More Variety in Hulls? (SEV maybe)

[Aub]

The standard ship hulls are pretty boring We have a single line of combat ships (with the idea that bigger is better, although it's not always true) plus some support ships like transporters and colony ships.

Now let's think for a second if we had more parameters to play with in VehicleSizes.txt For example:

Max Armor Tonnage :=
Max Shield Strength :=
Max Ecm :=
Max Sensors :=
Max PD Cannons :=
Max Weapons Tonnage :=

and so on and so forth. Not too hard to code, don't you think? But now think of the variety of hulls one could have:

- really fast ships that cannot have armor
- heavily armored ships that could not have Ecm and would be easy to hit
- limits on PDC could help balance missiles vs direct fire, if ships with a PDC limit had other advantages

... and so on. Finally, the "only one component effective" could be taken away from Ecm and Sensors if all ships limited the number of these components mounted. This way you could have ships with lots of Ecm that would stack, making the ship impossible to hit. But - no PDC at all, and only light armor. So you are an easy prey for missiles. Of course you can have PDC-loaded ships in the same fleet, but those would not allow for Ecm at all and could be taken off by direct fire weapons.

I can keep going on like this Throw in different mounts for different hull classes. If you take into accound that those hulls cost RP to research so one really needs to choose which ones he's going after, things get even more interesting.

Doesn't it look like a good way to give the game more variety and strategic depth?

Aub