First let me summarize what I see as being the major problems:
Munitions boosters are either too powerful if they are the only major source of boosting, or useless if their function can be achieved by the fleet line.
Finally, fleet starships are pretty much a must have right now(well light starships), as they not only boost, but also give a decent chunk of firepower on top of that.
Let me throw out one last idea to solve these.
It has a few key points(and borrows some ideas from previous posts):
A) remove boosting from the fleet line completely.
B) create a support line of starships, has three tiers, tier 1 munitions boosts, tier 2 munitions boosts + speed boosts within a range, tier 3 gives munitions, speed and shield boosts(say 1k,3k,5k knowledge cost and 3 ship cap).
C) limit boosting to 1x per unique source--this would mean if you have support mk 1, the max boost you can have is 2x, if you have support mk 1 and munitions mk 1, you can have a 3x boost, munitions mkI-IV, the full 5x boost.
What effect would this have? Well if you don't have munitions boosters, you max at a 4x boost, and its very expensive knowledge wise to get there.
Thus munitions boosting gives you an early advantage in how quickly you can increase your boosting, and has a higher max but it isn't the only real source of boosting.
Switching topics
Yes, if we go back to all-in-range boosting the no-stacking rule is feasible, as the higher-level ships would not have to "run" first in the boost-checking loop, the loop would just override any lower boost with a higher boost if found.
Ok, so far I'm thinking:
- make boost amount more granular (so Light Starships can apply a 25% boost or something instead of 100%, and high level munitions boosters can apply 175% or something instead of 100%) and scale the boosts from say 25% to 175% from light starship through to core starship to munitions booster I through IV.
- raise simultaneous boosting caps to 1000 or something in proportion to "how many ships could reasonably fit into the boosting range of this ship" so as not to restrict the total boosting capability in any normal case (i.e. only when spam-click force-stacking ships on top of the booster)
- if more than one boost applies to a specific ship, apply only the highest boost
- certain ships (just electric shuttles for now) will have a boost cap lower than the highest boost available (100% for the shuttles, though I guess we could make it lower)
Any objections to that?
On a related note, do others of you agree with orzelek about the Interplanetary Munitions Booster? That can be nerfed, I just wasn't aware it was in need.
Thanks!
Keith
Granularity is fine as long as precision isn't an issue.
First, I'm really not really in favor of any ship cap on the number of boosts. All that does is make swarm ships(which usually have smaller sizes and are easier to fit around starships) worse than more powerful ships with lower caps(would you rather have 250 beam frigates boosted or 250 laser gatlings?).
Making so that one ship overrides another ships boost would pretty much mean that people wouldn't bother with light starships again once they got any ships that give a better boost. I'm much more in favor of something like I gave above where you can get a boost from each unique booster in range of you. In your example, say that light starships give a 25% boost, as do flagships. If you are in range of both a light starship and a flagship, you have the 50% boost, however just being in range of a flagship shouldn't be as good as being in range of both.
Having lower boost caps on some units is a great idea.
