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I'd also like to see this - I've never gotten these outguards and been happy since not only do they have the weird "better if found earlier to stockpile more" thing going on, they have significantly longer cooldown than normal outguards which makes them far less useful for the usual purpose of outguards - quickly defending an area or helping out in a tough fight. |
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Also would like to see this, they aren't so worthwhile to justify this permanence. It doesn't help that they have no hotkey. |
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I like them the way they are. I think their relative uniqueness is an asset, not a hindrance. I find that better than having all Outguard having more homogeneous roles. |
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I actually think there should be one or two more outguard factions like this. I think it's a neat idea to have an outguard faction that's completely under your control. |
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I sort of like these, but yeah; they require additional micromanagement in a way that nothing else in the game does. Probably my biggest complaint with them would be the way they don't follow the fleet system; so you can't control them with hotkeys. If all Harvesters/Siegers were automatically dropped into an appropriate fleet, created when you first call them in, then they'd be notably more fun to play with. As-is, I find that I mostly just routinely call them in as permanent reinforcements to relevant chokepoints and forget about them. |
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Endovior, that is a great idea. Now the question is would each group you call be its own fleet, or would all siegers and harvesters be grouped into one giant fleet? Since these units can only be obtained by the player via outguard iirc, grouping them all together would be a great way to keep track of them. |
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That's sort of the problem with Harvesters and Siegers being fleets. Each group being its own fleet seems messy, but all groups being the same fleet tends to make you want to put them all in the same place. That said, having *any* kind of hotkey mechanism seems vastly better than just not, so it's not like we're losing anything from the change. In that sense, I'd recommend a fleet of all Harvesters, and a fleet of all Siegers; that seems like it'd be the easiest solution, and one that'd still give the players most of what they want out of a controllable non-rebuildable entity.
An alternative would involve formalizing the weird "permanent-but-destroyable mobile unit" thing that the 'War' Outguard units have. Units that behave like this might be called "Auxiliaries", and new key commands could be added to attach Auxiliaries to a flagship (binding them to that fleet's hotkey and making them able to load into a transport), or for a fleet to detach all of its Auxiliaries. This would make Auxiliaries nearly as easy to work with as normal ships, while retaining their comparative fragility. You'd be able to carry them into battle if you want, but they still aren't getting replaced if they die. This would probably only be a worthwhile change if the devs want to add more units that work like this; otherwise, it'd make more sense to just automatically chuck them into their own fleet. |
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I wonder how feasible the fleet approach even is. I know these ships were fairly difficult to implement due to the game code not liking them being without a fleet. The fact that that you can't rebuild them possibly wouldn't play nice with the fact that you can rebuild all fleet ship lines, and the game code likely assumes that in a whole raft of places. |
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I don't know anything about how the game is coded, but perhaps an invisible, unselectable dummy fleet ship could be created in order to group them together or something? I don't know. |
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It not being possible to rebuild them while they don't go away on their own is a vital component of what makes them incentivize babysitting behavior from the player. Making them get grouped into a fleet would make them easier to keep track of and thus fix part of the problem, but can something also be done about removing incentives to babysit them? |
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I also wonder, do the war harvesters/seigers have any scaling? It looks like I have been only getting 5 harvesters when I called them in even as AIP went up from around 20 to over 200 in one of my games. |
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It's always been the same as far as I can tell. |
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That hasn't been my experience. I got more of them over time. |
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