Tiirae
The New Era HUZZAH FEDERATION
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Posted - 2008.11.22 11:55:00 -
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This is something I've thought about ever since starting Eve. And it may well be a way to stop the 'capships online' cheapening of capital ships.
Back when Tribes 2 was released, one of the cool features was a variety of vehicles, but all of them required more than one player to fly. I really enjoyed this aspect, although due to tribes' casual nature it was difficult to find competant co-pilots. But when you had a good team, you were able to turn a battle on it's ear.
Why not do the same with eve ships? Want to fly a carrier? Well you need two players to do so: A Navigation officer and a weapons/drones officer. Sure, you can fly it by yourself but you won't be able to launch drones/fighters.
Motherships? They need 4 people.
Titans? 8 players are needed to get one of these babies into space.
When in space, each crew member has a different role to play and is responsible for a particular part of the ships operation.
I'm not sure I need to go into exhaustive details for this, you should get the general idea. The benefits of this that I can see are:
- Encourages teamwork - Makes capital blobs much harder to create - Makes at least a token gesture to the idea that our ships do have crews
Perhaps as part of this the capital ships could be buffed in offense and defense, or have added capablities to give the new crews something to do.
Here are some potential downsides that I can see:
- Transitioning from the current system would be painful and a large number of capital owners would pretend to cancel their accounts - Could be some issues if one crewmember gets disconnected for whatever reason. I guess the ship could warp away under the same rules as existing now, but it would be weird for the remaining crew. - Some people will be able to solo fly the ships with multiple clients running. I actually think that might be OK, presumably it would be damn difficult to do well.
Anyway, we could discuss this forever so I'll just leave it at that. But I think it would fix some of the problems with the game right now and add a new dimension that would reward those prepared to put time into building teams of specialised players.
One last thing, it could also open the way to troop transporters; a titan needs 8 crew and can take an additional 50 passengers. Upon arrival at destination you all transfer to the 'docking area' and board your ships and leave the titan. Does this offer anything more than the existing bridging system? I don't know, but it's a crapload more realistic.
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