a lot of speculation, hype-building and expectation setting in here, enough to reach critical mass when this doesn't live up to even a percentage of the wishful thinking here.
But don't get me wrong either - I'm not against the idea of Carriers - I'm in favor of them. Help the people who just want to blow each other up go broke faster and keep them all together for easier staying away from, and I couldn't be happier. Unfortunately it seems all the thoughts revolving around these are "how I can use them to better blow people up?" while the rest of professions are left in the lurch.
I disagree with most of your post but this is the only part I especially want to address. It is such a negative and detractive way of looking things. Why would you *want* something to be less than it could be? What sort of prepare for failure mindset is that? Perhaps that may well end up being the reality, I wouldn't know because I'm not prescient. Are you?
Amazing.
And there I was complaining today, that the players aren't interested in discussing the topic, which even made me start my own, what I hate to do
But seems to be completely different from what Frontier announced. It was supposed to be mostly "refuel, refit and respawn". If they wanted to introduce even half of what you have proposed, they would probably need at least half-a-year development time on the carrier only. With all the related features it would be probably more like a year.
There are also some things which will probably never happen - like shared material storage. A sure way of introducing real money trading into the game. "You will get access to our G5 material storage for only 20$! Don't waste time on gathering them by yourself! PM me to get a squadron invite!"
I loved the themes of the wing missions though, even if they would end up much simpler, which they probably will
I'm also agreeing that it is probably the perfect time to start with ideas on what we want to see. One year isn't too long for development. Once Frontier have their own base ideas and start with the design they will be hard to change. And Frontier clearly stated - they want our ideas on the squadrons.
And there I was complaining today, that the players aren't interested in discussing the topic, which even made me start my own, what I hate to do
But seems to be completely different from what Frontier announced. It was supposed to be mostly "refuel, refit and respawn". If they wanted to introduce even half of what you have proposed, they would probably need at least half-a-year development time on the carrier only. With all the related features it would be probably more like a year.
There are also some things which will probably never happen - like shared material storage. A sure way of introducing real money trading into the game. "You will get access to our G5 material storage for only 20$! Don't waste time on gathering them by yourself! PM me to get a squadron invite!"
I loved the themes of the wing missions though, even if they would end up much simpler, which they probably will
I'm also agreeing that it is probably the perfect time to start with ideas on what we want to see. One year isn't too long for development. Once Frontier have their own base ideas and start with the design they will be hard to change. And Frontier clearly stated - they want our ideas on the squadrons.
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+ REP
Excellent idea and presentation (far better than a wall of text). I have been wary and a little sceptical of the whole Squadron Ship mechanic, could see too many wanting to create their one little fiefdoms to the detriment of others. But your ideas would work. The collective ownership of the asset and all the mats it contains is a good idea but could be open to being abused. Not by the Squadron itself, but one disgruntled member could decide to empty the coffers of a specific hard to obtain mat. I know you said that any Squadron member breaking the rules could be evicted and carry a black mark, that is a good idea if the player was going to try to join another squadron. I would much rather that in addition to the black mark the player receives a global bounty of significant proportions. Of course this would probably have to be petitioned to the FD Admins, the Squadron Commander pleading his case so to speak. At least that way, the player couldn't commit the infraction in Open, then go and hide in Solo. He would end up always wary of Authority Ships, bounty hunters and have to restrict himself to Anarchy systems to dock. Of course the Squadron would provide the bounty (only paid if a player Commander hands it in).
Excellent idea and presentation (far better than a wall of text). I have been wary and a little sceptical of the whole Squadron Ship mechanic, could see too many wanting to create their one little fiefdoms to the detriment of others. But your ideas would work. The collective ownership of the asset and all the mats it contains is a good idea but could be open to being abused. Not by the Squadron itself, but one disgruntled member could decide to empty the coffers of a specific hard to obtain mat. I know you said that any Squadron member breaking the rules could be evicted and carry a black mark, that is a good idea if the player was going to try to join another squadron. I would much rather that in addition to the black mark the player receives a global bounty of significant proportions. Of course this would probably have to be petitioned to the FD Admins, the Squadron Commander pleading his case so to speak. At least that way, the player couldn't commit the infraction in Open, then go and hide in Solo. He would end up always wary of Authority Ships, bounty hunters and have to restrict himself to Anarchy systems to dock. Of course the Squadron would provide the bounty (only paid if a player Commander hands it in).