[IDEA] Interceptors and Battleships - evasion and power bars

[thereaverofdarkness]

I've been working on ideas for a major expansion to FTL for quite some time now and I've got a lot of ideas I think would greatly improve the game. I just posted a topic about my idea to multiply ship hit points/damage by 5 in order to enable some modding options that aren't available with the current numbers. That is in this thread http://subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=30357. Here I will discuss my idea for small ships (interceptors) and large ships (battleships). I picked the names based on things in FTL already: the battleship is named for the Rebel Flagship which is a battleship opponent and will have some of its attributes adjusted accordingly; the interceptor I named after the tiny Slug Interceptor which has its oxygen room cut off so it cannot be repaired by the crew.

Some ships you come across as opponents already fit these metrics, at least in raw appearance and overall power. Battleship opponents are like the Rock Assault, Slug Assault, or Mantis Bomber. (These ships aren't actually larger than the player ship, but they are considerably larger than most other AI opponent ships.) Interceptor opponents are like the Slug Interceptor, Rock Scout, or Auto-Scout. I would change the game such that the interceptor opponents had more evasion, and the battleship opponents had less evasion. I'd also have the battleship opponents grant more scrap while the interceptor opponents would grant less.

But the biggest difference would be for player ships. Your battleships would have -10% accuracy and evasion as their baseline, and you'd get less evasion from engine and crew levels. At max evasion, a battleship might get as high as 35%. But they would have 8 total weapon and drone slots (usually 5/3) and could upgrade the main systems (shields, engines, weapons, drones) to ten power bars. They could also upgrade the reactor five units higher. They would have 4 augmentation slots, 6 inventory slots, and 11 crew slots. The biggest advantage to a battleship is that all the extra options and space enable the ship to become much more powerful, while its biggest disadvantage is that its reduced accuracy and evasion forces it to rely on those upgrades, making the ship more expensive to run. Being able to easily dispatch other battleship opponents can ensure a steady stream of scrap, but you'll want beam weapons or drones in order to reliably defeat all the interceptors.

Interceptors would have +10% accuracy and evasion baseline (shots can miss even with no pilot/autopilot), and they get more evasion from engine and crew levels. With the numbers I have on my document, an interceptor with no special effects can max out its evasion at 89%. With engines 2 and untrained pilot and engineer, it gets 43% evasion. However, the interceptor can only upgrade main systems to six power bars. It gets five fewer max reactor bars. They have 2 augmentation slots, 3 inventory spaces, 5 crew slots, and only 4 total weapon/drone slots. An interceptor will cost less scrap to make it perform well, but it may get less scrap since it might have to run away from most of the battleship opponents. Its evasion and faster FTL charging will help it get away safely, but its weak weaponry may prevent it from being able to pierce the opponent's defenses.

Overall, it would be much harder to beat the flagship with an interceptor, and possibly much easier to beat it with a battleship--but throughout most of the game the overall difficulty of either size class should be about the same as cruiser.



I've got a few battleship designs written down in my notes, including a set of Rebel Battleships to go along with my Rebel Ships line. I'm putting auxiliary weapons on several of the battleships, but especially on the rebel battleships. These ships start with 4 auxiliary weapons each, taking up the weapon slots instead of system slots. You can put a normal weapon of the right type on top of the auxiliary weapon and use it as a weapon slot instead. For instance, you purchase a Burst Laser Mk III, and you can place it in your auxiliary laser slot and use the burst laser instead of your auxiliary laser. But if you have no weapons, the built-in weapons are more than enough to defeat your opponents as long as you have enough power to run them all.