'Splosions: When things go boom

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:50 pm

I'm not quite seeing your way of thinking.  If a ship is short-ranged, like the defiant, that means it's closer to the ship that explodes and will take more of the impact than a longer ranged vessel.  I think Adm. Zaxxon already mentioned this, but ships with weaker defensive values, such as the klingons and dominion, would fair worse than other races from this ability.  Both rely more heavily on destroyers than other races, especially in multiplayer.  (Except for Breen Avatar, but that's another story.)

Also, in large multiplayer battles where your forces are right on top of each other, you would lose tons of ships to the area effect once ships start blowing up left and right.  It would become less about strategy and more about who had the highest defensive value to withstand all the extra damage.   

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:58 pm

I agree.

I still like the the idea of pushing the ships away, or canceling out special energy though.  it could cause even mmore confusion when an entire romulan fleet cloak's as soon as their star base is destroyed.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 8:07 pm

I see your point on the multiplayer front; I'm not sure if it would be possible to code additional "attack formations" where ships would use AI to keep them a safe distance from their targets, but that would certainly amount to some extra work.

Regarding my idea for short-ranged ships having a defensive bonus, it would be exactly for the reason that they'd be likely to be closer to the explosion. In order to keep the game balanced, they would simply take less damage from explosions than ships with long weapons range, as part of a passive bonus to short-ranged ships (a system like this for certain types of damage is already being implemented in the upcoming patch, IIRC).

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 8:59 pm

so you say that smaller ships can dodge (passively that is) the space debris from the explosions?  That could give reason to say that larger ships are likely to take more damage from explosions than smaller ships.  not exactly what you said but it could work.

I still say that damage is a bad idea.  it could destroy an already crippled fleet even if it caused very little damage.

posted on December 24th, 2009, 1:52 am

I think explosions of ships should only damage targets in dogfight-range station explosions could get further (at least short, I guess medium would be more logical), and not as much damage as artificial ion storms. At least this would be considerable fair, I think.

posted on December 28th, 2009, 4:15 am

Going along the idea of the occasional warp core breach, and the fact that it only seems to happen occasionally, maybe ships that have lost engines will explode with the warp core breach when destroyed. Maybe if that is too common maybe when they lose engines and have low special energy? Lots of possibilities. I think it would be a very characterful addition to Fleet Ops to see these kind of warp-core breaches that feature so prominently in Star Trek.