[DirkHowitzer]

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Originally posted by CheshireKatt:
1. Ship Portraits

The current implementation for ship design lets you choose an overall design (weapons platform, ship, etc), a hull, a design (just for grouping purposes), and name your ship. This works pretty darn well, overall.

However, there's still something missing for me -- when I'm in a large battle, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember which of my ships are which, at a glance. Sure, I can mouseover them and find out who they are. But I was thinking about ways to make ships more distinct, and here's what I came up with -- what if the "Design Type", instead of simply being a string used to group ships, also determined which ship portrait was used? This would also reduce some of the clutter in that list, as it would have to be done by type now -- which isn't bad, since it really doesn't make much sense for me to have a Destroyer-class Parasite ship with a design type of Colony Ship (Gas) anyway.

Choosing a design type would select you a design picture and a small combat picture (and while you can't fit too much detail in the small combat pictures, you could do enough to differentiate things -- the three dots I'd recognize as EEE fighters, whereas the three dots with little fins I'd recognize as bombers, or something of that nature).

This is pretty inconsequential in terms of gameplay, and a fair bit of work on MM (new ship portraits, new DISTINCT combat pictures, a redesign of the Design Type list and how it's used), so I'm not really holding my breath. But it'd rule, and I'm all for it if it happens.

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This is something I've mentioned before that I would like to see implemented. Not only would it make combat easier(ie remembering which ships are what), but just this simple addition of multiple ship portraits for each hull size would add so much more color to the game.



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"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)