Thank you! I have been saying this for two years. Someone from Muse send Howard over here!
They got crazy with this "low armour means faster tanking idea" awhiles back. It works on the squid and fish, not the spire.
The spire is the original gunship. Unlike the mobula, it can't vertically evade. It's too tall, and it's a risk or just damn impossible on many maps. Unlike the junker, it doesn't have a slim profile, and broadsides to dodge side to side. It's a big target at small or long range. At long a merc, and artemis pair can pull it apart easily. At short, it can't stand up to flanks, or gat/mortar pressure. It's F'ed in either range band. It has always needed something else to survive, and that's either a lot of armor, or a new "true horizontal" side movement mechanic. It needs everyone on a gun to be effective. It's only defense is a good offense. If everyone isn't shooting, it's dead. There is no other reason to bring it. In order to do this, there needs to be enough armor to absorb long and short range punishment in order to fulfill its role. The balance is in the skill of the crew, just like the junker; if you mess up your shooting, you're dead. That high armour will give you just enough time to kill, but if wait too long or mess up somewhere, eventually the armour will go down and you'll die very fast. But... that armour needs to be high enough, so that a main engineer isn't standing at the damn hull the moment a fight starts!
This is where Eric will chime in with his arrogant, smug expression saying "well if the crew is really good, or the pilot is smart, they'll ambush. Why is your engineer starting the fight at the hull anyway?" Well Eric, it's because the strength of that low armour, high health design is the fact that you can bring that armour up fast. It rewards a playstyle that has more crew repairing the hull at once. High armour=one mallet limit (effective, but risky). Low armour=many spanners (spam saves us, lose effectiveness). Low armour works really well on the squid and fish because they have speed, limited guns, and easy accessible hull for all crew (even pilot). So by this design, your spire gunship, needs your heavy weapon gunner off the gunn constantly, running halfway up the ship, while your bottom engineer needs to run the entire length. So to use that many spanners design ideally (since you gave it the low armour, I'm assuming you wanted many spanners) your pilot has to be going to the hull, not flying. What's the point of that many guns facing forward when one crew member has to baby-sit the hull the entire fight, and another engineer has to leave a gun the moment you need engines or balloon?! You just lost 66% effectiveness, and chances are all that's firing is your gunner, on a heavy weapon that are designed to NOT be stand-alone!
So either you have one engineer being very ineffective on the hull (because this design works best with, that's right, many spanners!), slight effective with no pilot or no second engineer on a gun/bottom components, or highly effective with no one doing anything but spamming spanners. That's how you design a gunship folks. I'm done with this joke, please get rid of that clown and hire a lead game designer with some humility and even more experience. It's been 3 years! Most MMO's don't last this long. You've done well with the support of a community, but you're skating on thin ice. You guys can't keep leaving balance to the whims of this amateur, it's going to destroy your company.
P.S. my partner has told me she'd give Muse 10 grand on the spot if they ever did sack him. She knows Howard won't, but she is dead serious. So if you guys ever get desperate enough and need 10 grand, she'll get the checkbook.
