With all these fancy new consoles going onto the Cstore ships it gave me an idea. A ship rank scaling console. These consoles would be specific to the ship class and would allow it to scale to some degree with both passive bonuses and/or active skills allowing it to be viable in a PvE sense all game. These consoles would be purchased with dilitium. To illustrate this idea I am going to list an example. Keep in mind the design goal is for them to be viable for PvE, not necessarily as powerful as the higher rank ships.
T2 Cruiser to T5
The T5 Cruiser has 2 more fore and aft weapons, double the hull, double the crew, and around 7 more officer abilities and 5 more consoles. To offset some of these weaknesses the following passive bonuses would be added:
T2 to T5 mod bonus
+30% hull energy resist (10 per tier)
+15% hull kinetic resist (5 per tier)
+36 Engineering Skill (12 per tier)
+30% Beam Base Damage (10 per tier)
-This would modify the base, which would than multiply with other bonuses.
The first two bonuses will close the gap on their effective HP, the third will just be a nice binnie, and the last bonus would allow it to put out decent damage while creating a focus for the ship in beams. Then I would give it the following two captain abilities:
Full Power to Beam Array: Deals damage every sec for 4 sec, massive power drain (-30 to all systems).
Rapid Repairs: Moderate shield and hull heal. (would not receive until T4 console)
Possibly a third ability one the T5 version as well, not sure.
These ability cool downs would decrease with rank and their effects would increase in power. It may or may not be necessary to create a T3, T4, and T5 version of the console, or just one that automatically increases in strength. Now this is just an example and I'm sure the numbers would need tweaked, also this is not meant to create an uber ship at T5, just a viable PvE one. Creating these consoles would have a number of positive effects:
- Greatly increase ship variety at higher ranks
- Lessen the outcry for more refit/retrofit ships
- Allow casual players to use a ship with fewer active abilities if desired
- Increase the desire for more ship slots (Cstore!)
- Give yet another desirable use for dilitium
- Allow those who want to keep the same 'primary' ship most game.
- Console passives could be universal for the type simplifying design
- Could be designed for Cstore ships as well
- Shouldn't be too difficult to implement
Two other quick examples, an Escort and a Science Ship.
T3 to T5 Escort console
+16% defense (8 per tier)
+24 Starship Command (12 per tier)
-20% torpedo cooldown (10% per tier)
Ability
Pulsar Torpedo: Deals full damage to shields ignoring typical resistance
Launch Shuttlecraft: Deploys small number of shuttles to attack the enemy
*Yes, I am an Akira fanboy, so sue me.
T4 to T5 Science console (This may be stretching it a bit)
+5% Shield Regen and Strength
+1% Sensor Analysis tick strength
+12 Starship operations training
Ability
I honestly cannot think of one, any suggestions?
0