Hard Counters for Humans in SCO

What? The cruisers in SC2 were self-guiding nukes, too. What is this madness?

Same with the flagship, once you added the modules, but I know what your point is now, and I'll respond.

That's what I said.

But I did just make an edit to add SCO tags where appropriate.

I've been wanting to post about your starting Flagship for a while. 

It's far too OP from the beginning. I would assume this is WiP, bigtime, though. But it still needs to be said, because...

Humanity's VERY FIRST FORAY into space (your flagship) is, from-the-get-go, AN ABSOLUTE star-destroyer. Able to keep up with the most incredible ships from empires thousands/millions of years old. It's simply not *dangerous* feeling.

Now, I may be the only person on earth who's like this... but my absolute favorite part of any RPG - is when you start at level #1, with rags and a rusty sword and shield. The first time you actually get a sword made of iron?! RPG Heaven. And then I quit when I have full ebony armour and a fiery glass sword that makes you invisible when you're standing still. When I can't get any better, I'm so done. I actually... this may be heresy... but in my 10 replays of Star Control II, at least 4 of them have ended when I got the Hellbore and trackers and maxed the turning and thruster modules. That should be the end of the game, right there. I see it as there's nothing really left to do. SC2 didn't do a great job of spreading out the upgrades, so that NOW when I play - I go straight for the BIO units up front, and upgrade everything right away. A few months in, and I've already basically "beaten" the game. This needs to be crafted specifically to stop you from getting too powerful early on. And a big portion of that is hard counters to earth-tech.

In the build I played, I felt like all that was just given to me at the very start of humanity's first jaunt into outer space. I agree that there are no real counters to these insane nukes, coupled with the speed and turning radius of your ship. I want to start way, WAY before any of that.

But to IBNobody's point - if you view your flagship as arms and armour in a typical RPG, the extension of that should be that the SHIPS in your repertoire need to be your early arms and armour as well, before the upgrades come. So, in Baldur's Gate, a fiery greatsword would be perfect for fighting humans, and a lightning wand would be needed to fight a slime... in Star Control, a Spathi should be used to counter a Mycon, and a CHMMR should be used to counter an Urquan (but not a Kohr-Ah). You usually can't do everything yourself in an RPG, which is why you get a party. Ships are also your "party". Play a mage, you're still going to need a tank to get the beating. We need this synergy to encourage varied gameplay BEFORE you get any upgrades to your flagship. 

He's got a good plan, which... it pains me deeply to say about @IBNobody.

Placement of races was key. Does anyone think it's a coincidence that our closest neighbor was the only ship that could outwit our initial homing missiles?

Ship counters was key. You NEEDED Spathi, and it made losing them so much more painful.

One additional solution would be to give the Scryve flak cannons the ability to disrupt / destroy incoming missiles. It is a duplication of what humans can do with PD lasers, except that it can be used longer. Doing this would make the Scryve a group to be feared.

This would mean that the initial Scryve scout you fight would need to have damaged flak cannons, or else you wouldn't be able to fight them off.

I may be wrong, but if flak cannons are mini explosives that shower an area in metal shards and other debris... in space, would they really be effective? Wouldn't they blow up and then the metal shards would just drift forever outward, littering the entire battlefield in millions of small pieces of fast moving debris? Could be bad news for everybody.

But, certainly you don't want the captain to be fighting the Scryve straight away?!? No, we need a different enemy in our immediate region. Who would it be? 

They would be, as a similar system is actually used in real life to counter high-speed missile systems. As for the shrapnel? The likelihood that it provides any noticeable impact is so slim that it isn't even worth worrying about.

Much on board with you.  Right now the flagship (aka humanity's first big entry into the galaxy) is as powerful as the fully upgraded Vindicator.  It's fast, it turns well, it's got really overpowered self-guided nukes.  Why bother with meeting other races?  Just fly to the Scryve homeworld, and rid the galaxy of them all by yourself.  I'm hopeful that the current version is just a placeholder.

The cruiser really needs some tuning.  I've previously suggested a reduction in the damage done by the nukes (PD is fine, feels like the SC2 cruiser), and reducing the max velocity + acceleration to break the ability to kite.  Keep the really quick rotation, that is the way it handled in SC2.

Agree that the cruiser should not be a strong ship because you start with it... and you should start pretty much naked and bankrupt (not to mention a naked flagship but that will probably change).

I always thought the cruiser was one of the worse ships, it really couldn't stand up to any of the more decent ships out there.
indeed it was slow, but it also had a very slow energy recharge, so if you're busy laser defending, you can't shoot, and if a Dreadnought comes at you, you can't run. The only way to stand a chance with it is to use the planet as a slingshot and try target practicing.

to the progression point:

Would be great if the progression is well tailored, SC2 didn't do that very well and there are a few reasons why:

- lander upgrades didn't cost, were instantly deployed and 100% eliminated the threat, this can be a lot more gradual
- you could sell anything at the same cost you bought it, so no penalty for poor planning, and almost doesn't cost to upgrade.
- there was only 1 upgrade path to the ship, as you couldn't choose what the melnorme offered.

Agree about enemy placement on the map, definitely should be taken into account. In SC2 you got a few strong ships in the beginning: Eluder (Spathi), Nemesis (Orz) & the Fury (Pkunk), but unlike ships like the Avatar, you had to learn how to use them, that was great because i would have never got any good with the Eluder if I didn't really have to use it (nor the Fury for that matter).
There are a number of good ship counter pairs but I also liked how with some ships you can just dominate if you learn how to fly them (Fury/Arilou..... Skiff).

Partially related idea:

Allow specific flagship modules to be damaged or outright destroyed so you have to go back and repair/replace them. This way even if you have an OP flagship you have to be extra careful or you might lose some speed or turning jets and become a sitting duck.

Yes... This is going to be tricky, I had been hinting at that a long time ago.  Doing it "realistically" is a bad idea because that will be too hard for too many people.

I think the best solution, that allows ANY GAMER to easily complete the game and experience the story, is going to be to think of the mothership as the "Trump Card" ship.  All the other ships are balanced to make for a challenging game with the classic SC2 rock, paper, scissors balance.  The mothership should be "easy mode" in space combat.  It doesn't have the rock, paper, scissors balance and is good against any opponent and the ship you use in boss fights.  It's balanced for the boss fights... which means it's going to have a pretty easy time with the "satellite ships" (everything other than the mothership, boss ships, and bases if they have them).  In the early game the mothership can be weak until you build it, but very early on it would become the "Trump Ship" that a player can always use to win any fight relatively easliy by the standards of us players who like these kinds of games and are actually really good at them.  We are, in 2017, a very tiny minority.

For anyone who doesn't like the "arcade" top down space combat, or who finds it too difficult, the mother ship is there to let them waltz through the game essentially ignoring the space combat to get through the story.  They build a "battleship" or "hybrid carrier" out of the mother ship.  For those like me, IBN, or any of you who like and are good at that part of the game and want a challenge... we build the pure carrier to intentionally not use the mothership crutch that we all know it is.  The carrier build is for us, to take the "Trump Ship" away from ourselves and play the game that was meant for those of us who love and understand this kind of game.  For everyone else, doing anything other than that leaves you with a super ship that allows you to essentially skip all that "hard and long space combat" to just walk through it as an adventure game and experience the story.

This is a compromise that allows the game to appeal to the widest audience, and us "experts" can be expected to get the fact that the mothership is a crutch for people who don't like the space combat part, or just don't want to be distracted from the story by it.  It allows a player to choose to treat it as an adventure game if they want to, and us purist to restrict ourselves to playing the game as it was actually meant to be played... which is a pretty hard game by today's standards.

Also, you can elminate the hybrid carrier build as an option if you don't like it by flagging certain components as carrier or battlship only.  As soon as you mount one kind, you can't mount the other anymore.  This makes no sense from an engineering standpoint and will stand out to us starship geeks as being "silly wrong"... but there are very, very few of us starship geeks who will even notice that it is downright silly that you can't mount any more guns with 80% of ship volume unused just because you put a third hangar bay on the ship.  It makes no sense, but most won't notice and most that notice won't care.  That's an option if you don't care about the engineering of the ship making any sense and you don't want the hybrid carrier option to exist.

If you try to make this "realistic" a lot of people are going say it is "too hard".  If you make it for those people, all us old school guys will say it is too easy and boring.  By doing something along these lines you can please everyone, and leave it to us "hard core" guys to simply restrict ourselves by building the carrier that the casual players can't figure why it is even an option because it makes things "so hard".

That seems to be the best solution too me, in making SCO work equally well for both audiences.

...to continue this, and maintain my reputation for long posts (haha), the core problem here is that the "satellite ships" are basically destroyers and the mothership is a captial ship.  The game is about the destroyers, only your mothership and the boss ships are capital ships... everything else is a destroyer.  That is what is causing this issue, if an encounter is balanced for the satellite ships then, by definition, the mothership will easily crush the opposition.  The "realistic" way of addressing this is to only allow the mothership to be used in fights that are balanced for it.  It only fights other capital ships, bases, and "end of quest finale" scenarios that are designed for the mothership.  The more general fights are done with the satellite ships.  But if you do it this way... what about all those people who want to experience this story but either don't like, or aren't any good at, the space combat?  They'll get frustrated and give up and not complete the game.

So by doing something more like what I mentioned in the first post, you make the game work for both the old school SC crowd and the younger generation who doesn't have the patience to play the kinds of games that existed prior to the 1990s.  Games used to be much, much harder than they are today.  Few modern gamers will tolerate the difficulty level that was present in games of the 1980's and earlier... and was largely also present in SC2.  Except, of course, SC2 had this same issue and if you used the mothership it was easy mode for you.  So this isn't anything new, what I am suggesting is actually how SC2 worked;-)

Diablo, one of the most successful games of all times, a game that almost doesn't require you to be conscious in order to play it (bash bash bash, gulp gulp gulp, basically), and certainly not a realistic game, had you start with a dagger and a cloak.

Star Control isn't a realistic game by any account, and the point isn't about making it hard. It's about making the progression right so you can't just go ahead and pretty much skip the game. It also serves to help the player uncover the game world in a more coherent way which ultimately i believe leads to a better game experience altogether.

and really at heart, i'm a casual gamer. I like Mass Effect after all   

I love this even though it's a bit extreme (of course can't fully agree as there's a lot of story to play for).

The point is that when the flagship is fully upgraded, you basically hit fire 3 times for each battle and it's done without taking damage. That will get old for any kind of gamer. 

But that's end-game. You shouldn't be playing 2/3rds of the game like this. More like the last 10% and any post-game content.

I thought i said the same!

You could have multiple difficulty levels in that game, when on higher levels mothership can be weaker, thus increasing focus of using satellite ships.

Anyway, SC2 did not have great balance of early enemies, which usually led to focusing of running away from enemies, or even using AI when fighting probes, until there is time to upgrade the mothership.

On the other hand, there were expert players that were using Fiffo to pretty much grind away many of the early enemies. I was never skilled enough to do that and am still lacking the patience of playing such way.

That's possible however it will change the gameplay too much. I would rather have lower difficulty AI to fight instead.

A thought on maybe why earth vessels shouldn't even have nukes. It does involve some assumptions on story line and absolutely zero playtime on the alpha so please be nice .

Two things to consider:

1. This isn't the same universe as SC1 and SC2, therefore the lore may not apply
2. This isn't a remake of SC1 and  SC2

If you consider the first point and look at the original SC lore, the nukes were put onto earth vessels only after they had formally engaged with the Chenjesu in war with the Urqan. And the nukes were only available because they were ALL located in peace vaults. Based on early founder updates from Brad the 2015 nuclear war didn't happen and we don't yet know the full story of current earth politics, but I would assume they don't have peace vaults. Knowing that in SCO it is the first starship built by humans I would assume that 'confidence' in reliable space travel/transport probably isn't quite there yet, which makes me question if anyone on Earth would even allow nukes in space at the start of the game (people are scared of fallout). Perhaps they become viable as a late game weapon as an all-out last ditch effort.

My question is - other than for nostalgia reasons, why should the earth cruiser even work the same way as in SC1 and SC2? Going back to IBN's original post, maybe they do become a ship available later in the game. Early game we only get crappy asteroid mining ships that have been shoehorned with naval railguns (sea faring version). Earth is only just entering space and has no idea how to use or design a spaceship that can fight.

But there is a major issue, that also existed in SC2.  SC uses "champion combat".  One unit represents each side in the fight no matter how much force is actually present.  Only the mothership and bosses are "capital ships", the vast majority of ships in the game are "destroyers".  The game is balanced for the "destroyers", and yet you allow the player to use their "capital ship" whenever they want.  This is a serious problem, which you saw in SC2... using the mothership after the very earliest stages of the game makes any fight easy.  It's you in a battleship and the AI in a destroyer.  There is no direct solution to this, either the upgraded mothership is a "Trump Ship" crutch you can use to easily win any fight or the opponents become too strong to use anything but the mothership and all the ships of SC except the mothership become useless.  Take your pick.

And SC is, by today's standards, a very hard game to anyone who has no experience playing this type of game, and today that is most people.  The generation who played Star Control had grown up playing Asteroids, Star Castle, Defender, and Stargate.  Many gamers today have probably never played a game like this before.  For this type of combat to even rate as "fun"... it needs to be pretty hard by today's standards.  I am not saying it should be made hard, I am saying that, for example todays gamers would consider the Spathi/Probe fight to be a very hard thing to do... and by SC2 standards the Spathi was actually very good at killing the Probe.

A significant number of today's gamers are going to either not like the space combat, or think that it is too hard, but will still want to experience the story.  Since there is the built in "problem" of the mothership breaking the balance of the rest of the game, and the "problem" of locking out a significant portion of the audience who won't like or not be any good at the space combat, the two "problems" can be used to solve each other.  The mothership as a crutch to allow "the kids" to just walk through the game as an adventure game, essentially getting to ignore the space combat with the easy to use mothership.  This is how the original SC2 worked as well, it had this same problem and they dealt with it in this same way.  If you play SC2 with the mothership it is very easy, if you use the satellite ships it is very hard.  The mothership crutch is always there for anyone who wants it at any time, to never become stuck in the game.  

I am not saying they should make it hard, I am saying that it already is hard by today's standards.  Dumbing that down will make it boring for everyone.  And there is no solution to the fact that almost all ships in the game other than your mothership are like destroyers compared to your battleship.  If it is going to be like Star Control, than this is inevitably still going to be the case.  You have to find a good way to use that reality, because you can't change it.  That battleship is always going to have an easy time with its destroyer opponents no matter what "progression" you give to the battleship.  You can make it weak in the very early stages of the game, but it won't take many upgrades before it seriously outclasses all of the ships that it can encounter except for a few relatively rare bosses.

I'm not saying it should be made to work this way, I am saying that it unavoidably works this way and you have to find a way to work with that.

I guess I should give my opinion on the actual issue IBN had brought up, too.  Missiles are actually really easy to deal with, there are so many ways of dealing with point defense that I can't even really cover it here in any comprehensive way.  You could literally write a book on this subject.  You can either make the missles weaker, slower, or less accurate... or you can give the ship some means of destroying incoming missles, or "jamming" them through Electronic Warfare.  Every ship should have at least some form of active or passive defense against small targets (missiles, fighters, breaching pods, etc).

In a simple arcade game this is abstracted down in very simple ways.  For example "Electronic Warfare" becomes simply a chance-to-hit at the point of contact giving the ship 2 passive means of avoiding missiles.  First, you might dodge it and make it miss through your own maneuver.  Second, it might miss even after it "hits"... just like in Faster Than Light when it says "Miss" and the missile just flies right past you.  One of these SCO ships has a "Flak Gun" which should be, in addition to the anti-ship weapon for that ship that I am guessing it is, an active defense against missiles.  This is among the worst forms of self defense, needing to use a primary ship weapon against missiles, because it means the missile ship can make you use it against his missiles instead of against him.  So it is "self balancing" in that regard, using it as a missile defense means not using it against the enemy ship.

A ship might also have "counter measures".  The Measured in SCO can use it's warp ability as a countermeasure against missiles, for example.  There are many ways of dealing with missiles other than simply shooting them down, and the passive "ECM Defense" is always the final balance solution across the board for the ships that have little, or no, means of dealing with missiles.

I think you should just limit the number of nukes. The upside of human tech is that it is destructive. The downside is that it is not so renewable. Other alien races with more advanced tech have moved away from such weapons systems to energy ones because it is harder to run out of "bullets". Just limit the number of nukes to 10 per battle (or 10 per 5 min refresh rate).

That will make it fair. Powerful but limited. After you run out you are a sitting duck.

That sounds boring.  With a capital B..and O, and R, and you get the idea.  It just needs to be nerfed. 

Ehh? Boring to limit the number of nuke missiles but not boring to nerf them??? The easy way out??  Serious?

Okay then how about we do it this way.

The nukes are actually the advanced kind where the power of the nuke is adjusted by how much nuclear material it is loaded with.

It takes time to charge those nukes so when you fire them quickly (successively) then they only have a low nuclear load and are not powerful.

To achieve the highest power you have to charge the nukes for 30 seconds. every 10 seconds increases the power level of the nukes.

So you have:

Power 1: 0 - 9 seconds very weak explosive force.

Power 2: 10 - 19 seconds moderate explosive force.

Power 3: 20 - 29 seconds large explosive force.

Power 4: 30 seconds nuclear Armageddon.

Alternatively you could make it that is shoots multitude nukes and it takes to prep them. so 

Power 1: 0 - 9 seconds. One nuke

Power 2: 10 - 19 seconds. Two nukes

Power 3: 20 - 29 seconds. Three nukes

Power 4: 30 seconds. Four nukes

SC1/2 already did this well, i'm not sure why we need to invent the wheel here...

The original cruiser:
- had slow recharge time.
- was slow.
- you could only fire 2 nukes when the energy was full.
- missile guidance was less effective at close range.
- missiles had a slow turning rate so they were actually easy to dodge.
- nukes weren't the highest damage weapons (they were 2nd tier)

I think the main concern is that the playing field is now much bigger than in SC2 so therefore the distance gives the earthling cruiser a greater advantage.

But you are correct. The cruiser's powerful nukes were already quite balanced against other factors and in fact the cruiser was not a big favorite to use (at least for me), which shows that they were not all powerful. If you got unlucky and crashed into a planet it was cumbersome to escape the gravity field. 

And they were fodder for the Ilwrath ships, and fast ships that could outrun the missiles.

But going back to the point, this is not in a point in time for history were the earthling cruiser is weak. It is most likely at a point in time were they were a force to be reckoned with. So if you keep the original cruiser (which the developers can't due to licensing) then you have to really nerf the other ships and that won't be pretty.

Remember, developers have a license to build a game from the same universe but cannot use wholesale the content from the previous games which includes aliens, all ship designs, abilities and etc.

The playing field is smaller.

Honestly, Xenove, you should try to get a key and try the game out. It will improve your understanding of where we are coming from.