[Karibu]

Four suggestions:

One
Relative weapons. For example, a shield depleter, which reduces certain percentual of enemyship's remaining shield instead of fixed number. These kind of weapons would add totally new dimension in the fighting. This particular weapon would be powerful against unharmed ship and useless against battered and damaged ship.

Furthermore, you could make this kind of weapons to apply armor, internal structures, etc. Also there could be reversed Versions of such weapons, which would do very little against a ship of full health and be lethal against damaged one.

Two
Area effect guns. I would like to see some scatter grenades, which would damage not only the ship they hit, but all nearby ships too.

Three
Chain reaction guns. Organic race has electrict discharge. Why not have electrict discharge, which would hit one ship and do some damage and then continue some nearby ship, etc. The more advanced weapon, the more ships it would hit. It would imitate reality, after all.

Advanced computer virus. Instead of destroying the computer of one ship, it could spread random near ship with master computer after infecting the target ship. Perhaps somewhat weakened state. It would also imitate the reality.

Four
Devices which would make barriers in the battle field. I think how Q stopped Enterprise in Star Trek Next Generation. There appeared energy barrier in the space, which was impassable to Enterprise. Such barriers would add a lot of fun in combat, especially if you could not fire through one (except you would be able to launch missiles, fighters and drones), but you would have to go around to have clear sight. Also launched objects would have to go around.

The barrier could Last some certain amount of turns or it could have some hit points so that you could shoot your way through it.

[ June 15, 2004, 06:29: Message edited by: Karibu ]