posted on December 6th, 2011, 1:17 am
Last edited by
Tryptic on December 6th, 2011, 1:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
I just got done posting in the Chonaq thread about how I think late-game cloak detect is more powerful than people think. To be fair, I realized that it isn't always that easy for the feds, when the enemy is really good at sniping your scouts. The Romulans have this problem too, but their late-game spike damage is high enough to kill enemies before they can cloak.
When someone is being harassed heavily, it can be frustrating to have their scouts blown up over and over, especially considering how long those suckers take to build and that you can't build new miners at the same time. So I thought, "how can we make this easier on them without breaking the current system?"
How about reducing their build time? An industrial upgrade to the starbase that allows them to be built much faster in the late-game, when you need them in numbers far greater than in the early-game. But I know there are already a ton of ODF files for the starbases to track their offense and defense upgrades, and this would just add more.
Then I thought, why not integrate it into the existing defense upgrade? Tritanium is the utility resource, spent on various upgrades that support your main dilithium-based fleet, so it matches up perfectly. Yes, this would encourage people to upgrade their defenses resulting in a more drawn-out siege (which I consider a bad thing overall) but you could simply reduce the defense bonus a little to compensate.
I'm thinking something like this:
Constructor build time reduced by 5% per upgrade, down to 90% of normal
Miner build time reduced by 10% per upgrade, down to 80% of normal
Scout build time reduced by 25% per upgrade, down to 50% of normal
I know in the beginning of the game it's important to limit how fast people get additional scouts, but as the game progresses people have more important things to think about. Reducing the build time is only a small help in some cases, but if a fed finds himself in a bad situation where people keep killing his scouts over and over, this could really help ease his frustration. It also helps with building new miners, of course, allowing people to use their excess tri to lower the impact of enemy raiding just a little bit.
A cost reduction would also be an option, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Maybe for fed scouts ONLY, because of the situation I described above. I think if a fed is able to bring in 5 scouts to ping the battle, it will greatly improve the fun of the game and make the balance of cloaky ships less extreme. Actually, they already CAN do this, it's just annoying because it takes so much time to get them out so most people don't bother even when it's the right way to deal with the situation.
What do you guys think?
