Ship Combat Rework

[hollow needle]

Create a bottleneck to the raids while in ships to encourage more ship to ship combat. As of right now there is no point to ship combat unless you are going exclusively for kills.

A way this can be done is 2 parts IMO. One, have beefed up defenses like the towers on prison (extra health [not a one to three shot], decent aim) on all raid entry points that MUST be destroyed in order to enter the raid. It’s important that these are challenging enough to warrant some thought on if you want to engage them or at a minimum it takes some time to disable to allow other players to congregate in the area. Two, to add some gameplay variety, make some (1-2 per match) broken down merchant ships that you must hover your ship next to for X seconds to collect authorization codes that will allow you to bypass the defenses and enter the hangar. The idea is to give the player a choice between risking engagements with the defenses or risk engaging other players at the broken down merchant ships.

As it stands right now 99% of my raids consist of me ignoring other players until I get into raid and other players also ignoring me. I know there’s a reason for the ship pre-lobby but right now it feels empty and pointless with the current setup, even with the optional side-missions like merchant ship.

Also, there should be a more punishing mechanic for when your ship gets disabled, being able to potentially pod into other players when you lost the gunfight makes ship v ship combat incredibly unrewarding and tedious. Higher ranked players may say that it’s easy to compensate for but that doesn’t mean it’s fun to play with. If a game had a mechanic where every time you shoot your bullets went above your scope by X amount and every high ranking player was able to compensate for it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t bad game design.

My suggestion for this aspect of ship combat is when your ship gets disabled your “breach pod” becomes an “escape pod” and all you can do with it is run to the exit. This way there’s no flipping the script because of game mechanics when someone loses a dogfight and it would make you feel rewarded for winning a dogfight while allowing an opportunity for the defender to escape with their loot.

[static grail]

i like it way more when the pod tries to breach me though... its much easier to kill it. and lots of people actually enjoy breaching and breach combat, just because you dont like it does not mean it is bad lmao

it would lead to lame and boring space fights if the only option once disabled was to leave all the way to the extract. a lot of people gun each other down in space just to bait people into breaching their ships