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Why not make it a 2500 (or 5000) tech at the least? That way it's more of a 2 minute break on carrier rush.

I got another idea, just remove the enh carrier devel and make them available with a SY for free? You could even make Adv carriers with drydock.

Carriers are 3k hitpoints and have utility ship armor class. Dis1 does 6dps v carriers, mini1 does 13 dps, gat1 does 16 dps. Nan1 does 90.

In a small games basic carriers are a great world of hurt.

PS: Food for thought. In Heavy class -- where you find the carrier's big brother, the attack carrier -- you have dis1 doing 51, gat1 doing 22, mini1 doing 25 and nan1 doing 45.

Badp wrote:QUOTE (Badp @ Jul 11 2009, 10:34 AM) PS: Food for thought. In Heavy class -- where you find the carrier's big brother, the assault carrier -- you have dis doing 51, gat doing 22, mini doing 25 and nan doing 45.

they also have skycaps, more energy/regen, missles, and prox

Removing the ability to relaod at carreiers would suck and would probably cause me allergeic rage reaction.

Is it impossible to make the existing carriers dockable without removing the reload feature?
If there is no technical problem, I think having the ability to upgrade existing carriers wuld be great.

As to the value and cost of enhanced carriers, I can't offer an educated opinion.

Spinoza wrote:QUOTE (Spinoza @ Jul 11 2009, 01:17 PM) Is it impossible to make the existing carriers dockable without removing the reload feature?

Essentially...yes.

IMO carriers are fine although I think I've only seen enh. carriers once. Seeing as the research is tied to the SY on flag, its always possible to buy a SY to dock & upgrade them. Either that or wait for the research to finish before finishing the carrier*. Considering that carriers are pretty resistant to early game tech (mini1/gat1) and are easily nanned I think this is an acceptable trade-off.

Given the rarity of them being bought though, I do think some sort of change is in order. IMO we can either:

A) Reduce the cost of the research and tweak the stats a bit (maybe a bit less hull than it is now). Or,

Leave the research cost as-is and perk the current stats to be more in line with their upgrade cost.

As it stands right now you barely get any bonus to the carrier energy with the upgrade, although you do get a significant amount of hull. The balancing issue to perking the regen is keeping it possible to actually kill the carrier: Too much energy regen and the team can rip in nans faster than the attacking team can kill them and wear the carrier down. This is doubly true for Belters as Enh & Adv fighters use much less energy than a scout does to rip in.

This is likely the reason behind the upgraded carriers getting a bonus to their max energy, but not to the energy regen.


*Note: I did run a test, and you can queue up the carrier while the research is running without losing it. So long as the research finishes before the carrier does it will launch as an enh. carrier.