Sabotage and Self destruct as a defensive ability

posted on July 25th, 2013, 6:48 am

I was reading a fellow self destruct post, and was reading what has been basically the same argument and ideas for self destruct that have been proposed over the last few years. These posts always seem to envision self destruct as more of an offensive weapon, captains ramming enemies and blowing their ships up in the middle of an enemy fleet. While I see how that could happen in certain scenarios, in game that could be problematic. So I would like to suggest a self destruct/sabotage system that focuses more on keeping ships from falling into enemy hands, or at the least preventing ships from being easily taken over and quickly put to use.

Basically if an enemy is trying to take over your ship you can try to self destruct, or sabotage to prevent it from being put to use by the enemy This seems like it would be somewhat star trek realistic, and as far as the game goes, wouldn't break it, but rather serve as a way to prevent your ships from being taken over or assimilated.

I figure the catch could be that in order to assimilate you would have a countdown or a fail chance.

Countdown:
-Ships can have a standard 5 second countdown or something of the sort.

OR

-Ships could have a countdown related to crew numbers of somesort. So maybe 10 crew is 1 second countdown whereas a 200 crew count is a 5 second countdown.

Fail Chance.
The idea being as more troops are boarding (or assimilating) they will potentially stop you from self destructing. This fail chance could be related to the number of crew on board vs. the number of enemies, or something else.


Finally In lieu of self destruct there could be a sabotage feature, basically this ability would direct the crew to stop running the ship, and to sabotage the ship as much as possible to prevent it from being used against their freinds. This could result in hull damage, lost of systems, etc.

Sabotage could also be used in conjunction with self destruct. Such that the crew tries to self destruct but if they fail and the ship is taken over, they may still inflict some sort of systems damage, so that although they may fail in keeping the ship out of enemy hands, they are able to cripple it in some manner.

--- As a footnote, perhaps ships that are successfully taken over (perhaps not assimilated ships) via transporter have some sort of reduction in efficiency. This could come in the form of a certain percentage reduction in systems across the board, or some other sort of penalty. The idea being taking over an enemy ship is one thing, but rendering it fully combat ready is another thing. In order to get rid of this penalty, perhaps it would need to be ranked up, or sent to a shipyard to be repaired and inspection. This could either be free or carry a small resource requirement (something like 50 di/tri and 5 supply).

Thanks!