Units: Mothership / mothership core ideas

[MatthewMarinets]

What feature would you like to see?

Me, Bones, and Alice had a big discussion around mothership ideas starting around here in the discord. We'd like to have:

• More motherships available, to use those extra models
• A mothership core unit, which can morph into motherships
• A better power curve on motherships within a mission
• Mothership items that break up the power scaling over the course of a mission order
• An opportunity to add more mothership abilities

I (phaneros) proposed a mechanic to ease the in-mission power scaling, whereby motherships are cheaper yet weaker when they first come out, and the player must spend additional money on them to get per-unit upgrades to up their stats and unlock more abilities. They can start with some baseline stat upgrades / abilities, with the rest being unlocked with AP items.

Alice would like to be able to get a single ultra-strong mothership unit.

I would like the opportunity to spread the power around the map / have different complementary hero units.

Proposal

Trying to find a synthesis I propose this setup:

• Motherships come out relatively weak, and may upgrade their stats. All upgrades cost money, all motherships may get upgrades for health, damage, cast+attack range, and energy regen. To upgrade a stat, you must find the AP item for it (maybe the first level is always available, but later levels need the item?)
• Motherships can spend money to unlock abilities, up to 4. Once a mothership unlocks an ability, no other mothership may claim the same ability. Unlocking an ability requires a corresponding AP item.
  • Black Hole
  • Thermal Lance
  • Planet Cracker
  • Recall (or ?co-op Alarak Teleport?)
  • ?Maybe allow warping in timed-life airships?
• Motherships come out with one starting ability unique to them
  • Aiur gets cloaking field
  • Purifier gets an AoE movement speed buff
  • Tal'darim gets blink
• Each mothership variant has one additional ability they can upgrade, unique to them. This ability costs money to unlock, but does not take an AP item.
  • Aiur gets Time Warp
  • Purifier gets a mobile power field, and can summon timed-life cannons
  • Tal'darim gets interceptor hangars

This is all subject to change, an after discussion we may scramble stats / unlocks / abilities around or abandon the idea and go a different route.

Other concerns / opinions

How committed are we to maintaining the ability to achieve a vanilla loadout? The tal'darim mothership in vanilla lotv costs 1000/1000, is built from the stargate, and has blink, black hole, and thermal lance. In Utter Darkness allows you to rebuild a mothership if Artanis dies, it has black hole and recall and is built from the nexus.

Melee motherships are built from the nexus, though in the days of the mothership core, the core was built from the nexus and later upgraded into the mothership.

In my opinion, the tal'darim mothership as it is now is kind of unfun because it's just a grind to collect 1000 gas to build it, then once it's out the mission is basically already won and it's just a long slog to move the unit around. The fact that you can build the Aiur mothership on IUD is basically trivia and has very little gameplay effect, as once Artanis dies the mission is basically already over. The mechanic of building from the mothership core is an interesting one I'd like to see, and it also provides a production bottleneck on motherships as only one mothership core may exist at a time. If we want to avoid this bottleneck, I'd like to see motherships coming from the nexus instead of the stargate, stargate just feels wrong.

Other ideas considered

• To encourage spreading out stat upgrades / mothership investments, maybe have upgrade costs scale depending on how many the mothership already has
• Max number of simultaneous motherships may be an upgrade
• Safe Haven has a mission implication that Nexuses power a mothership's shield. Trouble in Paradise similarly has generators on the ground. We could have a mechanic whereby mothership stats / abilities scale with the number of nexuses on the map
• Alice proposed having just one mothership, with the model swapped out via yaml option