Let us assign a flagship to Heroes

+1

I neeeeeeed this

No need for big ship for heroes - that'll ruin balance too much.

But "advanced hull" for hero ship would be nice. It needs more defense (innate and/or via modules) - heroes are too squishy late game.

Maybe some weapon modules, but not much, on par with advanced smal hulls for regular ships.

And to make heroes a little less boring - support modules shoud be divided. "Fleet boosts" and interesting utilities like probes, "science for kill" etc need different slot types (as of now former is always better than latter).

I never really remembered to do hero ships, the fleet was always outside borders and unlike ship designs they cant be saved and done later :/
And it dosent really look like they give much either? its not a strong ship and i dont really put them on ships at all :/ usually always have 1 for ship (more from quests).

on that note, and flagships, maybe unique ships sounds nice,

wouldn't it be OP for some cases? i am a tyrannical person but this just feels like tracing a gasoline around galaxy

I have had similar thoughts on this subject since I started playing, and with the addition of the BEB, my concerns over the fragility of hero ships has doubled.

After reading this over and pondering a bit, here is my take:

I think the existing hero ships are great for the early game, they are considerably more powerful than the other hulls available and offer a great tool for dealing with pirates or early warfare with other factions, so I am all for keeping them around. However they drop off in power considerably by mid game as-is and feel more like something to babysit than a valuable addition to a fleets combat potential and with the BEB around they are at risk of getting splattered in the first round of combat every single time.
I think the time has come to find a solution to get them into bigger hulls as the game goes on.

I agree with Aitarus that it would be nice to be able to start unifying the aesthetic of the fleet as time goes on and I think the best option would be to allow them to access the empire hulls as they become available.
It seems like the best implimentation would be to give them access to a special skin for each ship class (a relatively speaking minimal investment of man hours) or like Aitarus said just give them a dust halo effect (even less time intensive) to keep them visually distinct in combat.

 I think it would also make sense to have them attaching to ship designs and having those designs continue to upgrade normally.

However to make these ships a bit more unique I think it would be interesting to give them multiple additional module slots (scaling by ship class) that they are able to modify through the hero Management -> Inspect -> Ship design screen.
What I envision would be dropping the base ship design with all modules from the base design locked in place with however many additional slots open for them to add on to the base design on the hero Ship Design screen.
To make it easier to manage and avoid excessive costs related to switching heros from one ship to another I think the best implimentation would be to give them layouts for each class that is available to them which automatically take effect when they are assigned to the appropriate ship class and only charge them for the modules when they are initially added to the layout the first time or if they modify the layout for that ship class later.
So the first time they are assigned to a Hunter class ship they would choose their extra modules and pay for the, if you then assigned them to a Coordinator you would choose new modules and pay for those, and then when you switch to a Carrier you would pay for your modules one more time, but you could switch back to any hull type you have already used previously with the same modules without paying any more. If you switch modules on around you would pay for those changes when you make them.

This would also allow you to keep each hero role in the fleet unique and actually continue to enhance their role specialization by tweaking what kind of extra module slots each hero type gets for each hull type to keep with the module balance themes of the existing hero ships. So as an example Gaurdians could still be extra offense oriented by getting more extra weapons slots relative to other hero types regardless of ship class, Counselors more defense and support, etc.

Lorco wrote:

maybe you could get better tier of hero ships with the basic techs for ship classes?

this way you could get some bigger ships to lead your fleet as well as some more progression for the heroes.

I have an idea, feel free to criticize or shoot it down, but what if you were to research a ship, and then it unlocks that ship hull for the hero? Like, if you researched a Carrier, you unlocked a Carrier hull for the hero too...? Each Hero could give specific hull boosts, if you REALLY wanted to get into it. It`s interesting, might be iffy though. Just a random thought to write down.

I would love this idea to be implemented somewhat in the game. I agree about heroes ships aesthetic to be a bit disconnected from the rest of the game, it feels a bit "cartoonish" compared to the other ships. Or maybe a solution would be to change the design (in a selection of special heroes available ships) or at least the color.

That's kind of a yeah, duh thing. +1

Also, can't you name stuff? I rename my fleets, my ships, my heroes... :D

This is interesting!   I almost always have a hero in a fleet, the damage buffs and seeker movement bonuses are faaaar too tasty for me to ignore.   While I agree they tend to throw the aesthetic off, I always just assumed their aesthetic and design was 'Isyander Academy' design, as that is where all heroes hail from in the game.

I would, however, be in favor of paying any reasonable sum in-game to upgrade their somewhat tiny ships to something more formiddible.   I'd also like to see the ability to paint them faction colors, same with behemoths.   

Even a partial paint job...I'd like to slather some black and purple all over my juggernaut to make it match the fleet.

I think it would be easier to assign a hero to a ship, rather then a ship to a hero. The hero can be then assigned to any ship in a fleet and brings the hero abilities with it.

A ship with an assigned hero can then use hero modules in the same way as it worked on a hero ship.

Only question would be how to deal with the loadout when removing the hero and assigning him/her to another ship.

Even if the heroes belong to the academy and do not lead your fleet:

Shouldn't your high-paid advisor be on the bridge, next to the fleet admiral?

Being able to put them on a different ship would be great. Being able to upgrade their ship to a larger hull-type would also be great. 

"Something like this" should be done. Nothig should be scapped, but it should be expanded - more options for the players.

A lot of the time in the mid/late game zones, the heroes assigned as admirals end up getting oneshotted by really kitted out Large/Heavy ships, and have pretty miniscule stats comparatively towards the other ships. That being said though, it is nice to have an extra ship on top of the actual capacity to have additional fire power, along with the buffs from the skill tree.

I'm all for a research path to enhance the Hero's ships to add modules or hero specific modules, or perhaps making it a medium-sized hull later down the path, but turning it into another Large/Heavy ship on top of the fleet capacity kind of sounds a little bit over the top/strong.

I'm not sure if this would be the absolute best choice, however I do find the Hero vessels to clash terribly with almost any faction's theme that I play. I'd really appreciate a better aesthetic that would match the vessels of the race that the hero is hired by and this discussion seems to have a lot of good ideas on how to approach this issue. Count my vote in as allowing the ships to be traded for different ones after recruitment, it seems to be the easiest solution requiring the least amount of effort on the devs part?

Thanks for the support, I agree that having them auto-attach to an existing ship would also be cool. I'm just unsure which is most workable to implement.