Mining Freighter

posted on January 11th, 2009, 3:24 pm

How come every race's Freighters (except the Borg) have the same cargo size? Wouldn't they be different?

The Federation one has 4 average sized bays.
The Klingon one has 6 smaller bays.
The Romulan one has 1 large bay.
The Dominion & Borg ones are likely a Cargo Bay with engines.

posted on January 11th, 2009, 3:31 pm

I think there should be an outpost capeable  of mining and some defense/offensive Skills might be aboard too...

posted on January 11th, 2009, 7:46 pm

i do too, i think that it would be cool to let some of the mining and construction have some abilities, kligons can obviously become the ktinga class, you could make romulans cloak, idk about dominian, borg are fine, and then you could have the feds have a small phaser, worth maybye 10, and then you could have a mining that has the equivalent of two pulse phaseres or somthing, or a super mining station, with two mining bays

posted on January 11th, 2009, 7:57 pm

I've always thought it kinda odd that a military would leave their most important of all units unarmed... seems thats it's just s rule in RTS's though. I like the idea for a mining station with two or more bays. I think the Dominion should have such a station, because for some reason they have the slowest income of resources (this is because the cost of their units is slightly ridiculous)

posted on January 11th, 2009, 8:01 pm

well i think the borgs resources need to be tweaked for one, but im not talking about big guns on the mining freighters, just specialities like i mention , the cloak, defensive phaser, and for the feds you could make it so they have fighteres escorts, like the runabouts on ds9, just an idea

[Anonymous]

posted on January 11th, 2009, 8:34 pm

Last edited by Anonymous on January 12th, 2009, 1:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I've always thought it kinda odd that a military would leave their most important of all units unarmed... seems thats it's just s rule in RTS's though. I like the idea for a mining station with two or more bays. I think the Dominion should have such a station, because for some reason they have the slowest income of resources (this is because the cost of their units is slightly ridiculous)

yes. the Dom are a little heavy on supplies. we need to have a way of having the supply miner not having to trade off a moon or station with a dilithium or trilithium gatherer.
I would rather increase the cargo load that a single miner can mine - that way while the dilithium/trilithium collector is unloading his load the other miner can collect supplies.
the key point however is while the miners are orbiting a moon - we usually have more than 1 orbiting at any given tome for resources - about 3 or int he case of the borg 2 (due to their increased capacity).

In any case, teh miners wait in turn 1 at a time. so regardless of whether we have more docks for a supply gatherer and miner, or just 2 docks for 2 miners, weneed to allow the miners to mine more than once at a time at any moon.
this would be something that the developers will need to consider in regards to game balancing and overall side advantage/disadvantage.
it should be noted that the Dominion are notorious for pumping out ships at a rate higher than any other race.
So while we have accounted for the borg being strong in game taking the above average strenght of borg ships into account, the devs should try to incorporate this intrinsic Dominion strength as well.

So while the borg are fine with the higher capacity, the dom should be tweaked at least to allow simultaneous gathering from the moon if 1 miner is for supplies and the other is for dilithium/tritanium.

The rest are typically alpha quadrant and are fine as is, the varying bay sizes being mutually compensatory at 150 .

posted on January 12th, 2009, 12:21 am

Remember, it's gotta be balanced AND allow easy harrassasing (otherwise RTS's would fall apart)...
Plus RA3 had harvesters with special abilities (Soviets had armor that deployed, EoTRS had a minigun that could be deployed)

posted on January 12th, 2009, 1:05 am

Hey, no need to snap at me, I was just pointing out that not all RTS's do have identical harvesting abilities... but harassing enemy harvesters is always a necessity. Thus while giving phasers to a harvester may be ok (and definitely increasing loads or decreasing based on race), beefing up a harvester with armor will probably be rather detrimental to strategy unless the ship gets less cargo room or something like that (harder to quickly disable the freighter and get out before response... thus you may lose a few ships). It is important that we discuss balancing suggestions as well, because that is part of the reason that the destroyer spam issue was fixed. Not discussing balance on the other hand is part of the reason why some forum members are adament that the FO team is wrong in relation to the Galaxy thread (aka, making it much more powerful).

I by no means ever meant to imply that Cubes should be as easy to destroy as Sovs (hence my remark about RA3 differences) as balance does not imply that all sides are the same, just that while one side has advantages, it must also have compensatory disadvantages. Likewise I was not stating that the developers did not know how to balance (merely that we should never leave that out of our discussions). Please don't put words in my mouth as my comment was not meant to be hostile in the first place.

posted on January 12th, 2009, 1:36 am

Increasing the number of bays would be no different from the way the Klingon Field Yard is done.

On the other hand, you were aware that this thread was about the freighters cargo capacity?