that is MY question

This topic is about bay variants . I've just been whether I should make it so the player can buy them or not. One thing that has crossed my mind is making it so you can only buy a bay variant if your ship came with that same type of fighter. I've only posted this here because I wondered what everyone would think about the potential customization it could add or the potential painful irritation it could also add by making you scroll through 5 secondary weapons. Example one: How many of you remember flying an unmodified heavy weapons platform pirate carrier. How many of you remember dying a lot when we were all evn noobs because you had to toggle through all the useless vipers to send out thunderheads and all the different types of missiles you bought. Example two: you could purchase the equivalent of the light-gunboat viper and win a lot because they don't suck.

Personally, I'd recommend against it. It my TC plug, I'm only making the 'standard' bay available to a player. If the player captures a ship that has a variant bay, they can sell the bay and its respective fighters at any outfitter (thanks to the "can be sold anywhere" button), but they can't buy fighters to replace any that might be lost. Additionally, ships that are 'variants' are not available to be bought, but can be captured if the player chooses to attempt it.

Again, this is just my opinion, but I hope that it helps.

QUOTE (fir992 @ Sep 5 2010, 01:30 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Again, this is just my opinion, but I hope that it helps.

It should, I just hope I get more feed back.

I think it might be better to not put in bay variants, at all. Multiple classes of fighters, sure, but only one variant of each class should have a bay.

For example, say there was only a bay for the Heavy Fighter variant Pirate Viper. All the rest could be found in some areas (to be captured, not bought, of course) but no player nor AI would have a bay for it. Same for all other kinds of fighters. If one class of fighter is used by multiple factions, and each faction has their own variant of the fighter, you could give each one its own bay, or you could simply omit bays or those. Up to you.

On a related note, if you decide to make only standard variant bays available, don't make them too expensive because noone who doesn't cheat will use them. When I didn't cheat and didn't have variants in stock, I never used fighter bays because they were too expensive and it took too long to get the money for them and their fighters. Despite mantas being awesome, replacing the fragile fighters was a nightmare. If you lost a raven's worth of mantas, you were out 6 mill, and it can take an hour of boredom to raise that much by conventional methods. I never used the standard thunderhead bay either, because it was worse in every way than the pirate one, not that I would have used it anyway were the pirate variant not available. In my opinion, it would be best to make the player choose between a set of different yet equally good variants, only able to use one. So if you buy the beam variants pv bay, you can buy more beam variant vipers and bays for them, but you can't buy any for the missile variant, and vice-versa. Let a manticore-equivalent sum of credits be the amount of money one can get from boarding a reasonably challenging foe from a lucrative race. The bays should each cost only one or two manticore-equivalent credits, unless they're manta-awesome, in which case they should cost twice as much as the other bays of the class. The fighters should never cost more than one manticore-equivalent sum each, and in fact should cost much less (usually) in general. If the ships that will be carried in the bay are not fighter class, average the price of the ships with the price of an equivalent fighter, and for the bays, average their prices with equivalent fighter-class bays. Make sure to keep bay mass down and scaled for class and fighter strength, as well.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I hope I've helped.

^ that

I always hated how fragile your fighters were, and how pointlessly annoying and OP'd the AI's were. When your squadron of Vipers gets blown to bits, it's back to the outfitters to spend 150000 credits a pop replacing them. I actually never use bays at all, because I'm so paranoid that I'll lose my fighters and then be out my defensive screen. I would always sell the fighters and bays on ships that I captured in order to get back (some of) the space and earn some $$$ at the same time. I just recommend making all of the bays be 'can be sold anywhere', so you can always get rid of them if you want to.

To be honest, I wouldn't include bays unless the carried ships in question were actually worthwhile. As fir992 said, it's pointless to own the Viper/Anaconda bays because of the exorbitant prices (for both the bay and fighter) and because of the space needed. Pretty much every carried ship (with the exception of the Manta) was useless, unless you were playing with ShipVariants.

If you're going to use bays, at the very least give them unique features that make the choice worthwhile. Manta bays are the best bays because two bays make for twelve Mantas, but that's why no one uses any other bay. Each fighter bay should have its own advantage, otherwise those bays and fighters will sit there and take up unnecessary outfit and weapon resources.

Well I guess everyone is saying the same thing: Mantas rule, vipers suck, bay variants are annoying. All this I agree with and I thank you all for your feedback. On a side note do any of you think that I should use the require field in the outfits so that only larger ships can buy bays? There are a few fighters I've implemented were if you sell all the standard weapons and your incredibly lazy, you could buy a fighter bay and mount it on a fighter or gunboat.

Well I guess everyone is saying the same thing: Mantas rule, vipers suck, bay variants are annoying. All this I agree with and I thank you all for your feedback. On a side note do any of you think that I should use the require field in the outfits so that only larger ships can buy bays? There are a few fighters I've implemented where if you sell all the standard weapons and your incredibly lazy, you could buy a fighter bay and mount it on a fighter or gunboat.

This post has been edited by ReclusiveOne : 05 September 2010 - 06:17 PM

As in: set something like a tonnage limit on the minimum mass of a ship that can carry a bay? Sounds good to me. That's a matter of personal preference, but if I was playing a plugin, I'd appreciate little detail things like that.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing in HOTS, too. I have three size classes of launch bays. Ships with a length of 100 meters can mount the smallest bays, 200 meters can mount the mid-size bays, and carriers are the only ones capable of mounting the largest bays. Bay mounting is accumulative, too, so 200 meter ships can have mid-size and small, and carriers can have all three.

QUOTE (ReclusiveOne @ Sep 5 2010, 07:13 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well I guess everyone is saying the same thing: Mantas rule, vipers suck, bay variants are annoying.

May I assume by this post that I am noone?

Though I am glad you reached a decision.

This post has been edited by oryhara : 05 September 2010 - 08:10 PM

QUOTE (ReclusiveOne @ Sep 5 2010, 04:14 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well I guess everyone is saying the same thing: Mantas rule, vipers suck, bay variants are annoying. All this I agree with and I thank you all for your feedback. On a side note do any of you think that I should use the require field in the outfits so that only larger ships can buy bays? There are a few fighters I've implemented where if you sell all the standard weapons and your incredibly lazy, you could buy a fighter bay and mount it on a fighter or gunboat.

If I might point out, most everyone seems to be saying that in stock EVN, fighters were more or less a waste of time, excepting the manta. I personally didn't like the fighters in stock EVN, but in 'Classic' EV and EVO fighters were more worthwhile, and the reasons were the reasons that everybody's been listing as reasons not to buy EVN fighters. There were only a few different bay-able fighters in EV (you could actually only buy one bay, and I didn't use that one, but there were 5 bayable fighters TOTAL), and they were cheap compared to your ship (A 20 Million Confederate cruiser loaded with 4 900K fighters? No problem. A 10 Million Kestrel loaded with 2 1.2 million lightnings? Fine).

The other thing that was true in EVC and not so much in EVN is that the fighters were more resilient and more capable. Of course, a missile was a thing to fear in EVC and missiles are almost meaningless in EVN, so fighters mounting 2 missiles were great.

Here are the things I think might make your fighters worth while:

1. Make them do something useful, I hate when fighters are capable of taking down cruisers on their own, but if you limit their armament or even give them fighter-specific weapons that do some damage, and then they go in to reload, that might work.
2. Make them cost-effective. I'm a fan of a more diverse pricing scheme than NOVA had, especially since a 10 Million Leviathan could do regular-cargo deliveries that netted several million. So your fighters can cost in the 500K-2Mil range, but then I'd expect your cruisers to be in the 15-30 Million range. Maybe even up to 50 or 100 Million, depending on your missions, available freighters, and special cargo runs.
3. Make them mass-effective. While I don't think you should make a fighter bay only weigh in at <10 tons, you should make them a reasonable proportion of the ships that can mount them. As DarthKev was pointing out, don't let other fighters mount fighter bays, but also don't make fighter bays take up all the space on your cruisers.
4. Make them have special, fighter-only capabilities. For example, the fighters in EVC had near instantaneous shield recharge. If you didn't drop their shields and destroy them (I'd advise against that, and add disable-ability to your fighters so they can be captured) before they were out of your range, they'd be fully recharged by the time they came back. You can deal with this by giving your ships special anti-fighter weapons, use point defense to your advantage.

What Meaker said.

He's pretty much summed up everything there is about making fighter bays useful.

A lot of that I was planning on doing. My TC will have its far share of expendable decoyish fighters, but some will be more than capable killing machines. Trust me on this: They will all be priced based on their abilities. A useless attack drone will cost less than 10,000 credits. A souped up heavy fighter or gunboat will be up to 500,000 to 1.5 million credits.

This post has been edited by ReclusiveOne : 07 September 2010 - 02:01 PM