Hi there testers!
!!!WARNING!!!
Wall of Text
I’ve been playing with the beta since about 8 days now and i find the gameplay entertaining and challenging, but this topic is more about ship roles, expecially the Frigates. Currently most people are don’t want to fly frigates and i’m one of them. Now frigates are mostly just flying coffins. I think this is not entirely but mostly because it’s role and the special ability of the ship which is supposed to enchance in it’s role.
Basicly all ship types have a special ability as you guys already know it. MWD for the interceptors, cloak for Attack Ships and sniper mode for Frigates. My problem is that these special abilities defines the role of a ship, which isn’t a bad thing for interceptors and attack ships. MWD can be used to quick raids, caping an objective or GTFO manouvers. Cloak is the perfect tool for hit&run tactics and flanking, but the frigate’s sniper mode is for only one purpose… to deliver devestating long range fire support, if you want to specialize your frigate in any other role you need to forget about the special ability.
For instance i want to turn my frig into a mobile repair platform. So i can repair hull damage and restore shields of allied ships on the battlefield or making it an EW ship with some nasty modules to make angry everyone in the opposite team. Sure i can do this, no problem, but any other role than sniping is looks bad because of the special ability.
Now you can say, that the special abilities also limits the role of the interceptors and attack ships as well and i agree, but don’t forget that those are supposed to be specialized ships, they’re are fighter crafts afterall. The frigates are different because a frigate supposed to be a real ship, some of the today’s Navy even describe them as capital ships because frigates are the largest ships they have. real life Frigates have crews, redundant systems and are mostly multi mission capable. Of course comparining real ships to a video game is looks silly, but still if you call something a frigate that means it’s supposed to similar to a real life frigate.
I have some suggestions about this. First, make more frigate types with different special abilities and also with a little different stats. For example…
Support Frigate - Special ability: Logistic Reconfiguration (Directs energy from weapons, engines and shield to remote repair modules). These ships have weaker hulls and shields, but speed would be higher than sniper frigates so they can be deployed with smaller crafts, of course the speed would be still slow compared to an attack ship.
EW Frigate - Special Ability: Scrambling (Reduced capacitor and shield/hull regen but increasing offensive EW modules range and effectivness). Generally these ships needs bigger capacitors, but with weaker hulls and a penalty to weapon damage.
Sniper Frigate: This is the current frigate
Battle Frigate - Special Ability: Overcharging (Slowly damage hull and draining capacitor but increases shield resists, shield regen and the rate of fire of the main cannons aswell). These ships meant to be on the front line to deliver heavy fire support or to serve as the spearheads of a strike force. Stronger hull and high capacity shields. Also these ships have a higher resists on default, but this kind of protection comes at a cost which is low speed and manouverability.
MIssile Frigate - Special Ability: Missile Barrage (Disables main cannons and reducing speed, but greatly increase the reload speed of the missile banks, also these ships has far bigger ammo reserves) Well this is mostly another type of sniper frigate. These kind of ships have a big missile reserves… say about 3-4-5 times bigger than normal ships. These are rockets, guided missiles and also long range cruise missiles, but no torpedoes. Costly ships to maintain i’m sure, but having such a ship in your team to suppress and harass enemies from longer ranges with fire and forget weapons is always a good thing. The more ammo means the ship needs to sacrifice it’s armor plating, so the hull should be weaker and by that i mean atleast 30-40% less hull points than the current frigates. Shield regen also reduced and because the main armaments on these ships are missiles, the equipped cannons do 25% less damage.
Second suggestion is to allow us to change the special abilities on our ships. These should be skills that we need to learn. This method requiries other approach than my first suggestion. in this way ships will be mostly identical. I think this kind of thing can be done quickly.
Overall i think frigates needs to be more powerful or atleast giving them more hull/shield is essencial. Right now i can go on 1vs1 with any frigate with my interceptor and i think all of us know how these fights usually ends.
Right now these are my suggestions for frigates. What you guys are thinking? Should we try to convice the devs to change the frigates? Is that would be a small adjustment or a big overhaul?
If you have your own suggestion regarding the frigates feel free to post it here and as always… feedbacks are welcome.
