Boarding combat

kingofhearts81 · June 2013

I recently purchased the Caitian playable race, I knew they mostly had traits for melee ground combat, BUT I had no idea how limited their space traits were, they get practically nothing, which gives them a severe disadvantage, since no one what-so-ever does any ground PVE or PVP, I can never start one, I find that weird too, seeing as though the que last month was at almost 30,000 players lol. So, I figured, why not incorporate some ground combat into space, as boarding combat. Just an idea to add more ground combat, that or change the current ground PVE so more people will play them, that or take them out cause they seem like a waste of memory if no one is doing them lol.

My idea goes like this;

Space combat is started, when you get within a certain range, you activate a skill that allows you to beam an away team to the target ship, with your captain leading, but if their shields are up you cannot beam over, you must first weaken their shields, and once their facing shields are down you can use the skill, and beam over, which starts an instance with your away team beaming aboard their bridge.

If the attacking party wins the session the defending ship is brought offline for a certain amount of time before their "crew" can get another able body bridge crew onto the bridge.

Or

If the attacking party wins the session, they have a certain time limit to active a usable console (Weapons, Engines, Auxiliary) or a longer time limit to activate a self destruct sequence, before they are automatically kicked off the ship.

If the defending party wins, the assailant's ship is brought offline for a certain amount of time until. (i.e. the crew is panicking that the captain was killed, and they are trying to figure a chain of command) something like that.

During boarding combat, their ships are controlled by the AI, like an attack pet.

Or

During boarding combat, both ships are stationary, but receive a huge defense bonus for being close together, as to stop someone from simply camping the ships in boarding mode.

red01999 · June 2013

This is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

* First and foremost is loading time. If you or the other person lag out for three minutes in the middle of a game, what are you supposed to do? Loading screens are not exactly the most speedy things for a lot of players. This is only a few of the myriad of technical problems this would probably cause - one thing to note is that from the game's perspective, AFAIK, "your" position is your captain, OR your ship - not both. This is the reason for the "captain becomes the ship" bugs you occasionally see, and why they can't add a 'command from your bridge' mode easily.

* This doesn't touch on the fact that many people are not going to be set up for ground combat. A lot of the time when someone goes into battle they may do a quick check-over to make sure they've got the right warp core, etc. deployed. They don't want to do that, I'm sure, for their ship, their BOffs, and their captain, each and every time they go into battle.

* Mental whiplash - space and ground combat are considerably different. Someone who is prepared for one may not be terribly prepared for another. Even in canon, it seems that boarding parties during combat are rather rare - if not we'd seen everyone issued and carrying sidearms on the bridge and other key areas, aside from Worf, who seemed to sprout a phaser out of nowhere as needed.

* People often prefer one to another - space stuff is more popular because it is much different than most MMO offerings. There are lots of opportunities to play a human/humanoid/etc. on the ground out there among MMOs. There are far fewer opportunities to command a ship - particularly a large ship, and there is NO other (legal) opportunity to command a Star Trek ship, which is arguably a bit more exclusive to the experience than shooting it out with lasers. Many, many players try to avoid ground completely, and forcing space to have a ground component is a great way to lose them.

There are more reasons that I could list, but I'll stop there. Frankly this entire thing seems to be concentrated around the fact that you are unsatisfied with the limited applicability of your purchase. I believe you may be well-served to explore what options there actually are - there are a lot of Foundry missions that are concentrated on it, at least four adventure zones that are exclusively involved in it, and plenty of standard missions, including several Featured Episodes, and many options in PvE queues, which have been expanded on with Nukara Hard missions being transferred to the PvE menu. There is arguably more ground content than space content, despite a large number of players hating ground and concentrating almost exclusively on space.

canisanubis · June 2013

I'm not in favor. The idea of polluting the generally strong space combat with more of the generally weak and dull ground combat is not a notion I relish. As Red says, if you want to fight a boarding action, there's plenty of mission content that simulates it.

thegreatdragon1 · June 2013

Yes i asked this before, and yes i agree, loading times would be a MAJOR problem...

But... I beleave you shoud be abil to do it However the map you are on shall be small (Inproves loading time) AND your 2nd in command flys your ship and you can set the settings to (assist teammate)

But this idea shoud have a long cooldown and the instant shoud be 1min to compleat your objective and you get force beam back

Nova is done here

makbure · June 2013

I wonder if it'd work if the 'ground' combat was a RTS style interface. Basically, you don't leave the space instance, the current ship UI hides and a RTS UI takes its place for a squad control. As far as visuals, a map of the ship you just boarded would load and you would just use top-down angle to control your squad.

Boarding combat

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