Okay, now responding to what people actually said in this thread -- the other bit was a response to an email from Cinth (he's doing a huge amount of the ship organization/design work right now), and I wanted to just get that in there first.
So, just to clarify a couple of points, the archetypal capital ship now would be the flagship, with stuff like the zenith starship and the riot control ship filling out the category? As examples of course with balance subject to change.
Well, things like the zenith and spire starships would not longer exist in anything like their current form, actually. Now that you get to choose your race, the zenith and spire starships would be folded into their respective races, not the human ones. There might be some that fill the same sort of fleet-level role in the human ranks, it's hard to say right off hand, but overall we're trying to make all the races play notably different from one another (this is what Cinth is up to).
Basically the Spire are more designed around the Imperial Fleet than anything else, so when you play as them you're really just coming through as a sledgehammer in general... but of course that also draws more notice than usual, too. So that's a pretty wildly different way to play, but entirely consistent with what we've seen of the "true spire" in the past. The AIW Classic version of the spire starship was kind of generic and underpowered by comparison, so whether it evolves, dies, or stays as a kind of baseline small unit I don't know.
In the grand scheme some of those notes about specific ships don't matter, because we can change those during alpha and during early access with quite a bit of ease; adding and removing and splitting and combining ships as needed based on player feedback and testing. We're trying to come up with a compelling and sensible first draft, but definitely you should expect it to shift a lot once it hits serious playtesting. And of course it's the sort of thing you can shift yourself with mods, too, if you like!
Its clear how 'Black Ops' would act as force multipliers in conventional fights (unconventional attack styles) but how does a parasite or a melee unit get a bonus against a leviathan? That particular link seems kinda forced. If demolition ships are no longer triangle ships, it might make more sense to let them retain their current anti-leviathan duties. Less variety that way, but it seems to make a better sort of intuitive sense.
Ignoring the specific ships, the concept of black ops to me is basically those sort of people that sneak in and do dangerous crazy things that often ends in an explosion or a dead dictator or an airstrip in enemy territory or who knows what. Obviously that's a pretty Hollywood-ized version of it, and the one former army ranger I know probably would not be thrilled with that description, but still.
Anyway, I feel like "things that are great at knocking down buildings" and "things that are awesome at sabotaging or countering giant leviathan threats" should be different ships. Ultimately I might have to rescind that in the name of clarity, but I hate that bombers can so often be the answer to _everything_. "Is it big and scary?" "Yeah." "Get the bombers." Bleh. I mean, that might be how it needs to be, but at the moment I'm not feeling the fondest of that.
There's still a few more iterations of naming to go through here too.
I'm down with that.
I don't like the term black ops, especially when cloaking is a mechanic. Black ops doesn't communicate the idea of 'force multiplier' to me, it sounds more like espionage and sabotage (I guess sabotage could thematically work vs a leviathan?).
That's kind of what I meant. Honestly these things are not pure force multipliers all the time... though some of them would be. Generally these are causing some sort of chaos in the enemy ranks, such as a ton of AOE damage from an electric shuttle, or turning friend on foe in the enemy ranks, or whipping in close and "sucking your blood," etc.
I'm cool with something other than black ops, but I do like the espionage theme here... probably. That was intentionally done, at least.
Although if 'Tactical Superiority' might suffer from the issue of being very long. Its a good description, but given the role you might consider cribbing the term 'fleet ship' because its shorter.
I think that the term fleet ship would still be used to mean "everything moves that is smaller than a capital ship." Abbreviating that as TS, or tac-sup, seems like it would be okay. We use ARS and whatnot all the time for really long names. I do see your point, though.
How do we name large ships that are not involved in the fleet oversight and combat role? Specifically, you have stuff like the plasma siege starship and the bomber starship, both of which are essentially just 'very big bomber'. They of course don't need to exist in exactly their current forms, but there will probably still be a useful niche for 'very big bomber'. Its obviously a demolition ship, but you still need to come up with a meaningful name for the unit itself that doesn't accidentally make the player misclassify it when they see it. Or maybe restrict them to just the spire and that solves itself, I dunno.
That was something Cinth brought up from a mechanics standpoint, and you've brought it up from a naming one as well. Hopefully the mechanics bit is now addressed for both of you via the above post of mine. From a naming standpoint, Bomber Starship would probably become something like Demolition Capital Ship or something?
This is a very interesting dynamic setup. Three different triangles (even if two of them are weakly associated).
Interesting good?
Hopefully this is straightforward enough to understand, versus the craziness that results from everything being related to everything else.
One question, how are you going to classify these ships in the game. Will these new Archetypes become revised Hull Types, or will you be balancing them through stats?
I think I addressed this on the document, but if I didn't then please let me know and I will. Basically it would work like this (with further clarity now that offense and defense are split on a few ships):
Offensively ship A is a...
- Tac-Sup, so it gets 2x damage against Demo, BO, and Siege
- Cap-Ship, so it gets 2x damage against Tac-Sup.
- Siege, so it gets 2x damage against Cap-Ship.
- Demo, so it gets 4x damage against structures and 2x against cap-ships.
- BO, so it gets 4x damage against leviathans and 2x against siege.
- Structure, so it gets no special bonuses.
- Leviathans, so it gets no special bonuses (but just wrecks stuff in general from high stats).
And then part 2, defensively ship A is a...
- Tac-Sup, so it gets 0.75x incoming damage from Demo, BO, and Siege.
- Cap-Ship, so it gets 0.5x incoming damage from Tac-Sup.
- Siege, so it gets 0.75x incoming damage from Cap-Ship.
- Demo, so it gets 0.75x incoming damage from Cap-Ship.
- BO, so it gets 0.5x incoming damage from Siege.
- Structure, so it gets no special protections.
- Leviathans, so it gets no special protections (but lives long anyway because of high stats).
This is hopefully a lot more clear, given the updated stuff in general.
I think the idea of Archetypes is definitely the way to go, as it makes things easiest to balance and easiest for the player to understand, but how you implement the archetypes is also very important!
Agreed. Thanks!
My greatest complaint is that the "black ops" class is simply too vague to define a specific role it can do. Specialized offense is not enough of a defined term to really mean anything. I can easily imagine a rag tag group of units fighting of levitians. I cannot see how both parasites and melee ships both have an advantage against them when other forces do not.
This is a good point. Potentially nothing gets a bonus against leviathans, and potentially these get no bonus against siege, either. Maybe they are not part of any triangle, but they are just out there to do... stuff. They aren't JUST force multipliers, but they do various random stuff. Perhaps no lines go to or from them. And perhaps they are then specialists.
And perhaps then leviathans just need you to throw as much crap at them as you can.
