More suggestions for astronauts and multi-crew space combat

[ZombieMouse]

So, I was chatting to some friends recently about what made the co-op campaign in From the Depths so much fun (yes, I am going to suggest shamelessly ripping something from that game).

In said game, when in combat the player's character would
1. Be at constant risk of being killed.
2. Be able to return easily to combat under way if killed.
3. Be able to repair ships to actively repair battle damage at a rate that could never keep up with damaged done, but could potentially swing a battle if a critical system was saved at the right moment.

Now, I don't want to encourage spam building in combat, but I do think there is an easy way to make extra crew on a spaceship useful in battle. Allow them to enter a "Repair Computer" to automatically repair a small percentage of ship HP per tick.

This would give a reason to have extra crew on big ships, and would place them potentially in harms way as they are not in a core. Killing these extra crew members might even give an incentive to boarding. I am not suggesting that any blocks get repaired, but the extra ship HP might make the difference in preventing overheating in a close match.

There are of course ways to expand on this basic idea. For example, making a repair computer master of shield capacitors could allow a player to give a combat bonus to that system. They would then need to change computers once the shields were down to do repairs instead to SHP. Allowing players who went into a jump drive computer to give a combat boost to that system might allow for an easier escape for a damaged ship. I'm sure there are many other ways this could work, but the point is there should be ways that crew can buff a ship. In the future maybe hired NPC crew could also give these buffs, but not quite as much as real players can.

I think the idea of undeathinators on ships has been mentioned before, so I won't go into it further.

IMHO ways to make astronauts useful in battle by buffing and repairing HP in ways that put them in danger will make StarMade more exciting, even against NPCs. Plus it really encourages co-operative play. Having many people play on the same ship is great fun, and might fit nicely into the "exploring the universe" role quite well when friends can really work as a team. Plus, a new player can potentially be useful in a faction from the first minute, even if they don't have a ship.

[Edit: Oh yeah, and allow people in "Repair computers" or whatever to use the ship's cameras so they don't get a boring view... and allow cameras on rail rotators to be viewed from the base entity and rotated!]

 

[jayman38]

Mostly, I agree with the idea of making crew more interesting, but I disagree with repairing ship HP, if only because that amount of repair would be dwarfed by the average capital weapon system that would simply take 2/10s of a second longer to whittle down the additional astronaut repair HP. In other words, I don't think HP Point repair could be made effective enough to make a "fun" difference, short of making it over-powered.

Instead, I think a "critical repair" would involve astronauts being able to rebuild only certain blocks, such as a weapon control computer, to get a ship system back online. Think: A critical weapon system's computer is destroyed, rendering it disabled. An astronaut can repair the computer, but no weapon emitter blocks, so the main weapon is back online after the repair, but with half of its blocks destroyed, the weapon is only half as powerful as before. Even with only half the damage (and half the energy usage), that sort of thing can swing a battle in an exciting, effective way.

Likewise, if astronauts can rebuild reactor blocks to recreate the efficient layouts, but not thrusters or shield blocks, you could have a ship that still limps along, but suddenly has enough power to run at its new, lower full speed, plus being able to charge other systems. This, too, could be a swing-repair that turns the tide of battle. (If subsystems were to get their own control computer, as I'd like to see, the control computer for the system would be just like the control computer for a weapon system. See the paragraph above for how that repair would work.)

If we were to get an update to the turret rail system, where instead of popping off a rail when the turret rail is destroyed, it simply disables the turret, it would be exciting to be able to re-build the turret rail and see the turret spring to life once more. Again, such a repair could swing the battle in an effective way. (Considering how normal PVP combat tends to vaporize the entire turret, I'm not sure altering turret behavior would be worth the bother of programming this behavior. I'd prefer to see "popped" turrets continue to act as independent drones, as they do now.)

It would also be exciting to have a repair suddenly bring dropped shields up to 10%. Instead of being a disappointing "hack", I think such a scenario towards the end of a combat encounter would be an exciting surprise that would give the dying ship one last chance to pull a surprise victory, while giving the other ship a real sense of accomplishment if they can whittle it back down and kill the dying ship after all. Such a 10% repair-boost should probably be limited to one event every 15 minutes or so, but I think it could add significant excitement to the average battle. Of course, all values should be server-configurable, so one server might deactivate shield boosts completely, while another will shorten the cool-down to 1 minute, but only give 1% shields at the boost.

Speaking of cooldowns, the astronaut repairs of control computers should probably also have a cool-down period per block, so that the same block cannot be "resurrected" over and over again under fire.

 

[ZombieMouse]

Those suggestions also sound interesting. I don't mind an alternative implementation, just as long as the final game gets something by way of crew usefulness and combat repair.

In FtD the player will automatically repair blocks from the ship blueprint one at a time in combat, but having no control over which blocks actually get repaired. It makes more sense that astronauts should concentrate on critical systems.

I like your idea that system repairs would not be as good as the original, but that then raises questions about how those systems work with after-battle repairs. Perhaps just have repaired systems nerfed for an hour, and after that they return to normal. The temporary nerf would perhaps be removable at a shop or shipyard.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

If I Recall Correctly, things like this are the entire point of the supposedly upcoming NPC crew, in addition to being built-in "less stupid" turret controllers. (presumeably they'd be able to re-target a turret that can no-longer aim at it's chosen target)