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A use for ships - as shuttle boosts
Mithiwithi
✭✭
in Make It So!
If you've been playing for a while and rolling dabo more than once a day, you've probably got a surfeit of low-level ships you never use. I use one 2* ship for Commander arena, one 4* for Captain, and one 5* for Admiral plus whatever map missions might crop up in the future, and up until voyages, everything else was gathering dust. Voyages affected that slightly, inasmuch as all of my 5* ships are now potentially useful for matching ship traits, but it feels silly to me that I've got the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 and it never leaves stardock.
What if "shuttle" missions had the option to use one of your ships to enhance it? You wouldn't have to send a ship - you could still just send a shuttle - but the ship would enhance your chance of success. Rename "shuttlebays" to "starbase berths" to reflect this new aspect of shuttle missions. Obviously, each ship could only be on one mission at a time (and you couldn't use the same ship on a short mission and a voyage).
To keep the <5* ships from still being useless, maybe add ship traits to the shuttle missions and make it very important to match the traits, to the point that even a 1/6 Constellation class might be competitive with a 10/10 Borg Scout Cube if the mission calls for the Explorer ship trait (though of course the USS Enterprise or Voyager would be even better yet). Similarly, faction events could have specific favored traits (or even favored ships) that provide extra bonuses - from DB's perspective, that means blueprint packs themed to the events would be more valuable than just as collector's items. (I bet they'd have sold a lot more Shenzou packs if the Shenzou had helped people win faction missions, for example.)
The biggest challenge from a gameplay-design perspective is to balance the ships' contributions to success rates - a new player shouldn't lose ground from the status quo because they only have their 1/6 Constellation, and a veteran with multiple 10/10 5*'s shouldn't be able to auto-win every mission, but sending a ship (even without a trait match) should still provide enough of a bonus to be worth doing.
What if "shuttle" missions had the option to use one of your ships to enhance it? You wouldn't have to send a ship - you could still just send a shuttle - but the ship would enhance your chance of success. Rename "shuttlebays" to "starbase berths" to reflect this new aspect of shuttle missions. Obviously, each ship could only be on one mission at a time (and you couldn't use the same ship on a short mission and a voyage).
To keep the <5* ships from still being useless, maybe add ship traits to the shuttle missions and make it very important to match the traits, to the point that even a 1/6 Constellation class might be competitive with a 10/10 Borg Scout Cube if the mission calls for the Explorer ship trait (though of course the USS Enterprise or Voyager would be even better yet). Similarly, faction events could have specific favored traits (or even favored ships) that provide extra bonuses - from DB's perspective, that means blueprint packs themed to the events would be more valuable than just as collector's items. (I bet they'd have sold a lot more Shenzou packs if the Shenzou had helped people win faction missions, for example.)
The biggest challenge from a gameplay-design perspective is to balance the ships' contributions to success rates - a new player shouldn't lose ground from the status quo because they only have their 1/6 Constellation, and a veteran with multiple 10/10 5*'s shouldn't be able to auto-win every mission, but sending a ship (even without a trait match) should still provide enough of a bonus to be worth doing.
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