Kerules Yor
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Posted - 2006.11.06 22:55:00 -
[1]
I'll echo what's already been said, just to emphasise that many people are concerned.
Why limit the size of plain gangs if you've removed the overhead that made large gangs expensive on the servers? The limit will do nothing but make FCs sigh and form another gang of 50, and coordinate everyone over Teamspeak/Ventrillo like we do already.
Fleets, as I see them, are less about getting 250 players together and more about completely nerfing gang bonuses. Currently everyone in gang gets all the best bonuses available. If you have 10 guys in battlecruisers running different warfare links, they all apply to everyone. In a fleet the soldiers get gang bonuses from AT MOST 3 people. One of those people has to train up a dreadnought-rank skill for the privilege of sitting in a safespot somewhere. Another of those is the squad leaders, of which you need one for every 10 players. It's very unlikely that all 25 squad leaders will want or be able to fly command ships, so you're down to just 2 people giving gang bonuses to each soldier.
And that's IF you find 5 command ship pilots who want to train the charisma equivalent of Battleship V, and one with the CHA equivalent of Dreadnought V.
The new Counterstrike-like broadcast commands seem cute but ultimately useless. "Enemy spotted!" Okay, where? how many? what ship types? are they alligned on anything, jumping in/jumping out? All this needs to be typed in gang/squad chat anyway. Or more likely, spoken on Teamspeak. These tools don't make up for the huge multiplayer SP-sink required for fleets, or the added complexity of organising a fleet.
Bottom line, I think the changes are more likely to dissuade players from specialising in leadership/gang assists. If gang bonuses are nerfed anyway, people will just use plain gangs.
As suggestions for improvement:
1) lower the rank of the fleet skills would be a start, so they are more in line with the advantages fleets provide. Or make the prereqs for advancement at level 4.
and/or
2) increase the effectiveness of gang bonuses, or give fleets more advantages.
I would do (1) or both. You're killing gang bonuses either way by limiting their spread, no sense in being overly brutal with the SP-sink.
Other suggestions for features:
I liked Gramtar's Fleet composition idea. Expanding on that, I'd like the ability to rename squads/wings for organisation purposes. Naming squads "snipers", "tacklers", "ewar-a" "ewar-b", etc. would help the FCs see at a glance how many they have and which squads to place new members in.
This is a bigger change but, instead of the burden always being on squad leaders to invite and move members, allow members to request transfer to other squads/wings, and the leader would only have to click "okay". In conjunction with named squads it would make it much easier for pilots to sort themselves into squadrons by roles.
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