PTR wrote:You describe an upgrading mechanism giving you a super-ship, which I don't like. I like having ships with strong and weak points so I can pick the right ship for the right mission. Plus, upgrading your ship to a super-fighter is fine, but what if I want to fly a M2 type of ship?
It all depends on the implimentation of the one ship by the Egosoft dev's whether it will be brilliant or doomed to fail.
Stick more turrets and armor on it, suddenly you're flying an M7, which is also a super ship in all respects except when compared with an M2, which is a super super ship.
Also yes, it is giving you a very powerful ship, but that's the point of an RPG, the player becomes much more powerful than most single enemies, the game counters this by throwing lots of enemies at the player. So a super fighter would have to fight lots of enemy fighters or big ships by targetting weak points, a super corvette would have to do the same, only differently, being less maneuverable but having more firepower and a few turrets, so it would focus on battering down shields more than the fighter, but still involve some good flying. A frigate-style ship would focus more on plotting out movement ahead of time as it can't accelerate too fast, but it carries heavy forward armament and quite a few turrets, which you might switch to to shoot down attacking fighters in between fighting bigger ships.
For every increase in player power you increase the challenge to match, which is only really possible if all builds are balanced, so it is somewhat neccesary to make fighters just as capable as frigates if you pour enough money into them. The player should always be better at the game than any given enemy he is supposed to fight, the challenge comes from fighting multiple enemies and relying on some form of player skill to succeed.
A good example is probably STALKER, if you ever played it, in that the player can easily wipe out huge numbers of enemies purely through planning, being a good shot, or having really good armor and gear. As a player you're no stronger than anyone else, if you run into a machinegun wearing a leather jacket you're going to die, but you have options. You can pick a very accurate gun and silence it, then shoot everyone in the head from a mile away. You can fight using cover so you don't get shot, and thereby beat similarly equipped foes with equal equipment, or you can spend your money on a giant robot suit and a machinegun full of armor piercing ammo, and just shoot everything while being really hard to kill, although it will cost a lot of money to do so. You win by investing effort either in thinking about how to win, by honing your combat skills, or by doing enough side missions and exploration to make a lot of money and buy yourself a really tough suit and gun. The game lets you play however you like, and you can accomplish anything with any build, as long as you're good at it, what you mostly buy is extra skill space, you buy the room to be skilled at the game. No amount of skill will make your early pistol good or your starting suit effective, but if you buy a sniper rifle, or a suit that lets you run faster, or a protective suit that lets you explore more, it allows you to get better at the game, and that's what I see ship upgrades as. More cargo space, more speed, more gun turrets, more armor, whichever you pick you're going to allow yourself to progress further down your chosen playstyle.
For chasing down enemy fighters I'd still pick a fighter myself, for general use I'd fly a corvette, and for anti-capship I'd still pick a frigate or super heavy corvette, but you should still be able to get things done regardless of what ship you fly, you can be better at some things without being utterly useless at others. Frigates can use drones and missles to hunt fighters, fighters can cripple capships by shooting out subsystems. Much better than M2 > everything which is what we have now.
. Gates FTW!!
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