OK before I begin this is likely going to end up a bit wall of text, well more like a jungle of text. There will be randomness, there will be serious ideas, and there will probably be rambling do not enter the text jungle unless you’re fully prepared to get lost in it. Still here? Good. Let’s begin.
Star conflct’s gameplay right now can be described as “Fun…grind…fun…griiiind…fun bits…griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind. funbits…griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind.xxxx–griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind. hey where’d my fun bits go? MOAR GRIIIIIIIND hey…didn’t this used to be fun? Oh hey tier 4! what do I do now? Oh yeah upgrades…Griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind. WTF DO YOU MEAN THERE’S STILL A WHOLE OTHER TIER TO GO?! Griiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiind.” And simply put that isn’t fun. It wouldn’t be so bad if the prices didn’t seem to jump exponentially. I thought T3 was ridiculously expensive for ship+upgrades.I don’t even want to know what the last T5 ship costs I just know I’m probably never buying one. Simply knowing there’s another ship isn’t reason enough to go through the ridiculous grind to buy them.
Forming a corp costs cash, which is beyond weird for a f2p game…or…any game really. I don’t think I can recall a game where forming a guild required you to spend extra cash. The fact that corps have exclusive access to sector conquest is a bit odd too. I mean if you’re an independant player aligned with a faction you should at least be able to fight for that faction, even if you can’t get the benefits of owning territory you could at least participate.
Ship Tree:
First off the idea of ships being a ‘tech line’ is ridiculous in the first place. You don’t have to buy every old model of a car to get the newest one now do you? There’s a lot of ways this could’ve been done better, here’s a couple:
Pilot level’s or more specifically pilot certifications, say you start out a newbie pilot who’s just earned his basic certification by completing the tutorial missions,that gives you access to all T1 ships, to buy in any order you want so long as you have the credits to do so, however to move up to tier 2 you have to pass another test and have gained a certain amount of synergy (drawn from combined totals across all ships in the tier) getting progressively more difficult tests to get into each new tier.
OR
No ship is locked, however the price is significantly increased for ships you haven’t followed the tech line for, essentially you’d be paying extra to skip the grind to get straight to the ships you want, however to encourage actually grinding through the ships a discount would be applied for every 3 synergy levels earned in the previous ship of 20%.
So for example, moving from a deimosII to a phobos, would mean you could at most get a 40% reduction in the phobos cost because deimos II only has 8 synergy levels.So you can’t get lower tier ships for next to nothing but you can still get a significant cost reduction. Making the ships themselves much more affordable and the taking the edge off the grind.
Upgrades:
Upgrade modules are ridiculous right now, you have to buy litterally the exact same modules every time you move from tier to tier their perfomance generally doesn’t even change. A T1 weapon overcharge and a T5 weapon overcharge have EXACTLY the same performance stats just the T5 has higher energy cost and the same is true of most of the modules in the game. Yet inexplicably the cost of these upgrades skyrockets even though they’re the SAME THING.
I can only imagine how that’d play out in reality:
Pilot: “So I was thinking let’s move that nano composite armor off my deimos to the phobos and I’ll just buy that particle purge I’ve been hearing about.”
Mechanic: " :what: you wanna do what?"
Pilot: “Move my nano composite armor to my phobos? Ya know that mark 3 I had you fit the other day?”
Mechanic: “Ya mean you wanna buy a whole new nano composite armor and upgrade that to mark 3 all over?.”
Pilot: “No…I want to use the one I already have…it’s litterally right there on the ship!”
Mechanic: " :learn: That right there goes against the rules, and regulations, I can’t fit a Class 3 ship with inferior Class 2 parts. You’re gonna have to buy a new one."
Pilot: “alright fine, gimmie the class 3 version then, whats better about this new version?”
Mechanic: :lol: New version? Who said it was new? It’s the same as the old one just retuned for Class 3 specs."
Pilot:" Which means…?"
Mechanic:“It uses more energy.”
Pilot: :01414: You’re telling me it’s exactly the same thing but it uses more energy? HOW IS THAT A GOOD THING? Things are supposed to get MORE effecient with an upgrade not less! What kinda scam are you running here?"
Mechanic: “Nope. It’s not the same, See? It’s got class 3 right on the box. The old one says Class 2.”
Pilot :" …Can we at least move the MK4 Blasters on the Hydra to the Acid hydra?"
Mechanic: “Have you not heard what I’ve been saying?”
Pilot: “THEY’RE THE SAME MODEL OF SHIP.”
Mechanic: “Nu uh, see that spiffy paint job on the acid hydra? That makes it a class 3.”
Pilot: “How the—Paint doesn’t----…I hope you burn in whatever hell you believe in.”
Mechanic: “Lucky me I don’t believe in any.”
This system needs to be fixed. Badly. It also makes no sense why there are no mk3 upgrade kits and why loyalty vouchers are ONLY used for mk3 upgrades. Why isn’t there a option to use whichever currency you want for each upgrade? Why are the costs for upgrading so high? and more importantly why do the majority of modules not even improve at higher tiers? they could’ve done this almost any other way and come up with something better.
like say for example tier 1 versions only have mk 1 functionality and tier 2’s maxing out at mk2 and so on and rework upgrade kits so they’re a bit more generalized, to be split by module type rather than tied to specific modules, so there’d be multi-purpose upgrade kits for the multi purpose modules, and more specific kits for the gunship modules,tackler modules, covery ops modules,lrf, etc.
Loyalty Vouchers
Oh boy the biggest waste of space in the game, Loyalty vouchers. They need to be given purpose beyond making modules mk3. Choosing a faction should matter. Right now it doesn’t mean didly squat. How about some faction bonuses buyable with loyalty vouchers? Such as a synergy increase for faction specific ships or credit bonus for flying faction ships.
Say for example 25,000 loyalty vouchers to increase synergy gains for all factions ships by 1% buyable up to 10 times. so 250000 vouchers for a 10% synergy increase to all faction ships
or a 2.5% increase to credit gains while using faction ships resulting in up to a 25% credit gain bonus.
Or a .5 second reduction in respawn time for a maximum of 5 second faster respawns.
Or a increase to the rate of upgrade kit drops.
Or maybe something as simple as earning a discount on ships and upgrades related to that faction. So that the more you support your chosen faction the easier it is to get access to their weapons and ships as it logically should be.
Another idea is to incorperate vouchers as a payment option for faction ships, maybe add a few new unique ships buyable only with loyalty vouchers that have some unique advantage compared to other ships in their tier. such as having an extra module slot that the ship type wouldn’t normally have or something.
and the last thing I wanna say about loyalty is you should gain loyalty for every pvp battle you participate in equal to the score you achieved in the battle. You are essentially representing that faction while you’re in battle so you should always get at least some loyalty vouchers for fighting under their banner because it’d be tied to score you’re motivated to perform well to earn more vouchers by playing for score rather than just kills. As opposed to hunting just to completing arbitrary contract tasks which may not even always be possible depending on what mode the PvP queue decides to throw you into. Vouchers should also be earned for assingments…I mean they’re litterally missions given to you from the faction yet you get no vouchers for completing them.
and lastly I wanna touch on missions specifically PvE missions.
Firstly, there need to be faction missions, maybe it’s just me but I find it incredibly strange that a bunch of mercs affiliated with different factions all get exactly the same missions to choose from. Sure there’d be some overlap with pirate bases and whatnot but there would definitely be some thing jerhico would want done they wouldn’t trust someone with empire contracts to do, or vice versa. I’d also like to see some more versatile mission types, like a bombing run where you can only use interceptors and tacklers that requires you to get into a massive enemy base plant a bomb and get out before it detonates and takes you out with it. Or something requiring a lrf to snipe a target from outside of detection range to prevent an alarm from being triggered before you start an attack run on a important target. I’d also like to see bonus objectives that give you extra rewards or specific loot or even just extra advantages in the final stage of a mission.
Ok I lied theres ONE more thing I wanna mention that I just remembered. HULL VS SHIELD!
There’s one aspect of the hull VS shield thing that I haven’t seen anyone really talking about, and that’s shield regen. Shield resistances end up being somewhat lower than hull because of lower modifiers on modules but shield has innate regen in theory this should balance out but it doesn’t, because every factions ships have about the same shield regen so essentially shield’s are equally effective across all ships once you reach low shields shield volumn is irrelevant only shield regen matters because that determines how much shield you’ll have in the few seconds you might be able to avoid incoming fire. So Jericho ships end up getting the shaft because an empire or fed ship setup exactly the same way will always be more durable due to the extra hull while generating shields at exactly the same rate. Jericho ships need their shield regen increased compared to other factions and not just raw shield strength.