"Well,
something we are working on right now is evaluating all the
mechanics and asking "Is this fun or is this
work"? And the support mechanic right now is one of
those that we are evaluating. Is this something we actually
want to keep in the game? Is this fun and add a lot of
strategy to the game? Or is this just something that adds
work for the player. So we are doing a lot of testing.
Currently, the way the system works is support frigates,
carriers, mothership, shipyards can actually increase your
limit and the same thing with a production facility.
Obviously the bigger the ship the more limit it takes
up." - Josh Mosquiera, Lead Designer
The
initial discovery of the Support Frigate caused some hope
that fuel for strike craft might be returning in HW2,
but that has turned out not to be the case. The
Support Frigate (and its Vaygr counterpart, the Transport
Frigate) have been removed from the game since E3. There is
an entry for the ship in the release-game version of the
.big, but no data or geometry.
It
was armed with a single topside turret, and had six sets of
docking pads on the starboard side (under a convenient
gas-station-like "roof"). It now
appears that the row of lights on the port side, originally
thought to be separate docking pads, are just lights. It
still possible, though, that there might be another six sets
of pads on the underside of the "roof."
Since
fuel is not modeled in HW2, we're unsure what role the
Support Frigate was originally intended to play. Überjumper insists that they
couldn't repair fighter squadrons nor capital ships. At E3 Josh Mosquiera
said that they added to the support limit,
allowing for more ships to be built. If this was their only
remaining function, it's easy to see why they were dropped
(when support units were removed).
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