Make damaged stations more realistic!

posted on July 24th, 2013, 9:27 pm

Back in Armada II, damaged and derelict stations were a frequent sight. It made sense to disable a station, forcing its owner to sit and wait for it to repair, or demolish it and build a new one. It was also relatively easy to take over an enemy's damaged orbital metal mining facility once life support had been disabled, allowing the new owner to reap the resources gathered by the facility.

Why is it that in Fleet Ops, a mining station, for example, remains in perfect working order almost right up to the moment that it catastrophically explodes from taking too much damage? A player who is able to deplete more than 90% of a station's hull points should be rewarded with a system or two (life support) being disabled, don't you think?

Since I'm making a whole new thread, I may as well put another related idea I had in here: I would like to see mining stations have a new subsystem that needs to be online in order for miners ships to dock with it. If the docking subsystem gets knocked offline, mining ships will not be able to offload their resources, because the station's docking ports have been damaged. I believe it is reasonable and realistic that an intact mining station with life support could lose the ability to dock with miners, especially having its hull exposed to powerful weapons fire and the vacuum of space.

posted on July 24th, 2013, 9:39 pm

Let's try not to apply too much realism to a Star trek based game hey Otherwise you could argue back that if a system got to 10% whole then nobody would realistically be able to salvage as it would be damaged beyond reasonable repair, ie cost and crew loss and so on. Hell im pretty sure if a station got to 10% health or a ship got to 5% health it would blow up no matter what on it's own. Think of all the Star Trek episodes where a few good hits made the warp core go critical...

Remember fleetops doesn't play like A2 where everything was much faster and all the ratio's are different but you can steal mining stations in flops quite easily with B8's on the dominion or the borg forcing a play to deconstruct it before you capture it and thanks to the strong hull it is worth stealing as depending on your race you can then start using it straight away. Also flops focuses on fleet to fleet engagement not fleet to station since they can't move so you'll find the game tries to make sure this happens. Finally for the sake of raiding balancing it would be pretty annoying if romulans or klingons could easily cloak, render your station useless and then get out again instead of focusing on your miners.

As for the second idea, well that would require pain staking effort to get working if you even could as you'd either have to make freighter docking a new subsystem instead of a classlabel weapon and so far I haven't seen anyone create a new sub system or two, modify how the classlabel works which again requires loads of effort when there are much bigger things to work on

posted on July 27th, 2013, 12:21 pm

it would be good if it had visable damage like in a2, but that didnt look brilliant it would probably take alot of time to make a good looking version. as for the system damage that cloaked ships could do i have to agree with redmanmark it would be a balance problem.

posted on July 30th, 2013, 4:12 pm

Yeah, it'd be nice to have visible damage, and maybe the weapons should like get weaker or something until repeaired.

posted on August 9th, 2013, 6:15 pm

I think something like this would be pretty neat.

@75% hull: a chunk of the station gets "blown off"(actually would be a sod change)
@50% hull: two additional chunks
@25% hull: subtract four more chunks

posted on August 11th, 2013, 1:06 am

Do it like in Klingon Academy where you could see dead bodies floating out in space.

posted on August 11th, 2013, 2:05 am

Also be cool if damaged/blown off modules could emit sparks similar to what you see on the nacelle of the reliant in TWOK.

posted on August 11th, 2013, 6:07 pm

Also be cool if damaged/blown off modules could emit sparks similar to what you see on the nacelle of the reliant in TWOK.

Do it like in Klingon Academy where you could see dead bodies floating out in space.

If this is the case there should be an option to turn it on or off. My fps would drop so hard... From 15 fps...