limit race-based abilities to ships native to that race.
We've all either run into or played things like Federation Biocides, Fascist Gorbies, etc. Not to put to fine a point on it, but they throw the game for a loop, combining factors that simply were not designed into a given race.
The campaign game only makes this worse, given the expansion of race-based abilities. But it also gives us the option to fix it.
This isn't about ship-based abilities. Stole a cloaker? Captured a Meteor? Traded for a Cobol? So be it... but that cloaker shouldn't have a crew bonus, that Meteor shouldn't have x2 beams, and that Cobol shouldn't fix itself in space.
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Chanain commented
As a matter of principle, it's very clear that certain racial advantages, in fact, are designed to work with captured/traded ships. Consider, for a moment, Federation "Loki Immunity". If that worked only with native Federation ships, it would be completely useless, as the Feds have no native cloakers. A newer example would be the 'squadron repair' feature of Super Refit. Again, the Feds have no native squadrons; simply put, this racial advantage *was* designed to work with other races' ships.
Heck, even Cloning and Advanced Cloning qualify as 'racial advantages'.
Ultimately, the general principle you propose, that racial advantages should apply only to native hulls, is a non-starter.
To the extent that a handful of interactions create pretty powerful phenomena - like the Fed Biocide - we can argue about the game balance implications, and whether some more specific change should be made to fix those balance issues...but those are relatively narrow issues, which don't lead in any way to the conclusion that captured cloakers shouldn't be Loki Immune, or that the Privateers shouldn't be able to use captured ships to rob other ships, etc.
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Jessica Orsini commented
In answer to a question from another thread on this topic:
"So would this include Super Refit, Hiss, Cloak-and-Intercept, Pillage, Rob, 3x Beam Kill, Lay Web Mines, Dark Sense/Detection, 4x mines, and RGA as well?"
Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. If it is a race-based ability (i.e. one not endemic to the hull but rather the race), it should be limited to native hulls. The foreign hulls lack the various equipment -- from webmine generators, to snap-transport capabilities for RGAs and pillaging, to Dark Sense amplification circuits, to rapid-recycling beams, etc -- for the race-based abilities to work; that's the technobabble to support it.