Gytrash's rant.

[lIceColon]

Then you take away the battleship capabilities and what do you have?

An exploration/colony ship.

A piss-poor exploration ship relying too much on the random ally who just happens to be in the same area of deep space to answer the distress call, annoyed. You'd think that after experience with every colony ship in human history ever, zoner colonists would have the sense not to go into the rigors of deep space without at least a heavily armed battleship.

[Thunderer]

I'm just told
"We decided this without requesting input from you and without telling you it was happening at all, if you wanted to protest it then you should have read our minds and protested about it earlier."
End of story.

Reminds me of how they deconstructed Arthur Dent's house. But no battleships defending Freeport 1 still sounds tempting.

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[Moberg]

A piss-poor exploration ship relying too much on the random ally who just happens to be in the same area of deep space to answer the distress call, annoyed. You'd think that after experience with every colony ship in human history ever, zoner colonists would have the sense not to go into the rigors of deep space without at least a heavily armed battleship.

One word. Escorts.

You either hire yourself one or gather Zoner ones around you. And having an escort does not necessarily mean that they have to fight. Scouting for enemies and disrupting them has already saved transports/battleships I escorted from bomber/cap swarms.

If you fly a battleship alone without any escorts, you are supposed to be doomed. They are no ship that universally ravages everything that comes into sight.

If you in deep space nomad swarms get close to you, you're screwed anyway. Battleship weapons won't help you against them. Your best hopes is to get away before they can reach you, and therefore you get escorts.

To get rid of those bombers, your best choice is a gunboat or a fighter.

[Coin]

@Coin - the zoners got the cap from igiss ( CIS star frigate ) - read things up before you try to state facts. and there is nothing about "getting the models back" as the model was put into the mod when igiss had a very precise policy about submitted model ( which you probably know nothing about but still assume too much )

but since you only seem to read and take in what you WANT to read - it won t make sense to repeat over and over again how things got where they are today. - as it was said dozens of times - and yet you seem not to know about them. kinda sad for a '08 join date.

ahhh, Jinx, I have been wanting to engage with you in a dialogue on this matter. Thank you for replying. I'm not aware of any animosity between us that would warrant an ad hominem attack on your part - all i said was that I had seen nothing that suggested otherwise, not that this was the reason; after all, you had many options in your arsenal, and you pulled out the least likely to be accepted. It is true that in vanilla lore, there is a difficulty with zoners having caps, and in current gameplay, zonercaps can be misused. Please don't misunderstand me, I do agree with you on these two points, but i cannot stress enough the manner in which you have conducted yourself throughout this debacle has ruinously affected your chances of implementing the changes you desire.

If a process of dialogue had been followed more intensively, and the zoner leaders had been given the stark choice of 'bring your own suggestions to the table, we suggest a retcon', then none of this would have been the imperious face-slapping that I am positive that you did not intend to project.

Moreover, I do not understand why a new model needed to be constructed - the stats of the old one could have been adjusted, or the Id's could have been adjusted in alignment with the BHG/Core (precedence), or giving a technerf through shipcompat, a most elegant solution requiring the minimal amount of coding.

I don't want you to think that I am being partisan - i'm not - but I do want you to think that there are limits on what the dev team can implement without a thorough process of engagement with your 'readership' - things like cruise drain and tractor beam limits are accepted without a quibble, but this does not extend to retcons.

Perhaps this is our fault - perhaps we should have intensely debated every single line of code produced by the team - and so the concept of a retcon would have been too horrible to contemplate. As it is, the brouhaha that your suggestion has created must be a bit bewildering for you, being used to our agreement in matters developmental.

@ vipex

SP is way too easy. sure, it took a load of restarts to be able to get that shot - but the npc ai is ridiculous - im not sure if you remember, but you pretty much have to kill everything yourself, and all ships target you. if you fly around shield running (even with a twinked flea i had to. felt dirty) the npc's cannot shoot down a single nomad. Yes, you can bring down a BS without a BS with bombers, but you have to be a good pilot to avoid the flak and the fighters to kill off the BS. A BS with bomber escorts has a much stronger chance of being a victor

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[lIceColon]

Escorts.

Sure, in-rp it makes sense to get escorts, and I would like it if I were to hire a small wing of competent npcs for a few twenty mil (nice expensive zonery money sink) that I can summon from and to my carrier bay/ or as an SOS with a x seconds delay any time, because really otherwise the intended function of an exploration ship is to wander off into the wilderness, and that simply does not warrant bothering an actual player at all - basically wasting money on the off-chance that you will be attacked, also boring for the escort when he could be doing something much more fun than escorting a zoner who is going nowhere.

My kind of Zoner cap RP is basically leisurely wandering in deep space, enjoying the view and observing stupid nom npcs trying to get through my shields as well as the occasional red-alert when there's nom players, but somehow I get the feeling that spending millions on an escort (as well as having a relatively paper hull of a battletrans) would make the cruise much less leisurely.

[Moberg]

Paper hull? You can take out cruisers in a battletransport. And this 'lame' supertransport is going to be able to take more damage than a battletransport.

Basically, it is a nerf of stats for the original Nephilim. Weaker stats overall in comparison, and then buffs on stats that emphasize on endurance. (I.e. high powercore compared to other ships of the level, higher hull).

I personally think people like to cling on the 'transport' term when they listen to the ship and then lynch the suggestion altogether, when in reality it is a hybrid of different shipclasses, and 'battletransport' only the comparitively closest class the ship comes to.

And I'll repeat myself from a thread months ago .. If you fly alone in a battleship, you are easy prey for bombers and shouldn't wonder that you get ripped into pieces.
If you can't gather a group of allies, friends, whatever around you that offer to RP with you while at the same time fulfilling the functionality of an escort, then you should get the money to acquire an escort (which also in return allows you to have substantial RP with another player).

In any case, a battleship is not meant to fly alone. If you then get assaulted by a group of bombers/cruisers/whatever, then you are going to die. If you have battleship-weapons or not won't change the result of your encounter anyway.

The strongest weapon of a Zoner is his/her tongue. If that fails, no amount of weapons can save you when you're alone.

[lIceColon]

*tongues a nomad
How do you say What is this thing you call love? in nomspeak? :3

but seriously. Has anyone done a size comparison between a shire and a nephilim? One of them is bigger, and I'm pretty sure it's not the shire. Sure the new stats will be buffer than a battletrans, but just how much buffer will it be? Porportionate to the size increase compared to a normal battletrans? What about cargo hold?

Will these big scary zoner "transports" be allowed in house space whereas they previously weren't?

Also, it's easier to take out a battletrans in a cruiser than vice versa, supposing BOTH have cau8 and the players are of similar competency.

As for the escort thing... here's my solution: http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=112728

In other news: Zoners seem to have the same bs fleet size of Houses, not because they can produce that many bs'es- of course not. However, unlike the houses and at least in lore, zoner caps don't die all the time because of their supposed neutrality. So the amount of nephs and aquilons they have made seems like a lot, but if, say zoners and LN switched roles, the borderworlds would be chock full of liberty caps, meanwhile libertonians will have nothing left to defend them since zoner's production rate can't keep up with the LN(S) death rate.

[Moberg]

Just to clarify, because I'm genuinely interested: Do you seek to avoid player encounters and prefer to fly all by your own? Because by what I read, I get that impression. I hope this is not actually the case.

[lIceColon]

About Me: I do enjoy grouping up and coordinating with the faction when I'm in my BAF, but my preferred RP of Zoner caps is about intentionally staying out of sight. Player *encounters*, not at all - you found me, good, let's interact. *Grouping up* with other zoners? I'd go join an existing exploration faction or something.
That is my preference, an RP the current ship-line supports but the proposed one doesn't.

[t0l]

Then you take away the battleship capabilities and what do you have?

An exploration/colony ship.

A piss-poor exploration ship relying too much on the random ally who just happens to be in the same area of deep space to answer the distress call, annoyed. You'd think that after experience with every colony ship in human history ever, zoner colonists would have the sense not to go into the rigors of deep space without at least a heavily armed battleship.

You seem to care less about RP and more about having your e-peen to flail around.

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