the point is.... it was NOT an intended feature for it to work like that. what would be the purpose of support ships in the future,if you can cramp everything in one ship protected beneath layers of armor and mothership shields. all it does is ecouraging building jack of all trades motherships.
before you start defending. Yes.. we have many guys here who love their reactors,but I think we would all love if more ACTUAL strategic elements were introduced to battles. And removing reactors in favor of having support ships would do that. battles would be way more interesting,and fleet commanders would have more stuff to work with to outwit the enemy.
Can I introduce you to our dear friend the
Mitochondria?
And regarding the jack of all trades argument, when you take an equal mass jack of all trades ship and pit it aginst equal mass specialized ships, it will lose. (and a ship specialized in one aspect will loose to a ship specialized in its weakness, and vise versa).
However, in starmade there was NEVER a point to stop building a vessel at some point and then make a second one of it, until now!
You could only ever fly one ship, so you would try to make it as big as you could to defeat your enemies.
Now you have to factor in costs, and that really was only an issue before when your ship wasn't big enough and was destroyed.
I argue that docked components serve to make a ship even more specialized for a role and not for general purpose use.
I will also argue that the fleet update might serve as a way to somewhat cut out the "build big or go home" mentality.
red "I brought the biggest ship!"
blue "I brought two smaller but still really big ships!"
red "damn I lost my big ship"
blue "damn I lost one of my big ships, but I have this even bigger ship as salvage!"
We will just need to sit back and see where the balance of power switches to.
Ships that are small enough to not break the bank when lost, but not so small that it breaks the server whenever your fleet with you in command finds something to shoot at. (aka, maybe not battleships [too expensive] and maybe not frigates [need too many] but something in-between for ideal size range.)
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I wonder if there will be some way to see how an AI battle is going, some kind of way to see which side has the advantage, so you can order them to retreat or will they just fight till one is completely destroyed. A way to tell the fleet when to retreat automatically would be useful too. Meet a fleet more powerful then you, run. Have 60 percent of your health left, get the hell out of there.
I agree, I also think they should take time to play out.
Like, with a ship engagement between 2 sides with 5 or more cruisers on each side, it might take up to a half an hour or more for the fight to finish, AND would allow time for people to join the fight, and for the participating parties to get reinforcements assembled or give commands and change up tactics.
We will really need to see if this game will lead more towards an RTS game or have more of the 4X flavor of the big strategy games.