Infinity Battlescape Continuous battle

Suggestions
21

“Dedicated orbital cannon” is a gameplay construct. That means that it needn’t exist as a distinct game piece or art asset. It is a role.

Take a cruiser. Equip it with gear. Fly it off and use it in some role appropriate to that gear.

Orbital cannon is a role. To equip a cruiser as an orbital siege engine, it needs to devote all of its customization to firing that orbital cannon. So it has basic engines. It’s terrible at defending itself. Also, it burns through so many resources to fire it that it must be resupplied after every N shots. It may also require target designation by one or more additional ships (perhaps more ships doing designation when the atmosphere is thicker or some such thing).

It’s all the same art, but the gameplay is structured such that players must behave differently than if a cruiser is just a big fighter with bigger guns that require a bunch of people to cooperate if one is going to be purchased.

As for destroying defended ground installations, I don’t have much use for that. A ground installation with big defenses is essentially a capital ship sitting on the surface, unmoving. So everyone just pounds away on it until it gets destroyed. If an attacking ship is damaged by the installation, it retires and repairs. But if the installation is damaged by ships, it stays there and continues to take a pounding. Repairs can be attempted in place, but it’s a static fight.

It seems to me that fights over control of installations is the far better way to go. If an installation has been improved by a team to the point of cranking out 3x more resources per minute, then it would make more sense for an attacking team to go in and raid the installation for those resources - or to simply take over the installation.

Hauler fights could be the same way - capture the hauler and take the resources.

22

If you go with the story that ships are literally AI controlled, you could say that “to capture a ship a corvette with an electronic warfare module has to stay within X distance of an AI for Y time and must avoid the enemy team doing Z”. That way, you could go in and attempt grand theft cargo ship.

23

I was only expecting 1 or 2 replies so that is why it isn’t that well made. This was my first post too.

24

I think destruction should be viable, but it should be considerably least attractive alternative. It should take considerably more time/resources to destroy than to disable, for potentially less effect. I’m imaging something like:

Disable:
-Takes 15 minutes, unimpeded
-Hundreds of resources lost during time disabled
-Relatively cheap to perform, fewer structures required to destroy

Destruction:
-Takes two hours, unimpeded
-One thousand resources lost between time destroyed to time rebuilt, if started immediately
-Relatively expensive to perform, because everything must be wiped

It is technically more efficient to just constantly harass and disable the facility than it is to destroy. It takes less time, takes less resources, and results in a greater loss of credits per hour spent. These are obviously very rough, thrown together examples, but the point remains.