Star Control 2 draft ideas

[Reality]

So I was playing this the other day when it occurred to me, who the hell uses Druuge? So I thought it would be fun to draft the escort ships in this game.

Also to keep in the spirit of things, I'm banning the Fusion Blaster and the Hellbore cannon, since having a super-flagship is counter productive to trying out the unpopular escort ships. You can still research them to get access to the later battery upgrades, just don't actually purchase and equip them.

Also I'm banning the drone, because you can only get 4 of them ever, and also it's really painful to actually use in combat and would be awful for the person stuck with it. I'm only planning a draft for the base game, so the AI-only and SuperMelee ships aren't draftable.

You can still do the events and ally with people for free ships and sell them off/get quest items at same time, just don't try use them if possible.

I had 2 main ideas for the draft.

A: Cruisers are free for everyone, and then Torch, Terminator, Stinger, Skiff, Scout, Penetrator, Nemesis, Mauler, Jugger, Eluder, Fury, Blade, and Avatar are drafted in a traditional style. 4 person draft with one ban round and 2 picks, and the 13th ship would also be made free to everyone along with the cruiser.

B: Cruisers are free for everyone, and then people draft from two lists, once for the ships with short perquisites, and once for the ships with long perquisites. The short perquisite ships can be gotten pretty early if you know where to go, so they are particularly useful.

The lists would be, Penetrator, Nemesis, Mauler, Skiff*, Eluder*, and Stinger for the fast , and everything else for the slow ships.

You can get these pretty much at the start of the game if you know where to go, and their quests are trivial. The skiff and eluder both require you to make a landing, but their quests don't really force you into combat areas, although the skiff quest takes a lot of fuel.

This would work from 4-6 players, and all undrafted ships would be automatically banned. Final battle must start with at least 4 of each drafted escort ship.

Versions: It's better to allow both Star Control 2 , and the free Ur-Quan Masters version, since higher number of participants and so on.

Scoring: I'd prefer to just go with time. I'm open to ideas about doing all the side quests or minimum resources used though.

Other notes: If you take something like skiff or stinger, you'd better practice in super melee a lot or load up on cruisers...

[Jedi]

The Earthling Cruiser is pretty lame, but its workable so being free makes sense (plus you start with one lol), the Eluder is really ridiculous if you know how to use it, it might be the most powerful ship in the right hands, I'm not sure if it being draftable would provide an unfair advantage to the person who managed to snag it.

I'd have to think about this, its been quite awhile since my last run of SCII and I love the game.

Edited May 19, 2016 by Jedi

[Reality]

Yeah the AI ships are kind of easy to convince into following you, especially during the story. I think it uses the weak cyborg instead of the good or awesome one from supermelee. This kind of makes me feel like ships like the Eluder and Blade can kite every enemy type until they die, which makes it possible to practically keep your very first one alive for the entire story. The ships with shields can kind of do the same if you go to the starbase to repair them every now and then, but you can't get either one nearly as early.

I think the other potentially broken ship would be the Chmmr avatar. You do have to do the spathi quest and then a bunch of stuff with podships/syreen, but since podships are slow, you can get it semi-early if you brute forced or used something speedy (arilou and spathi come to mind) on your other draft pick.

The earthling cruiser, I only really like to use against like Druuge Maulers, Probes (although that's important since their is so many of them) and the Vux ships. That said, even if the rules were changed so that you had to use only the ship you drafted (or the other "weak" ships) you would have the advantage of being able to have a full 12 following you. The final battle at the end is only a group of 4+the sa-matra, so it's okay that they cut through you as long as you chip them a little with each ship before its death. I think even the worst draft combinations like Cruiser+Mauler+Torch should be able to beat the game without needing even moderate reseting/abuse. Obviously doing a gauntlet in super-melee would be much harder/impossible for some of the ships.

I think cruisers can limp their way through almost any of the other ship's prequistes on their own, although maybe the ZFQ dreadnought fight and Thardash would be bothersome, and yehan encounters might need to be avoided in their sphere of influence if you drafted one of the 3 ships near them. This is pretty much why I'm leaning toward short/long perquisite drafts, although I can debate about how painful some of the alliances are to make with solely cruisers. Starting with the Pffunk.

I'm not really sure if further restricting the pool of ships to make the draft more exciting and balanced would do much. It would just bring up issues like people routing in rainbow worlds or building up fuel so they can run away from encounters in areas clearly beyond their fighting ability. Where is the threshold between unfairness and just being really clever with what you've got?

[Jedi]

You're right, we are limited as is, and limiting it further would be a bit silly ^^; sorry about that.

[Reality]

I'm currently testing things to see what is okay to consider "early" game.

I've decided that the Stinger... is not viable for cruisers alone.

I was able to get to the ZFQ homeworld by September of the first Year (taking a detour to do the spathi stuff so I'd have enough organic units to buy fuel from the melnorme on the way back) I left with only 5 cruisers. On the way there 2 were brought to half health by probes. I fought 6 dreadnoughts before arriving at the planet. IT IS possible to kill them with the cruiser (undamaged) by running away and firing in the direction you are moving, although it is dependent on you not spawning too close to them and you have to reverse direction when the opponent does to avoid them ambushing you with the screen wrap. Lost 2 of 5 cruisers because of this, and then made it to the planet.

I then tried to get out of urquan space by the shortest route possible. However, before I could, I was surrounded by about 6 ur-quan encounters (of both types) and obviously my cruisers had no hope of getting the luck neccesary. Spathi could win said battles indefinitely (amd amass an unusual amount of RU for year one) but it was only a matter of time. I suppose if I had installed more than 6 engine modules I could have avoided encounters, but that would require cleaning out more planets and probably take until year 2. Not really a time loss if you did the suns device quest stuff during this time, but eh.

Also tested rushing the Druuge, which was tedious, but not particularly life threatening. Pfunk and Orz were easy enough to get before year 2, although I am not very good at fighting with Pffunk. While the first 4 Pfunk ships being free helps though. Thinking I'm going to drop the "start final battle with 4 of each drafted ship type" to 1 of each ship type. It's okay to start with 0 cruisers however.

For now I'm moving Zof Bok Quik Stinger to the late list and tentatively moving Pfunk Fury to the early list.