RFC: Thoughts on New Features

[CheshireKatt]

Well, here goes some of my thoughts on things I think would be good enhancements to an already VERY enjoyable game. Feel free to bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate as necessary. (Oh, just a warning, it's fairly wordy. My apologies in advance.)

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.

2. Racial Characteristics

Racial characteristics currently allow for racial bonuses that cost you points. And, if I understand the files properly, I can also assign a penalty in the same way, say making a trait called Jinxed, that gave double the chance of bad events, as so:

Name := Jinxed
Description := Twice the chance for bad events.
Pic Num := 0
General Type := Advantage
Cost := -1500
Trait Type := Luck
Value 1 := 100
Value 2 := 0
Required Trait 1 := None
Required Trait 2 := None
Required Trait 3 := None
Restricted Trait 1 := None
Restricted Trait 2 := None
Restricted Trait 3 := None

And I think that'd work fine. For taking double the change of bad things happening, you get 1500 points more to spend. And if they then take Lucky as well, they've netted 500 points for a 50% increase in bad events, which is fine too. I can even prohibit them from taking Lucky by changing

Restricted Trait 1 := None

to

Restricted Trait 1 := Lucky

No problem. But here's the kicker. I can't mess with their tech tree in any way beyond GIVING them tech. This actually came up in an earlier discussion about a true "Organic" race, one that has different ship hulls and doesn't have the standard weapons (DU cannons, that kind of thing), but STARTS with level 1 organic guns instead.

I can see a way this could be done, by giving all the starter stuff little invisible techs that EVERYONE starts with by default, and then disallowing those techs with the "Organic Race" pick. To do this, we'd need a way to disallow a tech tree with a pick.

As another example, let's say I wanted to make a detriment called "Existential Race". This would disallow all sensors, as they don't believe anything they're not experiencing firsthand. So, I'd deny the base sensor techs from their research. But I can't do that, as far as I can see.

3. Weapon Mounts

There's a few things I'd be interested in here as well. The ability to adjust the rate of fire of weapons would be nice -- a mount that let a weapon fire more or less often, specified as a change, either a multiple/fraction or plus/minus of the weapon's normal ROF, (maybe even more than once per round -- I'm looking for a multiple-shot, less-damaging gun, used for crowd control of smaller ships, especially with engine- or weapon-targeting guns), or less often (for making a REAL wave-motion gun -- slow to recharge, but mindbogglingly powerful and long-ranged), would be WONDERFUL.

What about a modifier to the speed and range of seekers -- obviously, it'd only matter on weapons with speed and range, but it'd be a cool mod nonetheless.

Or instead of a simple range modifier, one that lets me specify degredation of damage or not. Some weapons do less damage as they get farther from the firer, maybe I want a mount that doesn't degrade damage? (Though that could be tougher to implement in an intuitive way.)

I guess what I'm _really_ looking for is a piecemeal mod system. One that lets me say "Ok, this Wave Motion Gun has the Slow Recharge mod (ROF x 4), a Massive mod (Damage x 6, Supply x 4, Tonnage x 4), and a Long Range mod (Range + 6)." and the game then figures out the net total for that gun.

'course, that's a lot more work (and more changes to the existing weapon mount system, which uses one mount per gun, and NO in-game modification to said mounts), may bother people who just liked the simple method, and requires more hooks for the AI to use to figure out what the heck they're doing with all these gun mods now.

In any event, here's my thoughts. Hopefully I'm not too off-base in at least the "wouldn't it be nice if" factor.

--Chesh



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We're all mad, down here.