a question of scenario balancing.

Poll: Should Escorts Trivialize Content? (34 member(s) have cast votes)
Should Escorts Trivialize Content?
Yes, a player with escorts should have no trouble doing anything.
(1 votes [2.94%])
Percentage of vote: 2.94%
Yes, but only very rare, hard to acquire escorts. If the player manages to get these then they deserve to have the rest of the game be a cakewalk.
(4 votes [11.76%])
Percentage of vote: 11.76%
Yes, they should trivialize some content, but other content should require good escorts to even have a chance at beating it.
(11 votes [32.35%])
Percentage of vote: 32.35%
No, escorts should not make it possible to do anything that isn't possible without them.
(2 votes [5.88%])
Percentage of vote: 5.88%
No, escorts should speed up battles and trading but they shouldn't remove the challenge from the game.
(14 votes [41.18%])
Percentage of vote: 41.18%
No, all content should be trivial even without any escorts.
(0 votes [0.00%])
Percentage of vote: 0.00%
Content? What's content? I thought this game was just about the graphics.
(2 votes [5.88%])
Percentage of vote: 5.88%

Please share your opinions.

Options 3 and 5 seem to not be mutually exclusive. In fact they seem to go together, to me.

I vote for them. Well...not actually , because I can't vote for two.

#3. I would like to fight singlehandedly something that should only be beaten with escorts- it adds some challenge to the game that it could use. My second choice is #5- it is certainly the most preferable for regular gameplay, but during storylines extra challenge is preferable. Nova escorts are too useful, though, especially Polaris vessels.

Good poll, I think I will find it useful.

Crusader

Ideally, gameplay should never be trivialized, whether by escorts or anything else. That said, missions that are only possible with escorts would add a lot of variety to a scenario. "Go here and blow up some ships" gets repetitive after a while.

Basically, while I don't like the way it's worded, my preference is #3.

I agree with PBoat there. Missions that actually require you to have escorts would be great (or are otherwise extremely difficult). In other words, I disagree with option 4.

This post has been edited by Guy : 20 September 2005 - 11:02 PM

As for trading... think of the economy, if it was that easy to make 100 million, why are you the first person to do so?

For my plugin, profiting from trade ventures will be much more difficult, and saving the universe is actually gonna pay. I think escorts will probably be a staple, as you are a commander (though escort control in Nova is somewhat limited). Different ships will be for different things, and the escort will be sorted in the menu accordingly (like standoff, good vs shields, tank, etc). So escorts will be critical to doing most missions.

Overpowered escorts just make the universe so boring. Defense fleets should be damn near impossible, and tribute should be a bigger deal.

Im still not sure if i want hireable escorts at all... its hard to say. I want escorts hired for military purposes to actually be used, ever, unlike now.

I think the idea of having missions that only can be beaten by hiring escorts is a good one, and hope to add something like that to my TC someday.

( Aside best left aside: Having just read the announcement email for El Ballo, I'm half wondering if ASW is heading towards gaming territory in which the meaning of "hiring escorts" could be very, very different.... :rolleyes:)

I like the idea of specifying so much cargo that freighter escorts are needed to carry it.

Lindley, on Sep 22 2005, 03:46 AM, said:

I like the idea of specifying so much cargo that freighter escorts are needed to carry it.
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Mm, too bad you can't use escorts for mission cargo.

...Oh? Damn.

Another thing for the hypothetical EV4.

Or to be tricky, you could have an escort that gives you a cargo outfit when you get it and takes it away when you lose it. Just give a non-freighter AI and type, so you don't get double cargo.

Uh... that wouldnt work with hireable ships.

Hiring escorts works completely seperate from most of the rest of nova control (except for deciding whether they should appear in the bar or not). Theres no onHire field or anything like that, and no onDefection field. So that would only work with ship granted in an escort type mision, and that would actually make sense. They add x tons of cargo space and fill it nearly full with mission cargo.

I'm all for having more rare and powerful escorts.

Another thing I'd like to see in said theoretical EV4 would be to let përses be captured as escorts. Maybe there could be two different name fields, one for when the ship is player-owned or an escort of the player, the other for when the ship is flown totally by AI. For example, you might see a pirate carrier called "McGowan" flying around, but if you capture it as an escort it just becomes the "Hellhound" (although perhaps with "McGowan" as a subtitle... could be cool).

NebuchadnezzaR, on Sep 22 2005, 06:21 PM, said:

Uh... that wouldnt work with hireable ships.

Hiring escorts works completely seperate from most of the rest of nova control (except for deciding whether they should appear in the bar or not). Theres no onHire field or anything like that, and no onDefection field. So that would only work with ship granted in an escort type mision, and that would actually make sense. They add x tons of cargo space and fill it nearly full with mission cargo.
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Except that kind of defeats the purpose. If you've got tons of cargo space, but it's all full, what's the point?

So that wherever it lists your cargo, you won't see "0 tons of Infinite Improbability Drives", you'll see "100 tons of Infinite Improbability Drives" - for instance, in the commodity dialog. It's the little things that count.

Well it could be sone as part of a mission storyline--a partnership with another ship captain or something of the sort. Or even just a rare event mission that gives you the option to hire a highly respected courier that everyone will trust with their stuff.

orcaloverbri9, on Sep 22 2005, 11:26 PM, said:

So that wherever it lists your cargo, you won't see "0 tons of Infinite Improbability Drives", you'll see "100 tons of Infinite Improbability Drives" - for instance, in the commodity dialog. It's the little things that count.
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Hmm... I cant remember off the top of my head because I don't use it much, but doesnt the player info dialogue distinguish between fleet cargo and personal cargo? This cargo would go into the personal cargo space... though maybe a rewrite of the #STRs would change that. And more than just making it say 100 tons of improbability drives, there could be some excuse like "I can't pay much, but I really need to get this cargo to my destination safely. I don't really need to get it there immediately, so ill let you use the extra space in my cargo bays for your own personal interests, you get 100% of the profit. I know its not much of a bargain, but I don't have much and I need this deal to keep my ship.

You think about it and agree, but send some of your soldiers aboard as 'insurance'."

So you can distingish between ships that have a vested interest in staying with your group (and therefore could be trusted to carry mission cargo), and ships that are just there for the moment (and therefore cant be trusted with anything more valuble than a pile of commodities). I see this working out quite nicely, but there are some tricky things to consider when you fail the 'protect ship' goal. Protecting against passing the mission and thus losing the escort while you dont have enough cargo space isnt really THAT hard... mostly. You can make sure no missions are active before letting the mission fail, and for the commodities, you could have some excuse like "Oh, ill wire you the balance of all the commodities I still have in my hold... I can't remember whats there at the moment, but ill give you the password for the sell orders, and ill gurantee the market price at whatever market you sell it in".

This actually sounds kinda neat... I think I might go for it. Come to think of it, the above excuse even counts for if the ship is destroyed. You abort the missions, then say something about "At least I bought the insurance package that covers lost cargo, so thatl be wired to you when the insurance company decides the value of what was lost. (I'll give you a hint, sell high)."

I only understood the question after reading the answers. Learn to write better questions.

This post has been edited by Hudson : 23 September 2005 - 01:28 PM

I made this poll to gather opinions, and it seems that opinions I have indeed gathered. Now I'd like to turn this discussion toward the issue of how to best implement the prevailing ideas into a plugin.

This must be attacked from two sides: possible escorts and possible enemies. How can you make powerful enemies without the possibility of them being captured to use as escorts?

I see these as options:

Make strong enemies uncapturable, either through zero crew or 1 armor, or have them only appear as parts of defense fleets or missions. One possibility here is to Sxxx the LinkMission of a përs that then appears as a special ship in the mission, letting the enemy be vastly more powerful than its standard equivalent.

Make weapons really weak, and have enemies come in swarms.

Make weapons strong (one hit kills) so escorts (lacking good dodge skills) can't survive.

Eliminate ship vs. ship combat entirely, and focus on other things like antiplanet fighting, asteroid mining, or just the storyline.

Other ideas?

Hudson: I only understood your cynicism after rereading my question. Learn to be more cynical.

Dr. Trowel: Such "escorts" could be added to Nova easily enough. It's just a matter of graphics and text, really. I mean, a sprite doesn't have to look like a rocket, it could look like a chick in a bathing suit easily enough. And it could be animated!

Alternately, you could make the most powerful ships only appear as perses, so they are even more powerful than they should be to begin with, and so there is also a limited number of them.

Also, don't make them have as severe a weakness as, say, the Raven has.