A general goal was to make capships beefier and very scary. And that's definitely the case to some extent. They got several adjustments. For example all ships got their hulls buffed to give them more staying power, because they usually can't jump to safety in Mayhem 3. Capships got exponentially more hull point growth than all other ship classes.
Then you have these fast capital projectiles. It's now very dangerous to approach large vessels in a smaller ship. Capships missing shots is rarer. I believe this also serves to somewhat reduce their performance gap between IS and OOS combat. In sector they can now hit fighters more often.
I really like how Mayhem 3's slower projectile speeds on smaller ships are affecting dogfights for the player. It made me realise how little enjoyment i got out of LU dogfights where it's way harder or even impossible to dodge shots and you have to stay away from the fun if you're sitting in a fighter. But just 1 enemy capship makes this way too risky right now.
For the next M3 playthrough i'm thinking about modding the heavy lasers back to slower speeds to get this feeling of being a fighter pilot in the middle of a battle again. And maybe also halving all missle costs to make them more viable against the overall NPC chaff spam. Just to see how it feels. If i can figure it out.
I'd also like to lower chaff trigger chances (anyone know how/where to adjust CCDS in LU's game files
).
Mayhem 3 Capships get balanced by their lower speeds and the general absence of jump drives (at least for NPC's). They can't simply jump right into your sector anymore, but when they do show up the tension usually rises a bit
In reality it doesn't really matter what you throw against the enemy. Fighters don't get shredded by flak cannons. Small arms can also destroy capital ship hulls. Trying to implement a rock/paper/scissors balancing ends up being a huge mess. For this we would need Egosoft to implement an armor/dodge system first.
- armor value on larger ships which reduces damage taken by a certain %
- armor penetration on larger lasers which bypasses armor by some %
- dodge value on smaller ships which gives them a % chance to disable physics collisions against incoming large laser projectiles (so that the shot simply phases through the ship model without any impact even if it would've physically hit the ship)
Without such a system you can totally forget proper ship class or weapon balancing. It's simply beyond the scope of this engine. Right now we are just clumsily working around it by tinkering with projectile speeds and hull/shield damage. Trying to make ship classes at least a bit unique and interesting.