Aw man I'm bored what should I do I KNOW IT'S TIME TO SCREW WITH WHAT DISCOVERY'S LONGSTANDING TRADITIONS AND DO SOME OFF THE WALL SUCKERPUNCHES
Right, so we all know that this game hasn't been growing a playerbase since 2012 and a lot of the weirder mechanics just don't resonsate with new people. So let's talk about one of the traditionally more baffling ones: armour upgrades.
HISTORY TIME: Up until recently, armour upgrades came in eight flavours ranging from "better than nothing" to "what everyone actually uses in combat so there's no reason to buy anything else", and that top tier armour cost seven times as much as your ship. Then one day we ripped the other seven armour types, cut the cost of the remaining Armor Upgrade to a third of its original cost (inducing a frankly impressive amount of complaints about *checks notes* how devalued everyone's ships were now that they were less expensive to fit). Everything got a lot simpler, but reduced the appearance of variety.
Capital ships and transports, however, were not so lucky. Their armour situation still sucks: you can fit the standard 2.5x fighter armour upgrade (which costs 5.25 million credits), or you can fit one of eight types of progressively more expensive armour upgrades, from the now completely useless and baffling Heavy Armor Upgrade I for 2.25x (3 million credits) and Heavy Armor Upgrade II for 2.5x (8 million credits and a whole bunch of "why woul you do that") to the "I could have bought two battleship hulls" Capital Armor Upgrade VIII at a whopping 4.0x armour for nine hundred million credits.
Now, on all ships, you're effectively expected for PvP to have at least 2.5x armour. But this isn't exactly understood for new players, and just a money sink for existing players, some of whom may actually just be new players who rubbed some trains of thought together and realized that, hey, this armour upgrade thing is seriously useful, I bet anyone who wants to shoot at me will have it, I better get it OH GOD THAT'S A LOT OF MONEY, and can't afford that. They then get absolutely dumpstered on by the first nuke mine that someone drops in their area code because their Guardian has a one-shot EHP of 11000, not 27500 (11000 × 2.5). This game sucks, I'm going back to World of Warcraft / EVE Online / Age of Wushu / competitive Tetris.
Aight enough talk Kaz what's the idea WELL I'M GLAD YOU ASKED GOOD PLAYER OF DISCOVERY FREELANCER because much like X, I'm gonna give it to ya:
Step 1: Make the Armour Upgrade a free item that is stock on all ships purchased, subcapitals and capitals. Step 2: Make existing Armour Upgrades sellable for 5.25 million credits so we don't end up with that thing again where people drop a hot one in their jorts because they just lost a battleship hull's worth of dosh across all of their accounts. Step 3: Remove HAU I and II because literally no one buys them at all. Keep other HAUs and CAUs because we still need to remove money from the economy somehow. Apparently this was already done at some point, cheers for pointing that out Snak3
Now, before I go on, it's time for a short installment in a series I like to call "The Freelancer Engine is Equal Parts a Pile of Garbage and Hilariously Resilient". Turns out the game just lets you add more of some types of equipment on and it'll just add the numbers for them together and let you go about your day. So, if you have a shield with 10000 capacity and 50 regen, and you also equip a shield with -1000 capacity and 10 regen, the engine goes "yeah sounds good dogg you've got 9000 capacity and 60 regen" assuming you've done some things with the equipment entries and toughness values that otherwise make NPCs do funky things. This is what we call an excellent way to add customization options and also a brilliant replacement money sink for the fact you've slashed the cost to fit a ship for PvP by 5 million credits.
Step 4: Add new fitting options that take things like weapon slots or a countermeasure slot or one of those special equipment slots we never got around to using for anything and gives you a few extra shield EHP or more shield regen at some minor drawback. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT ADD THESE TO THE POB SYSTEM. STOP ADDING STUFF TO THE POB SYSTEM. IT IS A TERRIBLE GRINDY MESS WITH IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEMS. STOP IT. DON'T EVEN FRIGGIN THINK ABOUT IT. BAD. BAD DEVELOPER. NO. Step 5: Enjoy more customization options and a lower cost to entry that make the game feel less like the 15 year old mess of hacked together ideas that it actually is.
I'd say "discuss" but this idea is so objectively good in every way that having an argument over it instead of implementing it right away would be an absolute crime. I will literally write a diff to do this myself if you will push it to live.
TL;DR: make AU8s free in all newly bought ship packages, refund the cost of the existing ones by making them sell for their current buy price so people don't pitch a fit, delete HAU1 and HAU2 since they're irrelevant, keep everything else, add new customization items which we'll talk about in more detail in a later post
Would it not be easier to just multiply all huls by 2.5, remove bad armors [AU1-HAU2] from game or make their multiplier 0.0, and then adjust remaining armor multipliers to have as close total hull points (even though armors actually lower damage) as previously, while perhaps rounding up the multipliers to look nice on infocards?
The fundamental issue comes down to "even though armors actually lower damage", namely a side effect of that. With armor reducing damage, nanobots are proportionally more effective - if you're shot for 50 damage and nanobots heal 200, one bot heals four shots. If armor reduces that to 20, however, one nanobot heals ten shots.
You could sort it out by also merging bots with hull. This also reduces the risk of instakills further, whether that's good or bad is apparently up for debate.
Doing an armour-into-base-hull merge was my first thought, but the major implementation issue with that is that it would mess with the regeneration that nanobots do (nanobots apply to base hull, not armour-scaled EHP) so you would need to appropriately scale nanobots up, a side effect of which is changing the potential nanobot capacity throughout a fight. Presently a single nanobot will always heal up to 600 hull; multiplying everything by 2.5x would result in nanobots needing to heal 1500 per, drastically increasing the amount of potential overhealing (the excess of which is just discarded) you can accidentally do with nanobots. Potentially this could be a new fight dynamic but I'm only trying to rock the boat a bit by solving issues.
I have other thoughts on nanobots but those fall under the category of "wacky idea" and not "simplify barrier to entry without breaking established game flow", because it would be a complete overhaul of how nanobots work and I can already hear blood pressures rising from the thought.
I'm totally fine messing around with weird shield mod values as 'boosters' if the anticheat doesn't have a grand mal seizure and start choking on its own tongue and pooping everywhere. That's what happened back when we tried it with Neo Terra iirc and its made me leery ever since. I know for a fact our powercore and thrust 'boosters' caused it to spazz out, I can't remember if the shield ones did or not.
Anyway, uh, you'd be the one to know whether that'd cause problems or not.
I'm a little confused about step 2 - surely we're not advocating doing a hard reset on Disco's metaphorical stock market where we slash the value of all armor upgrades down to 5.25m? As much as it resonates with me and cathartic as it would be I don't think anyone would be very happy about losing all that money - people literally store their credits in CAU8s because FL is too stupid to handle more than a couple billion per account after all.
He means the UAU8's being integrated into all ships (as hitpoints?) and the equipment itself selling at the price it was bought at dealers, so people don't freak out about losing a few mil on every ship.
Nah it's just the AU8s we'd set to a sell value of 5.25m, so anyone who wants to trade in the AU8s they previously bought for 5.25m for cash can do so. When we dropped the price originally from 15m there were no differential refunds and it was a bit of A Problem.
e: Saro beat me to it. As for the anticheat having a Terrible Awful No Good Very Bad Day that's mostly a case of telling it to stop it and to get some help. I know thrust boosting is a mess but there's a few issues at play there and the physics engine doesn't like it