Once the new component system is in, how does that play into time to kill? It seems very easy to drop a Starfarer or a Constellation very quickly in the game right now.asked by Valchor
TL;DRTime to kill on large ships is expected to grow once component damage and repair gameplay exist, but that isn't in yet and is not the current focus, which is Squadron 42.
Right now every single part of the ship has a health value. So if you nail a single part, it'll drive its health down, and then if that part dies, any further damage will transfer up. So that's the current system, but once we get to the component damage system, where it's radial damage and pipes and all that, you'll see more strategy involved in taking a ship down instead of just, okay, just nail this one area until it explodes kind of situation.
Just saying that as it is right now in Crusader, the time to kill on things like the Starfarer, the Connie and whatnot, I'd expect that to grow.
I mean, yeah. Similar to before, when we had only single-seaters, I think the time to kill was even shorter. It's not super useful for us to increase the time to kill to what it will be when the gameplay to support it isn't there, because that just leads to you repeating the same action over and over again without getting the reward for repeating the same action over and over again, because there's no gameplay for it to progress into. So as those things come online, as there's a thing that you would be doing during that time, then it makes sense to start increasing that.
Yeah, we'll be balancing the bigger multi-crew ships so that there is that time to repair. There is that time to do that gameplay to survive. It's just that the interaction of repair isn't in yet. And we may not see that until we're focused more on the PU. Right now we're obviously all on Squadron 42 and the ships that are involved in Squadron 42 mostly. So our attention is there, but when we get to just pure PU stuff, then that's really where the salvage and repair and all that stuff will be tuned to be fun.
We've also been talking about ways to link that directly to the ship a bit better. For instance, currently our health is just: I open the Hornet and I say that it has this much health, and that's how much health it now has. We're looking at tying the health to perhaps the mass, because it makes a certain kind of sense that the materials that are actually used on the ship could contribute to how much health it has. And what that means is that because we assign health on this sort of large scale, like I set the health of the Hornet to be something, versus if it's by mass, then this panel of the Hornet has this much mass because it's this subsection of the ship. So that makes it so that as you lose parts of your ship, you're losing health more directly related to what's actually happening to your ship, because there's less abstraction between the health and the actual condition.