Science Station

This suggestion is meant to solve two issues I see:

Late game, there's not enough stations for people to use to contribute in a ship battle. Often I see people launch miners in a firefight for lack of anything else to do. Also, Kerm is way too abundant. Mining one kerm field will set that team for life. I typically end games with 500 kerm.

To solve this, I'd like to introduce the science station. It replaces the tractor beam station (gone now but whatever). It adds several abilities which synergize well with other team members.

Starting abilities:

• Power Transfer (300 energy, 45s CD): Fires an energy beam at a friendly ship, giving it an instant 150 energy. This ability can be upgraded once per game. Short range.
  
  
• Purge Core Plasma (30 kerm, 15s CD): Increases core stability by 10%. Gives off an obvious visual effect from the BC when used.
  
  
• Load Yamato: Moved from the construction terminal, because being on the con terminal solely to load the yamato isn't very fun.
  

Purchasable abilities:

• Longeye Sensors (upgrade costs 100 veld, 25 chal, 100 kerm): Activating this gives the BC a sight range of 20. This sight range is visible to the enemy on the minimap. While this is active, the radar ping is on cooldown. Having this active drains 20 energy per second.
  
  
• Tractor Beam: Exactly the same as the one in game.
  
  
• Flux Cannon: (upgrade costs 50 veld, 50 chal, 200 pyro, 100 kerm): Using this costs 35 kerm, 5 second cast time. Does 100 damage and 1% core stability damage to a target, plus an extra 100 damage and 1% stability damage for every 10% core stability missing from your BC. So a BC at 50% stability would do 600 damage and 6 stability loss with this ability.
  
  
• Ion Vortex: (Upgrade costs 250 kerm): Using this costs 95 kerm, on a 5m CD, with a 3 second cast time. Creates a 'charged vortex area' the same radius as the nuke from SC2, causing space to swirl around. Ships inside of this area lose 100 energy and 0.5% core stability per second, as well as halving shield regeneration. A yamato blast destroys this effect (also cancelling the yamato). Affects everyone. Lasts for 20 seconds.
  

Upgrades (can only choose one per game):

• Ionic Transfer (50 chal, 50 pyro, 50 kerm): Power transfer gives 350 energy and a buff that increases engine speed by 50% for 30 seconds.
  
  
• Nanite Transfer (100 veld, 100 chal, 100 kerm): Power transfer gives 250 energy and a buff that repairs 50hp/s for 30 seconds.
  
  
• Plasma Transfer (200 veld, 200 pyro, 200 kerm): Power transfer gives 150 energy and a buff that causes the ship to explode violently on death, doing 800 damage to nearby ships. This buff wears off after 30 seconds.
  

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The power transfer ability benefits an organized team, powering up miners lets them miner boost more, and powering up wraiths/corvettes gets them into the fight faster. You can't use this ability on your own, it requires teamwork, something which I think this game should encourage more of. The upgrades give a team choice of versatility, getting the engine upgrade early can really help out chompers, or give wraiths ridiculous mobility. Getting the repair upgrade gives your ships a huge edge on defense. Getting the explosion buff, well, I'm sure there's all sorts of creativity for such an ability, though it is expensive.

Purge Core Plasma turns kermiculite into BC power, but in an indirect, interesting way. You've got to work with the player on power to maximize extra power and minimize blackouts. Teamwork. And I'd like to see setting the core output above 130% to be a viable concept for a ship rather than a desparate gambit. This ability always rewards a team that mines out the kerm fields.

The sensor upgrade helps with late game fights where the BCs are using engine boosts and may have crazy power operators dumping a lot of power into engines, making a lot of weapon shots end up being blind fire (because holding fire means the enemy's shields recharge).

The flux cannon is intended to make running with low core stability a legitimate, viable strategy rather than the result of being yamatoed 5 times and not having a power operator. Each shot uses up kerm, and having low core stability means you're probably being disconnected from terminals a lot, but the damage output might make up for that, if you have kerm to burn.

The ion vortex is just one realization of 'spatial anomalies' that I think CC could use. It creates interesting terrain, and it forces your opponent to react or suffer. In addition, it makes the yamato a bit more interesting (which is otherwise just something you spam without thought). Even if this never happens I'd still like to see nebulas or some other terrain in CC beyond asteroid fields.

I'll admit it, it was a long post and since I am lazy it was rather painful to read.

First off I generally like the idea. Don't get me wrong.

The big problem with that is that there's too many skills, with too many functions. I'd rather have a small ship and one or two stations fulfilling about all of the abilities you've written rather than having one console handle all of it. Else you're giving one console too much power, which might lead to people fighting for it, trolls, et cetera.

Also, the tractor beam has recently been moved to the Nav console.

I have no opinion on its complexity but I disagree that this needs to be two consoles. First of all, power, nav, and weapons are all more important than this console, so I don't buy that it'll be victim to trolling.

The main reason I disagree though, is because I am firmly against creating a console that amounts to 'push a button'. I don't like the construction console being 'spam the yamato button' and the upgrade console being 'spam hull repair', these are things that could be autocasted and the person on the terminal can go afk and get a sandwich while everyone else fights. The power console requires some thought when deciding on power settings, nav involves steering the ship, and the weapon terminal is improving with the multiple types of weapons.

First of all, if you have skype and you're not in the skype chat, I highly suggest you join. This post alone shows a great deal of creativity and game sense which is greatly appreciated in the chat.

Although I don't agree with Sheogorath on some things(like that we should put this on a small ship or split it into two consoles), there's still some things that I agree with him on. There are too many skills. Technically it could work since you can have 15 buttons (+ more on submenus) but from a gameplay perspective, it's too much. Tractor beam is 4 buttons so in total there would be 10 buttons. That is kind of overwhelming. Some other consoles have more buttons, but most of them are easy and intuitive to use. Power console has 11 buttons (excluding leave console) but most of those buttons have an opposite so you basically just have to learn what one of them does.

10 entirely new abilities that all work differently will be quite daunting. I suggest we do the following: Keep tractor beam in navigation console for now and possibly remove/rework some abilities. I'll go through all your suggestions and tell you what I think:

Power transfer: This is a good idea and along with the upgrades, I feel like it encourages a lot of different strategies.

Purge Core Plasma: I think this is a very good idea as well and as you say, it introduces a kind of dynamic with core stability which I like.

Load yamato: I agree that moving it here would probably be a good idea since it's boring to have someone stuck at construction.

Longeye sensors: I agree with the idea of this ability, however, we have been discussing a sensor console with a lot of different stuff for sensors. This could probably fit in there, but I'm still not sure if I'll create a sensor console. We'll see what I do with this.

Tractor beam: Keep it in the navigator for now.

Flux Cannon: Same as purge core plasma, I think it plays well with the core stability dynamic.

Ion Vortex: This ability seems rather expensive, even though it could be pretty powerful. I'm not sure about the yamato connection and it feels like it would feel weird to aim at the thing to kill it. I would rather remove the yamato cannon part and maybe make it draw ships towards it.

I agree on all the upgrades.

I appreciate the invite.

Regarding the ion vortex, I'm not particularly satisfied with it. I spent a lot of time thinking about this ability and could never really put together something satisfying. I left it in because I wanted to suggest the idea of something that impacts the 'terrain', with the hopes that it would inspire something better. CC is asteroids and blank space right now.

So would we consider the Science Station as a "combat/small ship support" console of sort?

I think it works well with everything. It has power transfer for small ship support, it has purge core plasma for power console support and it has flux cannon for combat as well as longeye sensors for general BC support.