Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 8:23 pm
Indeed, not much has much life in it, missions in them games lasted an hour with the same ship.. they needed characecter.
I definitely think capital and even mid-sized ships gain from this. Amongst other things, it makes piloting such ships more interesting.
It's occasionally mentioned on these forums that commanding capital ships is a bit of a boring experience: flying one doesn't feel any different from flying a very slow, very un-manoeuvrable fighter. If a cap ship pilot had to worry about damage control, that would add to their responsibilities, and make their job harder -- and more interesting. You've just lost one of your turrets and the engines: which should be fixed first? It's something to think about, and something you have to constantly keep an eye on (at least, if your ship is under attack).
Also, sometimes cap ships die quickly, and sometimes not. I was recently in a game where a single Bios battleship went around the entire game map, methodically destroying enemy bases while the enemy scrambled to try and kill it. That battle ship lasted for an hour or so, and was badly damaged and then repaired on many occasions. If its pilot had to worry about damaged components and repair priorities, I think that would have added quite a lot to the game. And if the defending team had a chance to knock out specific parts of the ship, like engines to slow it down or turrets to make it easier to attack, that would make their job more interesting also.
Perhaps the criticism holds more true for mid-size ships, however.
Anyway, two things still kind of bother me about the whole idea, though: firstly, exactly how damaged components behave, and secondly, whether having a good nan team makes the whole thing kind of superfluous.
Does a damaged component work at reduced efficiency, or does it work perfectly until it's completely destroyed, and then stops working altogether? For instance, does a damaged turret start to do less damage as soon as it's at less than 100% health (perhaps this could be manifested as the turret "misfiring" rather than each shot doing less damage) or does it work perfectly until it gets to 0%? Each possibility has its pros and cons, and would change the game in different ways.
As for repairs: In a lot of space sims that have localized damage, the status of your ship's hull/armour and the status of damage-able systems are two different things. In Freespace 2, for example, repair ships would fix your fighter's sensors and the like, but would not be able to repair the hull. In another game I once played, it was sort of the reverse: docking at a base fixed the hull quite quickly, but repairing various systems took more time, so you'd spend a lot of time flying around in a ship with 100% hull integrity, but no radar and wonky flight controls.
How would implementing localized damage -- and repair of such -- in Allegiance address this? A good nan team can fix a damaged ship very quickly; if components are repaired at the same rate as the armour, then nothing would malfunction for very long anyway. I mean, you don't always *have* a good nan team, so maybe that's alright. But still, maybe things could be even more interesting if nanning the ship to repair the hull, and repairing its different components, would be separate?
One possibility would be to make "armour" just *another component* in the repair list: So a capital ship pilot can set it as a low priority. Say a cap ship is down to 70% hull, but has also lost a SkyRip turret. The pilot decides fixing the turret is more important than fixing the hull, and uses their repair priority list to set the turret at the top, and the hull after it. Then when escorting scouts start nanning the cap ship, the hull would stay at 70%, and the turret would get repaired instead, until that's done, and the repairs would move on to the next item on the pilot's priorities list. The only issue with this, though, would be that the nans would need some way of telling what is still damaged and what they're repairing; or, say, if a ship is at 100% hull but has damaged components, they might think the ship is in perfect condition, and stop nanning. Perhaps the colour of the ship's armour health bar can change if it has damaged components. Alternatively, it could be left up to the ship's pilot to communicate with the nans in such circumstances -- why not, the whole game is about good team-work, after all.