Welcome to the next installment in our Lord of Rigel design series. This week we are going to talk about doomstars. Certainly a favorite ship class for many, doomstars have the potential to provide doom to your foes. Certainly the name doomstar pays a great deal of homage to classic strategy games in particular the Master of Orion series and certainly while they were an enjoyable part of late game, in many ways the spoiled fleet design and diversity by late game when tech advancements and well built and populated industrial colonies could produce these massive vessels in as quicky as a battleship earlier in the game.
Lord of Rigel aims to make doomstars more of an achievement rather than a standard ship in fleet combat. So what does that mean in practical terms? Say goodbye to facing off with the over species in an 82 doomstar fleet face off. So why are we doing this, why would we take away the fun of an 82 doomstar fleet face off? Doomstars are essentially a Star Wars Death Star. These are massive ships that take incredible resources to design, build, and maintain. Lord of Rigel wants to treat them that way. Having a single colony create and man a deathstar in 8 turns certainly doesn’t seem reasonable additionally it breaks fleet design. There is little incentive to build a frigate in 1 turn, when a doomstar can be built in 8.
Players can expect Lord of Rigel to treat doomstars with the respect they deserve. Don’t expect to build doomstars in 8 turns, instead expect much longer windows of time and additional focus on acquiring strategic resources that meet the needs to create the massive superstructure needed to create a doomstar. Additionally players will have exponentially larger maintenance costs that players will see via command points. In massive galaxies doomstars should be used as the big gun used to product whole quadrants of your empire rather than just another ship of the line. As discussed in other articles command points will be a much stronger feature in Lord of Rigel that will force players to keep fleet sizes reasonable to the size of the empire forcing players to make strategic choices about fleet positions and compositions.
With Lord of Rigel we don’t want to take away the fun of a doomstar. What we want to do is pay it is respect it deserves as a massive moon size ship capable of destroying entire worlds. By doing this we have to provide a sense of scale and realism to fleet composition as well as not break fleet design and composition once doomstar technology is researched.
Join us next week!
