So, normally I'd put these kinds of stuff in the Mantis, but this... well, it'd be a pretty major shift, so I figured I'd put it here instead. The basic concept is simple enough: A "transport" that allows ships inside it to fire (and be fired upon).
So why would this be good? Well, most of my games lately have basically spired into the old "deathball" mode of battle, with splitting off forces to take care of the eyes before bringing the main force in. Needless to say, having ~4000 ships fly around in a group... well, as we all know, it tends to get a bit laggy after a while, and ships don't get as responsive to enemies while on FRD.
So, the solution is to have fewer ships, which by using a smaller ship cap would kinda remedy. But even on a smaller ship cap, you can still get too many ships in the late games. Thus, the solution of being able to combine several ships into one massive ship.
When it comes to this ship being in battle... well, I can see that working in various ways. One way would be to have it be more or less identical to carriers, in that ships just add to the DPS of the big ship, which would be the easiest solution. Another would be to have all ships inside the big ship fire independently (with its own shots per second, reload timer, range, etc), which, at least to me, would be the preferred way of doing it. When fired upon, the same solutions would come to mind: It either automatically targets the first ship in the group, and kill the ships one at a time (ignoring attack multipliers), or it would semi-randomly target the individual ships inside, which would mean they would more closely resemble the current method of combat.
The one problem I haven't solved would be the static defenses, i.e. mines, tractor beams, etc. One solution for tractor beams would be to introduce a type of "tractor resistance", which would mean all ships could be set to be more or less resistant to tractor beams, and those resistant (instead of immune) would simply have their speeds reduced while tractored.
So... That's basically the gist of it. Thoughts or comments?
