Proposal: Remove Battleships from the Zoner ID.

[HarryHicks]

Discuss.

Ok.

Your average Zoner does not need a capital warship.

Very few players want to be an average person in an RPG.

No average person in any faction needs a capital warship.

Zoners live in the most dangerous, remote, and lawless places of Sirius. They have all reasons to want to protect themselves.

They're in tight with the Order in case something goes horribly wrong in the Omicrons.
They can go hide in Baffin if things get pants-soilingly bad in the Taus. The Sigmas are pretty close to the Omicrons. Same with the Omegas.

The Order aren't the bodyguard of the Zoners. Its simply not their agenda to protect Zoners in particular but to protect humanity. That doesnt cover winning wars for zoners. Order has no bases outside the omicrons, would bring more trouble than help if they decided to station fleets at zoner bases (which actually has happened ingame on many occasions), nor are they even allowed to bring capitol class ships to the majority of Zoner bases due to Order ID rules.

Now, add in the question of "who really wants to kill Zoners?" and you've led to the question, "do random Zoners really need battleships?"

No. They don't.

They have needed them in the past and will need them in the future. They've had to defend themselves against nomads, QCP, Corsairs (you know... the yalalala ones), BHG Core. And, as recent events show, zoners also need cap ships to fight other zoners.

Even if those events didnt happem, they still have reasons to own huge cap ships:

Its the main purpose of Zoners to go where no man has gone before.

To establish and secure human civilization where it was deemed unthinkable before.

They are Zoners. They go into unknown and perilious zones and turn them into safe zones.

You cant do that in a starflier.

The discoverers, colonizers, and conquerors of the americas didnt go there in row boats. Sure, a few went without guns and tried to leave peacefuly and co-exist with the natives and maybe read them stuff from theri favorite book called the bible hoping they'd like it too. Thats the situation we have at freeport 9 and 10 in vanilla. Back in america, a few of those even survived. But most of them brought a whole lot of canons, powder, and guns.

Those were the zoners that ended up turning the american zone into their own zone.

Some of espanish spanish zoners faught the brett zoners over zones, and then there were gallic zoners but they only played a small role in helping the brett zoners gain independence from the brett king and didnt get a very big peace of cake and ended up being a tiny minority in the now independent zone of the bret zoners that we call USA now. And then there were a lot of molly zoners and rheinland zoners there too but they all learned to speak bretonian and were assimilated. So the espanic, bretonian, and gallic zoners used to fight each other a lot, but now the espanics just try to find jerbs in northern zones, and sometimes the bret/molly/rheinalnd zoners think they are taking them way from them.

So you see that these conflicts taht we see among zoners are very logical and perfectly valid RP, because the now independent bret zoners have like... the coolest strongest ships in the WORLD.

Of course, there are a couple official Zoner factions that could use one or two -- Phoenix and TAZ for example. Thankfully, TAZ already has an ID of their own. Phoenix doesn't, but they could get a SRP one if they wanted to.

You're saying that those factions need warships purely based on the power and influence that you know they have in the communtiy, not because of any RP logic. From what I gather, the TAZ have RP that actually would have the least need for warships, of all Zoner factions.

I think the problem here is that most people think got their ideas what zoners are suposed to be from TAZ and the situations zoners that the zoners of FP9 and FP10 have at the time the vanilla campaign takes place. That's only a very narrow perspective on what zoners really are: They are people who left the houses to form new civilizations elsewhere. Those new civilizations can be weird-ass hippy communes, and they can be new microcosms where megalomaniac maniacs unleash themselves onto others. They can be diplomats, and they can also be conquerors.

"But what about the mobile Freeports, Kaz?"

The Jinkusu Juggernaut was designed as one. The Nephilim Dreadnought is not. Check the infocards. I think I remember one usage, maybe two, of the Jinkusu as a "mobile freeport". That's it. Everyone else used them for waving around like male-exclusive extremities or pewing nomads in the Omicrons even though they're not supposed to according to the ID.

The only "mobile freeport" I ever met was owned by Saronson. Thats the guy who's been acting like a baboon in this thread and keeps talking about jinx's suposed masturbatory habbits as he imagines them. His mobile freeport shot order fighters to protect nomad-allies in New York, and shot LN to protect a phantom Osiris which was blowing up traders (I think that was in California, anyways somewhere in liberty). And then his character complained that he got kicked out and that his intentions were noble. He says he RPed a philanthoropist, but I think considering that he was not really helping any humans but rather helping people who wouldnt mind seeing most humans dead, the term philanthropist is not really accurate. I'm trying to think of a better term. Ah yes. He was RPing as an imbecile. Which is perfectly fine and valid RP in my opinion because I like to RP most of my chars as idiots, but I wish he could be more open towards other people's RP than he is being in this thead.

Just remove them from the ID. A destroyer is plenty for your average Zoner.

Allow me give you a broader explanation of my view on this.

The most significant difference of the Discovery mod towards vanilla, and the one that makes it the most attractive for players who come from vanilla, are the very beautiful cap ships that people like Jinx, Doom and a lot of other devs have spent a lot of time, creativity, and effort making.

Its not because of Gallia, its not because of RP (although RP is the reason why people end up staying a long time). The one thing that is certainly NOT keeping people here is people who decide that only certain people should have the best stuff, and who do their best to keep the best stuff out of other people's hands than their own and of their frieds, by mobbing them out of the ships with ingame PvP, forum PvP, or requests to make rules and restrictions (for other people than the people they like, that is).

People like big ships. Thats why they spend a lot of time trading, mining, exploring. In short thats why most people play the mod.

If you take their ability to get things that they like althogether, they'll stop playing. If you take away their ability to get a zoner Juggy and play it in the omicrons, they will get the next best alternative, and will play a LN juggy in New York. Or a RNC cap in Texas.

If you want to improve things, I would personally recommend to make it easier for those people to learn to RP properly, or to give them more motivations (positive motiovatins, not negative ones, for the sake of the mod and server population) to fly other ships, if you think the ships are really the problem.

The real problem I see is that people are a little to close-minded about Zoner RP, a little to hostile towards people who are just taking what the mod is offering them and playing the game, and a little too blind to the fact that this cap issue is not one that is restricted to any faction, and if you forbid it for one people will only move to another, or leave and drag down the server population even more.

Corsairs have planets, OCs have planets, they have fields with minerals and shiz in them, they have a FAR greater population than Zoners, and they pirate big fat transport convoys.

Corsairs and Outcasts had the crappies planets inhabited in all of Sirius for the last centuries. Many died of hunger, and population growth is said to be extremely low, one due to infertility caused by cardamine, the other because of inability to feed themselves. It is well possible that the population didnt grow significantly in the last 800 years, and my even be smaller (both Corsairs and Outcasts put together) than were orriginally on the Hispania. In vanilla, both nations resolve to stealing things from the other houses to survive and build the ships that they have. Piracy is not a choice that they make, they are forced to do this because of their own weakness and inability to strenghten themselves by other means than stealing from travelers and traders. If you want to compare them to a nation today, you'd have to go for somalia.

Zoners come from 4 houses which have been thriving and growing in the last 800 years. They are out exploring and discoverying the untapped riches that Sirius holds. From where do you take the assumption that they are few, poor, and technically inapt?

BHG are filthy dirty rich from bounties

So you're saying that BHG is filthy rich from collecting bounties put up by companies or houses to protect themselves against pirates who are piss poor. Sounds like the people putting up the bounties should rethink their investments.

What do the Zoners do? They act like a pack of monkies and start attacking their powerful neighbors. For almost no reason at all.

You're acting like a monkey here and are attacking someone who did some very nice contributions to the mod, including many other ships apart from the one you are mentioning, for free.

While you were still flying one of the ships you want to restrict for others now, you were also acting like a monkey, attacking the Order and the Liberty Navy. In Liberty.

Now you want to take stuff away from monkeys because you say they are monkeys.

So whats your problem with monkeys?