I’m a little curious as to why there is no option to skip past the alternate classes in Tiers 2 and 3. One of the complaints I hear from Empire pilots, for example, runs along the lines of “I want a Cerberus 2 but don’t want to have to buy five Long Range frigates first!”
Proposed ship tree revision uses the current format of 8 main roles and 4 minor roles per path
Gaijin wont need to add or omit ships, they can use existing ships - minimum effort
Skipping R5 and R8 means players get a 2 ship discount
if you dont want them to get those discounts, you’d need to create 2 new ships per class x 3 factions to fill the empty spaces
The only “problem” with this proposal is, ALOT of main role ships will get upgraded to a higher tier.
And a few minor role ships getting downgraded to lower tiers.
T4 has alot of minor role ships that shouldn’t be there and many of them gets relegated down to T3
And many R9 ships will get reclassified as T4’s
for eg. R9 Federation Guard gets booted down as a T2 R5 ship but at the same time their R5 Engy promoted to an R9 Final rank Tier 3 flagship. Ships are gonna have to restat as a consequence but shouldn’t be too much of a hassle
tl;dr
giving a 2 ship discount affects their license revenue
adding 18 new ships to fill in the gaps = more work
this is a happy median between the two
[edit]
also note: players do get alot of opportunities to skip cross progress early on, an R2 interceptor for eg. can proceed directly to R9 frigate and a Frig pilot can switch to an inty in T3 without having to go thru the earlier ranks. This should make up for the ‘forced’ purchase of minor role ships in T2 and T3.
all entry ships in T2 and T3 have the advantage of crossing paths except for the interceptors. This adds value to the ‘thrash’ ships and again compensates for forced purchases.
