Ok, so I'm kinda surprised at the level of dogpiling suddenly being directed at champions. At least, it feels sudden to me but perhaps that's just my perception. I was aware of concerns people had before, just not like this.
Well, people were probably sitting on it until the subject came up. I know I'd barely used them until recently.
Anyway, what I think I'm hearing is:
- Most players hate the nebulae. Too disconnected from the main game, too invariable, too long, etc.
"Hate" is too strong a word, but yes it's not something I care for. I can't focus on what's going on in the main game and what's going on in a nebula at the same time, so I basically stop playing the other game (maybe letting something build) while I'm doing a nebula. I don't really think that's a good thing, because it just makes the game take longer. Nebula length can be really variable, if you get one of those three way wars when you're just in a frigate your ability to influence the outcome is limited to the shield ability and that takes forever. In the stronger ships you can flat out assault things and it's not so variable.
(It also doesn't work that well in MP. If the champion player goes into a nebula and I'm a normal player, the two of us are now playing different games that have no connection to each other until he comes back out.)
I do like the journal entries and storyline bits in the nebulae. They're great. I also like the shorter nebulae more than the longer ones, as they're much less of an interruption.
- Many players aren't happy with the offensive response to champions (threat/threatfleet nemesis units). One explanation is that it's too similar to Hybrids in terms of the constant vicious pressure on anything not sturdily defended.
That was no doubt highlighted by the bug that made tons of them appear. But even without that, until you can get past the frigate level the benefit the AI gets for you having champions far outdoes the benefit you get. They require significant effort to ramp up, outside of what you'd typically do in the game.
- Virtually no one likes to play just a champ-only slot in MP. This isn't so much a problem with the implementation as with the lobby tooltips, etc: it just needs to make clear that you'll want to also be playing a normal slot, or at least be team-controlling somebody else's units a lot of the time.
- Also stuff like wanting more direct-use abilities, which desire I've known about (it'd be nice, but I don't think it addresses the main concerns here), and wanting more options for the response/rewards.
I'm pretty sure the second one would address the first one here. A champion that's more active in terms of abilities is going to be more fun to play as a solo unit, particularly with fleet sharing enabled where you can use it as a kind of fleet leader. With only one ability it's more of a "is shield down? cast it" type scenario and just doesn't drive enough attention to stand alone as gameplay. Making it a more active unit can help that.
- Find some way where a champion can earn growth (XP, module unlocks, ability unlocks, hull-race unlocks, hull-mark upgrades) in "normal space".
-- Would need to be:
--- At least balanceable (so it's not just "fly through the whole galaxy zerging special structures with no effective opposition or retaliation").
--- Not grindy (so it's not just "kill every guard post in the game for the XP").
--- Not insanely hard to code (nothing nearly as complex as the nebula scenarios will work here, just too hard to keep the AI and other factions and stuff from just stomping all over the sandcastles such that the champ's involvement is irrelevant).
-- One concrete idea I think would work is: having special structures on AI planets that grant the various kinds of champ growth when killed, but are also defended by nemesis units (and cause more nemesis units to go after you when killed).
-- There's also more complex ways to spin that, like having some of the structures give the benefit when killed, and others spawn an object that you then need to get back to your territory (and then you get the benefit), and others spawn a boss object that you need to kill before it gets back to the AI HW (and you get the benfit when it dies).
--- Though after all those FS shard recoveries I doubt anyone's looking for more escort missions 
-- The minion starships from the nebula factions would simply be not there.
-- The non-human mod forts could be gained in some other way, or perhaps just unlocked by a particular kind of target structure.
Maybe it should be something like hacking - the AI has shadow relics in systems to study, and you need to get your champion next to whatever building has those relics and leave it there for X amount of time to steal the relics. Once they're on your ship, you get some unlocks. There could also be a periodic event of the AI moving relics between systems and you get a chance to intercept the convoy.
Either way I think it should require a champion unit to do it, rather than just blowing the building up type scenario. A fleet is going to be helpful of course, but that's generally true anyway. Some of those could actually take place in a nebula, if it was more of a 5-15 minute scenario instead of a 30-45 minute one. (The multi way war ones should probably not happen until you're in a destroyer or even a cruiser or higher, because in those ships you're a lot more able to attack and not just shield AI ships.)
--- Also, those sound like it would motivate you to have a fleet to back your champ up, which runs counter to the champ design goal of "give you something to do when you're waiting for your fleet to rebuild". Even the "just pop the structure to get the benefit" mechanic would seem to encounter that to some degree, though perhaps not a bad one.
I guess the question here is - should that be the design goal? It can take me 45 minutes to do some of the nebulae, and TBH if it takes me 45 minutes to rebuild my fleet then I really did something wrong. Now if we're talking about 5-15 minutes while I rebuild or get a Zenith Power Generator up? Sure, that's reasonable.
I certainly think that the relic caches are a good addition to the game in the AI's hands, and it plays in with the idea that the AI is trying to develop the technology (Nemesis units are partially developed shadow ships after all). Combined with a nebula rebalance and adding some shorter scenarios for low level ships so you don't get caught in one that takes forever because you're not strong enough to do anything in it, and that might be enough to address the issue without drastic measures. (And the options to control the AI response of course. We can do that with almost everything else in the game like Golems or Spirecraft, Champions should have similar response levels.)
