Perhaps this has been raised before but let me put it up for discussion:
Enable capital ships to shrug off small arms fire from un-upgraded frigates and fighters (not bombers). Company of Heroes had this inplace as you couldn't actually damage a tank without giving your infantry squads explosive or armour piercing weapons to get past armour. Granted, the whole HP system was different in that game but perhaps something similar might be used to make Capital Ships more... Capital.
Perhaps weapons can recieve Penetration and Energy values.
Penetration would indicate how effective these guns are versus armour. The higher, the better it could overpower targets with a high Armour Value. Obviously, bigger caliber guns would raise this amount as well as specialist ammo on smaller guns (Upgrades/Techs?). Autocannons would have a high penetration for example and are a classic example of Armour killers.
Energy value would indicate how much energy the weapon would transfer on impact, be it Thermal for Lasers or Kinetic through explosive Missiles for example. These would do the same thing penetration does, just for Shields. Reasoning being Energy could either overload emitters or cause the shield to collapse.
This would scale effectiveness of small vs big ships quite harshly so to stop a single Capital Ship from devouring a whole fleet of frigates, there have to be handicaps.
1. Lower Speed. This is already requested to make Capital Ships feel massive.
2. Reduce the size of firing angles. Already on the menu afaik but just to reiterate: Seeing the Kor firing it's front Beams anyway in it's current 180 arc is a little silly.
3. Let Capital Ships to change heading while remaining stationary, this would combine nicely with lower speed and smaller firing angles.
4. Allow big guns to miss smaller targets. The bigger the gun the harder it is to target fast frigates. (This point, if implimented would require a lot of classification and testing)
5. More HP for Shields and Armour to compensate for lower speed and big, easy-to-hit profile.
On the Frigate side, we'd probably want to see special abilities or perhaps weapon techs to make them more effective vs bigger ships. Or have specialist ships such as the bombers or Siege Frigates. In Homeworld, the Ion Cannon Frigate was the anti-cap ship in the light weight class.
Thoughts, feasibilty, extensions?
Cheers,
Zero
P.S. Yeah it's not so long this time I know... I gave myself a cookie and hope for responses.
