Escape Pods

posted on June 18th, 2011, 12:31 am

Just an idea (stolen from other places)

Research: Escape Pods


When a ship is destroyed, there is a chance that some crew may escape. When these ships are picked up by friendly vessels, they will join the crew and offer their expertise to the ship.
* Rescuing an escape pod gives a ship a small experience boost.
* The escape pod's experience value is based on the rank of the ship that the escape pod came from.
* Escape pods have scout level targeting characteristics (i.e. last on the hit list)
* Destroying escape pods gives no experience.

posted on June 18th, 2011, 12:48 am

I'd be down to see a ship of Officer rank or Higher do this.

  Like if an officer vessel is destroyed it "creates" a unit that is similar to the Dominion Probe in that it cannot be targeted.  I'm quite sure that there is a way to have units like that be neither targetable nor auto-fired on.


 
  Pretty neat to see an Officer vessel release an escape pod that gives a rank to whichever vessel picks it up or transports on it.  A veteran might give 2 ranks .

  That would be a pretty neat idea in some fashion once it's implementable.

posted on June 18th, 2011, 12:53 am

Non-targetable I'm not sure would be good, not for the Dominion or Borg at least.

posted on June 18th, 2011, 1:08 am

True, Borg might not benefit from that much... :0

  However... if the escape pod was on a timer .... a battle might occur where a vet or officer is destroyed and leaves an escape pod.  It may then encourage the losing player to come back and be ravaged even further by the Borg in an attempt to reclaim that escape pod!


  Of course ... this would affect balance enormously, but there's no harm in having some imagination!

[Anonymous]

posted on June 18th, 2011, 1:24 am

Last edited by Anonymous on June 18th, 2011, 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

This is would make a great officer ability for a ship or two.  The other ships just can't get their pods to work as well!

OR

Make it an avatar bonus.  Perhaps if Mayson's abilities were different, then he could have this trait instead of defensive bonuses at the antares yard.  There would be a 10% chance for the escape pods to happen, and then they go to the nearest vessel you have and give you XP, but not a free rank up. 

posted on June 18th, 2011, 4:34 am

I really like this idea but my only concern would be how to implement it.  I haven't really looked into the core of FO files but I'm fairly certain a separate ranking system would have to be implemented for this to function correctly....feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.  Now the difficulty of that, I cannot say because I have not looked into the inner workings of the game/mod. 

posted on June 18th, 2011, 10:29 am

i love the idea itself. but veterans are already a serious pain in the bottom to get rid of, and if they give even more after death it could get too much.

posted on June 20th, 2011, 3:36 am

So what if instead of keeping all the rank if the ship loses a rank (that would make a vet a rank 4 as well) call it acclimating to a new ship.

posted on June 20th, 2011, 5:34 am

Personally I say no to this, my big concern is one for balance with the borg who wouldn't be able to utilize this at all but also the fact that when you get a vet it shouldn't be something you can be dumb with either so the escape pod kinda lets it have a second life when vets are hard as hell to kill anyways

posted on June 20th, 2011, 7:31 am

...

Couldnt agree more. Plus this feature might be totally overpowered against players with real good micro.

The idea of an escape pod itself isnt that bad at all. Maybe in another direction? Let's say you can research "abandon ship", so you're able to self destruct and abandon any ship and regain 20% of its support cost. Which would of course benefit the late game of all races.

posted on June 20th, 2011, 12:52 pm

I know that when I read this, I wasn't thinking of matching the same experience.  For example, if a vet died, and someone picked up the escape pod, you wouldn't get a vet out of it.  You would only get experience, thus only raising the rank up level by one if at all depending on how much experience they give.  For example, they might just give the same experience that a brel has.  It's possible that it's not the right move, but it's an interesting idea.

posted on June 20th, 2011, 9:24 pm

I think if the escape were targetable it wouldn't be unbalanced at all. It's like those pilots in C&C Generals, who left their planes after destruction and simply ran to the next one. You could kill them easily, making it not that strong. I agree with not keeping the rank though, only give one or two ranks.
An additional idea would be to board these in order to get prisoners and scout info(an idea specifically for Dominion). If you board Romulan escape pods, those cowards will betray the star empire and you may use the rank up for your own ships .

posted on June 21st, 2011, 4:25 pm

Another main question remains (for my topic as well):
is this escape pod / shuttle feature including a "give away rank" technically possible with armada / FO???

posted on June 25th, 2011, 2:17 pm

One way I can think of to make it work would be just to make the pods targetable, and destroy them for the experience.  It would be assumed that the survivors were beamed off before the destruction of the pod (which would just take up space on the rescuing ship). 

If it was possible to set up a team for the pod that only gives the experience to allies, that would be perfect.  If not, justification for giving the experience to an enemy could be that they captured and interogated the survivors for their own benefit.

It would be best if the pods were small and hard to see, and had to be manually targeted.  The destroyed ship could send off a homing beacon to friendlies as it dies to inform that there were survivors.

posted on June 26th, 2011, 1:25 am

a concern I've heard around the escape pod idea is that escape pods take up way too many resources when it comes to generating the game. I think that the escape hide idea is good also has to take in the concern of how many resources the escape pods are taking up.

that I Daca cola has posted in the past that ships are created in such a way to use a certain amount of shapes to minimize the amount of resources taken to create the ships. So I suggest using escape pods on a individual basis otherwise resources will disappear very quickly in the game will not function as it's designed