Hey again everyone.

I've noticed after my return to disco in late 2022 that heavy caps (carriers, battleships, dreadnoughts, etc.) are more common in the game than ever. With an easier and faster way to make money, many willing to part with their unused toys, and almost a complete lack of restrictions, everyone can quickly get their hands on a heavy cap and roll it out in the next major engagement. With plenty of helpful guides and tips about how to use them effectively, even a newly minted captain can substantially contribute to a fight, event, or siege.

Over time, and especially more recently, I've noticed that a growing number of players have not enjoyed gameplay in which heavy caps are involved. These are still capship enjoyers who like flying cruisers and bcs, but draw the line at bringing more than 2-3 of their heavier cousins to engagements. And yet, many players who are just coming into the game or enjoy playing more casually seem to gravitate towards the firepower and durability that these heavy caps offer. So there seems to be a imbalance between the ideal fleet combat experience for different types of players, which is centered around the massing of heavy caps.

The question is: is this an issue? If so, what should be done about it? And if not, why not?

To start the discussion, I will offer my personal opinion - caps should be a limited resource in some form. They can be as powerful as necessary in terms of mechanical balance, but some sort of inrp limit needs to be placed on their operation, deployment, etc. This would solve the immediate problem of a potential mass of caps making the engagement unfun for a lot of people on both sides. However, this may also result in people losing interest in the game, as flying heavy caps is one of the primary selling points of disco. So if any change in this direction were to occur, it would need to be rolled out slowly and carefully, always paying attention to player feedback.

But enough from me - I'm interested to hear what everyone else has to say!

As a person who doesn't go looking for or participate in PVP/E situations, I has a view on this too. As much as it is flying Dreadnaughts being one of the top-selling reasons to play Disco, it is just as much, or even more so, that the server is primarily a roleplay server.

People tend to forget this.

Restricting the heavier capital ships to OFs only, or on an SRP basis would be best in my eyes. Save for the Bustard, I guess.

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I mean, the way balance currently sits really encourages a balanced fleet composition. BCs do things which cruisers can't do and cruisers do things that BCs can't do, et cetera. I really don't think any inrp limits should need to be placed since, as you've already observed in your original post, the problem has solved itself. People have realised that mono-heavy-cap compositions aren't really it.

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I think the genie is already out of the bottle, caps are prolific as is, that cannot be undone. Bigger caps have been pushed into more of a supporting role I suppose, so that curtails their spam somewhat. Though I find myself wondering now, what percentage of players even own a battleship?

(06-30-2024, 04:21 AM)Big Bison Bessie Wrote: I think the genie is already out of the bottle, caps are prolific as is, that cannot be undone. Bigger caps have been pushed into more of a supporting role I suppose, so that curtails their spam somewhat. Though I find myself wondering now, what percentage of players even own a battleship?

I have to concur with Bessie. I doubt just rm -rf'ing caps from Indies will do anything but de-incentivize those who don't want to be burdened with factional obligations or otherwise don't desire to play snubs - worsening our population problem. It also poses the hypothetical - what happens if one NPC faction has an equivalent OF and the other doesn't? Are we supposed to expect the OF to just not whip out gunboats and cruisers to every non-event encounter and delete the UF players?

If we absolutely must put a stop to the lolwuts and comedians running around planetdiving capitals as a defensive measure, raise the price. I personally won't like it in the long run, but if it's that big a problem, artificial grind would solve the issue.

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Large capitals is the only reason many people play discovery. This would be a 0 player speedrun. They also still turbo die to - cruiser spam, bomber spam, gunboat spam.

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I mean, I am actively trying to encourage the rebuilding of the Libertonian indie cap spam. For cap pilots, they're a big power fantasy, and help mitigate some of the issues newbies often have of feeling useless in a snub engagement. For snub pilots, they serve as a "raid boss"-type enemy. Not having regular cap enemies is part of what has Liberty in its current sad state, and even as one of the leaders of the only faction (to my albeit limited knowledge) that still restricts cap ownership to high ranks only, I don't think exacerbating that issue is a good idea. I get the concern, cap spam has always been a controversial topic, but looking at things now vs 13 years ago, I see how important they were.

At the same time, I think it's silly that everyone and their mother has cruisers now, but oh well. Cat seems to be out of the bag. I can't really speak outside of Liberty anyways.

Instead of restrictions, perhaps a better way is to give people more reasons to fly snubs.

One of Discovery's big features is that we allow for the usage of capital ships. That was one of the reasons I downloaded the mod.

I will also remind people that when you play a capital ship, you pretty much do guaranteed damage in group fights. In snub fights, a low skill player dies in seconds and any damage the player contributed is immediately nullified by them potentially having fed bots and bats to the enemy. You don't have that issue with capital ship fights at all anymore, which is one of the best and rewarding changes that gives people the feeling they actively contributed to something. I certainly won't bother with snub PvP if my low snub skill ends up being an actual benefit to the enemy.

With battleships, you have your five minutes of glory and you know you did something the moment the enemy takes hull damage, and the only thing that can undo it is if the enemy is allowed to restock and repair.

We can't tell people how to play the game when we offer this exact diversity. And luckily, player ships are not influencing the lore at all, so there can be thousands of Corsair Dreadnoughts, Red Hessian Blood Diamond Jormungands and LNS-KEVINHD-ON-TWITCHs - these people just play their favourite ships. And since there is no matchmaking in Discovery, the only thing we can do is hope for the best, expect the worst, laugh it off when we get blue'd or try to talk in a constructive manner to the opposition to somewhat balance the fights in both numbers and skill.

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Snubs are just too unforgiving for newbies, too useless for PvE and the skill floor is too high for PvP which is part of the reason why they gravitate towards caps