Part 7: Harbinger - Part 1
Harbinger, Part 1Commodore Freyv: Traitor flagship that launches support corvettes which carry repair drones.
Commodore Asgauth: Shielded flagship.
Commodore Elduette: Appeared to be a vanilla flagship. Didn't notice anything special about it.
Enemy Starfighter - Podding
dyingsun.com - February 13th, 2014 posted:
One thing missing from the game was a satisfying currency reward loop for killing fighters. The tumble alone felt good and you earned points for it, but a new layer has been added: the escape pod.
A majority of your currency is acquired from killing the crew of downed vessels. If you have an autoturret, it happens automatically. As a capital goes down, the famous loot-piñata situation occurs as the crew abandons ship.
It's one of the first things I've put in the game that makes people feel like a villain. Several people reported feeling conflicted about it. Good!
As mentioned before, shooting escape pods was the form of currency generation back when the game featured a different main currency: Dread. Dread was a representation of the fear you generated within the enemy forces as you cleared a path through enemy space. You would then spend the acquired dread at certain rips in space, called Warrens. This was used for things such as new ships, including interceptors, destroyers, frigates and dreadnoughts.
Escape pods would be automatically taken out by the interceptor's now removed point defense system. In the game's current form, escape pods are only used by the traitor flagships, and you must take them out with manual fire or the AI will kill them. This is a very minor change, but I personally feel that the loss of the escape pods detracts greatly from the feeling of being the bad guy, which even in this version of the game you clearly are.
Here's a video of a build featuring the escape pod mechanics circa 2014. Unfortunately, the VoDs that were not marked as videos have since been lost due to Twitch wiping a lot of their older content, and only some of the 2014 streams remain. It's a damned shame too, as the 2015 builds of the game were the most promising of the original vision. More on that later.