Small ship autoheal / docked heal rates

The way healing works feels a little odd: docking is an instant heal to 100%, but there's no way to heal out in space. I propose changing both.

First, out in space:

It's no good pulling off a brilliant escape, with only 2HP left, only to be smacked by an asteroid. Particularly annoying: When you wrap around the map, only to smack into an asteroid you could never have seen coming. Ouch!

It would play much better if small ships had a very slow auto-heal, maybe 1HP per second. It could be increased via a Small Ships upgrade as well. Heal rate could increase by 1HP per second per upgrade.

The psychology here is that, when combat is over and adrenaline is fading down, you're still vulnerable, but you still WON. And the longer it's been since combat happened, the less relevant that combat should be to your current status.

Neatly solves the problem where everyone launches at once in the start of the game and crashes into each other. That initial damage will just heal away. Likewise, new players in miners will not be punished quite so hard for smacking into every asteroid before they figure out where the X button is.

A fully upgraded auto-heal might make for some interesting strategies, too. For example, a team of destroyers could use their auto-heal to continually harass the enemy BC, making them much more viable as an end-game choice.

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Now docking:
On the other side of it, dock = insta heal would benefit from a change too.

When docking a damaged ship, it should take some time before you can jump back out in it. Maybe 30 seconds to heal 100% of the ship's max HP (15 seconds to heal 50% of the max HP, etc). That will give small ship pilots a bit of time-out: they can go refine, build missiles, do a nav ping, etc. It would help break down the boundary between "bridge people" and "small ship pilots" that is especially present in early game.

This could really help newer players who have gotten used to running miners and are looking to grow into the more advanced roles on the ship. If you get damaged, go in for a bit, and see what needs doing on the BC.

This is something that's been discussed for a long time. The problem is that when you launch a ship, you launch a new version of the ship so health is reset back to max. I can get around this but then I'd have to basically program in a custom regeneration. What I'd like to do instead is to save the ship somewhere in the hangar so it uses the same unit all the time which regenerates normally, however it will take some time to fix to make sure it works properly.

As for adding default hull regeneration, I feel like it's a good idea but it makes shield generators less useful since the shield generators are usually got for the regeneration.

Redo how the hanger is set up so it has open pad slots that the ship itself docks in and little scv's repair it in dock.

That's what I'm planning to do, but it requires some work. Also, what would you think of lowering the amount of ship slots to 6(maybe ? So each ship gets its own launch pad.

No dont lower the slots of ships, just make the hanger more vast and maby show the ships like in WC3, that would be cool with the animations, maby seperate 4 docks to one side and 4 docks to another. Make it vast because im thinking as far ahead as boarding parties where there will be alot of fighting and many exploring the ship

Oh and if there is an auto heal, make it an upgrade (+level*repair rate+hull %) and start it at 0 repair rate, just to keep things interesting =)

Boarding parties will be great, I can't wait until I can land starting miners on the BC and steal the starting corvette.