And same way a marine with a machine gun can shoot down a fully armed, titanium-plated, flying fortress of a Battleship armed with lasers if you’ll just give him two minutes.
I still don’t get why they put capital ships in the game if they were going to make them so relatively crappy. I’d have made them be the kind of thing that you would only be able to build 2 or 3 of (huge resource cost as well as 20-30 food, not to mention time) but would command a great deal of respect once they hit the battlefield. In a real battle a cap ship versus infantry would be no contest and it doesn’t make much sense that it isn’t so.
Battlecruisers should take 40 supply, have 2,500 HP, be armed with 6 6-damage machine guns on perma-stimpack, a 75-damage ATA and ATG laser, a 15-damage slow-loading area-damage “bomb” like a guardian has, and have 4 lockdownable parts, in which if you lock down the back, it will disable movement but not weapons, if you lock down the front it will disable the laser but not movement or the gun turrets, and if you lock down the sides it will disable 3 turrets at a time, etc. Also they should take like 8 minutes to build.
Only if the sprite is three times as big.
The sad thing is that that would make perfect sense given the size of the things. though 75 damage is a bit excessive. As it stands cap ships regularly die to in in 1:1 confrontations with fighters. I’ve seen a mod that makes BCs and Carriers as powerful as one would think they should be, but they neglected to increase the food costs so it winds up just being crazy air masses due to the lack of worthwhile ground.
I said 75 damage because I always thought that it was ridiculous that a marine or a hydralisk could survive a laser hit form a giant Battlecruiser, much less two or three.
Good point there. Carriers could mostly be fixed by more health/shields and a much larger interceptor capacity. After all, there is production art showing countless interceptors coming out of one, not just the 4 or 8 you get in the game. I would also be tempted to raise interceptor damage to 8 or 10 to allow them to actually damage another carrier or bc.
I think Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun managed to pull the Bigass Unit of Unholy Power best: The Mammoth MKII took forever to build, cost more than a whole new base, you could only build one at a time and moved slow as hell, but it could take on a medium-level base BY ITSELF. That’s what should be done with the Battle Cruisers and Carriers.
Indeed, it should not take vast fleets of capital ships to take what amounts to an ad hoc military installation in the middle of nowhere.
Actualy, I think this is all a very good idea. Leave the BC and carriers alone, but add a whole new, massive siege engine. Like a Flagship for the Terrans, Mothership for the Protoss, and a playable Cerebrate for the Zerg.
Yes, let’s turn SC into WC3 where the only thing that matters are heroes and the game amounts to nothing but overhwlemingly trite micro.
We are not saying that, just that if you are going to have a unit that logically speaking should be devastating, then make it devastating. I’d remove both Battle Cruisers and Carriers, since it’s stupid to make them so easy to produce in the same field as other considerably smaller and (supposedly) exponentially less powerful units.
Perhaps a limit to how many of a type of unit you can build. That might make you think about STRATEGY more, rather than building mass units and just all-out attacking like brainless warheads.