Remove Nomad Cruiser Missions / Replace Nomad Cruisers in Missions with Battleships

[Sombs]

hurricane missles are hard to flak and harder to spot in fleet fights than nightmare torpedos. they are most certainly a deadly pvp tool.
suppose you do change hurricanes splash dmage, then it will be nightmares being used. they do 1.7mill dmage and have a massive splash zone. will there be more complaints then when they finish missions twice as fast?
you can have a cloaked snub trigger the mission, the NPCs just stay at one spot when 2 bs launch 2 nightmares and decimate them in seconds.
the issue is not the missles, its the frequency of murduk spawns. i dunno when it was changed but when me and a friend did missions in delta 6-7 months ago we go frequent spawns of duks. they weren't really difficult for 2 nephs with 4 cerbs and prims

Of course missions aren't difficult if you spam the most tanky battleship with the highest DPS loadouts at NPCs.

The idea behind the missions in Discovery is to provide an optional challenge. Doing anti-VHF missions in a VHF is a certain challenge - although it can be done alone, as Vasko showed. The less dodgy the ship class is, the harder the missions are because dodging is less of a factor to win the mission - Hitpoints and DPS are, in that case. A lone Light Battleship with any non-Hurricane/non-Nightmare loadout will have troubles already when it starts fighting Corsair Cruiser groups in Omega-49, for example. It is certainly doable - I did that quite often on my own. A Nephilim in Delta can easily take on Nomad Cruiser groups, but a group of Marduks are different. It will most certainly require at least one second ship - be it a snub that pulls the aggro or a second Nephilim that offers Hitpoints and DPS.

And there you already see the idea behind it: Difficult missions require more than one person, and that is exactly the way it should be. Hurricanes negate this, and that is bad. There is however a notable difference between doing missions solo with Hurricanes and doing missions solo with Nightmares. The latter is a bad idea when solo.

Matter of factly, I do suggest the removal or decrease of the Hurricane AoE damage. It would fix this issue. Nightmares can be untouched because they are highly inefficient in this scenario. They were never meant to be anti-NPC missiles. They simply got un-purposed this way. In games like Discovery, anything that can be exploited, will get exploited.

I would actually change the general concept of the missions. Right now, it is looking like this:

Code:

0-29 = Fighters
30 - 34 = Fighters + Gunboats
35 - 39 = Gunboats + Cruisers/Destroyers/Battlecruisers
40 - 50 = Cruisers/Destroyers/Battlecruisers + Battleships/Carriers

You can check this in the RANDOMMISSIONS folder of Discovery, by the way. Of course battleships will only spawn if said faction has them (Molly 40+ missions always spawn Scyllas only).

I believe the encounter groups can actually be adjusted to ensure only certain ship types to spawn, I'd need to look deeper into all ini files of the RANDOMMISSIONS folder. In a way to make pretty clear from wich difficulty rank which group would spawn, and only that group to spawn. HOWEVER, since this would result in making the farming of Marduks VERY EASY, I'd drastically reduce the chance of them dropping Nomad Battleship Remains - so people CAN do Marduk missions in Delta, but for more effective farming, they would require to enter the nomad realm, which would result in more time for people to intercept the invaders. Meaning it leaves you two choices:

a) Do less risky missions in Omicron Delta as FP11 and Yaren are merely 30K away, however with less BSR drops.
b) Dare to enter the nomad systems to get guaranteed BS remains, but exposing themselves to natural defenses of the systems, the likeliness of Nomad players intercepting them AND not having a base to dock in Iota, Major and Psi. I wish Minor could be listed here as well, but sadly Capetown and the junker base have been placed there, which devalues the system's risk.

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