The core of this discussion is going in wrong path.
All of you forget that in reality behind their fancy names the said slots are shield hardpoints - for fighter and heavy fighter shields.
I really doubt that there are so many available free shield classes to be renamed and used for separate slot for each type of equipment since there are already fighter and heavy fighter shields in use- the Devs can tell us more about it, it could be possible to create more hardpoint types but still we are limited up to 9 classes per hardpoint type. If the creating of the new hardpoint types is not possible then separate slot for every single POB equipment item is not possible on technical level.
In this line of thoughts powercore restriction and cargo restriction are not bad thing.
However you miss the main point- the stuff that is presented in the game is the untouched 4.86 beta stuff that was never finished or balanced in 2 years time.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
(09-28-2013, 09:11 AM)Govedo13 Wrote: The core of this discussion is going in wrong path.
All of you forget that in reality behind their fancy names the said slots are shield hardpoints - for fighter and heavy fighter shields.
I really doubt that there are so many available free shield classes to be renamed and used for separate slot for each type of equipment since there are already fighter and heavy fighter shields in use- the Devs can tell us more about it, it could be possible to create more hardpoint types but still we are limited up to 9 classes per hardpoint type. If the creating of the new hardpoint types is not possible then separate slot for every single POB equipment item is not possible on technical level.
In this line of thoughts powercore restriction and cargo restriction are not bad thing.
However you miss the main point- the stuff that is presented in the game is the untouched 4.86 beta stuff that was never finished or balanced in 2 years time.
Now there's a point.
If we go under the assumption that they can't make new hardpoints and are stuck with what we have, then we could tweak it. For example, carriers have two hangar slots, despite only using one. We can retool that 'heavy' slot to be the hyperspace scanner slot. That way we'd have a hyperspace scanner slot, a jump drive/cloaking module slot, and a hangar slot. So for GBs and cruisers they'd have the scanner slot and the drive/cloaking slot. For carriers they could have a scanner, jump drive, and then several hangar slots.
It can still work even if the devs can't make new slots. Then we add in the power core restriction, where only tier 2 drives can work on GBs, as the power core can't support higher tiers. Cruisers are tier 3, and bigger ships are tier 4. For traders, if we don't want them jump-trading we simply don't give them the drive slot. Freighters don't need to jump or cloak at all anyways.
Well this is entirely other topic and there is no chance with the current Dev team.
If they wanted to fix and balance the things they could do so 2 years are a lot of time.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
(09-28-2013, 09:43 AM)Govedo13 Wrote: Well this is entirely other topic and there is no chance with the current Dev team.
If they wanted to fix and balance the things they could do so 2 years are a lot of time.
Never too late to make changes. Just cuz they didn't perfect the system when it was first introduced doesn't mean they can't now. Especially when it wouldn't even take that much work. Just rename the heavy hangar slot, alter what can mount on it, change some numbers for the jump drives and bam you're done.
Really, hardest part would be adding these slots to all the ships, but that's not hard as it is time consuming.
Good luck then.
Before wasting energy of doing it and before proposing something viable use search-a lot of topics about that with many many people that proposed working solutions for fixing the base items and 0 response from the Dev team as result. They does not seems to care about it.
After having working solution in your own server then it could be proposed to the Devs and may be even then they might decide to implement it or not.
Still different working solutions made as update packages could be used on all other then the official server so the community in general could benefit from it.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
Well, I'm not gonna put in work if the devs don't care. That's just silly, I have other projects I'm working on. I can afford to think up ideas and post them on forums, but that's the extent of the work I'm putting in. After all, this isn't my mod, I'm not a dev here, it shouldn't fall to me to make their features work properly. I can suggest ways to make them work properly, but if the devs refuse to put in the work that's on them.
While the cargo limit of the equipment themselves prevents you from simply mounting everything on a battleship and doing whatever you wish, everything apart from Docking Modules use fuel to power themselves.
For cloaks, a CAU8 LAC still has something like 1500 cargo space free which, using MOX, is 25 minutes of cloaking which I'd guess was viewed as far too long - shorter bursts are the tactics encouraged. They also added the ability to stop the cloaking sequence with a CD so having many opportunities to cloak and move around undetected. Cloaks remove your CM capabilities as well, so you're a lot more susceptible to missiles and CDing.
However, the fuel will be changed to an ammo-based commodity from what I heard of the devs' plans. The cargo space remains to prevent them being used on small ships, while the actual cargo limit for smaller cloaks prevents them being used on larger ships.
Jumpdrive Mk IVs are not intended to allow solo jumping, the high cargo space require at least one transport to fuel the fleet's jump. Mk II and III are not really that different in cargo consumption (other than over time). However, the Mk III is intended for Battleships only, using the powercore requirement - likely it is a 'lore' decision for the power required to be above that of cruisers. Battlecruisers can just use Mk IIs and no more.
Hyperspace Scanners aren't really needed to actually have equipped all the time, since you can just type in the coordinates gathered in the past. Battlecruisers are actually pretty good at this with enough space to do a scan. Most Cruisers can at least mount one scanner module, The power limit here is to stop transports flying around gathering several sets of coordinates in one cargo hold's worth. Gunboats don't have the slot since they are not intended to scan either.
I would agree with you about reducing the cargo requirement for Docking Modules though, making heavy use of them on Carriers available without making their use of cloaks too great (by increasing the ship's cargo hold for example).
(09-28-2013, 11:29 PM)SummerMcLovin Wrote: While the cargo limit of the equipment themselves prevents you from simply mounting everything on a battleship and doing whatever you wish, everything apart from Docking Modules use fuel to power themselves.
For cloaks, a CAU8 LAC still has something like 1500 cargo space free which, using MOX, is 25 minutes of cloaking which I'd guess was viewed as far too long - shorter bursts are the tactics encouraged. They also added the ability to stop the cloaking sequence with a CD so having many opportunities to cloak and move around undetected. Cloaks remove your CM capabilities as well, so you're a lot more susceptible to missiles and CDing.
However, the fuel will be changed to an ammo-based commodity from what I heard of the devs' plans. The cargo space remains to prevent them being used on small ships, while the actual cargo limit for smaller cloaks prevents them being used on larger ships.
Jumpdrive Mk IVs are not intended to allow solo jumping, the high cargo space require at least one transport to fuel the fleet's jump. Mk II and III are not really that different in cargo consumption (other than over time). However, the Mk III is intended for Battleships only, using the powercore requirement - likely it is a 'lore' decision for the power required to be above that of cruisers. Battlecruisers can just use Mk IIs and no more.
Hyperspace Scanners aren't really needed to actually have equipped all the time, since you can just type in the coordinates gathered in the past. Battlecruisers are actually pretty good at this with enough space to do a scan. Most Cruisers can at least mount one scanner module, The power limit here is to stop transports flying around gathering several sets of coordinates in one cargo hold's worth. Gunboats don't have the slot since they are not intended to scan either.
I would agree with you about reducing the cargo requirement for Docking Modules though, making heavy use of them on Carriers available without making their use of cloaks too great (by increasing the ship's cargo hold for example).
My thing is that there's ways to balance it other than cargo limitation that don't exclude 99% of the ships in the game from using them.
You mention cloaks lasting for too long, you can balance that by changing the rate at which fuel is consumed. So if 1500 units of MOX is 25 minutes cloak, and that's too long, make it drain 2 mox a second.
For jump drives it's much the same way. It's not really fair or fun if battleships are the ONLY ships capable of mounting any sort of jump drive. You can adjust the jump drives, maybe even add a new one. Tier 1 would take say... 90 seconds to charge and would work with GB power plants. Tier 2 would take 60 seconds and work with cruisers. Tier 3 would be 30 seconds and work with battleships. And the tier 4 also works with battleships but lets them jump the whole fleet if they want. So battleships can choose between two different types of jump drives.
I just don't see the point in having these things exclusive to battleships. Especially since, after the rollback, most players wont have battleships. It's excluding the vast majority of players for no real reason. I mean, I myself came back specifically because I saw Discovery had these things that I hadn't experienced in FL before, bases, jump drives, hangar modules, cloaking modules. Only now I'm finding these things really don't work. Seems like the only module that works the way it should is the cloaking device. Jump drives are restricted to the biggest and most expensive ships in the game and dedicated carriers can only carry a meager two fighters.
So I figured the system could be altered and expanded in a relatively easy way, allowing ALL classes of military ships access to all these modules. The bigger your ship, the stronger the module you can use. But smaller ships should still be able to use these things, even if in limited capacity.
I just don't agree with the prevailing theory of "well, to make them balanced we'll just exclude everyone from using them!"
(09-29-2013, 12:01 AM)Colt556 Wrote: Only now I'm finding these things really don't work in the way I think they should
Added that bit for you. There's a reason they were designed and balanced as they are (with a couple of tweaks that were and could still be required but nothing extremely drastic), and I doubt there are plans to let everyone jump around wherever.
Also something I forgot to address in your reaction to Sabre's post - it really seems you misunderstood what he was going for. Everything being able to jump (which he included transports in) would reduce the transit time which is an opportunity for interaction. The basic cycle of activity that plenty of people go by is that people trade in transport to earn money for whatever they want to buy (or to maintain a base, build equipment, fulfil RP contracts etc.), which brings escorts and pirates around them, and lawfuls to fight said pirates. Taking out that "people flying places" where they can just jump to wherever they want is viewed as a problem, as it was with jumptrading. Flying across a few systems as most IDs' ZoI extends to doesn't take all that long in real terms anyway.
(09-29-2013, 12:01 AM)Colt556 Wrote: Only now I'm finding these things really don't work in the way I think they should
Added that bit for you. There's a reason they were designed and balanced as they are (with a couple of tweaks that were and could still be required but nothing extremely drastic), and I doubt there are plans to let everyone jump around wherever.
Also something I forgot to address in your reaction to Sabre's post - it really seems you misunderstood what he was going for. Everything being able to jump (which he included transports in) would reduce the transit time which is an opportunity for interaction. The basic cycle of activity that plenty of people go by is that people trade in transport to earn money for whatever they want to buy (or to maintain a base, build equipment, fulfil RP contracts etc.), which brings escorts and pirates around them, and lawfuls to fight said pirates. Taking out that "people flying places" where they can just jump to wherever they want is viewed as a problem, as it was with jumptrading. Flying across a few systems as most IDs' ZoI extends to doesn't take all that long in real terms anyway.
Using jump drives as your primary means of transit wouldn't be worth it. It's expensive to get all that fuel, or at least it should be. Besides, what gameplay truly comes from flying around? Because it's certainly not military gameplay. Fleets just go to where there's a fight and stay near where there's a fight. The gallia-bretonia war is proof enough of that. Gallic ships aint flying from leeds to loraine, they're camped in Leeds and only travel to magellan and new london.
The only gameplay that would be hurt by jump drives would be unlawfuls preying on traders. Well if freighters can't use jump drives due to balance issues, then unlawfuls can still camp the trade lanes. Also you have to keep in mind that what I want is a slot system. Meaning, if you don't want certain ships to have certain equipment for gameplay reasons, you simply don't give those ships equipment slots.
For example, you want unlawfuls to actually move around, as they and traders are the ones who benefit from this gameplay. Then simply don't allow unlawful ships to mount jump drives. They simply wont have a slot for it. Can rationale that by saying unlawfuls wont have ships on par with the houses, so while military ships can support these things, independent cruisers really can't.
That's why I want an equipment system. It allows the devs to tailor what ships can do what. Relying on cargo basically means 'nothing but battleships can use this' and that's just silly. Why the hell shouldn't house military cruisers be able to mount jump drives? But with the cargo limit, you can't go "well house militaries can use this but independents can't" you are forced to go "battleships only". A system that allows you to balance the equipment around individual ships allows for far greater gameplay than just doing it across the board.