Forum goons? What the...

FatStrat85 -- The characteristics of a ship should not be dependent on the players inside it because that makes a dropped connection that much worse. It also makes use of a capital ship that much more DEPENDENT on player cooperation AT THE SAME TIME. It is hard to coordinate even a couple schedules; it would be nearly impossible to do so for a full crew the way you suggest. There is an important difference between encouraging player cooperation and forcing it.

SuperMegaMynt -- As for a 3-way capship battle with those same 5 players per nation, who owns the capships? With single-man vessels only, there are no disputes about what positions people play or who suffers from a loss; with a capship battle, whoever owns the capship is the only one who faces a significant loss and who DOES NOT want to be the captain??? Also, if players have to join a guild (either actually or essentially) to do capship stuff, you are simply creating a pyramid scheme.

"the key to making these games fun, is to give the players options without making them necessary to stay competitive" - Exactly.

"Walk down the street, visit any school, and most likely you'll see people in such groups, with obvious leaders, and obvious support" However, many of those groups are NOT actually optional, nor is the position of "support" necessarily taken by choice. I happen to like playing games because then I am a boss and I get to make decisions, unlike the real world. In the real world, basically everyone is a person Z and they have to quietly listen to whatever people A through Y have to say and then try and figure out how to do it; and then when it gets done, people A through Y get the credit for it because it was their decision and/or their money.

LostCommander, when Capital Ships come out, I hope to see you as well... a commander. You sound like the kinda' guy who doesn't like the title "underling" attached to his name.

Third person camera angles, Ender's Game style (god bless that mormon author, Orson Scott Card) would be positively delightful, and not any less useful.

And it pleases me we can accurately perceive the same concepts here. Painting a picture through words can be harder than it seems, but none the less it shows that there's truth to be had.

If people were especially concerned over losing their Capital Ships, I'm sure they'd agree to disengage when the other reaches 10% or something. As for who would own them, I know that Omega 0, being the avid Itani nationalist he is, would almost certainly captain one. He is, after all, the guy who practically runs the whole nation wars thing.

"I hope to see you as well... a commander" -- LOL, so do I. I also (more than a cappy) want to run a station. [well, maybe a homeworld mothership factory cappy would work ;) ].

"Painting a picture through words can be harder than it seems" oh dear yes... *groan/sigh*

I forgot to mention this earlier, but Ender's Game is a WONDERFUL series! :)

SuperMegaMynt: You crack me up, man.

I doubt there'll be many instances where anyone will disengage when their opponent got down to 10%. If it's a duel, maybe, but if it's nation war, it makes no sense to let your opponent go free. They'll only be back to fight you again. The only reason to let them live is if they surrender and you get to take their ship. If I were a captain, and I were clearly losing a battle (I know, not very realistic, right? When would I lose a battle?) and there was no chance of escape, and my opponent told me to surrender or die, I would sacrifice the ship to keep it out of the enemy's fleet. Better to simply lose a ship, no matter how important, than to lose a ship as your enemy gains a ship. If my opponent is willing to surrender their ship to me, great; but not likely, so I would go for the kill. Disabling is a different topic altogether.

The only way surrendering would ever happen is if there was permadeath. I mean real permadeath, not just "cap ships are super expensive," because you're going to lose your ship anyway, so the money isn't an option other than to not save money for your enemy. And as we all know, permadeath isn't that great an idea for an MMORPG. Permadeath would be cool in a seperate server for special events, like a completely winnable war (that way the consequences don't extend to the main server).

Off topic, SuperMegaMynt: You mention Card's religion in passing; are you LDS? That would make two LDS players (other than my brother and me) I've run into in the game. Cool. Even if not, cool. Orson Scott Card is one of my top five favorite authors, and Ender's Game is my favorite novel of all time. I hope the movie is finally made, and I hope it's as good as, well, as good as I hope it will be.

Off topic: No, the saints were never for me. I just think that "Mormon Author" has a bit of a ring to it, if not a little humerous sounding. And yes, more praise to the Card man for bein' awesome.

On topic: Like Ender's game, how about a type of capital ship that has minimal to no weapons, but a belly full o' fighters? It wouldn't even have to be player owned at this point; it'd be sweet enough just to encounter those in Deneb.

Yeah, that's a fine idea. A carrier would add a cool element to the game. No offensive weapons but the fighter bay, but lots of defensive turrets and armor.

All great ideas for sure, but I want a cap now.

What is the bare minimum we really need to have capships in the game (without destroying the game).

The basic (one man) interface could look a lot like flying a fighter.

Add in a command authorization interface. The captian can give other players partial or even complete control over the ship. He could effectivly appoint other captians, who in turn could assign post to other players.

Don't predefine roles. Let the captian define the roles, and the responsabilities/authorities of those roles. You can call anyone a navigator, but what the navigator actually does and has access to could be very different from one cap to the next. A captian can review the ships personel roster, and assign permision settings per person (player x can access weapons and communications, but not navigation). the captian could create permission presets, so he could name a permission set "navigator", or whatever.

This should reduce the coding for making a cap, by reusing code and interfaces in use now, while limiting the amount of new code and interfaces that need to be added.
By making the issues of roles a player problem instead of a developer problem, the developers can focus on coding, and the players can experment with different styles.

One man could fly a cap, and probably fly it much better than a cap with a greenhorn crew, but a practiced and experienced crew could milk a cap for every ounce. You would need to not only buy the cap, you would need to train your captian and your crew on how to work effectivly with each other, without tripping each other up.

and hopefully we could have caps in my lifetime.

I almost completely disagree. I don't want capital ships as fast as possible, at any price. I want as well-rounded, useful capital ships when they're ready. Time, to me, is not really an issue, I'll keep up my subscription as long as GSW exists and as long as I can spare it somehow.

But the reusing of existing stuff for capital ships makes sense, and they're already doing that; have you ever sat in a turret?

I'm with toshiro. I'd rather not rush it for a crappy product, I'll wait impatiently until it's polished.

i want to be impatient *now* damnit!

and that sickening feeling tells me we need them cappies sooner than my ulcer aches for.