An idea I've floated to a few players in the lobbies, and now that I figured out how to access the bleeding Forum I can actually leave it here where it can be critiqued to pieces.
The Dreadnought. Massive, 8 man crewed ships with power and strength to give the enemy an existential crisis, and let the players truly go toe to toe with bosses as they come.
These would be very heavy ships, slow and extremely well armed, but still difficult and requiring skill both by the captain and by the crew to man them. These Dreadnoughts would take up the space of two ships, gaining both of their crew while occupying both slots. In combat, it would be heavy and slow, but different dreadnoughts would have the chance to attack in a varying number of ways. They would be command ships, raid leaders, and act as a kind of defensive platform, guarding the smaller ships from either Titans or from waves on waves of enemies, acting primarily as the flagship for the team.
Now, the balancing of this ship is... a little odd. It's so heavily armed and armored that just making it slow is not nearly enough to make it balanced, especially while it's moored in the middle of a swarm of bot-boats and putting out enough fire to level a small city, so the general slow-speed-high-armor balancing wouldn't apply. So I devised a way to make them still fun and intensive to crew: Multiple hull and balloon repair points. This sounds counter intuitive at first, but hear me out.
The idea for the armor would be that the armor is now counted in a limited way as a component. Say you are on a Dreadnought that has two armor points, one on the port and one on the starboard. If you begin taking damage on the starboard side, the armor point on the starboard side will take damage, leaving the port side armor point unharmed. "But wouldn't that mean you just have to have one armor point active to keep your ship from taking perma damage?", no, no it wouldn't because of the second part of the "armor component" theory; should the Starboard armor fall, you will still take perma damage from the Starboard side, but it will be reduced. So, saying that you have a ship that has two armor points, if one point goes down, then half of the incoming damage would go to the hull, and the other half would go to the still active armor point. In the event of three armor points, then the damage would be spread across the hull and the two remaining armor points, 1/3rd to hull and 1/3rd to each of the armor points still active. This is supposed to somewhat simulate the weak points that can be found on Boss ships, and to keep it fun *Coughstressfulcoughcough* for the engineers. It also encourages the captain to try and switch the side that the ship is taking the majority of its damage, attempting to twist hard to put the still armored side to the source of incoming fire in order to minimize the damage taken to perma hull.
A similar strategy would be applied to the balloon repair ponts, where multiple balloon repair points would be required to keep the ship afloat. If one goes down, then the ship will become less responsive to elevation commands, and on heavier ships will slowly begin to descend, the rate of descent and the responsiveness both increasing/decreasing as more balloon points fail. Damage on balloon points, however, would be spread equally across all points instead of being on the component system. If you take, say, 50 damage to the balloon on a ship with two balloon points, then both of the balloon points would take 25 damage. This means that, for full effectiveness, both points would be required to be repaired, but that they would not fail as quickly, since the damage is spread out.
On a ship like this, firepower goes without saying. Bristling with weapons like an angry procupine of war, the Dreadnought would be a floating existential crisis. I don't think I even need to go on in this regard. It's a Dreadnought. Enough said.
I can also see another game mode that could be developed out of crewing aboard a Dreadnought class ship, a kind of survival mode, or else a Capital Clash, where Dreadnoughts face off against Boss ships and their escorts in a wave-based mode, or else the mode that Luharis mentioned, where you have to hold out for a certain amount of time for reinforcements against a heavy enemy presence. Putting these ships in either Assault or Defence would make them extremely powerful, so I would say they would be limited to either Hard or Hell modes in order to maintain balance and to make the experience more enjoyable.
Any and all criticism is happily accepted, and I hope it is at the very least entertained as a thought. I would just relegate this type of ship to Alliance mode, as in Skirmish... well, I'd rather not go up against that. It might be fun as a kind of tactical fight, but Skirmish is delicate enough as it is. It'd be easier to keep this to Alliance mode in order to have the massive armada fights we all hope for and love.
