Doable Capital Ship Battles

[Squidslinger Gilder]

The stuff that passes into the mind on lazy Saturday afternoons. Ok, this idea has been presented before. It is nothing new. However the problem with it has been involving how the engine could handle larger warships along with how to implement cap ship combat.

Either way it goes, we're looking at this setup needing 4v4 maps and player counts to work. Now there are a couple of variations that can be done in this.

-2v2 Capital ship slugfest
-1v1 Cap ship with escorts

To get this to work, Capital ships would consist of 8 man crews. So this means in a 2v2 slugfest we'd be within the limits of the engine @ 32 players. Escort battles would entail 1 Cap ship with 2 escorts. Now due to the size of the capital ship, I'd say there would need to be restrictions on the escort vessels. Limit them to light class warships only or just no Galleons.

Why? Because it would suck big time doing 2 Cap ships + quad Galleons. You know it, I know it, new players are the only ones who don't know it but they don't count.

Mechanics of Cap ship battles would be a bit more in depth than regular battles. For example:

1- Cap ships have more than 1 hull.

a. Say we split the ships into 4 quadrants. Each section gets a hull. When the hull dies, that part of the ship goes dark or say gets blown off/etc. Probably just go dead so it isn't overloading the animations.
b. Each quadrant handles a different task. Guns + Balloon or Engines + Balloon
c. Balloon system is armored and linked to two of the hull points. So when the armor drops, using flecette rounds impacting a hull point that has a balloon will cause it's perma to drop faster.
d. So optimal kill order will be to focus on the two sections of the ship which house the balloon hull points.
e. However, remaining hull points will be linked to heavier gun batteries or say AA turrets/defensive points so ignoring them and focusing on the kill points may not always be the best idea.
f. Engineer duty would be shifting between which hulls to keep up and which to sacrifice. Ideally you'd want 2 dedicated to sticking to the main 2 hull points with roamers and maybe another 2 being semi dedicated. 1 engineer can in no way maintain a single hull. Probably needs 3-4 engiees to keep one from collapsing.

2- Cap ships can destroy escorts quickly

a. In an escort battle you'd want escorts focusing fire on certain targets and drawing engineers away from others. However, cap ships would need to have firepower to be able to sway the pesky escorts down.
b. Heavy weapon slot added to the game. These could potentially be used for major hardpoints like Sky Torpedoes for cap ship combat, or say add pom poms for AA defensive turrets to chew up escorts.
c. Escort flying into the broadside of a Cap ship should mean dead escort

3- Cap ships will have blindspots and weak points. Pilots get new tools

a. Pilots will be very limited in vision. Relying more on crew members for spotting and steering.
b. New tools added. Claw will still have a use but as the cap ship is a slow lumbering behemoth, the pilot wouldn't be needed. So to make them needed a new pilot bridge is added with new tools which are cap ship specific.
c. Pilot's bridge works more like the boiler room concept idea others have posted. Distributes power and aides in recovery time of the vessel. Pilot would be the master conductor, steering and putting up defensive or offensive buffs in a moment's notice to be able to take down the enemy cap ship.
d. Tools balanced. Can't keep defensive or offensive buffs up at all times.

4- Gunners made useful

a. Gunners would be the only ones able to fire heavy mounts.
b. Other buffs, new ammo types that are gunner specific? Something to make them a must have or cause crews to try to bring at least 2 to the battle.

Would this generate long range battles? Likely. This is the downside.

Propose solution for this is limit the effectiveness of light weapons. So say the captain/conductor's buffs cause light weapon's damage to be partially absorbed on the hull points. Engineers can easily maintain against this, however the buff will not work on sensitive hard points or engine blocks. So a sniper battle could still soften up a capital ship to allow approach.

As far as gun mounts and how many, that is up to debate. Likely would want a mixture of small and mediums along with the big heavy mounts. Some cap ships could have more of some sets than others. So if in a 2v2 cap ship battle, you could have one cap ship that is better at suppressing the enemy, then the other which is just the big boom boat.

Alright there, Saturday ramblings done. Go nuts.

[GeoRmr]

GUNNERS ARE USEFUL ALREADY GOD DAMNIT

[Frogger]

GUNNERS ARE USEFUL ALREADY GOD DAMNIT

oh, sweet! so they nerfed the buff hammer last patch?

[macmacnick]

Gilder, did you have SWTOR in mind when you made this post?
Oh, and when a portion of the ship goes dark, maybe make it so that the affected conducts damage to the nearest hull quadrant, or acts as an increasing damage multiplier, and aesthetic-wise, maybe have it so it looks like the portion has exploded, but the deck is still there and the components are broken beyond repair.


Also, for the gunner turrets, might I suggest something such as a set of gunner controls, that controls two turrets possibly? Say one gunner could get on at a mounting hardpoint where they would use the controls to control each together, maybe by default:


First Turret
W: Pivot Gun Upwards
A: Rotate Gun Left
S: Pivot Gun Downwards
D: Rotate Gun Right
E: Fire Gun


Second Turret
I: Pivot Gun Upwards
J: Rotate Gun Left
K: Pivot Gun Downwards
L: Rotate Gun Right
U: Fire Gun


This would allow for the gunners to make themselves useful, where they could also have a vantage point separate from the gun, which could be limited in turning arc to the approximate gun arcs of the turrets, and would also allow for a separate "Gunner Deck" where each gunner would be able to fire turrets mounted on the ship, say control one turret on each side of the ship, of which there would be a total of four turrets, and the gunners would require communication if they wanted to exploit the turrets in a bifecta, as they would have a degree of overlap. This separate mounting hardpoint from the gun hardpoint could also have a backstory, say "Captains want to keep their gunners safe, and not as targets, due to the value of an expert gunner, thus they developed a system allowing for gunners to control their guns separate from the gun itself."

[Squidslinger Gilder]

I run a SWTOR guild but no I wasn't thinking SWTOR at the time.

Ooo, nice ideas Macmac! Yeah that would be great for a quadrant going down. Eventually the pilot's defensive or offensive buffs would not be enough as the dmg increase from the lost sections would cause the ship to collapse.

Could also just remove the balloon factor entirely. Make it implied that it's part of the 4 main systems. Each system going down hinders the movement or stability of the vessel. So say one half the ship goes dark, you could have it visibly listing to one side a little. Or do 4 separate balloon systems in each section. If the hull drops you lose it entirely but an enemy could say take out a balloon in one section and cause the ship to list which screws up the gun arcs.

[macmacnick]

...what would be an interesting idea is to mount a massive weapon on a turret on the ship, such as the Heavy Howitzer, which would be slow to aim, but also slow to power-up and *maybe* have the time it takes to recharge between shots directly linked to a "generator" component on the ship, so as to incentivize the keeping up of said component, as if it goes down, the gun would not charge up at all. Sort of like the diminishing returns, but on a larger scale. As a bonus, maybe the cooling effect of chem spray could act as a buff for the component, say the cooling allows for it to work at a greater capacity for a short period of time, and the extinguisher's cooling effect would do the same for its 3 seconds of being active. Huge Dakka.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Oh thats easy. You have the gun on a rail inside the ship. When it fires, it is sent backwards into the vessel. Then to fire again it needs time for the gun to be pushed back into place.

Quadrants going down impact the reload time drastically. It would be a weapon where you'd get maybe 1 shot per min or two. Then each section going dark increases that time another minute.

As far as the dmg level goes. If a shell hits any escort vessel, it instagibs it. If a shell hits another capital ship, it immediately removes the armor from the section it hits. Doesn't kill, but then it is a frantic mad dash for the engineers to rebuild before the exposed spot is hit. If a shell impacts on an exposed section, it of course instagibs it.