New-to-RJ player experience improvements

[(NSW)TwilightLotus]

I've always liked the idea of Railjack, being able to fly around in space in a dedicated combat ship, but the actual gameplay feel for a new railjack owner is brutal, especially since there are no tutorials to explain the core mechanics. Due to the mission flow, I have to leave my RJ, use my archwing to fly over to an enemy ship to break into it, and because my RJ is freshly made with only the basic equipment it quickly blows up from being attacked. I can understand needing to upgrade my RJ overtime, but why is a warship seemingly made from paper? These two issues make me not want to play with my RJ since in order to use it effectively I need better parts or skills, but I'm not able to complete missions, which means I lose all the parts and resources I find. Me not wanting to play is a bit of a problem given how many hundreds of thousands of resources and credits I poured into making my ship.

Suggestions:

1. A repeatable tutorial/practice mission. I don't really know why this isn't already a thing when we have one for regular gameplay, archwings, operators, and necramechs. It would really help new-to-RJ players a lot if we were eased into the experience with a clear explanation on the basics of flight, what the weapons do, the fact that the big rocket thing consumes resources, that the big rocket thing needs ammo built at the forges, and so on. Maybe make it available at the relays with the dry docks so that players without a RJ can still practice without annoying more experienced players by accidentally using up their resources.
2. The paper-hull problem. More health or armour seems like the lazy solution here, and one that while may help, doesn't really add anything to gameplay. I would personally prefer the following ideas:
   1. Somewhere to park the RJ for a time in each mission (and marked on the map). A disused hangar, an asteroid cave, a shattered orokin tower, a fomorian wreck. Something. If that's a mission flow problem, then make it a limited time thing where your RJ has, for example, 30 seconds of cover from the enemies while you go off with the AW to deal with hacking the cruise ships from the inside. It would make solo-play for a new player a lot more feasible. You could scale the duration of the hiding down with how many players are in the squad since with more players some can stay and protect the fragile new ship.
   2. Some kind of evasion mechanic. I know that we're initiating the conflict in all the missions, but it'd be great if we are in a dire situation we could outrun the enemy and lose them for a time, giving us a moment to fix stuff, deal with boarders, or recover shields. Granted this might require more "terrain" for us to fly through to make this reasonably realistic, but that's not a bad thing since the RJ missions feel barren anyway. Also, this could be used in concert with the previous suggestion where you need to escape pursuit before you can use the hidden safe spot.
3. AI crew. I know that this is coming in the next update, but please don't make this feature completely locked behind a progression system. I can understand putting say the kuva liches and the corprus queenpins in the progression system, but at least give us the option to hire basic crew as a base feature. It's hard enough to find people to play RJ with, let alone in the Earth Proxima (at least on the Switch version anyway). Having an extra hand to keep the ship alive, even if it's basic turret shooting or extinguishing fires, while I'm off infiltrating an enemy ship would be really nice.

Thank you for looking into the situation and seeing what can be done. I think RJ is a cool idea, and I like the discussion in the devstream of merging more of the core gameplay with RJ. I look forward to seeing what changes you guys make.

[(NSW)Joewoof]

I definitely agree that the very start of Railjack is a big, ugly difficulty wall, especially solo, and it really doesn't have to be that way.

[tantanoid]

This seems to be by design to make you join other player's crew until you gather all lvl 3 components and max out the avionics (by this point you will also get to at least lvl 7 in all intrinsics too)

[DrivaMain]

I would also like to add a "Free Roam" mission that has collectable resources and no enemies. Getting into Railjack solo is painful because of the payload resource upkeep.

[Steel_Rook]

I'm of the opinion that we need an "Alarm" system for Railjack dogfight scenarios, as well. Currently, we have only one mission type, and that's a permanent-alarm Extermination mission. Once we start doing subtler missions (like Spy), we're going to need to start being sneaky. This means that we need a means of evading a fight, losing the enemy and returning to a state of non-alertness, where we can hide even with enemies on the map. And yes, I absolutely agree that being able to hide the Railjack in a nebula (or via a passive "turn off the engines" stealth Avionic) would be neat. After all, we're eventually going to want to park it and start going on more extended infiltration sojourns, no?

[Cy4Shot]

I have just completed the rising tide quest to build the railjack. However, once I did, it left me confused. I have no idea what to do, and have tried a railjack mission but failed very miserably. It would be a very good idea to introduce a quest or make a dead easy mission so that I can learn the controls, instead of throwing me straight into the mayhem.

[(NSW)TwilightLotus]

I completely agree and brought up the same issue of lack of tutorials for Rail jack in my own post on the topic. The start is very much not helpful to new RJ owners.