Enable self-destruct and suicide run for all ships.

posted on July 24th, 2013, 10:45 pm

Do Auto-Destruct like STO does: only activates if the ship is reduced to 25% hull. You'd have to be damn fast to make any use of it, while capturing wouldn't be hurt.

If the ability was only open to veteran ships, that would stop people from spamming suicide runs, while giving the ship a way to die honorably in battle! There would have to be a really cool-looking explosion effect to go with it, of course, and it would have to do a decent amount of damage. A damage bonus against stations with weapons would be a cool way to sacrifice your heavily damaged flagship for the good of the fleet, maybe to help take out an enemy starbase or platform.

posted on July 25th, 2013, 2:44 am

You could prevent spamming by having enemy ships take damage from self destructs at a logistically reduced amount for each sequential selfdestruct source of damage.

Alternatively or additionally, make friendly vessels take damage from self destructs as well and implement a variable self-destruct time of 0-1s causing the majority of vessels to be destroyed by the first destructing vessel and there not self-destructing.

Finally, to fix the experience problem- the system could be altered to be based on how much damage a ship has taken versus how many ships it made go boom. Which in and of itself would make a intriguing gameplay element in that your ships get better as you suck it up. This would interact poorly with my second paragraph and nebulas though; but, it could be fixed by restricted "experiential" damage to enemy sources only.

posted on July 25th, 2013, 4:47 pm

I added Dreyas' and Mr.Pistachios' ideas to the OP under Suggested variations.

To be honest I'm not a fan of changing damage per affected unit, like Mr.Pistachios was suggesting. It's unrealistic... If a grenade goes off near a single soldier, does it do more damage than if it blew in the middle of a squad? No. This is also why I favor units taking friendly fire damage from explosions.

Limiting the self destruct is certainly an interesting concept but I fear that I what I was trying to get rid of. It would be an improvement, but not optimal.

"causing the majority of vessels to be destroyed by the first destructing vessel"
That would be far too OP. To be honest I would hardly expect one vessel to be destroyed, and only minor collateral damage to be done.

One good idea I saw in another topic was changing the countdown timer to depend on the number of crew. This would explain the timer(People have to get off you know.) and also add a neat variance to the game.