So, the Attritioner isn't very popular. Not particularly surprising as an attrition mechanic in human hands would generally either be underpowered or overpowered, and tends to favor slow playstyles (nothing wrong with that, but I want fast-paced players to want these too).
While perhaps a boost to the attrition amount might be in order, I think a much more likely path to usefulness-without-overpoweredness is in giving it some kind of secondary ability. Currently I'm considering:
1) Adding a grav range; basically making these mobile grav turrets in addition to the attrition. But the "allowed speed" of the affected ships would be higher and the area-of-effect would probably be smaller, with both improving as mk level goes up. A mkV attritioner could become pretty nasty
2) Adding engine damage to the attrition. This would have to only tick once every few hp-attritions I think, or it would be too much ED, though I don't know for sure. And ultimately it could just be way OP to have _anything_ that does engine damage to every single hostile on a planet. One concern is that it could potentially single-handedly take a lot of the teeth out of exo-waves since engine damage is one of the few ways to "knock" follower ships out of the "goes lead ship speed + 5" rule. I could just have those be specifically immune to the engine attrition (not engine damage in general).
3) Adding armor damage to the attrition. A pretty safe change, I think, but I don't think it would actually solve the usefulness problem, it'd just be another takes-a-lot-of-time-to-make-a-difference ability.
4) Adding guns. They used to have them, but were taken off as they interfered with some players' usage of them: hiding on AI planets to wear them down, etc. Not sure if they can be properly hidden anyway, hmm. Some kind of selective low-power-mode thing has been requested several times by now anyway, wouldn't be impossible to make it happen for this. Anyway, one solid if uninspired way to make any of these more "utility" spirecraft more useful is to just slap a solid set of guns on them that gives them below-average-but-decent dps for service in the blob. As I say, uninspired; not a big fan of blobs, myself
And a few ideas I'm pretty against but worth mentioning for discussion purposes:
5) Adding Tractor Beams. Been there, done that (tractor platform, martyr, black widow golem), don't need to make it too common.
6) Adding Tachyon Beams. Useful, I guess, but kinda marginal.
7) Adding Repair Beams. Laughable
The MRS was bad enough back in the day.
Adding parasite damage to the attrition. Also Laughable
Goodness the insanity people would perform...
9) Add a short paralysis every 10th attrition tick or something like that. Could be interesting, but would have to be short/infrequent enough that stacking an entire cap of attritioners on a single planet wouldn't completely lock down every hostile non-para-immune ship on the planet. And even if they didn't it'd be pretty much a given that some folks would pile them all on their single chokepoint world and achieve something like a 50-75% increase in the effective reload time of most AI ships.
And so on for basically any mechanic ever in the game, though it gets a bit silly to have more than one unit like the Nanoswarm that's basically like those JRPG spells that hit monsters with like 10 debuffs at the same time
Anyway, favorites? And why? Not looking for a poll here, really, just comments and potentially new options (though anything that requires a really new mechanic is pretty unlikely right now).
