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In-battle repairs vs normal repairs

One takes too long and the other is absurdly fast...

Posted on Monday, June 29, 2015

I'm more than a little irritated by this.  Without any modules designed to repair a ship mid-battle, an enemy medium-size vessel managed to heal 102 damage in the middle of a battle (which is well over half its health...).  This ability is actually more effective than having 50 armor on a ship versus 16 kinetic damage, since the armor wears out over time (while the repairs last forever), and is making me reconsider ever using more than one defense module in favor of more weapons (or even just not bothering at all).

Meanwhile, a ship sitting over a planet or shipyard will take months to repair 50hp.  Repairing that much in the middle of a battle (i.e. minutes or hours most likely, days if both sides are defense-crazy) suggests that it shouldn't even take a full turn to repair 100% of damage.

Mid-battle repairs should be something for crazy-advanced races only, or for patchwork (aka a large portion of repairs are removed after the battle as they weren't long-term solutions to the problems) and possibly even allow for ships that survive a battle to be destroyed afterwards.  By contrast, repairs should generally be vastly-faster outside of combat (where you have weeks to properly identify problems rather than minutes) than in combat.  And repairing a ship mid-battle should require either crazy-advanced tech or at least a module, you can't just have all ships repair more damage than defenses are capable of reasonably absorbing; and again, either the ship doesn't keep all of its mid-battle repairs or it is presumably capable of instant repairs (or has a cap on how much it can repair).