"Fengshui says loudly, "Vehicle combat: I don't have any plans to further touch vehicle combat at this time. I fixed a bunch of the bugs that had been reported, and continue to fix bugs as they come up, but it is not something that I see being used overly much, or that more than a handful of people are interested in. I think our development efforts would be better spent in other areas at this point.""
I get it that staff don't want to devote time to vehicle combat. But if that's the case, I think heavy rollbacks or reworks of changes that were made to adjacent systems are desperately needed. I'm going to bullet point this to be a bit easier to follow than my last post.
1. Get rid of all retail vehicle hulks from the junkyards. Leave specialized hulks for vehicles, ones you can't purchase in a retail store, in a much more condensed version of the outside junkyard.
Vehicles are too easy and too cheap to get. Perfectly fine and works wonderfully in a system that has a growing and heavily used vehicle combat environment. But without it all it's done is led to an abundance of easily created, cheaply made vehicles that bite into lev use (so creating less conflict opportunities there) plus cuts into CHEX and Skyfox use.
This would mostly only impact retail bikes and aeros hulks, because there's only one, maybe an illusive second I could've hallucinated, retail car hulk that shows up anyways.
2 Take out and remove from stores the vehicle weapons that don't currently fit any known or easily accessible hardpoint. There are I think two weapon types that don't fit any of the currently available vehicle hardpoints. In all the vehicles I've gathered information on since vehicle combat was introduced, I think the hardpoint for the two high tier weapons isn't available to PCs.
Removing the ones that can't be used makes it easier to know what ones can and what to invest in to use the rare times they're used.
3. Reverse the previous vehicle part and overall vehicle purchase price reduction back to what it was. This doesn't impact aero techs so much, but it does impact lower end ground vehicles for auto techs. Prices are so low (and this contributes to the influx of vehicles) that you cannot hire out other people to help you without taking a loss on entry level builds, because someone could just go order the vehicle from a retail spot for cheaper at that point. And with all brand new parts, rather than repaired parts. I can leave more details on this in a note. Aero techs don't see this as much because aeros are so much more expensive retail that they get a nice cushion, but auto tech doesn't get that for the most part because the aforementioned lack of higher end ground vehicle hulks.
4. Remove the junkyard in the city entirely. Put kits of scrap up for sale in appropriate shops for when parts are still destroyed in combat. Parts were already cheap in the junkyard. The 35% reduction - and more than 35% for some - has made it an economic crash. Not only does this contribute to the insanely and terribly cheap vehicles, but it means there's no secondhand market for fixers or mechanics to sell repaired parts/have people on the lookout for broken parts unless it's for the handful of higher end stuff that you can only get in stores.
5. Please reconsider allowing aero techs work at shops in the Mix. This hasn't been an IC you can technically do it just don't get caught, it's been an OOC you cannot do it because the building isn't outfitted to work on aeros kind of deal. If you count where the aeros are IC, you might be surprised which sector they're more prevalent in. Even if it's just building a separate building and role for aero techs only.
6. Hot take: get rid of or severely lower the rate of aero and auto tech skillsofts, like has been done for several other archetypes over the years/recently. Or ramp up the UE investment needed for repairs, installations so someone can't buy a low end skillsoft and do it.
I know I write too much. Thanks for reading.
