A bit more about balancing, and something for which I will seriously need feedback. Now, we can weight each unit in various supply categories to play a bit with its availability. For example, a single Arrow will cost 1 supply for your Fighter capacity while a Hellcat will cost 1 in Fighter and 1 in the subcategory Interceptor and an Excalibur will also be 1 in Fighter but a whopping 4 in Interceptor, being a brand-new prototype. The Thunderbolt will be 2 in Fighter and 1 in Heavy Fighter while the Longbow will be 4 in Fighter, 2 in Heavy Fighter and 1 in Heavy Bomber. What does it mean, ingame? I can set up hard limits for each category. Let's consider the following limitations:
Fighter - 100
Heavy Fighter - 70
Interceptor - 70
Heavy Bomber - 35
You
could go with 100 Arrow in a blazing hedgehog around your capital ship force (which is also weighted the same way) but without anything else. Or you could decide to buy 17 Excalibur and 2 Hellcat to fill your Interceptor quota with quality rather than quantity (17*4 = 68, +2 to reach 70 in Interceptor). Thing is, I doubt such a fighter force would survive against 70 Hellcat, so you need to balance a bit and use your few Excalibur as a force multiplier while the Hellcat remains the backbone, unless you really want to punch
hard somewhere while lacking fighter cover everywhere else (or be limited to 30 Arrow). But you'll also notice that if you take 70 points worth of Interceptors, you only have 30 points worth of Fighters left, both for Arrow and for Heavy Fighters. Same thing there, Longbows will be really expensive to support, being huge bombers, but their capability to fire their torpedoes two by two can be worth the price. And whatever you do, you won't have more than one and only one Maniac (thank God), who belongs in his own subcategory.
I think you start seeing the picture there, right? These supply values are going to be pretty important for balancing and good gameplay experience, so if you can think a bit about it and give me some feedback about how to balance the availability of the various units, I'd appreciate it a lot. Just FYI, I'm considering now that the configuration with 100 points worth of Fighters should be the Normal one, with the Large at 200 and the Huge at 300 or 400. Same, an Eagle would be one point, a Yorktown or a Southampton would be 2, a Savannah 3 and a Tallahassee, a Jutland or a Lexington 4 points, a Confederation 6 and the Behemoth 8. We'd have 18 points worth of Capital Ships in Normal, 36 in Large and 50 or 64 in Huge.
The idea is that in Normal, you should be able to man one carrier battlegroup and two or more in Large and Huge. Ideally, I would envision a game with 4 or 8 players, in Normal so each can control a battlegroup in fleet operations. In any case, we're getting quite close to the release now, I'm gonna test the Confed ingame tonight.
P.S.: the Beta will not have the voices and musics from the game.
