#Ship combat overhaul idea.

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

thorny rover
#

Reasoning
At the moment ship combat feels underwhelming. I often find that ship battles usually play out the same way. You either shoot at a ship trading shots until one ship is disabled. The disabled ship will almost always immediately scramble for the escape pods and try to board you. This almost always ends in fighting inside the ship as the escape pods are quite hard to hit.

Allow ships to explode.
Allow ships to explode after a certain amount of damage has been taken. This would change the way players approach a ship. If their goal is to take over a ship they won't be able to damage the ship too much or it will blow up. They will need to board the craft and assault it from the inside then issue repairs.

#

New repair system
Adding a wrench (only one) to every ship that has infinite use.* (hear me out.)* In addition to the wrench, there can be segmented systems. You would now be able to disable enemy ship's turrets if you hit them enough as well as disable the entire ship just like usual. The defenders now have a new dilemma. Do they repair the turrets to defend themselves first or do they repair the engine to flee and get moving faster? Repairing the turret would be quite simple, you would grab the wrench and repair the turret controls. If the ship gets disabled you must run down to the engine to repair it. The wrench would take up a main weapon slot and can be used as a melee weapon. (Right-clicking to repair and left-clicking to attack.)

At the moment whenever you take damage the engine catches fire and the more damage you take the bigger and louder the fire seems to be. This is quite odd. I think we can keep the fire however it should have a random chance to happen upon taking damage say* (15-20%)*. That way the Devs can keep the fire extinguishers where they are and keep the fire extinguisher system in place.

In addition, your crew can now take on more roles. Your team can designate a 'Repairman' to look after repairing the ship and someone else could take an extinguisher if needed.

#

The explosion
Now for the explosion. If all attempts to repair the ship fail, the ship starts to "Meltdown". This would mean the ship starts a countdown of something like 10-15 seconds (This timer could and probably should scale with ship size.) Enough time to run to the escape pods and escape before the ships explode. Any attacking or nearby ships may take damage if they are too close to the ship once it melts down and eventually explodes.
Upon meltdown an alarm will sound, this could be a simple countdown 10...9... etc. I however think a meltdown alarm similar to a nuclear reactor would sound awesome and get the player's attention.
There could be a cool visual explosion in space. The explosion and the sound could attract other players.

#

Rustbucket changes
I simply want to reduce the amount of total escape pod locations to 1 or 2. Having four escape pods gunning for your ship all at the same time can be a little overwhelming, they can be quite hard to hit sometimes, especially if you have a weapon like Torpedos. This would force a team of four to head over in teams of two while the others wait for a few seconds. This would give the defenders a few seconds to deal with the first wave.
In addition, people running the rustbucket, have little care for their ships as they can just get another. The risk of podding out brings little risk.