So... I just had this weird idea tonight. I was thinking about how many ships of mine have maxed out reinforcement abilities and how much those actually get used. I'm sitting on a couple hundred reinforcement mats right now that I'm not spending because the ships I use as reinforcements are all maxed out anyway, so why not save them until a new ship gets added that seems good enough to break into my regular rotation?
And in that musing about how upgrading most ships' reinforcement abilities (at most you need 8 ships with reinforcement abilities for GA/TW) is pretty useless, I thought about this:
What if when the reinforcement cool down of your capital ship hit 0 you had the option of
a) bringing in a reinforcement, as normal, assuming you don't have 5 ships out already. This activates the special reinforcement ability as it has always done.
or
b) do not bring in a reinforcement, but activate the reinforcement ability of a ship already in play as if it had just come in. This ship does not gain TM or get a bonus turn (or maybe it does, if that's appropriate for game balance - play testing could determine this). This only activates the ship's specific reinforcement ability. Since you're not actually bringing in another ship, however, this ability can be used when you have 5 ships already in play.
So my question is, do people think this is a good idea? There are some ships whose reinforcement I've never maxed out because they get used in my starting 3. Maybe they don't have a good reinforcement ability, or maybe tactically you just really want them out there right away, but either way you would never put that ship in reinforcements when you could put it in your starting 3.
For ships like that, especially ones where the reinforcement ability is decent (TIE Silencer is one ship that many people prefer in the front line, Hound's Tooth as well) giving your capital ship the additional option of activating the reinforcement ability without bringing in a new ship might be the only way you'll ever have a good reason to play around with those ships' reinforcement abilities.
I honestly can't say how much I'd use it. Usually when I've got 5 ships out there and reinforcement comes up again, well, that's the 6th turn of the battle already (or 5th, with Phantom II) so I'm probably doing really well not to have lost anyone, and my CS Ultimate ability might be available, so it really doesn't seem like an overwhelming advantage - and it would work both ways, of course.
To me it seems fun and like it gives you a chance to explore underused aspects of certain ships. I don't know how much coding this would take for EA/CG, but for them to even take the suggestion seriously they'd have to know that people are interested.
So are you interested? Good, bad, meh? Let me know!
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You realize that the developers stay as far away from the dumpster fire of General Discussion as humanly possible, right? Moderators moving a thread to a feedback subforum gives it a significantly better chance of being read by anyone who would be in a position to do anything about it.
But u realise once it goes into feedback, fewer people comment on it so it just seems like a “not very popular” opinion too right?
I have only a tiny bit of experience in professional programming, and NONE of it in any way related to games or visuals. So I can't say if it would be easy or not, but it doesn't seem that hard. You're using the same cool downs, you're using existing abilities. You just get to choose from a couple more possible ships.
That said, since I've never done game programming (or any programming for the last 20 years), I don't actually know for sure that it's easy. If they say it's too difficult, I trust that it is. But this really seems like the kind of thing that they could do with quite minimal coding ... at least minimal compared to the other things you're talking about. The coding required to implement this would have to be tiny compared to the coding required to design a new raid.
TIE Silencer gets a unique buff from its reinforcement, and it isn't something that would make sense to just add another stack of, so how would that work? Ditto Kylo's Command Shuttle - it removes TM from enemy reinforcements, so would it just remove more TM when used repeatedly, or would they have to change the ability?
You get the point. It's a neat idea, but it doesn't really work within the current system.
Im pretty sure OP means activating it once. That pretty much nullifies your whole argument.
Since at this stage it's just an idea we're kicking around, you could theoretically make activating the reinforcement ability of one of your starting 3 only available as an option when you have 5 ships in the field.
I'm not particularly in favor of that, but that would further limit the use without making it completely impossible to activate the reinforcement abilities of your starting squadron. Basically, there's no reason to upgrade the reinforcement abilities of your best ships, since you want them out at the start. Even if it was only rarely available (i.e. only when you've got 5 ships out) it's at least possible to use the reinforcement abilities of your starting ships, so it's no longer completely useless to spend reinforcement mats on them.
I really like the OP's idea, but I'm afraid that this would be true.
Not a big issue though since fleet AI is miles ahead of squad AI, wont hurt to dumb it down by one step
I really think your idea is really good, and would really like to see this implemented (with some fine-tune to not let it totally unbalance ships, for instance make a time-out fleet even more likely...)
And, in turn, you realize that easily 90% of comments on suggestions are dumb and worthless, right? Either they're just several paragraphs of "I like this" or "I don't like this." As far as popularity goes, who cares? The fans of the game don't know what they want--ever notice how even when they're literally just giving us free stuff you'll see complaints in here about how we either didn't get enough free stuff and therefore the gift was "a slap in the face" or they gave too much free stuff and therefore the gift was "a slap in the face" to people who "earned" it before the gift?
They don't want popular ideas, they want good ideas.
Nice idea but maybe it needs to be refined to make it more impactful ? Veskasa1’s view is intersting but i feel it would make some reinforcements way to strong such as cassian’s for example. I don’t know.
Edit : though i’ve read there is some kind of new meta under mace where fights are really stalled so it can happen, but i feel like it’s more of an outlier.
And when it gets buried,it gets buried in obscurity and nobody will ready this anymore.
This goes for most topics here. They enjoy a max of 1/2 hours lifespan
It would require play testing. The core of the idea is activating the reinforcement ability of a ship already in play that started in your first 3 (so the ship hasn't used that ability yet). The details of it would require some playtesting, but that's fine. I don't think it would require a lot of work, but it's clearly going to take some work, and no one thought EA/CG would implement it without play tests.
I play Hound's Tooth with Phantom II as my first reinforcement. Unless I completely thrash the other squad, I get to where the reinforcement cool down is 0 but my fleet is full in well over half my battles. Probably 75% of those that last long enough I still have all my ships alive. Nobody kills me quickly.
But that wasn't the case before I built up a good HT, so I understand that this might seem like a difficult-to-meet criterion to too many people.
I'm fine with the implementation being activation only when you have less than 5 ships out (so you have to sacrifice something) or only when you do have 5 ships out (so it doesn't get over used) if either of those is what play testing suggests. I personally think it would probably be fine to offer the option whenever a reinforcement opportunity comes up, but if that isn't good for game balance, the facts are what the facts are.
Not entirely wrong haha. But what would the AI prioritize? You've got 5 ships in play already, you could either use a fake reinforcement or use one of your capital ships special abilities. AI might prioritize using a ships reinforcement ability that started in the initial 3 man-squad, or would they prefer to use something else. Ultimate's would clearly take the cake, but if the AI prioritized the reinforcement ability, the capital ships wouldn't be using their own abilities very often despite having all ships in play still alive. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, it would really only effect the long time out mace fleets right now. I think it's a really cool idea, but I would say that it should have reverse priority for picking reinforcements already in play. Offense first. If you've got 5 ships alive, you don't need to turtle more, it should start being offensive. Start activating JKA's starfighter's reinforcement, or activating Vader's reinforcement, instead of activating say Sun Fac's reinforcement or Gauntlet's reinforcement (etc.).