I was looking through the valk debate, where CD said "I actually would rather see the Serco have their own line of vultures, and not the basic Mk1 thru 4, and the Itani their own line of centurions, leaving the generic knock-offs (and hot-rod customs like the CV and RevC) to UIT and greyspace, but that is another thread and another year of debate and development…

heck, if it were up to me, Serco wouldn't have any centurions and Itani wouldn't have any vultures, just to make the early player experience different, but I digress…."

This idea deserves its own thread I think. Like CD said, nothing like this level of change is going to happen soon, or likely the way we expect, but I like this idea, and feel its worth exploring. We already have the top end pvp boats nationally exclusive, why not expand the idea across other aspects of game-play?

This is a much better idea than all the other crappy ones we've seen recently re: intercepters.

+1

+1

+1

Some of this stuff is much easier than others. Tweaking most parameters on existing ships is pretty easy, including where they're sold and with what requirements. Adding new ship variants (without model changes) that work within the current feature-set is also pretty straightforward.

What often bogs this stuff down is not the actual development, but all the controversial BS and ranting and raving and political hand-waving that springs up from discussing some of this stuff. I'll try to dedicate some time, like a few days on a given week, and it'll get entirely exhausted by writing messageboard posts to people who are just.. pissed, or something. And then I have to go do something critical for the company, and that sucks up all my time and I end up vanishing for awhile. Until I come back again for a few days, and by then people are pissed again because I didn't do (anything|enough|the right thing) from last time, and then I spend all my available time dealing with that again.

So, let's get some coherent and specific goals together. I'm fine with the Factional concept of Cent vs Vulture. What should they look like (stats-wise), and what specific goals should they fill? If we keep the current Mk1-Mk4 types as generally available as well, then these would be higher-level variants, I assume.

Well, Inc, as long as yer game provides me targets, i am pretty sure to find sumethin' sumwhere to kill or ransom 'em all. So we can say, ye get my support fer whatever is yet to come :p

C'NB

Thanks man, I appreciate it.

I mainly meant my explanation in terms of the OP talking about another "year of debate and development". We're all really used to those kinds of timescales.. what with us off building mobile stuff or keeping things afloat somehow, but my point is that with a lot of this "ship" stuff, if the goals are within the bounds of what we currently offer.. the changes can happen pretty quickly if we get some coherent and specific ideas worked out.

So, basically, it doesn't have to be a year or whatever. Not with this specific type of content, and using only variants of existing ships and changing stats and stuff.

I don't like this suggestion.

I've tried to think of some useful vulture or centurion variants, specific numbers even, but in the end of the day there's not much variation you can put on a line of vultures or centurions unless you venture dramatically outside the standard parameters of ships we have now (such as giving one an absurdly low thrust/weight or 80m/s cruise or something as such).

The IBG is a monster of a ship in terms of manuverability, it's probably better at dogfighting than the valk in terms of manuverability and profile, but the valk does both interception AND has almost double the armour. Unless you want to make a centurion that does one of the aforementioned roles better or equal to the valkryie, it's not going to gain mainstream use.

As for vultures, the high cruise of the corvult is something you could bring to an official vulture line, but I really don't see why you would do that and ruin the niche that the corvult has. Aside from what I've already said about the SVG (I mean the 54/s, 225m/s thing) i'm not hugely fussed about this idea of a line of high level vultures are centurions.

If we keep the current Mk1-Mk4 types as generally available as well, then these would be higher-level variants, I assume.

I was thinking more along the line of CD's idea of differentiation for the early game experience, with the "generic" Mk I through 4 models being the UIT/Grey "baseline" while Serco had more role specific Vults and Itani had role-specific Centurions. Not "better" variants, just role specific. For instance, the "SVG" might be the Serco interceptor, with great turbo thrust, etc, but with thin armour or less standard thrust than a normal vult etc, while the IBG might be closer to a CV like fighter, etc.

But thats what they are at the moment. What stats would you change, that's what Incarnate meant by 'coherent and specific goals', like, emphasis on the specific part.

Well, if we are to be in the business of designing new ships, I request a list of all the parameters that are currently available (/easy to implement), just so we are all on the same page. I will start a new post in this regard and hopefully Incarnate will be generous in his response.

Well, lets be honest. I fly a pretty specific selection of ships myself, and rarely play my alts that fly nation specific roles/ships. While I feel I could come up with RP appropriate roles for nation specific ships, I think others are better at nutting out the stats for them. That said, some sort of "Dev Approved" ship design format would be handy.

All the stats that are really relevant to the game balance under discussion, are already public in the game.

Darnit, Faille! You're gonna make me actually have to think thru a *coherent and specific* suggestion, aren't you? OK, I have pulled all ship stats from the wiki into a spreadsheet, and I'll have the game balanced and fair to all parties in just a few minutes… err, days, err… Soon™

If I had my way, and just a couple new spaceframes in each size/weight class, I would make exclusive one of each to each nation and grey. UIT and Grey Subfactions might produce inferior knock-offs or elite hod-rods of SOME ships, but each nation (and grey) would have one or two designs that are theirs and theirs alone, as the Valk and Prom are to the Itani and Serco. Eventually it would be awesome to give each sub faction a ship design that is theirs…

All I was musing over in that other thread was, in the case of light fighters, the Vulture & the Centurion could easily be nationalized as mutually exclusive between Serco & Itani, but their progression of variants would need tweaking to balance new-player access. If anyone can buff and scale 4 variants of the Raptor, UIT could get in on this too...

Anyway, this is quite a different matter from TRS's interceptor SVG.

Darnit, Faille! You're gonna make me actually have to think thru a *coherent and specific* suggestion, aren't you?

Hehe, fiiiiine. I guess I'll have a go at statting up some low tier boats as well...