Reducing the meta gap

[Powderpanic]

Hello,

The biggest issues I see around Open is the huge gap between a PVP Meta ship and everything else.

The main issue is around hull reinforcement stacking. Since even a trader, in theory, could decide to carry a strong shield and weapons.

My suggestion would be to make hull reinforcements limited to each ship and address the stacking.
Which really in the immersion of the game makes sense.
Replacing your cargo hold with a lump of iron, shouldn't make your ship strong to external damage. It makes no sense.

The end result is that a PVP meta ship would still carry an edge over a ship that chose other slots rather than hull reinforcement, but the edge would not be anywhere near as great as it is at the moment.

Changes could be made to base hull points on hull tank ships to balance this loss of stacking.
The result would give strong build multipurpose ship, at least a change against a PVP build.
Like it used to be before engineering and HRP stacking.

The result I think would lead to a more balanced open and more player community.

For the PVP bro's, their skill would be the winning attribute, rather than their build.
Traders would at least have a chance to fight back against gankers and indeed pirates.
Pirates would have a chance vs gank/defence wings.

Skill vs Build would be greatly reduced.

Everything would just make more sense.

I have even produced a graph, because really, who doesn't love a good graph

Powerpanic
The Voice of Graphing

 

[BinakAlgo]

Sound reasonable. It should be considered.

 

[Daynen]

What's odd, now that I think about it, is that you can reinforce your hull at all. It's a hull. How is internal module space being used for that? Also how is all this hull reinforcement completely invisible? the whole system of defense stacking is completely nonsensical. Why are shield BOOSTERS a utility slot (which is normally reserved for activated modules) and shield CELL BANKS (which must be activated) internal modules?

The biggest offense, however, is that reinforcements can be stacked engineered to provide SO MUCH damage reduction for explosive, thermal and kinetic damage with such negligible penalties. It does a few bad things:
-First it negates the point of choosing a damage type since PVPers can just balance themselves out almost evenly.
-Second, it provides enormous hull point/shield point multiplication, making every battle an all day slugfest even with optimal weapons.
-Third, it makes your own defense stacking an absolute necessity just to be able to TRY to compete, let alone have anything resembling a fair fight.
-Fourth, it then necessitates the design of weapons that completely IGNORE these defenses, i.e. plasma accelerators or flechette launchers, which then COMPLETELY DESTROY those of us who AREN'T stacked to the gills with fully engineered reinforcements.

The fourth problem is my real rub, because it boils down to a simple sin of game design: no strategy should be it's own best counter. Good luck trying to bring anything BUT a defense stacked vessel against another; the maneuverability you gain from "going light" is immediately trampled the first time you're hit by the tank that takes half an hour to kill.

...and then they reboot their chaff to cheat the cooldown so you can't even gimbal or turret them.

So yeah. Defense stacking needs a kick in the nuts somehow.