This came out of my recent excursions into a DOTA clone: League of Legends, it's heavily strategic, aim IS required, and it offers a high degree of customization. Yet it also places balance as its highest priority.

What struck me as interesting is that LOL has 3 major types of characters (each character has their own unique abilities, but we'll ignore that for a second), Casters (Burst damage, high dps for a few seconds, with occasional stuns), Carries (sustained dps),
and Tanks (Who tend to be a little lacking in the damage dept but make up for it by being hard to kill and annoying enough that you have to target them instead of the people you really WOULD like to target)

It occurs to me that in this game, we really only have casters and carries. The ultimate caster in this case would be the all-rocket ragnarok, the ultimate carry (damage-wise) would be the neutron/megaposi warthog.

Once upon a time, I think the devs intended the rag and the SCP to be tanks. Unfortunately, while they were, in fact, blisteringly hard to kill, the ability for any ship to take on any loadout made it such that they became tank/casters or tank/carries. In the case of the Skyprom with dual sunflares and an AGT you had a tank/caster/carry, with a capacity for huge burst, sustained damage, and armor.

Tanks are vital in a game like this. In other games they are the initiators, becoming the center around which battle is fought. In LOL there are other ways to score kills in group battles (by cutting off your opponent's retreat by judicious use of back alleyways), in VO, there is no such luxury. It makes the need for an initiator all the more vital.

Perhaps capital vessels are this tank, but since they are limited to major battles, I think smaller tanks should be introduced as well.

What are the qualifications of a tank:

a) Ability to take punishment
b) Ability to keep aggro (by being annoying and at the forefront)
c) Overall lower DPS

The first is easy, give the sucker a shield and/or armor.

Achieving both the second and the third is tricky. Maneuverability alone clearly wasn't enough (make it too maneuverable and it will solo 3 people, remove maneuverability and it dies in seconds). I don't think there's a balance point on maneuverability alone, it's either maneuverable enough to dodge everything, or it will eat every little thing coming its way.

My first thought is to design tank vessels with crowd-control devices:

stuns, slows, disabling capacity, interference

hence, the tank, while not especially maneuverable or damaging, can isolate opponents so that the high dps elements can wipe them out. The presence of stuns/slows even opens up the possibility for personal shields (if a person is stuck moving along their current vector for 1.5 seconds, there's a lot of damage that can eat into their hull)

An area-of-effect EMP might be a nice one.

Currently, the concussion rocket, or flares give some crowd control, but they can be mounted on very maneuverable platforms, making them a tad too effective. They have the effect of dispersing fights, not initiating them.

Is my analogy off the mark here? How would you build a tank in VO?

DotA doesn't have tanks (except for Axe). I assume most "tanks" in LoL are actually initiation/support with some health thrown in as it's a very very similar type of game. ;)

Meh, something with 40k armor, 20,000 kgs mass, one large port, and the size of 2/3s of a behemoth might work. We'd need an entirely new ship design, though. Annoying armor paired with decent maneuverability, but little firepower.

Well, I don't know that you can make it annoying enough with just damage, I think some kind of CC (Crowd control) device tacked on would be necessary.

I think a single large port is eminently ignorable.

Whether that device is a stun, a slow, or some kind of interference mechanism, I don't know.

It would be very interesting to see new classes of ships with certain ingrained weapons.
Special weapons which are built into the design of the ship.

This could be used to establish a general class framework for each ship. (Though heavy customization IS the name of this game, it just adds a bit of flavor of the originating Nation/Corporation)

The Sky prom, for example, might have a limited armor boost, so for 20-30 seconds after the usage of it, it takes half damage. The device then has a cooldown of 5 minutes.

The Valkyrie might have a radar cloak, with a similar structure. For 30 seconds after the activation of the "weapon", the Valkyrie drops off radar and sector lists. The ship is targetable, but only through visual confirmation. With a cooldown of 5 min also. (The cooldowns would need to be balanced... 5 minutes just seems like a reasonable length of time between battles... so that these could be used once per battle)

The Warthog TD could have a limited energy boost, allowing for a sudden refill of your energy bar every 15 min. This could be used for a sudden wormhole jump, or the energy required to chase down an opponent.

I recognize this is moving past my initial "Tank" suggestion... but loosely enforcing the class of vehicles via some onboard special seems like a better way to fill niches then trying to keep on tweaking armor, ports and maneuverability.

if you want to do this you need to change around the power grid so that not every ship has 20 grid, this will make some people pretty unhappy cause they might not be able to fly their favorite set up anymore but if you reduced the skyprom to 10 grid while upping it to 30k armor you would be on your way to making the type of tank you describe.

You're talking about special abilities or something for each ship? -1

I'm talking about onboard weapons which aid a ship in performing a role in combat.

An Addon scanner or the like, but more useful, perhaps? Hmm....

So flushing this out a bit more.

My goal is to create ships with particular roles in combat that they are built for. Not excluding the possibility of those ships being re-purposed, but if a "tank" is used as a light fighter you lose out on some functionality. AKA, if you try to take a tank and make it a hybrid tank-dps, it will not be as good at either of these roles.

Creating this class distinction is very difficult with the limited tools available. What are these tools?

Small Ports, Large Ports, Thrust, Turbo Thrust, Drain, Max Speed, Max Turbospeed, Armor,

To these I'd like to add some new categories.

Additional equipable armor/thrust/weapon mods is a very old suggestion, so if it looks like my "special weapons" approach is a little out there, bear in mind that I'm trying not to suggest the wheel.

Here's my flushed out approach to a special for the skyprom.
It could only be equipped on serco "Heavy" vessels. Since there is currently no other serco heavy except the skyprom, it would be limited to this.

Serco Military-Grade Energized armor:
Description: system which redirects energy from the weapons and central systems to a Thermo-electric mesh, absorbing heat and decreasing damage from explosions and energy weapons. Mesh must then cool before it is usable again. Activated like any weapon.

Large Port
Mass: 1000 kg
Grid Usage: 10u
Active Time: 0.5 min
Cooldown: 3 min
Damage reduction: 0.5 + grid_remaining/total_grid

Ah, now I see what you mean. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have several different types of armor available throughout the universe that can be exchanged similarly to a powercell? There could even be an option to customize where what armor goes, if you wanted to make a fighter with heavier forward armor and light, thin armor in the back (provided you aren't a ninny). Or you could place heavier armor in the aft for a trade ship, and leave the forward side slightly weaker, but lighter. The general exchange would be more armor = more mass, less armor = less mass, heavier armor (each armor has more mass) = cheaper armor, lighter armor (each armor has less mass) = expensive armor.

It's true that some of this could be taken on by having armor upgrades, but:

a) There is a lot of infrastructure coding that would need to be done to add those other equipment slots. It is a very old suggestion, and if it were easy it would already have been done.

b) Tracking damage by location is also an old suggestion and I remember reading that the functionality here is also difficult to track.

c) Having a flat armor increase makes the ship extremely difficult to kill at any time. Having a system which only operates for a short period of time allows much more damage reduction, while also allowing a skill-based component in the form of timing it. With a flat armor increase you have to be careful that you're not simply allowing a ship to charge indefinitely. With the approach I suggested, the prom user could activate it and charge, but would need to take into account their ability to back off from the charge.

In short, I think that if you use these specials in weapon slots, you can use the existing functionality with some small tweaks to create the effect.

I like the idea of a new ship with 40K armour. Maybe add this to the ship suggestions forumn

What you are proposing almost sounds like a temporary shield... There's also the defensive application for this to be considered too, most trade ships having large ports.

It isn't a flat armor increase, there are plain weaknesses in any configuration.

Your idea would be easier, though, but it should be tested quite a bit before implimented first.

The problem with a tank class in VO is that the way the game is designed, maneuverability is astronomically more important than armor. All the armor in the world isn't going to make a difference if you can't move fast enough to get your guns facing the centurion that's dancing circles around you and landing a steady stream of neut hits because you're too slow to get out of the way. Any tank class would have to have turrets to make up for this at the very least.

Now I'm all for making ship roles more specified, but I think we shouldn't look so much at tank/DPS as fighter/bomber. VO still doesn't have a real bomber. Why isn't the rag a bomber? Because the rag is still viable vs fighters and it isn't all that great against cap ships. We need a ship that is not viable at all for taking out other fighters but excels at destroying cap ships.