Right now the game has two seemingly unrelated issues.
First; Small Ships are pretty much useless for practical purposes. Sure, sure, you can canyon race in them or make meme builds with them, but for almost every practical purpose, medium ships do the same things only better.
Second; Mine Launchers are more or less useless. The problem is pretty basic when you get right down to it; space is really, really big, and no amount of aoe is going to be enough to make mines a realistic threat if you have to actually fly into them to be hurt by them.
So I had an idea to, in a roundabout way, fix both!
Idea One: Smart Mines!
Basically, make Mines HEAT SEEKING. At longer ranges, they'll just slowly creep towards the hottest local heat source, but at shorter ranges they'll actively leap towards the heat source at quite high speed. This makes an area seeded with mines an active threat, as they'll actively work towards you.
In tandem with this, make them smart enough to never blow up on allies. If an ally hits them, they should just bounce off their hull and take damage, potentially even being destroyed, but never actually detonating.
Thirdly, they should have a much smaller heat signiture, so they appear as an unresolved heat signiture on your scanners. The player should know they're there in general, but not their precise location, and Point Defense shouldn't be shooting at mines further than about 500m away.
Net Result; Mines that are a realistic threat, as you could potentially be hit by enough of them to actually make a difference. It would be a gradually increasing threat, however, so it would be important to take out a minelayer early, before they can deploy their entire payload and become a real danger.
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Okay, so that makes mines dangerous, but how does that make small ships useful?
Simple!
Idea Two: Blockades, IE; Mine Fields!
This would be contingent on a new type of BGS state, a BLOCKADE. This is a BGS state that would take place when an external faction has consistently lost wars to the dominant faction in an invaded system, but has never dropped to low enough influence to be forced to retreat.
The external power would give a last-ditch effort to beat the local faction with all their strength, and do so by deploying literally MILLIONS of mines surrounding the various orbital installations! This would basically be a sphere around the station, as thick as a planet's ring, only made up ENTIRELY of mines. And not only that, but roughly one in four mines is reverberating cascade, making brute-forcing your way through the minefield absolutely impossible. Trying to go through with a large ship would likewise be nigh-impossible, as putting out any heat would quickly draw in an overwhelming amount of mines, enough to drown any number of point defense. Even Heat Sinks wouldn't be a viable option, because the heat sink itself, once ejected, would draw in a huge number of mines from all directions, damaging or destroying the ship that deployed it.
You see where I'm going with this, of course.
Large ships would simply not be nimble enough to dart through the minefield safely. Even medium ships would be too awkward to consistently get through safely. You take a few hits and your shield fails, a few more and your engines fail, and then you're trapped, drifting helpless in a minefield in silent running, heat slowly creeping up, and up...
Only Small ships could dart through, hands tight on the controls, watching the scanner with dry eyes and mouth...
Because inside the minefield, the station would be paying huge prices for even the most basic commodities! Offering extremely lucrative passenger missions for the Dolphins brave enough to risk the minefield.
And of course, if the BGS faction under attack manages to weather the blockade, the outside faction is immediately forced out of the system completely.
---
I think this would offer some great opportunities for using small ships, and for content in general!
Thoughts?
First; Small Ships are pretty much useless for practical purposes. Sure, sure, you can canyon race in them or make meme builds with them, but for almost every practical purpose, medium ships do the same things only better.
Second; Mine Launchers are more or less useless. The problem is pretty basic when you get right down to it; space is really, really big, and no amount of aoe is going to be enough to make mines a realistic threat if you have to actually fly into them to be hurt by them.
So I had an idea to, in a roundabout way, fix both!
Idea One: Smart Mines!
Basically, make Mines HEAT SEEKING. At longer ranges, they'll just slowly creep towards the hottest local heat source, but at shorter ranges they'll actively leap towards the heat source at quite high speed. This makes an area seeded with mines an active threat, as they'll actively work towards you.
In tandem with this, make them smart enough to never blow up on allies. If an ally hits them, they should just bounce off their hull and take damage, potentially even being destroyed, but never actually detonating.
Thirdly, they should have a much smaller heat signiture, so they appear as an unresolved heat signiture on your scanners. The player should know they're there in general, but not their precise location, and Point Defense shouldn't be shooting at mines further than about 500m away.
Net Result; Mines that are a realistic threat, as you could potentially be hit by enough of them to actually make a difference. It would be a gradually increasing threat, however, so it would be important to take out a minelayer early, before they can deploy their entire payload and become a real danger.
---
Okay, so that makes mines dangerous, but how does that make small ships useful?
Simple!
Idea Two: Blockades, IE; Mine Fields!
This would be contingent on a new type of BGS state, a BLOCKADE. This is a BGS state that would take place when an external faction has consistently lost wars to the dominant faction in an invaded system, but has never dropped to low enough influence to be forced to retreat.
The external power would give a last-ditch effort to beat the local faction with all their strength, and do so by deploying literally MILLIONS of mines surrounding the various orbital installations! This would basically be a sphere around the station, as thick as a planet's ring, only made up ENTIRELY of mines. And not only that, but roughly one in four mines is reverberating cascade, making brute-forcing your way through the minefield absolutely impossible. Trying to go through with a large ship would likewise be nigh-impossible, as putting out any heat would quickly draw in an overwhelming amount of mines, enough to drown any number of point defense. Even Heat Sinks wouldn't be a viable option, because the heat sink itself, once ejected, would draw in a huge number of mines from all directions, damaging or destroying the ship that deployed it.
You see where I'm going with this, of course.
Large ships would simply not be nimble enough to dart through the minefield safely. Even medium ships would be too awkward to consistently get through safely. You take a few hits and your shield fails, a few more and your engines fail, and then you're trapped, drifting helpless in a minefield in silent running, heat slowly creeping up, and up...
Only Small ships could dart through, hands tight on the controls, watching the scanner with dry eyes and mouth...
Because inside the minefield, the station would be paying huge prices for even the most basic commodities! Offering extremely lucrative passenger missions for the Dolphins brave enough to risk the minefield.
And of course, if the BGS faction under attack manages to weather the blockade, the outside faction is immediately forced out of the system completely.
---
I think this would offer some great opportunities for using small ships, and for content in general!
Thoughts?
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