Space legs, repair, wrecks and "Time to kill ship" dilemma

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I just wanted to put some random thoughts out there for us theory crafting lovers.

Every time I think about space legs and how to make them meaningful in ship setting is repairs and recovery. However there's big, big issue with such angle - we mostly "blow" ships up, not disable them, not make them not flyable, but straight up blow things up.

In my opinion, for repair, recovery, and exploring of wrecks to work ships should not explode so easily and they shouldn't be killed so easily. Disabled yes.

This however clashes with lot of people perception of ED being arcade ship game (let's blow stuff up and let's decrease TTK) but also several designs. Combat zones would have to look *very* different if we would like to have meaningful space legs for ships.

I think ED will have to move to less "killing ships" and more of "disabling ships" area. Bounties will also have to look different.

Just some grains of thought.

 

[bladebss]

The wrecks can be uss and mission spawns. So the ships we kill can explode as ususal. Unless we deliberately dissable them buy taking out modules.

This way we get to have a resonable ttk and have meaning for space legs.

There is also planitery retrival. Being able to enter bases and crashes on the surface and extract data or hack terminals to access new parts, retrives some important pice of equipment or material.

For piracy and hostile bordings i can see the need for ships to be dissabled in a different manner or under different situations to make this more possable, dissable the reboot repair facility with a limpet say, and then ship to ship dock or eva to the vessel.

 

[askavir]

I just wanted to put some random thoughts out there for us theory crafting lovers.

Every time I think about space legs and how to make them meaningful in ship setting is repairs and recovery. However there's big, big issue with such angle - we mostly "blow" ships up, not disable them, not make them not flyable, but straight up blow things up.

In my opinion, for repair, recovery, and exploring of wrecks to work ships should not explode so easily and they shouldn't be killed so easily. Disabled yes.

This however clashes with lot of people perception of ED being arcade ship game (let's blow stuff up and let's decrease TTK) but also several designs. Combat zones would have to look *very* different if we would like to have meaningful space legs for ships.

I think ED will have to move to less "killing ships" and more of "disabling ships" area. Bounties will also have to look different.

Just some grains of thought.

I think that space legs will have it's own separated gameplay scenarios, and will not change existing gameplay, so that problem will not exist. So ships can continue to be blown up, but there will be for instance missions that require you to go investigate a stranded / broken / non-communicating / etc ship.

I say this based one one thing alone: space legs will be a paid expansion, so it can't affect the gameplay (meaning previous existing gameplay) of people who won't buy the expansion.

Of course this is pure speculation, so I could be wrong on all accounts.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

The wrecks can be uss and mission spawns. So the ships we kill can explode as ususal. Unless we deliberately dissable them buy taking out modules.

I kinda made my point that if player ship gets disabled, space legs makes sense to go out and repair it. If it gets blown up to pieces, there's very little point for space legs gameplay for that.

This way we get to have a resonable ttk and have meaning for space legs.

Not really. TTK is way too fast even without space legs. if you want to have consistency and meaning, TTK has to go up, not down. I know it is sad news for blast friendly players, but that will be good for the game.

I think that space legs will have it's own separated gameplay scenarios, and will not change existing gameplay, so that problem will not exist. So ships can continue to be blown up, but there will be for instance missions that require you to go investigate a stranded / broken / non-communicating / etc ship.

I say this based one one thing alone: space legs will be a paid expansion, so it can't affect the gameplay (meaning previous existing gameplay) of people who won't buy the expansion.

Of course this is pure speculation, so I could be wrong on all accounts.

Of course it can. If FD feels they have to increase and change consistency of current gameplay to make it more richer and more choices giving, they will do so.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Blowing up ships is part of the "reward" or "satisfaction" of the gamplay. Whenever a buffed AI bulletsponge spawned on me that satisfaction level was severely diluted by having to pump 3-5 times the ordnance on it.

In order to make your idea work it would need to increase the TTK. At the same time there needs to be a feedback about "progress" in damage to the enemy ship. They'd need to increase that damage modelling and that is gonna take quite some work.