Targeting & destroying individual mods for more strategic gameplay

I was wondering if the following would be good for enhancing the gameplay and feasible to implement.

Perhaps there can be a mechanic where individual mods or systems on a hostile ship could be targeted for tactical and strategic purposes, especially on capital ships.

For example - perhaps a cap’s jump drive could be targeted to disable it’s ability to jump to safety, or frigs could destroy it’s turrets. Perhaps the cloak could be disabled so even if the hostile can put up a good fight, it remains visible.

There are options for balancing. For example - repair may be made easier for certain mods or systems, or defensive systems might be harder to kill.

Just wondering what this great community thinks of this idea.

Thanks

The game is simply not balanced around such things. You would need to massively buff larger ships to make this work. Since otherwise smaller ships would so easily neuter them.
And by the time you have a ship in hull you might as well just kill it. Since if you can disable modules th4ough armour or shields… yeah. See above regarding large vs small.

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I can see how it might be a problem.

However - I imagine you would need to get through shields and armor before hitting mods.

And an escort may hamper efforts by a frig wing to neuter a ship.

Also - the mods aren’t made of paper.

So possible balancing include:

  • More tanky cap mods
  • The fact that you would need to get through 2 layers of tank to get at them
  • While trying to avoid fire from an escort
  • I know this is just adding more complexity, but what about anti-subcap mods like flak turrets

This is a thing done in other games, and I imagine in the real world too. I think it can add a layer of fun strategy and tactics: blitzing the cap

Once you are through to the hull you just kill the ship. Though you might target the rep mod first I guess. But you wouldn’t bother with anything else because hull is in almost all cases the weakest tank by a long way.
It would also ruin certain niche hull buffer fits in fights.

And because time to kill once someone is on hull is normally so low. It just wouldn’t add much value overall to the game.

Not to mention the whole ‘you must have escorts’ to dare fly a bigger ship than a frigate is just annoying.

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Exactly. This is a solution in need of a problem.

Didn’t know that was true for caps. I thought that even if the tank was buffier in another area - it was still pretty strong.

I am not an expert in fleet operations. But it seems to me that an option to have a wing of cheap frigs or destroyers whittle down then disable a cap - it would allow more focus on the primary objective.

Maybe medium weapons wouldn’t have the “precision” to strike specific mods, or at least not enough to destroy the mod effectively or quickly enough. This would mean either having a wing of frigs or destroyers whittle it down like a chisel or attack it wholesale with a mallet like attack from cuisers or battleships.

At the point you can beat the rep/s of a caps local tank the hull buffer is under 60 seconds normally.
The exception would be if you were only beating it by 100 dps or something. But then you’ve spent 2 hours chewing on the caps primary tank anyway and no one has third partied both of you. Which… isn’t a normal fight.

So yeah. There are tiny niches where it might matter. But frigates already are ahead in the meta in many ways. We don’t need to give them even larger advantages. And we don’t need to make massive game changes for the sake of the tiniest of niches.

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Thanks for clarifying. Basically there are already effective techniques in place.

Again, I don’t know the nitty gritty of fleet ops or the numbers relating to DPS. So I thought this might be a good idea to present.

Good luck & fly safe. o7

The problem is that once you have a “wing” of ships dedicated to the role you could just put those players in proper dps ships and kill the target instead of screwing around with disabling its systems.

Or fly a fleet of Bhaals or something instead xD Apply enough neut pressure, you substantially diminish a capital’s ability to rep, and in half the dreads and titans, if you time neut cycles just right, you even suppress their ability to use weapon systems.

I’ve played many games over the years that had subsystem targeting. Invariably, one of two things happens.

  1. You get one or two systems that are super effective at disabling the ship, usually engines, and those are focused on to the exclusion of all others, and the ship is quickly picked apart once disabled.
  2. It simply remains easier to destroy the ship than to disable it, so subsystem targeting is rarely used outside of roleplay.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love subsystem targeting. It’d add a whole new dimension to ransoming. Unfortunately, it’s just not really feasible.

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