I'll explain our position on this from a gameplay perspective more then. You say you'd trust us to add it in a balnced way because of how we've handled other things, but I'd say that its the ability to handle the other things that kind of tips us off to how badly adding all of thse superships would go. It's kind of like telling an atheist that because they handle being an atheist well they'd make a fantastic Christian.
Yes, super ships did play an important role
for the Imperial Remant. That's why they get them in the first place. They did not for the New Republic, who went in the direction of miniaturization for all of the ships they made except the Viscount. The Strident and Mediator came much later. The Empire of the Hand was completely opposed to superships in the first place. So if we're attempting to make unique gameplay patterns for each faction, how does it help the game to saturate it with superships which would necessarily become the focus for each faction? We
know in advance that the superships are going to become the focus for the Remant and we're building the faction around it.
What "important role" does NOT mean is saturation. Just because superships provide the backbone for the Remnant does not mean you should get a ton of them at one time. When you're talking about ships in the size range of the Executor and Assertor, even the Bellator at half of their size, the differences in stats (which we'd have to make up for 2/3rd of those) are meaningless. What's the difference between 2000 Turboalasers and 3000 or 60 squadrons versus 100 when it's competing against things with 100, and the squadron releases are staggered? Really all you get is visual difference between them, which comes with its own problems. That's why we think it's worth it for us to do the Sovereign in addition to the Executor instead of just putting in more Executors. It actually does something unique.
In order for this to be balanced, it requires making the Superships need backup, and it means you can't have the same ability to split your forces the other factions have. The weakness of having 1-2 SSDs and 50-60 ISDs against 100 Mon Calamari Cruisers is that the Mon Calamari Cruisers have the ability to hit more targets at once to compensate. If you have it so you're at 4 SSDs instead, then you can hit just as many targets with more individual effectiveness, and you win basically everything.
So, once you take into consideration the fact that you need to limit superships to maybe two at a time, that the game
does not allow having more than one type of buildable titan or even more than one instance of each titan type, and that once you get up to that point the ship functions are nearly indistinguishable, why do you need to add all of these different ship types? You answered that part yourself.
see Ansel Hsiao's designs those deserve an appearance in star wars outside a source book [...] I want to see more star wars canon ships and still have it be a good game
Basically, all they're there to provide at that point is variety and visual difference. That's fine to an extent, we did it in Imperial Civil War because EaW has more tools to allow for it, we had a less intensive workload, and we were going for a more narrative structure so we could play around with splitting redundant ships into different eras. This is not the case with Ascendancy.
You say we can figure out how to balance having 4-5 different supership types, and we can. I'll tell you how. We'd have to make it so getting one one of them locks out the others. That's the bottom line. We can fudge with numbers all we want, but the end result of having 4-5 SSDs flying around would look cool for about 5 minutes, and add nothing to gameplay while detracting a lot. So why would we bother adding in these redundant (there's no better word for it) ships when they not only cause gameplay problems, but add technical and workload problems as well? Sins of a Solar Empire has a specific memory limit. Once the game hits like 2gb of Ram, it minidumps. The more ship models and skins it has to load, the closer you're going to get to that limit, so while it's all well and good to say having 3-4 different ships in the same role might look good for a while, it would have a bigger negative impact on the game than the galactic freeze does in ICW, for none of the benefit that bigger maps and more active factions did for ICW. This is especially true when you're talking about ships as large Ansel's are, because the filesize for each ship is huge. We've spent a huge amount of development time to optimize each model and limit filesize to prevent the crashes. We're not going to negate that by throwing in unnecessary ships of huge filesize.
The size and detail necessary for those models impacts the workload a lot, too. For every supership we add, to do it properly is basically the same amount of work as adding 4-6 other units. It's like chosing between the Assertor and Bellator, which would be locked out of the game half the time, and half the ship roster of the Pentastar Alignment or another faction we could add instead, which actually comes with benefits to gameplay.
There have been two main goals we've had when determining the ship rosters for Ascendancy: building a unique identity for each faction, and eliminating redundancy so we have more space to add in content that actually makes a difference to how the game flows. Those are the cardinal principles of Ascendancy. Visual variety is nice, but we can get that while also adding to gameplay in a way that throwing in a bunch of SSDs simply never will.
Topic: unit's for next version (Read 21109 times)