(Please review) Design info for re-launch of AIW 2 Kickstarter

[Glyoxim]

I finally created my account here on the forums. I know I'm late but I thought of the term "Flagship" as soon as the discussion with admirals started. So I definitely support this since that's what flagships should do.
I always used the flagships in AI War classic but much more as a support unit or even defensive unit that boosts my turrets.

Now onward to reading the rest of the document 

Edit: As a questions, Keith mentioned giving some of the Flagships the ability to hack so one does not necessarily loose the Ark during hacking. In the design document it's mentioned that the Ark is used to build command stations, metal harvesters etc. (same as Flagships?). So if I use some deep-striking strategy where I skip some invaluable planets and then conquer one, do I have to bring the Ark all the way into enemy territory which is of course high risk? Can I at least put it into a transport for improved security? Because that's my main offensive strategy with colony ships in AI War Classic at the moment (I'm still learning and probably will be for a long time to come )

[Cyborg]

I also echo the comments about flagships. Good name for it.

[Vinco]

I'm looking forward to the relaunch.  You've a compelling vision laid out there.

[yllamana]

The "deflectors" label strikes me as a little confusing. It has semantic overlap with "shields." Why not just call it "agility"? You're already just one step removed from that anyway, since the implication seems to be that the deflectors allow the ships to leverage their agility to avoid shots. Then the counter to agility can be explosive missiles and flak, since you can't dodge the explosion.

And then maybe it'd make sense if "bombs" were actually torpedoes, since people usually expect bombs to do area damage, and AI War ones don't? Maybe not so much since there's a pretty strong sci-fi tradition of "bombers" that just attack hard targets, but that's not universal.

On a slightly different note: are shields fun? They seem to make battles a lot more binary - if the attacker can't kill the shield they make very little impact. This seems to me like it's pretty negative both for defense (where your defense frequently crumbles based on whether the shield drops) and offense (where shields can cause incredible grinds). Would the game be better if they just didn't exist and things were however much tougher?

When I read about them the first time, I thought squads were going to be a collection of ships, letting you group things into one unit. Reading this document, I'm getting the impression a squad is actually just a ship. Is that correct? That's perhaps a bit disappointing if so, since grouping things together and having them fight as a unit sounded interesting and like it could make other things, like what ships the AI actually has on the game field, clearer.

The document seems light on detail about how defenses will be more interesting, or how the UI will be improved. I think the UI especially is one of the things that could most benefit from improvement and I am sure people would love to hear about it and also that if you do anything really interesting it'll cause controversy.

Anyway, it's an interesting document, but people are right that you could cut out all the technical stuff, or at least refocus it on the user experience. NAT punchthrough or lidgren are boring, but multiplayer working more seamlessly and smoothly is awesome. Multithreading is boring, but bigger battles than ever before would be awesome. And stuff like that.

[x4000]

I like the idea of agility.  Given that these are shown swarming about (any sort of ship that would have agility), it would make sense in general just from an intuitive sense.

I like the term flagship as well, although I thought there was always basically one of those in a real-world sense.

[keith.lamothe]

I think "Evasion" would be better than "Agility". "Deflectors" just gives a more concrete explanation of how it's doing the evasion, and why it isn't just something that all small ships have. But understood on the conceptual overlap with "Shields".

[x4000]

I like evasion.

[Draco18s]

+1 for Evasion.

[x4000]

+1 for Evasion.

Now roll for initiative.

[Draco18s]

Now roll for initiative.

[x4000]

That's awesome.

[nas1m]

Now roll for initiative.

Sir, you just made my day .

[Captain Jack]

Hahahaha. 

Oh, I just thought of one thing that's been bothering me since the first KS. We've been using derelicts to refer to the metal and research points on the map. This almost has to be changed to "debris field", "ship graveyard" or something similar. See, I thought the derelicts were SINGLE SHIPS that were producing metal, research and so on, because derelict has a singular connotation even in plural form. Please make this terminology change to avoid confusing people like me!

[keith.lamothe]

Jack, the problem is that a lot of people really like the word derelicts. So to some extent we have to change the mechanic to fit the word

That said, I don't see wht they can't simply be an old broken asteroid mine, an old broken energy reactor, an old broken science archive, or an old broken network node (hacking points).

[Tridus]

I didn't even realize that had changed. When I hear "derelict ship", I'm thinking of an abandoned ship that I can capture and do something with, since that's the meaning of the word. Not a scrap field. Those tend to be called scrap.