"why would you ever fly a battleship when you can do the same damage with a warhead on a cloaker"?
Because the battleship can sustain that level of DPS, and warhead attacks are pure alpha. If several enemy vessels are closing to destroy an outpost, a little spite damage from mines isn't going to stop them, but a good battleship might.
Your question has great merit - why WOULD you put all your eggs in one basket knowing that someone might give it a kick, when you could be creative, economical and wily about your offense/defense while inducing far, far less server lag? Seriously, right back at ya - why?
Should we be?
I strongly feel that nasty torpedo and mine tactics, as well as other devious and "unfair" strategies are totally balanced and appropriate. For a multiplayer game - which this is - though not for a single player game. IRL (ik, ik - bear with) does any naval commander anywhere, ever send out a battleship or carrier
ALONE? Hell no. That's absurd. Not that I've ever heard of - such huge, very expensive war machines are not deployed without a substantial escort. Typically some relatively expendable advance scouts are desirable to stay aware of approaching threats, as well as a handful of specialized smaller vessels specialized in sub & small craft defense, anti-aircraft, missile defense, etc. Because if you just dump everything into one ship and send it out there, it's easy for any opponent to come up with an innovative trick - like Kamikaze attacks, or nuclear weapons - that will eliminate that single target. So military strength is best deployed in dispersion, by anyone who has half a brain. It's not an issue of fairness at all; it's an issue of players not flying in teams, and constantly flying ships they can't afford to lose. Solo hulks absolutely SHOULD be ripe targets for clever pirates and enemies, because there's nothing whatsoever stopping them from flying with escorts in support and crowd-control ships.
I feel that complaints about how something might put someone's favorite, lag-inducing, all-in-one, behemoth ship in danger from ingenuity and innovation come down mostly to laziness or Pollyanna naivete. Munchkins want to roll everywhere in an OP beast and they want it now. They don't want to invest the time and effort in building a team and being intelligent about when, where, how and why to risk a valuable asset - they just want to arrive at every situation, every time being OP and able to do everything (and lagging bloody the server).
See, I think the entire game would both perform better
and be more fun all round if the focus was less on bending the game to aid and abet weak, lazy and foolish players in their constant need to roll solo in giant lagstrosities. Smart players should be fully capable of dominating stupid & careless players regardless of ship size, those players shouldn't be protected from their lack of foresight in having an escort along or from their hubris when it demands they must always fly in something larger then they can afford to easily replace when something more modest would just as easily do. You don't
have to be able to one-shot alpha stations
and strip planet parts in under a minute
and have 100,000,000 shield capacity all in one ship. That shouldn't be the gold standard of play or this game will never overcome its performance choke points and will never demand teamwork and group play in order to be truly successful.
Please don't nerf anymore tactics that allow intelligent players to get over on lazy idiots who just DL a monster BP and expect their huge piece of hardware to simply dominate the server without repercussion. That's basically what happened when warheads got nerfed. No minefields, no kamikaze, no torpedo ambushes - nothing to discourage players from maximizing their server load share every minute they're logged.
Don't want to be careful about deploying that battle-cruiser? Don't cry to me when it gets jacked - you F'd up, son. C'est la vie. Mommy aint on this server. Think ahead next time and maybe take out a tiny cloaking jump shuttle if all you were doing was shopping, exploring or swinging by spawn, or if your harvesting roll in a light, dedicated miner with a jammer that is cheap and easy to replace with a clone if it gets popped because it isn't loaded with expensive military hardware like shields, advanced armor, heavy turrets and fighters. There are such things as civilian ships, and they actually have a reason for existing - they save you a fortune and keep your head from exploding.
Mines sucked. Torpedoes sucked. Kamikazes sucked. That's what was great about them. That doesn't mean they weren't fair play. They kept the game healthy, they were part of the Darwin Awards Committee of Starmade, and I for one would
love to have them back.
