The Dreadnought Dilemma - the ideal role of heavy caps in disco

[Slimalou]

I think people are attracted to the BBs and Dreads because many players like the feeling of being the big bad imposing ship in (even if they are really can only do consistent damage to other BBs and dreads.) As it is in fleet composition BBs and Dreads primary roll is to set the base for the fleet, and support fire IF the enemy fleet decides to push.

As it stands BBs and Dreads are easy targets for the lighter ships as the smaller ships have no problem dealing damage to them while staying out of the range of the BBs and Dreads ability to do effective and constant damage. They have NO method to deal with any snubs, flacks can be easily avoided and all other weapons cannot consistently hit them. They cant event get away from the smaller ships, as the only defense they have its the amount of HP they have. I know some heavy cap players who just sit and wait for the enemy snubs/smaller caps to kill them as their is nothing they can do other then kill the other players fun by doing nothing. As other people have said the really only way for a heavy cap to deal with the smaller ships it to have someone on call or friendly player to deal with them.

So the question becomes how do we fix this, what are the problems. Well as Discovery is now, the game is solely focused around skill over equipment meaning that the game is balanced to make every ship every weapon to be a similar as possible so a player cannot say "Oh you have weapon X/ship X and that is the only reason you won". In a game where players are allowed to fly everything from a light fighter to a dead the focuses of skill over equipment demands that the smaller ships MUST have a way to deal with the bigger ships (Running away not included). As it stands that takes the form of bigger class have a harder time hitting smaller classes with each difference in class making it harder and harder for the bigger to hit the smaller (This is further made true by the simple fact that Freelancer's combat system was not made with caps in mind, that is simply a limitation of the game and moders can only do so much to fix this).

So how do we fix this? That's there it becomes tricky while keeping the current style of game balance. One way is, as Barrier stated, is to make getting a BB or Dread much harder. The how of course can take many forms. do we jack up the price of these ships so players REALY have to work for them. Are we talking prices in the 100 mill ( I mean most codes are fare more expensive then the ships they go on if you check that players are asking for them (most of them just leaning into one aspect, or a slightly more user friendly version of base weapons but that is another rant)). If the devs do this then their has to be a fair expectation of how effective they are in combat and that may shatter the current balance style of the game thus leading to a bunch of lighter class players complaining about "heavy cap OP" (but then again as it is your just trading off who is complaining heavy or light class players).

do we make them more tricky to get? We kinda see this with a few code name weapon being dropped as blueprints and needing a POB to build them. This could take the form of Official Factions being given (and non-official-factions having to build) a special type of POB shipyard which would be the ONLY place where players may get a BC and up ship. This would make it harder for solo players and indie plays to get the bigger ship true but it would fit into the RP sense that "we don't just hand out these things to anyone. Do you know how much goes into running one of these things?!" Of course this would be a lot of dev work to switch up the system and it would mean that the payoff for spending all that time to do this reflected in ship stats which would lead to the aforementioned complaining as "I should be able to effectively kill bigger ships even though I spent less time and money to get my snub ship!".

To sum all this up. As it stand Heavy caps are at the bottom of the ranking for PVP engagements (and even some PVE). New players will most likely find this out the hard way and be disappointed with how weak heavy caps really are. As it is now, heavy caps have no method to punish smaller ships, there is no "I got to to close to that cap before the fleet could help me and thus I took a lot of damage for it." and more "I will just sit just outside their effective range and kill em slowly its not like they can do anything about it." Making heavy caps more effective against their smaller counterparts will mess with the current balance style of the game and people who are used to this will complain about it. (Cap players would have less to complain about spam snubs if they had some way to kill some of the little buggers before they went down.) Bottom line, people are going to play that works and what is effective. In the current state of the game the BBs and Dreads are the cool thing that is not effective but people still play em because hey I like driving the big ships and I feel cool.

And that concludes my Tedtalk.