[UI] AWACS-style ship

We have fighters, we have scout ships, we have fast movers, we have tanks, we have healing.


When it comes to ESM, we're kinda limited.

Yeah, you might say the Spearhead can do a good job with it's double radar ability (limited) and target ping (limited), but it's not really the greatest in terms of searching maps.

Here's what I'm talking about.

NOTE: This ship is for those who want to help clan members or friends without wasting your ammo/sep, etc. You will need to be guarded, as an actual AWACS would be.

Ship name: Minotaur
Hit Points: 300,000
Speed: 550, unaffected by resources and pauses resource timers
Cargo: 100, this is to dissuade anyone wanting to use this to collect in 5-3
Extras: 3
Laser Slots: 3
Rocket Launcher: N/A
Generator Slots: 1, speed generators cannot be equipped, this is only to give you a slight amount of shielding

It appears this superiority has led to some controversy.

Now that you've seen the ship stats, before you start infuriatingly slapping the keyboard, let's get into it's abilities, both passive and limited.

Passive Abilities:

Eyes Up: The Minotaur, when in an outfit, is both cloaked and off radar to enemy companies, whether shooting or not. JAM-X can temporarily reveal a Minotaur's location as well as EMP-01 and EMP mines. If you're not in an outfit, you can be seen by all companies.

Electronic Support: Radar permanently doubled while flying the Minotaur, works in 2 stages. The outer half of the radius provides pilots inside a small buff to laser and rocket accuracy. The inner half of the radius provides a larger buff to laser and rocket accuracy. Essentially, stick close. 5% to both for outer, 10% to both for inner. The Palladium fields in 5-1 and 5-3 render this ability useless as well as the Mindfire abilities.

Limited Abilities:

Scan: Did you think you saw a cloaker fly by? Ask your Minotaur to use this ability, cloaked enemy ships will be highlighted with the yellow box used in the X-1 maps.

Flares: Under attack? We know you can't fight back so well. Fire off your flares to distract enemy lasers. Enemy ships hit directly by flares will have their speed reduced by 20%


Now, we see the true strength of this ship. It is not designed to farm, it is not designed to fight, not even to defend itself. It fits in with a lot of other ships (Solaris, Berserker, Zephyr, Disruptor), and adds a new critical role to the outfit.


Also, just the icing on the cake. Drones are disabled in this ship. Your 1 shield on the ship and 3 lasers is all you have. You better hope your friends have your back for as much as you're putting out for them.


This ship can also not be used in GG. I can just see people abusing the Electronic Support ability in Hades.


Now let's get down to the business end of this. This ship isn't nearly as strong as the others in the game. It doesn't hit hard, it doesn't have much shields. But it moves fast, it's got the means to slow down attackers, and it's abilities outweigh the negatives. This far puts an upgrade on the Spearhead (a what, 8 year old ship now?).


Recommended Price would be 75,000-100,000 Uridium, or to place it as a reward in the Battle Pass or even weekly Auction.

 

The only thing I would change is a slight tweak to the cloak detection.
Within the 10% range, cloaked ships would appear on the minimap even if using the spear ulti-cloak. They would also give off an extremely slight glare on the screen - like the ghost CPU, but much less visible
Within the 5% range, players would appear in the yellow box like you see in x-1 maps, but much smaller. No glare and no center dot.
Once players leave the range of the ship, a ping is given off at the edge where the ship lost visibility.


As for the drone, speed gens and rocks being disabled, I do not see this ship being implemented if DO has to disable everything on the ship. Make the speed 560 with rocks and the top speed gen. Drop the HP to 120k. This will make the player resort to a formation like Heart rather than Ring for the drones. Shields won't do much good if a player is mothing your lacking HP.

 

So all you can do is be in a group and scout for your friends.

Where is this usefull?
Base-Defense. That's it.

Why do we need that? Even the Spearhead is better that this...

300k HP, only 1 Gen-slot and on top of that no drones allowed means:

1. If you are detected and locked (or even just locked without being detected due to the auto-lock cheaters) you are a 1-shot.

2. The Flares Ability is useless because you die in 1 Hit.

550 Speed means you cannot escape anything either, cuz the normal speed of any other ship is already around 540.

The ability scan is not really usefull either.
You can see where a cloaked player is, ok. But telling your friends doesn't help, cuz locking someone who is cloaked is difficult.
You yourself can't attack him either to tell your friends the position cuz you are a 1-shot...


Overall this ship would be more useless than a phoenix....

 

What if we made this a new Phoenix design?