Giving EotH a proper flagship ?

[Zangdaar]

Hello everyone,

First of all, thanks to the creators for all the excellent work and the well-balanced factions in TR. I am NOT here to say "please give EotH a SSD", I know they are not supposed to have one and stuff.

BUT what I think this faction lacks is a good flagship. The reason why I love the Imperials so much is they have proper leaders and ships to go with it : leading your fleet with an Executor or the Eclipse really adds a dimension of fun I quite don't find when building a strong yet disposable force with EotH.
As a matter of fact, I love SSDs not so much because they are strong (because of EaW's flaws, they are also clumsy) but because they really carry a strong leadership symbol. I doesn't have to be SSDs, though : in eras 1-2, it really upsets me to lose the Home One, since it is distinctive, whereas in later eras, the loss of the Galactic Voyager only brings a "meh" to my face : any MC90 does just as well...

So my actual suggestion here is please give EotH a leader with a ship of their own, even an ever-so-slightly modified Phalanx class (with Visvia masers on the sides, or a special ability like Piett's special beam in the vanilla game, or even a custom painting), anything that might make me think "now THIS is my leader, the one ship I love and which shall lead my forces to victory", rather than "just another Phalanx among the dozens I have built, except this one has a little head in a square next to it".

NR has the Falcon, the Home One and the Viscount, PA has the Vengeance, IR has the Eclipse, I really think that EotH lacks a charismatic flagship, hence the name of the topic.

PS : forgive my English, I am not a native speaker.

[StarLordX]

I think the flagship of the Empire of the Hand should be the Chimaera (since it was Thrawn's flagship until he was killed at Bilbringi).

[Corey]

I don't have time to comment on the original idea right now, however as far as the Chimera, that wouldn't work. It was only Thrawn's flagship after he came back. Before that, from Endor to when Thrawn took it, it was just Pellaeon using it as a regular captain in the Empire/Harrsk's fleet. It was never part of the Empire of the Hand.

[Vulcanus]

EotH already has a star destroyer line-up that can beat anything that's not a SSD or Praetor II and they also have multiple SD heroes with powerful combat bonuses in all eras, so adding Visvia-masered Phalanx or something similar as a hero would make their top-heavy unit roster even better and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Consider that EotH is basicly building their Empire from the scratch. Yes, they have plenty of territory all for themselves, but the Unknown Regions lack the volume of shipyards that the rest of the Galaxy possesses. For them, ships like the Phalanx are already special.

I'd like to see some more diversity for fleet heroes in general, but if you're going to add some special abilities or weapons, give them some negatives as well. Something that makes them vulnerable to counter their abilities. I'd love to see a fleet hero that has excellent special attributes, but also has a crippling penalty to unit speed for being too cautious. Or a powerful damage modifier combined with shield strength penalty for emphasizing firepower.

In most of my EotH campaigns Voss Parck is my signature hero. Always place him in the frontlines with his Vic I to lead the charge, yet hate to see him get killed.

[Lord Xizer]

If EotH had a signature flagship it would be the Admonitor which was Thrawns and tgen Parrcks flagship in the unknown regions.

[Zangdaar]

I am new to the Extended Universe so I am probably thinking on a lower level than you guys, but what I meant is not to create an overpowered Phalanx-class (even though a unique hero with a slightly stronger ship wouldn't do too much of a difference in balance, I think). As said in previous post, it is mostly about making the ship distinctive, I actually liked Ackbar better when he had the less-performant Home One rather than an ordinary MC90.

I just like the idea of "this one is the leader, so he gets a unique ship with unique looks", I know it may sound childish but we are talking about a video game and obvious visual aspects do matter in my opinion.

To give another example, the first time I wanted to check what kind of ship Thrawn had, I sent him to a planet where because of the lightning, the ship looked black-hulled... and I actually was disappointed when I later found out it wasn't ^^
On that regard, EotH is the only faction without a custom flagship that would make their leader unique, add the "flag" in "flagship" (each other faction has one in at least one era). Except for stats, nothing distinguishes Siath's Phalanx from another regular Phalanx, and I think that a hero giving charisma bonuses should have his own recognizable ship, not one that can be mass-produced. The only counter-example is the Fel Ascent, but you can't picture it as a fleet commander's ship, more like a rogue fighter I think.

But then again, I might be crossing a rule I know nothing about from the Chiss policy about their leaders not showing off in fancy ships, in which case I give up, I have too much respect for the background work in this mod to ruin it with kikoo ideas like "the boss should have a kickass ship".
But if it were possible to make one EotH's command ship distinguable from all the others, it would be awesome and maybe a good compromise for all the SSD-demanding players.

[Vulcanus]

Speaking of the Fel Ascent, it could use some new lasers, other weapons/special abilities or slighly edited maneuver stats as most of the time it just whirls around in dogfights without actually doing any damage. I tried giving it a point defense laser system recently to make it more interesting, but that doesn't change the fact that the Fel Ascent can't vape a single X-Wing no matter how hard it tries. Don't wanna make it Falcon-overpowered, just a bit more useful.

[Lord Xizer]

Well you can change the appearance color wise in tge xmls i think

[Corey]

There are very, very few cases of a leader or commander having a unique ship in Star Wars, or any similar space series with a well-developed lore (ie Star Trek). The Eclipse is one of the few exceptions, because it was one of many random superweapons the Empire just built and threw out there, but even then it had a specific purpose. Commanders simply took whatever ship and crew from the fleet seemed most suitable. As far as SSDs, even the Vengeance wasn't unique. And Jerec isn't even a leader, he was mostly concerned with doing Dark Jedi things. Canonically he's never specifically mentioned as even being part of the PA, but we took his association with Kaine around the start of the PA and extrapolated to something that made sense.

A lot of the example you've given aren't really unique ships either; the Home One had a few other ships in the same class. The only reason it ever seems unique is because they were fairly old and honestly kind of useless on their own. The Millenium Falcon isn't unique either. The unique stuff about it is the result of it being old, privately used, and therefore modified by somebody who had a strong personal investment in it to serve certain functions.

I just like the idea of "this one is the leader, so he gets a unique ship with unique looks", I know it may sound childish but we are talking about a video game and obvious visual aspects do matter in my opinion.

Yes, visual aspects do matter, but so does staying true to the universe. Giving commanders these unique or heavily modified versions of their ships-of-the-line just isn't something that really happens in Star Wars (or real life) unless the ship itself was being made to serve a separate purpose and was then just taken as a flagship because the result ended up being powerful and too big to mass produce. The thing that makes the hero important (and what should make them important) isn't that they have some visual indicator to say "SHOOT ME AND YOU WIN" (obviously for gameplay purposes the game shows you where heroes are, but I mean in-universe), it's the person on it.

[Zangdaar]

Allright then. As far as "unique" ships are concerned, I only meant in-game, not in canon, but I see your point and I can respect that.

Well you can change the appearance color wise in tge xmls i think

Could you give me a little more information on how to do that please ? That interests me very much.

[Corey]

As far as "unique" ships are concerned, I only meant in-game, not in canon,

The point I'm trying to make though is that unique ships are not unique ships, so making unique ships for the Empire of the Hand doesn't fit with anything that happens in-universe. In-game, yes, the Millenium Falcon and the Home One are unique units in that the non-named other ships of the same class aren't in the mod, but again, that doesn't make them actually unique "command" ships, they're just ships that are important enough for us to have to include them, while their class as a stock unit wouldn't serve any purpose.

The difference between the NR/IR and the Empire of the Hand is that with the NR and IR, we have to narrow down an expansive list of canon vessels into a more robust selection of the main ships in use during the time, which means entire classes have to be left out with a few examples that need to be kept for a specific hero (like Home One and Vengeance). With the Empire of the Hand, we have to build up a ship list from nothing. This means when we're choosing which of their ships to give the fleet commander heroes, we have a few options. One is to give them one already in game, the other is to do what you're suggesting and make up a unique ship type for them.

The problem with the latter is, again, that the command ships aren't actually unique; they're only unique in game for other factions because of specific circumstances where there are more canon ships than ships we can actually use in game, like I said. So to get a similar situation for the Empire of the Hand, we'd have to design a ship type which, based on how Star Wars, Star Trek, pretty much any other fiction, and real-world navies work, is still used as a regular ship-of-the-line, and then not actually use it as a buildable ship for them. It takes a significant amount of time to come up with a ship design; even at this point we're still 2 capital ships short of where we want the EotH to be, so if we made it so that the Empire of the Hand had a ship type only used in the mod as a single hero's command ship, we'd be creating a ship that by all standards should be in their regular rotation, but isn't just so that it seems like a commander has a unique ship even though by any in-universe rationale, it actually isn't unique.

Could you give me a little more information on how to do that please ? That interests me very much.
Modify message

All this lets you do is make the team colour  markings default to a specific colour if there isn't already a team colour applied.

[Zangdar]

That certainly makes a lot of sense. I never asked for a new model though, even a custom ship would have made me happy (on that reagrd, the Battlehammer being the first of its kind, it could explain it being slightly different though ^^). But I won't insist furthermore, you've certainly made more points than I did and I am probably getting annoying anyway !

Thank you for taking the time for such thorough answers though, that is greatly appreciated.

All this lets you do is make the team colour  markings default to a specific colour if there isn't already a team colour applied.

I am still very interested, is there a way to change the NR color markings from orange to black (I mean the darkest color in skirmish) in GC ? I would love that.

PS : maybe that comes from my computer only, but there is a serious lag on posting as far as text appearance and selection are concerned, it took me more than an hour to post this and edit the quote