ORCA1911's Ship Tree Suggestion, It's not the main one, this one is made from various feedback gathered from all player levels.

Disclaimer

::this is the feedback i collected from players and reintroduced to you all so you can see if there is something big missing, please don’t be hung over details for now::

 

This is the current idea to rework standard ships in the sense of Ellydium upgrade design:

 

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There is not much to go by on this gif alone but cramming an entire ship line into one ellydium-like tree isn’t any better than having triple/quadruple copy-pasta models in the current tree. I was asked by newcomers why are there same-looking ships but different loadouts, like, wouldn’t it be better to have one ship and choose your loadout? (kinda makes sense)

 

I’m not exactly a fan of inflation of the ship tree myself but since there is a notion to changing that, based on the feedback i gathered for the past year and a half on various topics from various sources, i tried to put it all into one concept in hopes of a better future design. 

 

Current ship tree has over 240 ships of which only about 70+ are truly of unique design/model. The best way to shrink the number of available ships from 240+ to 70+, at the same time provide some extra customization to players, is to provide one ship model with more than one preset layout and bonuses to choose from, instead of 3-4 same models with preset layouts that we have now.

 

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When the player buys a standard ship model, that model will only have 3 nodes unlocked to provide the player with a basic layout to start with (a special mod, a passive layout and a level bonus node). Then the player has to spend credits and experience points to unlock other nodes to unlock other passive slot layouts, bonuses, or just special mod.

 

The idea is to have 2 nodes for special module selection (guard/long range etc) + one more for those ships that have additional special module variations/options like Sword S, 3 (or more) nodes for preset passive layout selection (passive slots to put in modifiers) and 3 nodes for preset level bonuses that were present as preset for that ship model variations.

 

Level bonus nodes can be expanded to individually select which bonuses one wants to use but I would advise against that due to possible imbalance/possible abuse of the upgrade system if that were to happen. It’s best to provide single nodes with preset bulk of bonuses that were present for each of the 3-4 versions of that ship model.

 

The last node would be the node that provides the option to select the premium version of that ship model OR the ability to turn the ship into a premium ship altogether with all of its bonuses for a price in GS. It would provide a nice incentive to progression on a ship for players and would support the F2P business portion.

 

This rework would ease the player progression difficulty while keeping the same pace with much more fun elements. Players will no longer be confused by the huge number of similar looking ships but with different purpose for each. Intuitive UI for upgrading and progress as well. No more farming experience on ships you don’t like just to move onto ships that you may or may not like. 

 

The problem that might occur is the unique module issue when the ships are fused into one upgrade process. Unique modules will need a slight rework too, to tie them to their respective ship model and class only. At least in this way the issue is manageable/contained within the ship model range and easily correctable, whilst in the proposed concept in the gif, it might cause further development issues in terms of balance that nobody wants.

 

One big issue that might arise from either ship rework is that there are players that like to play the same ship model but with different special/passive layout.

 

To counter this issue the Save Preset ship option must be upgraded to accommodate the players need to switch layouts while in respawn mode. What that option should have: the ability to save passive ship layout, crew settings and modifiers installed in that preset. Only 2 presets like this should be allowed due to most same-model clones having only 2 different special modules and to discourage any form of strategy abuse. On top of that if a person decides to switch ship layout, the respawn timer is slightly increased to mitigate abuse as well. This option should not be available in competitive modes like Portals or Conquest.

 

Another issue worth noting is the issue of prior unlocked ships, to have their layout already unlocked in the nodes would be a good start. If a player has unlocked all of the ship models, the nodes should accommodate that progress by unlocking all of the nodes for that ship model.

 

Before any of you start rampaging that i missed something, don’t worry, this is just a concept and i know like 99% of the issues that i did not mention but will be addressed.

I’m aware of things like “but what will the name of the ship be if 4 ships convert into 1” or “but what about the rank balance and weapons…”, primary goal is to provide a clear concept of things can be better, improving the gameplay experience both for newcomers and intermediate players and provided a nice and refreshed experience for us older players alike.

 

If you have concerns about this concept, please do write them down as this is by no means something created by the devs, this is just me combining all the feedback i got from all of you guys over a huge span of time of playing together. Try to be concise and precise with your questions and suggestions. Also remember to vote on the poll.

YES

 

11 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

the Save Preset ship option must be upgraded

YES

12 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

play the same ship model but with different special/passive layout.

YES

12 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

switch layouts while in respawn mode

YES

12 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

the option to select the premium version of that ship model OR the ability to turn the ship into a premium

YES

12 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

On top of that if a person decides to switch ship layout, the respawn timer is slightly increased to mitigate abuse as well. This option should not be available in competitive modes like Portals or Conquest.

And taking out any of the current way of choosing ships, since currently I can pick 2-3 Ships of the same faction and class if the team requires it. Having it crammed up like this prohibits it and I’m lift with a single ship I can use once. The full idea behind this and the official suggestion doesn’t work for Portals.

5 minutes ago, John161 said:

And taking out any of the current way of choosing ships, since currently I can pick 2-3 Ships of the same faction and class if the team requires it. Having it crammed up like this prohibits it and I’m lift with a single ship I can use once. The full idea behind this and the official suggestion doesn’t work for Portals.

 

Im sure we can figure our something in the meantime, but i do believe this is better than what was proposed, leaves the option for additional features at least.

24 minutes ago, John161 said:

And taking out any of the current way of choosing ships, since currently I can pick 2-3 Ships of the same faction and class if the team requires it. Having it crammed up like this prohibits it and I’m lift with a single ship I can use once. The full idea behind this and the official suggestion doesn’t work for Portals.

 

I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. You can still pick more than one ship of the required class, but, in general, for a mode like Portals, I’m not sure you need more than one class of ship from the same faction. Some of the frames are less optimal then others (Inquisitor vs Inquisitor S - there is a clear favorite here based on passive bonuses) and the benefits of being able to take both Inquisitor and Inquisitor S in the same battle are minimal and actually promote bad habits, a lack of learning, and stunt the overall growth of a player.

Option 3: neither for nor against. need more info and time to beta test

3 hours ago, mlnuss said:

Option 3: neither for nor against. need more info and time to beta test

You gotta give me questions so i can answer your concerns ![:)](<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/001j.png “:)”)

Ok so here is one, what will happen to DLC ships? Some are their own unique models like Nyx, Stingray and Phoenix, others are similar to regular ships like Scout, Priest Bartle and Superkite, would that even have a play in on the premium node aspect, or would they just be locked at their respective rank?

I think you should make clear (in big writing at the start of the post) to what extent this is an ‘accurate description of the developer’s thoughts’ (i.e. not at all anything to do with the developer’s actual plans). 

 

This post has been linked to the Russian discussion and people are reading “Star Conflict Developer” under your name and inferring this is an official explanation of the rework.

i wish they’d add larger ships like they already have destroyers in the game but i wish they’d ad cruisers and battleships such things like that cause it would be very cool and interesting to see them implemented

8 hours ago, xXThunderFlameXx said:

Ok so here is one, what will happen to DLC ships? Some are their own unique models like Nyx, Stingray and Phoenix, others are similar to regular ships like Scout, Priest Bartle and Superkite, would that even have a play in on the premium node aspect, or would they just be locked at their respective rank?

 

The standard ship models will have things what i already described, as for premium ships that have unique models, completely different from standard ones, they will remain where they are, unchanged. One can add later extra options on those ships just like on standards, for the sake of refreshing the ship itself a bit but its not needed for now.

 

7 hours ago, Cr0 said:

I think you should make clear (in big writing at the start of the post) to what extent this is an ‘accurate description of the developer’s thoughts’ (i.e. not at all anything to do with the developer’s actual plans). 

 

This post has been linked to the Russian discussion and people are reading “Star Conflict Developer” under your name and inferring this is an official explanation of the rework.

 

I made an extra disclaimer on top so people dont mistake it for something official. Thanks for pointing it out.

 

2 hours ago, CabooseKarr said:

i wish they’d add larger ships like they already have destroyers in the game but i wish they’d ad cruisers and battleships such things like that cause it would be very cool and interesting to see them implemented

 

You kinda missed the mark there friend xD

Does this include dessies?

I will ride on the :Brave: Bus if yes

or I will ride on the :Caltrop: one if no

This is about Standard ships, Caltrop and destroyers don’t fit in that category.

6 hours ago, ORCA1911 said:

This is about Standard ships, Caltrop and destroyers don’t fit in that category.

 

Well, I was worried about one thing

: Dessies stay at rank 8,11,14 (except Zeta) while other ships can go to rank 15, which destroyer players find no reason to make rank 8 and rank 11.

At least they can go to rank 14.

Just my op.

I think you mixed up my suggestion with the main suggestion.

58 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

I think you mixed up my suggestion with the main suggestion.

 

On 10/31/2019 at 1:49 AM, ORCA1911 said:

 

The last node would be the node that provides the option to select the premium version of that ship model OR the ability to turn the ship into a premium ship altogether with all of its bonuses for a price in GS. It would provide a nice incentive to progression on a ship for players and would support the F2P business portion.

 

 

On 10/31/2019 at 1:49 AM, ORCA1911 said:

Disclaimer

::this is the feedback i collected from players and reintroduced to you all so you can see if there is something big missing, please don’t be hung over details for now::

 

Sorry, as you said I kinda mixed up with main thread.

Facepalm for me.

 

Back to thread, I would say your idea can be great and can be bad depends on how node is well distributed. For example tormentor, you have both Long range and Guard version. 

  1. Nods force you to upgrade in Guard way, like there is no bonus toward Long Range in each node

  2. Each node gives you both rules’s bonus together, tormentor stands at strange position neither long range nor guard.

That is my only worry about your suggestion.

But, if you put all specific rules’ bonus in the special module upgrade, then I’m with your idea.

 

You can pick any node for special mod, any node for passive layout, any node for level bonus from the pre-existing ship variations. Guards passive slots, lrf’s level bonus and whatever special mod u take, the things are preset so its still the same thing but this time you get to mish-mash things for extra fun.

My concerns:

  • If a player already has say all 71 premium ships and this goes through, would they have to purchase the premium node once more?

  • If a player already has all standard ships at max level and this goes through, would they have to purchase the nodes with synergy+credits or would they already have them unlocked?

  • Would there be any way to have multiple ships of the same role and same faction anymore? say for example in Four Lives/SCL/Portals/Beacon Capture modes, there is a strategy (a dated strategy that doesn’t always work as well as newer strategies, but it still happens in speed runs) where players bring 4 recons and just capture beacons faster than their opponents (Tai’Kin, Spectre Falcon, Cyning, Berserker/Jarl/Viking) but with this they would still be able to bring 4, however they would need a t5 Tai’Kin and a Cyning in their complement. Another example of this would be a player put in the role of Thi’Lith spamming where everyone brings Lightbringer, Spark, Apollo, but if I understand this, the proposition would combine all 3 of those ships into 1 and the player could only bring 1 Thi’Lith gunship and if they die, the team’s Thi’Lith gunship is removed from play. Granted they could also bring a Thi’Lith Mjolnir which lacks any unique equipment but would work, and of course Wolfhound and/or Thi’Lith Pirhana-B2 or whatever the converted version would be, but federation gunships are almost never played as suppression Thi’Lith gunships because they suck at it compared to assassination/dog fighting. Another example of this would be a Sector Conquest team’s LRF player if they are dedicated to nothing but LRF (which is rare but occasionally seen where someone will bring only LRFs). This wouldn’t have much of an impact because the player could still bring Gargoyle, Kraken, Project 1011, and whatever the Dragon variant would be, but typically people don’t like to use Project 1011 or Kraken because they’re generally not as good at LRFing in sec con.

  • If a player had to start from the beginning of the ship tree (because they just got started, or because it resets everyone’s progress if it does) how incredibly long and expensive/pay to progress would it become? The Ellydium ships are incredibly expensive even without reaching the end of the tree, just getting a t5 plasma burster cost me 375k gs for just 1 copy of the gun, and that was near the beginning when the price for the Ellydium node components was low! The Object Ny18 was not much of an expense to me and only took a few days of Sec Con rewards, but that’s give that I frequently get 100 monocrystals per day, a normal player who isn’t involved in controlling map territories would struggle in comparison. It has been mentioned that the upgrades would require credits and synergy to unlock nodes, but given how incredibly expensive nodes are for the ships that currently have them I can only envision a single rank 15 ship under the new tree to cost more than credit cap (400,000,000 credits). I’m one of the game’s wealthiest players and yet that would be expensive even to me when I can pull in over 100m credits in a few hours of playing.

  • How would ships be limited by how much unique equipment they can use, previously premium ships could use 3, however the abuse seen by this imbalance was mostly fixed by reducing the number to 2, removing many of the most powerful combinations from the equation. Things get more complicated though if you’re mixing the ships into 1 ship, because the standard ships are not restricted by how many unique mods/modifiers/weapons they can have installed, and many of them have 3. If they are limited to 3, the extremely powerful combinations are allowed to return, however, if they are limited to 2, parts of what made builds on certain ships good become obsolete and the ship is left more and more out of the META, which was the reason the global revamp took place, to prevent useless ships from being useless.

  • I can’t help but imagine this will take an incredibly long time to balance the trees before release, which will take away all their time from fixing the issues we actually have, such as garbage tier networking, the rift created in PvE between Aces and vets by the power/defense levels, the Ze’Ta nodes are only getting more and more expensive by the day (Prolapse God is too hard for most players, leading corporate superpowers and friend groups to hold a monopoly on the market), all the crafted rank 15 ships are practically useless in comparison to the new content, and Sector Conquest as a whole is completely broken.

Assuming you didn’t mix up my suggestion with the “guess what this is” gif post from devs or read both and mixed them up into one.

 

The idea is generally simple, what you had before in ships, you would now have in nodes. Unlocked ships = unlocked nodes, before/after. There would be no reset of progress of any kind.

 

Pros:

  • exp leveling for only one model instead of all 3 same looking models

  • nodes would cost in credits what used to be the cost of the ship, since each ship would be split in 3 nodes with preset content, each node would cost 1/3 of the ship you see now

  • extra customization for standard ships layout and bonuses

  • the possibility to enrich said tree with extra nodes later in development to the devs discretion or player request or any kind of change, be it balance-wise or just easier model skin implementation etc

 

Cons:

  • you cant take aura, apollo, lightbringer and spark into the same battle as before (in all of my years of playing this game i have never seen 2 same model ships being played by one player in a match)

 

Neutral:

  • you can mish-mash all of the stuff these 4 ships i mentioned have and create a better one or more presets that could be better for specific stuff or more scenarios than one but still be balanced or easily fixable in case of imbalance

 

I’m against the big node idea in general but since it was first proposed im just using the lingo of nodes to explain my proposition.

Example: spark model would have a node branch that lets you pick between command or gunship, next it opens the branch where you pick between the passive module layouts of the 4 ships that existed prior to this imaginary change and the last branch would let you pick between those 4 ships level bonuses.

This topic is mainly about standard ships but lets go over premium too then. Last node would just be either the premium node that lets you have the no-repair+exp gain and other bonuses that are present in all premiums or unlock sparks layout, bonuses and premium bonuses in the respective branches as an additional option to customize your ship.

 

Premium will cost like before, standard ship parts will cost the total ship cost like before just partitioned between the parts.

 

There will be possible imbalanced combinations but one can easily identify them and manage them even during redesign whereas the full on elly node tree is an impossible thing to balance to this day apparently.

37 minutes ago, ORCA1911 said:

 

 

Cons:

  • you cant take aura, apollo, lightbringer and spark into the same battle as before (in all of my years of playing this game i have never seen 2 same model ships being played by one player in a match)

 

 

Actually this is pros for other players sir.