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Alliance art style
RearAdmiralZill:
Am I the only one who dislikes (put mildly) the art direction Alliance is taking for boats? The only one I feel that looks remotely ok and believable is the Magnate. I'm so used to skirmish look and feel that Alliance looks way too sci-fi for me personally. That or the skirmish ships really need a visual refresh to compensate. Opinion of course and I'm curious of everyone's.
Naoura:
I can agree. The one I kind of dislike, overall, is the Angleans. The Angleans are full Decopunk, and nowhere near enough Steam or Diesel, though I will say that the Anglean Frigate is absolutely beautiful, and I wish we'd have gotten that rather than the Corsair... *shudders* The Corsair... just... ugh.
I will disagree on you for the Stormbreaker. That is a very, very pretty cross on Steam and Dieselpunk, and the Crusader is a wonderful Steampunk craft, though I do think the balloons need to be a bit larger. The "train" look is close enough to regular Steampunk for my tastes.
Byron Cavendish:
Im with ya zill. To me the only ship that is only worth a dam visually and playstyle-wise is the magnate. The rest are all a various combinations of 1 heavy gun, with 1-2 light guns. Visually the rest don't make sense from an airship POV, and don't fit any vague definition of steampunk. The worst of them all is the Anglean one.
Unarmed Civilian:
The Chaladon ships have absurd, feathery-looking decorations in the back instead of the metal fan designs like on the Squid and Goldfish, which I think look better.
The Baronie ships are strange looking mostly because of the small balloons. If their balloons were larger, encompassing more of the hull and making them more zeppelin-esque, they would be much more believable. As it stands, they look like they must be using extremely lightweight construction (which I believe, given how squishy the Crusader is), or are heavier-than-air airships and use some vertical propulsion to assist flight (see Mobula's front fan-thingies). That said, it's still somewhat believable and at least it's pretty.
The Anglean ships look absolutely insane. In my opinion they should've gone with the Spire's more dieselpunk style (lots of black metal with wood and metal screens used in flooring, vertical construction and decoration, pointy bits like something ripped out of a factory). Instead they went with teslapunk, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a really cool if somewhat niche aesthetic, between dieselpunk and raypunk based more on the World War 2 era, submarines, fighter planes, battleships, and of course arcing electricity. However the way they've done it takes the Baronie ship problem up to eleven. They don't look like they should be able to float. The best way to resolve this would probably be complete overhaul of the balloons. As it stands, the balloons don't look nearly big enough to hold those things up, and the ships' thick metal construction doesn't help.
The Mercantile ship would be fine, but that spinny thing is based on the design of perpetual motion machines, which makes me want to rip it off and go after the shipwright who put it there. It's probably why the ship moves so slow thanks to that pointlessly wasted energy.
The arashi ship looks alright, though the balloons are a bit small in my opinion. It would look more floaty if some of the multiple balloons were just merged into one big one, as larger balloons generate more lift per amount of mass used in the balloon than multiple small balloons (has to do with minimizing surface area, like water drops, bubbles and party balloons).
In general with these designs it looks like they tried to move away from dieselpunk.
HamsterIV:
Aesthetically I think the skirmish ships convey a post apocalypse survivor mentality. There is a lot of recycled material and unpainted surfaces. There are many dents and scratches to indicate the ships have been in service for a long time. The alliance ships tend to be cleaner and newer looking, often with unnecessary embellishments. I think they are supposed to portray the rise of more powerful nation states who have the resources to spend on paint and in the baronies case stained glass and book shelves. I think the contrast is intentional to show how the world is evolving from scattered tribes fighting over scavenging rights to more complex societies. Part of the problem is we spent 4 years as scavengers and it feel comfortable with the aesthetic.
My main beef with the new ships is they feel harder to crew with 4 people. They have more fire power but are also physically bigger, forcing longer runs between components and guns. With the target rich environment of PVE it feels it takes longer for my 2ndary guns to become active while my engineers are doing low intensity repairs.
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