New penalty settings for ship death between permadestruction and not-permadestruction

[Nyrin]

Not trying to be a Goldilocks whiner--each of the two options right now just doesn't feel right.

I'd like ship death to be something that feels scary and worthy of going out of my way to avoid without a ship getting destroyed tanking my motivation to play.

Right now:

• Without permadestruction, you lose very little when a ship is destroyed. Towing/reconstruction isn't that expensive, you keep all crew, subsystems, and turrets, and full repair if you can wait a bit for mechanics to restore non-lost blocks isn't a big drain on credits/resources, either. If you had valuable cargo on board, that's one thing, but most of the time my reaction to death without permadestruction is "meh, oh well." I lose a few minutes of time while I get things up and running again, but that's it--there's not much incentive for me to try hard to not die. Ship incarnations are totally expendable and spending extra care and attention to keep them alive isn't worth the effort.
• With permadestruction, it's the other extreme. Every turret, every subsystem, every crew member (including that Captain you've been working on) are all gone and you need to spend every credit and resource to rebuild, from scratch, before you collect new crew, scrounge up new turrets and subsystems, and claw your way back up. It's meant to be "hardcore" and it succeeds in doing so.

I'd love something between. Some ideas for such an option:

• Keep reconstruction/towing, but with more lost blocks and increased guaranteed resource cost relative to the full cost of the ship.
• Lose some crew ("the ones that didn't make it to the escape pods"), but keep some of it, too, usually or always including the captain. That is: make the effort to recrew necessary, but don't make it a total wipe.
• Lose a number of your turrets/subsystems at random (for turrets, block destruction could have a fixed chance to delete vs. drop it) but keep some/most of them. You really don't want to die because you may well lose some of your best stuff, but you aren't guaranteed to lose all of your best stuff.
• Maybe (though this is stretching) apply a longer "debuff" to the ship performance (not just until it's repaired) to make it feel like you need time to get things running well again. Hard to balance this with people just deleting/recreating the ship, though.

In the end, I'd love a way for my reaction to dying to be 'grrr, that hurts, this is going to take some work but I can keep going' and not either 'meh' or 'maybe it's a great time to start a new galaxy!'

[MoreChainguns!]

I'll admit, I do agree with this. I've never tried playing on Permadeath mode, but having a 2.2km long warship deleted by a boss or crashing at full boost into an asteroid

a.) Doesn't matter - spend that 2,500c Reconstruction Token and be on your way (non-Permadeath).

b.) Matters a LOT - you'll have to found a new ship and drain both your resource and credit balances to get a single ship back up and running again.