Pilotable haulers probably means more long-term gameplay options for them. Ideally, a hauler pilot needs to pick between priorities in coordination with the commander. Do I resupply a carrier? Help build a station? Collect a strategic resource? Etc. In much the same way support/builder roles in other strategy hybrids can build, resupply, and even contribute to defense.
And just because you wouldn’t doesn’t mean someone else won’t. I spent way too many hours shuttling people around in Galaxies and Black Hawks in Planetside and Battlefield, some nights without ever shooting a person.
Hauler gameplay could be really nice If its a bit more than just flying from point A to point B, maybe add some purely defensive capabilities so a hauler is not totally screwed once its confronted by an inty and so on.
Maybe give it an EMP shock with a reeeally long cooldown that disables the shields of all ships in a certain radius (including the haulers) and the enemies electronics just long enough for the hauler to get into warp (as an option of last resort).
Scrambling targetting and scan of enemies (or even of everyone) could be enough, killing shields seems a bit too much.
One should then resolve to fire at point blank without the assistance of target trajectory prediction, or uses skill which is a fair trade regarding gameplay.
I didnt say there wouldnt be any people, i said there wouldnt be enough people.
Galaxies and black hawks are not the same thing as piloting an empty freighter back and fourth, flying gal there’s a lot of communication gameplay and of course you get to yell “drop”.
Resupply/building/etc roles need to be fleshed out for people to actually want to play them. Sticking something as vital as spawn tickets onto an underdeveloped role that just involves moving a freighter to a carrier and back in a game without even rigorious interception mechanics is a design disaster. There will always be people asking in chat for someone else to get tickets and the team who has more players willing to do the unfun stuff will always win. A game shouldnt be about the people having less fun winning, though. I think this could work better if it was an NPC piloting the freighter, same as existing freighters.
We kind of already have this problem in a huge way since one of the best ways to win is to bomber or cruiser rush enemy stations/spawnpoints while ignoring ship to ship combat. So already right now the team that has the least fun wins, and we see the results in the form of empty servers.
This is more about the lack of positive feedback (current fun-void) for attacking structures, the lack of smaller scale objectives that help a fight beyond ‘grind torp spam to kill all the spawns on the map to win entire game’, and the big separation between attacking a station or ground installation itself and just fighting the fleet sitting next to it in terms of feeling as though you’re actually contributing to things.
(And the fact attacking a station seems a bit pointless when winning critical battles auto-kills the site anyway, making any contribution made to attacking the structures totally worthless in a lot of situations.)
Attacking points of interest, (currently just big fancy scenery in terms of how most people play the game,) really needs to be woven into the experience a bit more thoroughly.
The ‘disposablity’ of bombers also doesn’t help here, because survival gets shunted to near the bottom of the list of player priories in a fight.
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As for the point of the post, I absolutely agree. There needs to be a lot of depth with plenty of mission variation to make hauling a viable gameplay option, preferably as something people could get into as their main playstyle over long-term timescales. This includes things besides varied and interesting objectives, like ship upgrades and custom loadouts of the haulers themselves.