Earthling – The Dan'Nath might be better, but other than that this is still the most powerful ship. The missile is too good and too powerful. They were able to make this work in SC2 because SC2 was practically on a hex map due to it having been designed with only 16 possible directions of movement. In your modern “free movement” where the missile is not “on tracks” that will cause it to miss unless you aimed it just right this becomes a big problem. With no point defenses or countermeasures the enemy ships are helpless against a guided missile. This could be solved with this “anti-ship missile” through its speed, turn rate, and range... but I think a medium-range Multi-Warhead missile solves this problem in a better way that will feel better and be more fun for the players. A “fully-capable” MW missile will be more fun, and seem like better game design, than an intentionally crippled anti-ship missile. The MW missile can also be designed as a 100% skill weapon that is not guided at all. The player would have to time/aim it right so that the “shotgun blast” of submunition missiles will hit the target.
Drenkend – I like the gun a lot. The boarding parties should have a timer and return to the ship, restoring the crew that was lost to launch it, so that they don't just endlessly chase you. If they don't succeed in catching the ship they soon “fail” and return to give the crew back. Like the Orz, all boarding pods on the map when the enemy dies should return to the ship so you don't lose the crew for the next fight. The boarding pods are probably still too big, if you are going to scale the ship sizes enough for players to visibly see the size difference at a glance. The Scryve Scout won't be much bigger than these boarding pods if you do that. The boarding pods should be even smaller than they are now, if they are going to “seem right” with the different ship sizes that should be a part of all this.
Trandals – I really like this ship a lot. This ship is probably probably pretty good as it is, although you might wind up slightly slowing down its rocket booster speed... but maybe not, the weapon has a very short range and is hard to aim even at close range. This is a really fun and unique ship, and a clever design. At first glance the rocket booster seems way too fast/powerful, but once you start using it you realize that the weapon is pretty bad. The fact that it is hard to aim even at point blank range does a lot to balance the “Ludicrous Speed” of the booster. “Speed is irrelevant at the point of contact”... and there is a decent chance you will miss and they won't once you there. This balances the otherwise near god-like ability to run rings around the enemy, which makes this ship a lot more powerful than most probably think it is. You dominate the maneuver game, but have a hard time hitting anything even up close. This will be a well-balanced ship in the end no matter which direction things wind up going, it is just a very good design for this genre and a unique type of thing that gamers really haven't seen before. If this ship had a straight-up gun like the Tywom ship, and if the ship orientation were not throwing off your aim, it would be nearly unbeatable.
Scryve – The flak guns should hit small targets like boarding parties, missiles, mines, everything. It's flak, it hits everything in the area and is meant to be a point defense weapon that causes light damage to ships. The flak is great for this ship because ultimately it should be like the Ur Quan that turns so slowly that the smallest and fastest ships can stay behind it for most of the fight. The flak gun prevents this ship from being helpless in that situation, just like the Ur Quan's fighters did in SC2. The current main gun is great for the AI, but hard for a human player to use well. The ships have to work in both single player and multiplayer, which are completely different things. The Scryve's “sustained beam weapon” is going to work fine for the AI, but not nearly as well for human players in multiplayer. I still think some type of long range seeking weapon works better for this ship, especially if it was as slow and sluggish as it should be and in multi-player games. The seeking weapon/flak combination would make it feel “relentless” as if there is no escape from it even if it can barely move and just holds the center. It would be the ultimate ship in the SCO lineup at controlling the center, which is what the “battleship” of the group should be. The seeking weapon would force the enemy to come too it and try to kill it as soon as possible to “silence the big gun” before it kills them.
Scryve Scout – This ship is absolutely huge for what it is supposed to be, a “fighter” like the Sofixti was. This ship should have so few hit points that getting hit once, or maybe twice, by any weapon in the game kills it. It's should be tiny, and the fastest ship in the game. The gun is almost pointless, although it should have it, but it is really just an intentional waste of that “module”. The whole point of this ship, with it's “Orion Suicide Bomb”, is that it is a gamble you can take in your ship lineup. It adds to the strategic choices available too the player. If you can detonate on a larger, more expensive ship, then that is a big deal. But that is hard to do because if you get hit once you are dead. So it is a gamble in your ship lineup selection. You might take out something big with it, but more likely you will just get killed without causing any damage. This was a very clever way of making a balancing a “fighter v battleship” that works very well within the points system of Star Control, and I think it is a great thing to have available that adds to the strategic thinking of ship selection. But it has to be what it is to work right, this is much too powerful for its purpose right now... and really, really big for what it is!
Measured – I need a gamepad to evaluate this ship. So far, it seems too me like it is incredibly powerful when controlled by the AI but practically useless too a human player. This might be because I can't control it with the keyboard. Once I can use a gamepad, it might seem more useful too me, but I think the issue is probably that this flight model only works for a gamepad player and that nobody can be truly good using this ship with the keyboard. I really think that with this weapon this ship should be the Airlou of SCO. Very fast, intentionally hard to control, and killed by one or two shots from most weapons. The weapon seems to be very, very powerful right now. The Airlou's functionally identical, in a 1v1 fight anyway, “auto-aiming Tractor-Repulsor Beam” (...the Airlou ship was actually an Andromedan from SFB) did very little damage.
Tywom – This is a great and very fun design for a ship. It still moves too fast, like all the ships, and also has too high of a turn rate. As a result of the current speeds the ships are moving, it probably also has too much thrust for fighting all that momentum to turn around at the current speed. Like Trandals, this ship is going to wind up being fine as it is currently designed and just needs to be tuned to where the final balance winds up being. In fact, this ship should be considered to be your “baseline” ship that you compare/balance all the other ships with. The Tywom is your USS Enterprise. There are over 2,000 ships in the Star Fleet Universe and all of them were ultimately based on the “dual baseline ships”, the Federation Heavy Cruiser & Klingon D7 Battle Cruiser. I say this because it is tactically the all-around “best pure warship” of the group with “Disruptor Cannons” and what we call “Captor Mines”. If I was going in blind, not knowing which ship I would be facing (and the Earthling and Dan'nath weren't broken), I would use the Tywom. [As things stand now I'd take the Dan'nath and just wipe out the entire lineup with one or two of them...]
Pinthi – I like this ship a lot, but fighters should be limited in some way and not last forever once launched. They should need to return to the carrier after having fired a certain number of times, and you should be limited to having 3 fighters active at one time. I am generally avoiding talking about health on all the ships because the health is my only hint at how “big” each ship is supposed too be, so it is hard to even know what each ship is supposed too be in terms of size, health, speed, and maneuverability. Even though it is not something that you will ever present to the players in any way, you really need to work out ship classes because the way the point system works depends upon the existence of what might be called “proportional ship classes”. Without listing it all out, these classes did exist in SC1&2. And there really needs to be a visual scale of ship size. Not too scale, of course, but in what ADB calls “Omni Scale” which is essentially “size difference that works”. For example, the “Planet Killer” space monster from Star Trek: TOS would be like 2 feet long compared to the 3-inch Enterprise in 3788 scale. Two feet is obviously a little big for a hex map game, so things that big (or things that are too small, like shuttles and fighters) are made in “Omni Scale”. So the Planet Killer is really big, but still fits within a reasonable space on the map... and you can actually see a fighter! You need to do the same thing to fit the ships in the thumbnails, show the size difference even though it isn't truly to scale. Right now all the ships look pretty much the same size, even the Scryve Scout which is supposed to be a tiny little “fighter” like the Sofixti in SC2.
Menkmack – The AoE area of this weapon is much too big, and the projectile moves too slowly. This weapon would be a lot more fun if it were like the “bombs” in Subspace, which were really “torpedoes”. It would have a much smaller AoE/detonation radius but move significantly faster than it does now (but still slower than “gun shots”). This would make it like a single-shot gun that detonates as an AoE weapon on a near miss. It does full damage on a direct hit and half damage as a proximity detonation on a near miss, the proximity detection/detonation radius is very small. You can try this yourselves in Subspace, and see how fun a weapon like this is. It's not really a change, just a re-balancing of what this weapon already is. A direct hit can happen by making it so that if the weapon is within the arc (or “on a vector”) for a direct hit it does not prox detonate and instead reaches the target as a direct hit. If the “wingman” is not set in stone due to lore, I would then replace this with a “towed array” type of weapon. A “tail” that deploys and whips around behind this ship as it turns. This is, intentionally, an almost useless weapon meant to waste the secondary ability of this ship... because the torpedo is so tactically good and easy to use. Knowing the lore, you may have a better idea for a “cool thematic way of wasting the secondary ability” that better matches with who this species is. This would make this a very fun ship, torpedoes are very fun to use.
Menkmack, like Trandals without using the speed boost, has trouble overcoming the gravity of the planet and can get stuck for long periods of time just trying to escape the gravity well. This problem will solve itself, however, when you get the speed balance down into a better range and make the planet smaller (think of it as a singularity, and not a planet, because that is what it needs to be to achieve that arcade-game “slingshot effect”). Right now you have been pumping up the gravity wondering why it doesn't work like other games that have had this, not realizing that the speed of the ships is powering them through the gravity and the planet is too big and getting in the way. When you find the right speed balance, you will also wind up turning down the gravity as a part of that. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, the best way to find the right speed/thrust/turn rate balance is to do strafing runs on a stationary turret. Avoiding the turret's gun while strafing it from behind. This will “ground” the speed/maneuverability balance to the reality of a fixed point in space (...and you'll also wind up with a really good turn rate balance for base mounted turrets and defense satellites, if you want them)
Mowlings – This ship cannot really be evaluated right now. I suspect that it will become a very powerful ship once the pace is slowed down and you can actually hit things with its weapon. I don't personally like just calling a second ship into the fight like both this ship and Menkmack do. I don't see the fun in calling in an AI ship to win the fight for me. If it were some type of support ship, like an escort that shoots missiles, mines, and fighters or provides some type of passive bonus to your ship, that would work better. Just a pure combat variant to fight the fight for you isn't really any fun. You call the other ship, then just run and evade and wait for the AI ship you called to win the fight for you. In PvP this ship is just going to be annoying, and not in a good way. But I know that this is a big lore thing in SCO and Jeff has to exist.
Jeff should assist the player in some way that gives them a temporary advantage while he is present, but it is still up to the player to damage the enemy ship. Since Jeff is obviously supposed to be a big deal, maybe he should be a kind of “Super Support Ship” that has a few different “forms” and between those forms he is useful in some way against pretty much all other ships. The “form” of Jeff that appears in the fight would be whichever one was most useful against the current opponent. So “Point Defense Escort Jeff” arrives if you are fighting the Pinthi or Drenkend, but “Dampening Field” Jeff arrives if you are fighting one of the super fast ships (slowing them down while he is present on the map). Anything that has Jeff temporarily support the player without fighting the fight for them... or the Mowling could temporarily become Jeff, like a Transformer/Mrrrm (or whatever it was) of SC2, but that probably doesn't match what Jeff is supposed to be.
Dan'Nath – This ship is awesomely powerful. If you are careful and focused first on staying alive and only causing damage when you can get away with it, you can defeat the entire enemy lineup with this ship. I never even really use the secondary ability. All gravity in SCO currently “feels wrong” because the ships are still moving too fast and largely overcoming the gravity with their speed. This is greatly impacting Dan'Nath's secondary ability, which is going to become a lot more powerful when the ships are slowed down. This ship is much too powerful. AoE weapons are very powerful in this type of game and the black hole has a huge radius. Offensively, the “Gravitic Torpedo Effect” is generally a medium-damage weapon that briefly slows/traps a target so that you can either shoot it with guns or seperate from it. It can be made to work without secondary guns. Once the speed/gravity is worked out you will probably decide to make the radius smaller as the gravity will be having a much larger effect in slowing the target and forcing a course change at the same time.
I can't thank you enough for allowing me to finally experience something at least close to the Gravitic Torpedo in action, even with the gravity still not truly working right. I've always considered something close too this to be the “signature weapon” of both Pirate Dawn and Manifest Destiny, but understand that my “Gravitic Torpedo” (which this weapon essentially is) is one of the most powerful primary weapons ever conceived for space ship games and any ship armed with one is going to be inherently tactically powerful. It makes a Photon Torpedo look like a BB gun! SVC would never accept this weapon into the SFU, he would say “It's better than a Hellbore Cannon, it's way too much!”. It's not easy to make this work in a reasonably balanced way, the damage caused by it is only half of its true power. This should be a medium size/speed ship at best, the main point of this type of weapon is that it allows a slower ship to somewhat even the playing field in the speed/maneuver department. A fast and agile ship doesn't need this weapon, and is too good at using it, but it still makes sense on a moderately fast and agile “medium” ship which Dan'Nath could be. Based on the health and thrust you are currently thinking of this as a small fast and agile ship, but it would also make sense as a medium sized ship. The look of it says “War Cruiser” too me, which is a “compact and streamlined heavy cruiser”.
