I've been viewing a lot of beef between the issues of balancing between fighters, bombers and capships/big fish vessels.
I've been seeing some sort of pattern that the only way things in disco would be balanced would be through nerfing and buffing entire stats, which would obviously take lots of time and tedious changes.
I don't know if this has been discussed before, but what I propose is instead a seemingly-simplistic solution:
why not have each ship class have a different armor PLATING and shield MATRIX for their respective class?
What this does is that each shipclass has its own type of hull and shield base that works similar to the auto-buff/nerf of guns-vs-shield-type damage. It works like how laser, photons and pulse weapons deal greater damage against positron shields, and lesser damage against graviton shields...
Simply put, it's another form of rock-paper-scissors, but the different ship-class armor PLATING and shield MATRIX are the choices. Fighter-type weapons deal lots more damage against Bomber-type armor and shields, but deal lesser damage against Capship-type armor and shield matrices; similarly, Capship-type weaponry punch holes into Fighter-type plating and shield matrices, but deal lesser damage against Bomber-type plating and shield matrices, and so on and so forth.
What this means that, in addition to the type of weapon versus the shield type, you also have the weapon-class of one ship versus the armor-shield-class of another.
you mean sort of like in Battletech/Mechwarrior, where there is Reactive armour and Reflective? Reactive being more effective against projectile weapons and Reflective being most effective against energy weapons.
itd be cool, but its getting things to happen which is the hard bit, there is normally less than a 1% successrate.
Would require a complete restructuring of all shields and shield types, weapons and weapon types. I doubt this would happen.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
There's nothing programmed into the game that differentiates between the armour on a fighter and the armour on a freighter. It's likely each ship would have to be programmed to take a certain amount of damage from a certain amount of guns individually, and probably through FLhook which could cause more load on the server. Furthermore, there are no classes programmed into the game for Gunboats, Cruisers and Battleships. As far as the game is concerned, they're classed as freighters.