What are your thoughts on massively increasing the hull and shields on all ships equally across the board? Currently I feel ship battles are over quickly and this gives little time to respond to system failures in larger ships. I would like to see this as battles would be longer and more immersive, allowing you to repair systems and hull breaches for more of the "decisions matter" effect. Right now by the time you take on damage the fight is over before you can finish the chair animation.asked by Raven

That's kind of the nature of the smaller ships though right?

I mean yes and no. This is a very fair criticism of some of the, especially the Arena Commander, battles. What we need to do when we are refactoring each of these systems, shields is being refactored as we speak, we then need to take a balance pass and figure out what we need to do to change the min and max ranges of each of the values in the system.So for example, with the shields we are going to introduce gameplay in which you can do things like give priority to a certain shield; or change the way it can repair faces faster; or do shield face hardening; or the way in which faces can absorb damage or deflect damage away. So once we implement these systems and get that gameplay into the game then we need to go and sit with each of the ships and start shooting at the ship, figuring out "okay, well ships of this size with this particular shield can withstand this much damage for this amount of time" and put that all in a big chart and then figure out where each of the ship lies and if we need to tweak any changes.So to answer you question, we do need to better balance passes for each of our systems. Making hulls and shields across the board larger may not be the best way to do that.

We want to have more tactical combat rather than just overall buffs.

Sure, and so what we can do is, we can take a look at each of the systems individually, shields, hull, health, mass, damage per second, by weapon type, etc. and figure out "okay, where in the realm of the things that we want to look at, like DPS for weapons, where does that particular weapon sit? Where should it sit?" If it isn't sitting in the right place we figure out "okay, we need to tweak these particular values and make sure that they do fit a role for that particular component type.So yes we want to make gameplay more interesting. We will do that with balance. I think this will definitely come into play as we start making larger and larger ships because as we do implement ships, or ship types, that we haven't before we need to figure out "okay, how do we do this without breaking what already exists?" So if we make, say, the Constellation, if we made it impossible to destroy with a couple of Hornets it wouldn't be very fun. So figuring out where, again, the ship lies; where the capability of each of its systems types should lie and ensuring that those values are correct is part of our jobs and we need to be better at that.

At the same time let's look at real world analogies or comparisons: if you have two people on motorcycles that crash into each other at high speed chances are they're both going to get wrecked. Pretty quickly. If you have a car hit a motorcycle the chances are the car will be a little dented but the motorcycle will be pretty totalled.

It's true. We still need to, as game designers, we still need to figure out a way in which that is fun.

Yeah. Absolutely. So you don't want it to be over quickly but you still want to add an element of adrenalin pumping with tactical strategies.

Right. So that also comes into play when we're designing ships. We can't make a ship that is just OP, in which playing any other ship types is just no fun.

Right.

So we figure out how is it better than other ships, yet consider if you have a fleet of smaller ships can they take it out? Let's figure out a way we can do that.

Ultimately just establishing a really good strong meta for the combat.

Yeah.