Assists should be less random#300

I have a issue with the assists being truly random and not having access to certain ones on any given match. I personally think that you should just be able to pick the ones you want for any given match instead of just hoping you get the ones you want or being unhappy when the opponent gets the broken ones and you don’t. This should be atleast for whatever would be considred the main game mode. Another alternate option would be for all of the assists to always show up just in random combinations. That way you would always get atleast 1 that you want and can plan around it.

You could add specific assists to your roster, so at the start of the game, yours assists are drawn the same as units, from a smaller pool.

This is one of my initial issues regardling game mechanics right now. It would be like having random Summoner Spells in LoL or random Perks in MultiVersus or random Class Spells in Hearthstone.

Incredibly difficult crafting a deck/team/strategy around random assists from game to game.

Even excluding what is really weak and what is overpowered, I think it kills team compositions in a really brutal way if you dont get to pick assists that compliment your team. if your team gets punished really hard by movement assists, and you dont get any to counteract that, it leads to a pretty miserable feeling.

I agree with all the above comments and think this is the number one issue in the game right now (besides matchmaking maybe). Having the strong assists toned down a bit to get on a level with the weaker ones and then having players just chose them during roster selection would be my preferred solution. I think with the random crew draws and more content being added in the future the game doesnt run into the danger of being too “samey” by allowing people to play with the same assists game after game.

Quickly - I think the issue here is that some assists are just too powerful. So we’re going to fix that first before we address the whole concept of dynamic ship assists. But we’re definitely investigating this.

Was thinking about this again. I like the idea of some kind of assist deck. Allow you to pick 2 from a premade selection at the beginning of a match or potentially have 1 you select to always have with one that dynamically changes during the match from a selection.

I think the balancing and the randomness are separate but related issues . In my opinion having them random kind of necessitates them to be very balanced, which is not necessarily the most fun. If they are all exactly the same power level for all rosters, where is the fun in chosing them? Having some assists being objectively “weaker” but strong in the correct roster and matchup makes it feel rewarding to use them to their full extend. Having a few underpowered assists that hardly get used is not really a problem if you can freely chose.
My suggestion would be if you were to rebelance to push all of them further from general usefulness to more specific situational usfeulness and then let us chose. Best case would be to have 3 pairs associated with your roster and after you see the opponent captain, map, and your starting crew - then you choose one of your 3 pre-selected pairs. In my opinion this would have the best of both worlds - strategic planning with assist/roster synergy but also adapting to opponents strategy (almost like a sideboard in classical dueling card games)