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Skirmishes - Ideas to make them better
Jim Steele
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Ok so love them or loath them, it appears Skirmishes are here to stay. before I start, lets look at the pros and cons of Skirmishes.
Skirmishes Pros
Easy to play
Holoemitters!!
Rewards participation with honour, Chrons etc
Can use intel at times to suit you
Can use chronos to level crew
Can send shuttles and voyages without needing to keep back event crew
Cons
Time consuming
repetitive
boring
hard to be competitive if you have life commitments, like spending time with the family, loved ones, eating etc.
Now, how would I make them better?
I realism some of these may be a pipe dream as they require significant coding but others might be easier to fix, what are your thoughts?
Skirmishes Pros
Easy to play
Holoemitters!!
Rewards participation with honour, Chrons etc
Can use intel at times to suit you
Can use chronos to level crew
Can send shuttles and voyages without needing to keep back event crew
Cons
Time consuming
repetitive
boring
hard to be competitive if you have life commitments, like spending time with the family, loved ones, eating etc.
Now, how would I make them better?
- The crew selection screen is horrendous! Especially if you have over 200 crew to choose from
- Id like to see more of a challenge and less cut scenes. Perhaps something simple like auto-starting the next skirmish battle with rewards only dished out when your ship explodes or you kill all the ships?
- Id like to see a more linear increase in difficulty, get rid of the normal - elite and epic difficulties and just increase the difficulty the more ships you destroy you could even not auto-repair shields at the end of each round, or have an option mid-fight to repair shields at the expense of attack damage or something similar.
- What about multiple engagements 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3?
- More ship types, christ they are enough in game could we mix things up a little so they arent the same old adversaries every 5 battles
- Could we make the game more multiplayer? i.e. have an entire fleet defending a POI against adversaries with points awarded for ships killed? Allies could even have special boosts to help allies repair their shields etc.
- What about autoclikers? I feel if the event was more stimulating and strategic choices had to be made at certain points (eg, repair shields or overcharge weapons etc) rather than the repetitive click click click largely the macro problem would go away.
I realism some of these may be a pipe dream as they require significant coding but others might be easier to fix, what are your thoughts?
DB: Do Better
4
Comments
This sums it up for me...
PM for details.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
I made suggestions before and I'll post some of them here:
1) Randomize the encountered ships more - facing the same ship lineup over and over makes it so that once you have a strategy in place, just use it repeatedly ad nausea. Same tier of ships in the lineup but just different ones periodically.
2) Give more reward for more risk by allowing the player to apply mutators to the event. Right off the top of my head is that you can add +100 base VP reward (without Intel increase) for each crew the opposing ship is allowed to have (up to its max). Meaning that in the Epic league you can get a +400 base VP (for a total of 900 or 1800 doubled per skirmish) by taking the increased risk of the 4 opposing crew. The crew could be either configured in advance for the event OR can be randomly picked from the Arena configurations. Get someone in the Arena using the same ship and has all the crew slots configured and use it.
3) Add a hull hitpoint increaser to the opponents as the player's overall VP total increases. So the opponent's hull would be hull + VP (for example). Meaning that once you reach 100k VP the current final fight would be 892K hull to beat increasing its difficulty. This would help keep people out of the stratosphere for VP. Eventually, you will start to lose. Could even introduce a mechanic where losing reduces the penalty by 1k or something. *shrug*
4) Finally, this would present an opportunity to do neat squad 'raid' style activities. Very difficult missions that require successes by squad mates in order to proceed OR may incur penalties later on. To clarify, think of the Episodes and a story that progresses but the results of the parts in the story have impact later in the story. For example, 4 of the 5 squad members win their objective. The next set of objectives could have a modifier to hull hitpoint because 1 of the squad members did not succeed.
I'm always up for ideas that increase reasons to play with people. The game's 'multiplayer' aspect is quite weak.
1. It doesn’t matter how random the ships are. With the current set up, I just push the same buttons in the same order for every enemy ship and they still go boom. It might be slightly more interesting to see a different ship go boom but not by much.
2. Unfortunately the arena is full of the same ships and same crew so it would be hard to get them from that list. But sticking crew, any decent crew, would go a long way to increase the difficulty as it is the lack of crew on the enemy ships which make them go boom so easily which is why the macros work so well. I don’t think I have lost a single skirmish battle since inception. However, there is a huge amount of RNG in space battles as we have seen with arena battles where you can lose 10/10 clone battles (same ship and crew) in a row. Seeing that kind of loss ratio in skirmishes would make them stink in a very different way (ie, make them throw phone into wall like Gauntlet aggravating).
3. Increasing difficulty like in shuttle missions is a good idea as long as the final balance is somehow maintained where there is a max difficulty where even the best players with the best crew have a chance of failing while others still have a good chance of succeeding. Something like shuttles where whales with 5/5 bonus crew get 95% chance and us lesser mortals 70% for 4K shuttles (I usually am around 85-95% for my four shuttles).
4. Yeah, the multiplayer and squad and fleet is pretty weak. Other than crew sharing for faction, there is little direct interaction between squad and fleet members outside of starbase donation and daily achievements. Plus no real way of monitoring who is slacking (I hate it when we miss dailies which are so easy to achieve).
Its still very painful to even set it the first time so I don't see that as justification for not giving a good QOL improvement for crew selection.
I think you personally have prevented your fleet from getting hololocked. What is your average finish, 3rd? :-)
I have a 1st and 2nd but the others were closer to 500th. There are two others in the fleet who get top 25 to top 50 in each one it seems.
Also everyone in general who participates gets a couple thousand holos it seems. Which helps a lot when you only need to get maybe 100-150k a month as a fleet.
I have used the exact same combination since the first skirmish (with the exception of the event crew of course). It's a bit of search but it isn't the end of the world.
Great thread, thanks for starting it! The current state of skirmishes is about as fun as cutting my hair with a cheese grater.