Auto-Scrapping vs Boarding
Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 8:23 pm
The scrapping mechanic in general was fine until boarding became a thing. Since you can just immediately detonate any ship that gets boarded and typically you know when you are going to lose, it feels somewhat cheap. I find it hard to believe that most crews would be willing to commit suicide rather than face capture (there are exceptions, obviously - when capture is too horrible to face - but this isn't always the case).
There's lots of ways this could be adjusted, but my suggestion is this series of changes:
1) Get rid of auto-scrap. Instead, have a command that asks for a construction ship to arrive and dismantle it. The construction ship would then arrive, 'deconstruct' the ship, which adds some resources to the construction ship's cargo and gets rid of the ship.
2) Add in a new series of technologies that deal with escape pods. The idea here is that with early escape pods the time between 'pressing the big red button' and the ship actually exploding is relatively long. With better technologies the time between Red Button and Boom would decrease, and the chances of a successful detonation after the ship has actually been captured increases. This represents how long it takes to set the detonation in motion and get surviving crew members to the escape pods. (Early versions would not allow you to cancel this process once it is set. All the crew is abandoning ship, it can't be prevented. But a later tech might allow you to cancel the detonation.)
3) Include in the boarding tree modifiers toward preventing detonation once the timer has been set. In other words, if the ship has been set to blow, the boarders have a chance to 'defuse' the process that is based on their boarding tech (vs the defender's escape pod tech). This ONLY WORKS if the ship has been fully captured before the timer is done counting down. If the timer finishes while the boarders are still 'capturing' then the ship explodes 100% of the time. Thus the benefit of faster detonation/escape pod technologies from earlier.
The idea here is to turn what used to be a UI convenience from a mechanically awkward 'cheat' into a more fleshed out game play mechanic that I think people would find pretty familiar from science fiction in general.
There's lots of ways this could be adjusted, but my suggestion is this series of changes:
1) Get rid of auto-scrap. Instead, have a command that asks for a construction ship to arrive and dismantle it. The construction ship would then arrive, 'deconstruct' the ship, which adds some resources to the construction ship's cargo and gets rid of the ship.
2) Add in a new series of technologies that deal with escape pods. The idea here is that with early escape pods the time between 'pressing the big red button' and the ship actually exploding is relatively long. With better technologies the time between Red Button and Boom would decrease, and the chances of a successful detonation after the ship has actually been captured increases. This represents how long it takes to set the detonation in motion and get surviving crew members to the escape pods. (Early versions would not allow you to cancel this process once it is set. All the crew is abandoning ship, it can't be prevented. But a later tech might allow you to cancel the detonation.)
3) Include in the boarding tree modifiers toward preventing detonation once the timer has been set. In other words, if the ship has been set to blow, the boarders have a chance to 'defuse' the process that is based on their boarding tech (vs the defender's escape pod tech). This ONLY WORKS if the ship has been fully captured before the timer is done counting down. If the timer finishes while the boarders are still 'capturing' then the ship explodes 100% of the time. Thus the benefit of faster detonation/escape pod technologies from earlier.
The idea here is to turn what used to be a UI convenience from a mechanically awkward 'cheat' into a more fleshed out game play mechanic that I think people would find pretty familiar from science fiction in general.