Escorting is a really fun experience. It adds a lot to your trade runs, such as protection and role play. Sadly, it takes away profit which is the most important part of trading (Don't deny it, you greedy fat cats).
And then we get to our problem as aforementioned; it's all about profit. "I don't care if you've had 99999 successful SRPs, I just want my credits". Ok, that might be a generalization but it's kinda true.
So how do we make the trader still make a profit and possibly pay for an escort?
The thing is, we don't. We can't really. Human nature follows that we'd aim to make as much money as possible. Buff the trade routes so the trader has extra cash to pay? Nah, he'd probably rather keep the higher profit.
And now we reach our conundrum, we can't ensure that the trader won't harm his profit by paying for an escort. So what do we do?
We crank up the number on the hardcore switch
Sounds cheesy? It is.
Basically, borrowing ideas from other people in the community, we could encourage 'high risk high profit' trade routes. These trade routes ain't no candy-land, the trader would be covering spaces of hell that you'd be mad to go into alone. So you'd hire an escort to watch your back out in dangerous space, maybe even more than one if you want the ultimate defense.
"Hurr, I'll just stick on my Cap8 and have a battle-transport. Who needs escorts? )))"
This is probably the ultimate sin as to why we don't have escorts. Why bother hiring escorts when you can have the hull of an unarmored carrier? That poses no threat to a single pirate. A group might pose a larger threat, which may mean more escorts, but lets be honest: single pirates are far more common than groups.
Therefore, lets prevent transports from using capital ship armours.
...
Ok, I know that wouldn't work. It also sounds stupid. But I stick by saying being able to dramatically buff transport armours is what has killed escorting.
Hold this thought for now.
I was playing GalCiv2 (awesome game, but that's for another time). People who are familiar with the game will know about trade routes. I was thinking about GalCiv2 and Disco. In GalCiv2, you can create trade routes with other civilizations (blah blah blah I don't need to go over it in detail)... eventually, a route will be established. Depending on it, that route might be gold dust because money in GalCiv2 is precious (duh). Trade routes can be attacked by hostile ships, which is why escorts would be crucial for your freighters. Freighters used Cargo hulls. These things could store cargo and were super cheap, so you could make cheap ships to make money for you. However, cargo hulls had pitiful hitpoints. I once thought it'd be a good idea to turn a cargo hull ship into a gunboat by dumping 5 odd guns onto it. Never again. This is why escorts were important, because freighters had very low base hitpoints. And although the route might take longer, it would be worth it to avoid those iconian scum from shooting it down.
Ok, this is the tl;dr part.
What I am proposing is that the base hull hitpoints of all transports is nerfed. So I'm suggesting we give some of the bigger transports 50K hulls. That way, with a capital armour upgrade 8, you could get 200K hulls on transports.
"ARRRGHGHGHGHH, BUUUT LYYYYYTH, PIRATES CAN BEAT US UP SOOO EASILY NOWWWWW". Well, that's kind of the point. You'd need escorts to defend your asses. However, I can see this as something that may be problematic, so perhaps we should buff the civilian shields to have higher shield health and maybe faster recovery time?
That kinda ends this post, discuss away.
P.S I thought we were told we'd get repair ships with repair beams? Anyway, repair ships could make the ultimate escort.
EDIT: Shoot, this might need to be put into an appropriate section if necessary. Could this be dumped in Discovery Mod Discussion please if deemed so?
(10-30-2013, 10:11 PM)Haste Wrote: Actually.
I'd rather see transports made more durable. Double their hulls for all I care. Triple them if you really want to.
Why?
Because in return, we drop their impulse speed to.. Let's say, 20. We make them unable to get capital ship thrusters. We make sure their thrusters are located somewhere we can hit pretty easily.
But won't this make them sitting ducks against moderately intelligent pirates?
Yes it will.
The effect? A transport that decides to run will take about six to eight times longer to make it back to port as long as it can't cruise. More than enough time to beat down that large hull.
Another effect? A decent escort fighter will be able to turn that solo bomber pirate into a smoking pile of space debris before the transport dies.
Hurray!
Another thing I just noticed is that it kind of, well, makes sense. The largest transports approach the size of (smaller) battleships. Making their hulls similar to a cruiser isn't too far-fetched.
Of course, the exact numbers here may need tweaking.