Shipwright Archive

Just some ideas that came to me while reading threads on these topics, that I think would enhance our experiences in JTL without significantly disrupting the game balance and things like that, and possibly without taking too much effort to code into place.

The issues I'm going to address are:

1. Ship Longevity - IE: people would like to see ships that are low in the trees have some use higher up, or even at master.

2. Crafted quality vs. Looted and a more interesting RE/crafting minigame.

So first, #1. Currently, ships, especially starter ships, are superceeded by those higher in the tree, but some pilots would like to have those superceeded ships have some use, perhaps as high as the master-level. My proposal for a solution is to add an optional subcomponent to some, perhaps all, spaceframe schems. These optional components are a variety of enhancements, that can boost mass, hitpoints, speed, YPR, etc. They have a greater effect on lower-level ships, and on ships that are lacking in the area they enhance. So While you could use a mass-booster in a B-Wing, you wouldn't get very much additional mass (as it's high-level and already massive), but a Z-95 would get a substantial boost, as it's a low-level ship that lacks in mass. The exact effects of each enhancement would have to be tweaked to maintain balance, of course. Enhancements would either be looted, or a combination of loot/RE.. and they would be high-level, rare/semi-rare drops. Either they drop directly from NPC kills in Kessel/Deep Space, or they have to be RE'd from existing loot like the KSE disks. Perhaps these enhancements might also make a given spaceframe require a higher cert than normal (a Z-95 built with a good mass boost enhancement might require Hyper-Manuveurable craft cert, for instance). this gives Masters more diversity, and more loot to hunt around for, and increases the viability of the lower-level craft, as rare-but-useful "agile Y-Wings" and "High-mass Z-95s" and the like start to enter the feild. these would have to remain somewhat rare and precious commodities, though.

#2 is nearly the same proposal as #1. Again, make sub-components drop in some fashion, with better stats than the crafted ones... and possibly affecting stats in different ways. IE: A "Drive Governor", which in addition to the speed boost an Overdriver gives, boosts an engine's YPR values as well. these would probably not drop as normal loot, but would be RE-loot like the KSE discs, with loot components occassionally dropping a sub-component appropriate to the component type and level or stats. this would allow SWs to compete with loot stats (and even do better than them), without removing loot as a desirable aspect of the game.

So, this was just an off-the-cuff idea, really... thoughts? Concerns? Scathing rebuttals?

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Chewato wrote:

I have always thought that instead of having the mass of the ships increase as drastically with level that the components would decrease in size. For example a Mk4 reactor would generate more power than a Mark I but be approximately the same size. And for the large ships (especially the multiplayer ships) there should be two reactor slots. And multiple armor and shield slots. And the mass would not be as dramatically different between low level and high level ships (althought the handling characterics should be very different still).

The 'Mark' of a component represents two things in my mind. The technology level is part of it. The Mark I stuff would be stuff that has been around for decades while the Mark V things would be the very experimental items. And it could even be that based on what type it is the mass stays about the same but the capabilities go up or since 'prototypes' tend to be larger than mass produced parts those should be larger, but I have problems with the current system. I would rather have 15 Mark 1 blaster linked together than 1 Mark V blaster in terms of both damage and mass concerns. At least I would have more options.

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there is that aspect of it... but the problem there is that it requires rebuilding parts of the system. The idea I was working with here was something relatively simple to get put in-- after all, you just add some stuff into the loot tables right next to things that already exist, and put in the appropriate item description files. Boom. done, relatively painless, especially when they're already mucking around with tuning the loot tables.

You might be right, regarding the novice ships.

However, taking a look at rebel ships, I notice that from Y-wing to A-wing the mass is decreasing while the manoverability is increasing at the same time.
So by getting better certs, you can improve a ships characteristics a lot. Especially the lower rebel ships.

Point in case: As a 3323 pilot, I am still using a tier 1 y-wing. And I am very happy with this y-wing. So a system like you propose already is available, at least for the rebel ships. Lower tier ships might not handle to well, but do offer large masses, while higher tier ships offer better handling but are a lot more limited regarding mass.

Regards

Niacia