First off, I know that the idea what pop to my mind will never happen and is very hard to accomplish, but I want to share it anyway.
As everyone of you know, there are games where you can be a soldier and when you find tank or copter, you can drive it.
When there are two players, one can drive a tank and another can use it is main cannon.
With 4 people, one can drive it, 1 can use canon, and 2 can use heavy machine gun ( same with copters and other vehicles ).
So idea pop to my head, why not make it in freelancer, but instead of soldiers, you have players in subs, and instead of vehicles, you have caps.
Here is how it would looks like.
You make capital ship, lets say, Liberty Siege Cruiser.
And next you make Guardian fighter character, and you put in in siege cruiser.
If you will fly with this Siege Cruiser alone, it will work just as it work right now ( and when it is destroyed, it will re-spawn on base you left it off ), and you will abandon exploding capital ship in fighter, so even if capital ship is destroyed, you can still use fighter again your enemy.
However LSC have 3 player slots, if there are 2 other players in fighter or bomber with you, one of them can dock on your cruiser and take slot of heavy gunner, thanks to this, you can drive your cruiser and shot FG and light turrets, but another player will control your heavy turrets ( and he will increase heavy turrets damage and reduce energy use ).
If two players dock on you, than you can drive drive LSC and aim with your Foward gun ( what get damage buff and energy use reduction ), while another player use your heavy guns, and last player use your light guns ( also giving them bonus ).
As result, 3 players will make 1 LSC very powerful.
Now lets say you patrol liberty and you see 1 pirate fighter, than one of players on your cruiser can un-dock and have fighter duel with him.
Lets say your cruiser is destroyed with 2 players on it, as result in place of 1 LSC, 3 fighters/bombers pop out, and capital ship fight can easy turn into subcraft brawl.
Thanks to this instead of having like 7 LNS ships attacking lone sub-craft what will escape them anyway, you can have 1 LNS Carrier with 6 players on board, players what will undock form carrier to attack enemy fighters, and if enemy capital ship arrive, they will dock back on carrier and hit him hard with heavy guns.
The system is easy:
Gunboat ( 2 player slots, 1 for pilot who can use FG, and 1 who use all other guns ).
Cruiser ( 3 player slots, 1 to fly it and shot FG, 1 to use heavy slots, and 1 to use light slots ).
Dread ( 4 player slots, 1 to drive it and use FG, 1 to use heavy slots, 1 to use primaries, 1 to use light slots ).
Carrier ( 10 player slots, 1 to drive it,1 to use heavy slots, 1 to use primaries, 7 to use light guns ).
Thanks to this capital ships will become more rare but more powerful and important, and every player will have at least 1 fighter or bomber.
I know this idea will never happen, but I still wanted to share it with all of you, please comment what you think about it, and my apologise if my grammar is to poor for you to read.
(07-06-2013, 08:58 PM)LordVipex Wrote: If this is actually codeable for Freelancer, I think it could make docking modules extremely useful.
Yes it would, as long as players who can dock on capital ships, would not only be able to use different guns, but also increase their damage and reduce their energy use.
There can also be other bonuses like increasing shield recovery speed ( because if fighter or bomber is not fighting, it should make capital ship stronger and harder to kill ).
Also, number of slots for docking modules need to be balanced as I mentioned ( 2 for gunboat, 3 for cruiser, 4 for battleship, 10 for carrier ), after all, while normal capital ship need to have power to fight enemy, carriers should rather spam subs at enemy.
(07-06-2013, 09:23 PM)McTemka Wrote: I like the idea of putting more then one player on heavy ships. However I fail to see how it shall be done.
And also, that won't make capital ships more rare.
It will make capital ships more rare, because one capital ship with 3 players on will be stronger and more effective than 4 players in 4 capitalships.
Also if you compare number of subs and caps what will be used, every capital ship user will have one subcraft ( what will spawn when cap is destroyed ), so even if number of caps will not decrease, number of subcrafts will increase ).
This is damn hard to make. The docked ships are not in the carrier now they are teleported to a hidden placeholder base 100k under the sun. Same story for the people that dock on POBs. So your idea is not possible if the current design is used. May be with some FL hook magic it could be changed,however connecting ships to the same powercore and guns is not possible by the game engine. It would require the modification of the game engine- and the FL source code is not available in order to do so.
May be exploiting the forming where the placeholder ship (called module for clarity) moves slowly without movement control but with gun control combining with different ship modules each holding 1 turret and own energy core.
Even so it looks terrible to balance with gun stats, also giving each module own zooming would be terrible to balance as well.
I guess all of the placeholder modules need to be really small and without hitbox- so they does not die too easy or they should have a lot of health. Still even formed they could move around automatically unless some hacks are made in forming system ( if even possible to make such) and be messing the aim. Sadly I guess it is not possible for many people to use the same guns and the same core of the ship.
In order to make even not perfect version the Dev team need to be doubled since it requires a ton of work. So it is highly unlikely to see such thing in Freelancer unless you find more Devs willing to work hard for free or unless someone come up with genius Idea supported with genius coding.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
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