More RP? Thoughts on mechanics

[Trogdor]

Yeah, capital ship balance is kind of silly. There are a number of factors in play here.

On one hand, you don't want battleships to be the ultimate ship. Otherwise, no one would bother flying anything else.
On the other hand, you do want battleships to be useful.

And yes, Highland, you can totally argue that irl, carriers are more useful than battleships. However, this isn't RL, this is a game. There are a lot of factors to consider.
-The intent is for every player to have fun
-Every ship should be useful
-Unlike in RL, both BS and Carriers have little purpose right now. There's no fuel or other logistical needs that justify a Carrier other than jumping. And there aren't any large targets for battleships to kill, except POBS (and how often do you attack one of those?) and other battleships.

Disco has this odd paper/scissors/rock balance, where any given class is good at killing one class but weak against another class. Except the only class battleship is good at killing is itself. As currently implemented, everything else is either too fast to hit and will kill you, or too fast to hit and will run away.

This is how I think it should work (roughly):
Fighter is good against fighter and bomber
Bomber is good against bomber and battleship
Gunboat is good against gunboat and bomber
Cruiser is good against cruiser and gunboat
Battleship is good against battleship and cruiser

Obviously there are some overlaps here that I didn't list. Bombers are also good against cruisers, gunboats are also good against fighters. But imo, every class should be good against itself and at least one other class. All of this is already in place except for the BS being good against cruisers. For this, they would need some long-range, high-projectile-speed turrets, suited specifically for this purpose in that their turret rotation speed is slow. I really don't see why a cruiser can both out-run and out-gun a battleship. Heck, even gunboats are out-gunning battleships. It's kind of ridiculous.

I would also discourage trying to balance battleships by making it expensive for them to die. Sometimes ships die from bizarre circumstances/glitches, or they get rammed by npcs, or they die trying to undock from a planet. Remember that (ideally) these ships are also people's characters, often the ones they put the most time and effort into developing. They want to play them, not leave them gathering dust on a base for fear of having to pay the repair bill.

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