Suggestion: Track number of kills for a ship

[Mikus]

Hi all,

I have a suggestion.  I don't know how hard this would be to implement, but it would be nice to be able to track the number of kills done by a ship.

I can think of at least 2 reasons for this:

1)  I'd like to know how effective my starships, or even Golems have been in wiping out the enemy.
2)  In the original Total Annihilation, units gained a a "Veteran" bonus after 5 kills.  Adding this feature could allow such a mechanic in AI War in the future.

Mostly, I'd just like to know how many ship kills I rack up in my Flagships.   

[Pandemic]

Hey dude, and welcome to the forums, where either the epically win people are, or those with no lives, depending on how you look at it .

I like this idea. Whenever I watch casted Starcraft or War3 VODs the casters always have fun with the number of kills some DT or Hero got. Fun stuff .

Not sure what this'll do to the lag though... Tracking 30 Ling counts isn't hard, but tracking 1,000 ships' counts may be difficult.


-Pandemic

[x4000]

Bear in mind that the game does already count the number of kills made by each ship count.  So if you're wanting to know how many kills your flagships have made in general, that is already available under the Stats window.  But, so far there's nothing for individual ships.  I might implement something like that in the future, it has been suggested a couple of times.

[Vaos]

I'd like to see that implemented, even without any change on the game itself. It's fun to see that one of your guys in your fleet has racked up more than 100 kills for himself.

[BoinKlasik]

At the very least it would be a lot of fun for capital class ships.  Since these are the most likely to get more than a few kills before being fodder anyway.

[HellishFiend]

As useless as it would be in most cases, I'm also intrigued by the thought of having veteran ships with extra damage or some other perk. Gameplay aside, it could add a storyline feel to the type of scenario where a player manages to keep a single fleet together throughout a large stretch of a campaign. Incidentally, it would also go very well with my "ball of death" fleet strategies....

[Sovereign]

I'm in favour of this as well, not to just jump on the bandwagon but I think Hellish sum it up nicely. Then again I'm the crazy type who enjoyed making custom names for his fleets and ships in "Stars Wars: Supremacy" or "Star Wars: Rebellion". 

[eRe4s3r]

Very well i shall proclaim my support for this as well (veterancy + stat affecting and kill stat display ,p)

But yeah, its been suggested like, the 50th time here 

[Spikey00]

+1, since it's been requested by me and others indirectly/directly a couple of times already.  =\

[Fiskbit]

I'm very much for being able to see the number of kills each individual ship has gotten so you can judge how effective that ship has been for you. For something like turret placement, this strikes me as really useful data.

However, I'm still very much against any sort of ship veterency. We don't need to have yet more complexity that players have to manage in several-thousand ship fleets. Your incentive to keep ships alive is the cost in rebuilding them, particularly with capital ships. Having inconsistency in ship stats between ships of the same type will lead only to confusion and is not something that I, while playing the game, want to be dealing with. I also know I'm not alone in wanting this feature to stay out of this game.

Surprising how polarizing that proposed feature is.

[Mikus]

Honestly, I just wanted to track kills.  I'm pretty neutral to the veterancy thing.  Though thanks for the tip on the stats page.  That does help tremendously to see kills by ship class.

[I-KP]

Kill stats: fine.  Veterancy: waste of time.  There is at least one thread that went into this at length but I can't be bothered to find it now.

[raptor331]

I guess kill stats and veterancy are a bit difficult to manage on an entire fleet, but why not just use it on starships? The number of them are few, so their firepower is not able to be adjusted to a bigger defence. The starship veterancy should work fine since there are so few of them anyways, and since they are expensive, why not make them worth it?

[x4000]

From a gameplay sense, what does veterancy add?  This is not something I have ever been clear on with RTS games that have it.  Sure, it creates an incentive to not let your veteran units die, but it's already more effective to retreat starships rather than letting them get killed (as is the case in most RTS games with centerpiece units).  So, what new interesting decisions really get added?  It seems like just another internal subsystem that adds complexity without function to me, for Starships or in general.  Having ships track their number of kills is something that I agree sounds interesting, though, especially for when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of turrets and so forth.

[raptor331]

For one, it rewards players for using strategies to minimize the casaulties. Then you got the popular rpg level up thing going on and just about every one likes that. I'm not saying you add this to all ships or even to all starships, but it would be nice for this feature to be in there.