There are a few things I've noticed that really concern me.

First of all, the trans skill in Combateer allows you to blow up a module entirely. The ONLY cure for this is a Mythical Empath skill. If one ship has a trans Combateer and they blow up the Command module of the ship they are targetting, which cannot be defended against in any way as far as I understand, the other ship is dead in the water without ANY thing they can do about it. The entire crew is stuck there until they either heartstop, or wait until the ship is destroyed by whatever is in the area. There is simply not a single thing they can do, even if they have a highly skilled crew. The combat system appears to be balanced if and only if the entire crew is trans. That's five trans people. How often do we have five trans MOON users around to Rage someone? Not only that, you need people trans in specific specs. This skillset is far from being a necessity - it is really just a novelty to many people.

To add on to this, can combateer afflictions be cured in any way if you don't have an Expert empath? Meaning, do they go away over time? Expert isn't very high, but all this means that you can NOT have a combateer or commander subbing in for the empath in any circumstance except aetherbeast combat, and you can't have some young aspiring empath in that position either.


Aetherbeasts deal module damage now. This is not a big deal, except for one thing: Unlike hull damage, module damage is not repaired over time while docked. Module damage is permanent until cured by an empath. This requires, of course, an empath grid. Before the specs, people would regularly spend 600,000 gold to purchase a one room ship, or spend 250,000 gold to make their already-built manse into a ship, just to explore the bubbles when they wanted to. Now, not only is it much harder for a single person to travel somewhere without an autopilot system like mine, a one-room ship takes PERMANENT damage. Thus, one-room ships are really impractical now, raising the price of an aethership from 600,000 gold to 900,000 gold, and the price of making a one room manse into an aethership 550,000 instead of 250,000.

This, of course, limits who can travel to aetherbubbles even further than it used to, and people already complained about the difficulties non-rich characters have in doing so. The solution to this that makes one-room ships nearly as feasible as they used to be is to have module damage repair very slowly while docked, in the same way that hull damage slowly repairs. This forces the pilot to deal with the damage while flying, but still make the damage non-permanent.

There is another solution I can see to this problem that I percieve to be there, but I'll post that to the utility skills thread.



Do other people have other concerns, or anything to say regarding my concerns?

Pretty much my concerns as well.

I don't think you are meant to ever solo this. It's probably truly meant for group combat. So in other words, rather than everybody having ships, you need teams of 3-12 to do this. (And it's good for pooling gold as well).

Maybe an escape-module artifact can be included that allows one to abandon the ship, only becoming active only if a command module is permanently destroyed to prevent quick escapes, and stop working if the ship is invaded.

I agree with you about the combateer skill that can blow up a command module, as we spoke about. I think the solution would be that 'blown up' be replaced by 'shorted out', and the affliction wore off after about 45 seconds.

I think the aetherbeasts doing module damage is not so much a concern because of one room ships (imploding cures it), but rather because hull damage plus module damage that hinders hull curing is too much, particularly for the larger creatures such as hydrians, dragons, and planar beasts. If it was adjusted so that either hull damage was deflected by the shield until it was damaged, or creatures hit for EITHER hull damage or ONE module damage, it would be more realistic to consider fighting them with a medium sized ship. At the moment, more than one creature means you have to flee and attract more, even in a huge ship like Avaerin.

My only other concern is the strain of Empath, because I'm not sure how well a single person will function in a large scale battle. Keeping the ship alive is an important function, but empaths are also the only ones who can both hear and communicate with other ships. This means that while they are curing, healing and distributing power, they also have to coordinate tactics by relaying from crew -> armada/ally and armada/ally -> crew. I'd like this to be adjusted so that only the Empath can communicate with other ships, but that any crewmember can hear other ships communicating with them.

There is a problem with immersion in that it cannot be used to aid in siphoning at all, but that just needs some scaling back of the escalating hull damage.

I'm sure the next round of envoy reports can deal with most of these little problems

Yeah, I was going to mention that, but forgot. As it stands, Immersion is a 10p skill that hides you from scans for 5 seconds and allows you to draw 4 power. NOT worth it.

Either immersino should be free, or the accumulating hull damage needs to be drastically reduced.

Personally, I think that if the shield is at 150%, the ship should not take harm at all. However, every link summons beasts, which harm the shield when they hit the ship, right? So, you'd have to deal with the damage every time a creature, summoned from the link, hit it.

Oh, and I'd like to reiterate as Shorlen said that these minor flaws are easily fixed, and that I'm just tickled pink with the potential of these specializations and aetherspace.

Given how much I've grown to dislike ordinary mud combat, this is really a fantastic opportunity for cooperative battles on a scale never before tried.

Ok, the price increase is bad, but its nice to see there being limits set on the tiny little ships that used to circle the bigger ones

You guys over-explain things! You wouldn't believe how much more responsive we are to simple requests, like "Module damage should regenerate while docked".

Would someone want to make a simple list like that for aethercraft specializations? We like bullet point lists of simple sentences.

Commander
- Reduce hull damage from immersion significantly.

Empath
- GRID SYNCHRONIZE TALK could be sent to all crew on target ship
- GRID CHANNEL TALK could be sent to all crew on target ship
- GRID MODULES should be accessable from a dock

Combateer
- TURRET CLARIONBLAST should only temporarily destroy a module, or be more easily repaired.

Aethercraft
- Some way to deal with combateer afflictions at a grid, even without empath specialization. Either the afflictions should go away after a while, or perhaps a power skill that cures a random affliction at a random module.

Misc
- Aetherbeasts do far too much damage when hull and system-wide module damage occurs on every hit.
- Module damage should regenerate.
- Shields should block certain attacks.

(Shorlen can add any I've missed. )

Empath- Instead of needing to name specific modules, perhaps GRID REPAIR MODULE TURRET fixes the most damaged turret, etc...

This would help Empaths who work more then one ship, making their job a little less complicated...

That would be nice, only maybe easier to implement if every successive turret/collector was counted, so it was like

chair23481 "the command chair" (1)
orb03942 "a glowing shield orb" (1)
turret32593 "a battle turret" (1)
turret23425 "a battle turret" (2)
turret55234 "a battle turret" (3)
collector29348 "an energy collector" (1)
collector52983 "an energy collector" (2)
collector68842 "an energy collector" (3)
collector97362 "an energy collector" (4)
etc

And you could GRID REPAIR MODULE

For example:
GRID REPAIR MODULE TURRET 2
GRID REPAIR MODULE COLLECTOR 3
GRID REPAIR MODULE SHIELD
GRID REPAIR MODULE CHAIR 1
GRID REPAIR MODULE CHAIR

(where without a specified number it just takes the first one, so the last two commands are identical).

And also, you could GRID DISTRIBUTE FROM TO


Edit: And while we're at it, could Empath specializations have a way to see module damage in their prompt? Not all systems, but say, any command, grid, shield, turret and ramhead modules that are installed? Because combat scrolls way too fast to see GRID MODULES.

Something like,

QUOTE

3626h, 5230m, 5497e, 10p, 15385en, 22675w exk<>-GRID MINDLINK

You infuse your mental awareness with the algontherine and see her health in your mind's eye.

3626h, 5230m, 5497e, 10p, 15385en, 22675w exk<>-

ONLY while docked.

And all Combateer afflictions should go away with time, I think, though the time can be a while.

Haven't really thought this through, but what if they go away when docked and not on a timer?

I think the main reasoning behind it is that some 1-room ships would become useless. Until they explode at least, that is if exploding cures module damage? I'm honestly not sure.

If gnomes went to work on your aethership when you docked and gave a repair time due to damaged modules plus number of afflictions, I think that would be cute, maybe 1-2 minutes per thing they need to work on.


It could even be something orgs had to buy to have available for their members, initially it would only be at the peak, and maybe the facility.

Could make automatic ship repair a purchasable Nexus Worlds feature.

Just need to make it not overly fast, so it's an out of battle thing and not a "quick, let's dock and launch again to trueheal the ship!"

That still means that a ship without a skilled empath is *worthless* in combat. Dunno if that's a good thing or bad thing. I guess the problem in my eyes is that I'm used to relying only on MY skills for whether I've lost before the fight has begun or not. If I don't have green, I can't cure a slitlock no matter what. However, I can learn green.

This is like if the only way to cure a slitlock as a druid was to have a wiccan nearby. Don't have a wiccan? Well, you're out of luck if you get hit with slitlock. I could have five other druids and ten warriors with me, but if I don't have a wiccan, I'm screwed.

With normal fighting, I could go fight someone and have four newbies with me, and they could really help. Not as much as if they were all omnitrans, but there are things they can do just as well as an omnitrans person. With aethercraft, it feels like everyone needs to be really high in their spec to be helpful, especially in the case of empaths. I think a ship should be able to fight with any one crewman replaced with someone who only has Master in Aethercraft (or the wrong spec for their station), and still function. Not function as well as if the entire crew was highly skilled, but be able to function. As it stands, if you can't do a thing because their combateers opened up with Clarionblast on the command module and the Empath didn't have Regenerate yet, and then the attacking ship just left, what is the crew supposed to do?

- Make blows from aether creatures function identically codewise to blasts from a ship. If you have a shield, it can absorb some of the impact.
- Make regenerate completely restore a module to no damage.

ya, that was my general idea.