I would like organic components to be obtained by refining plant material from farms and by refining organic matter from creatures. Each planet would probably provide a separate resource type from its plants and creatures.
I don't like the sound of "organic matter" that needs to be gathered. I'd rather ships consume asteroids.
Plant matter, on the other hand, gave me an idea of a greenhouse/tree-kind of ship that generates biomass through photosynthesis and rock consumption. Said biomass could be used as a much more efficient building material and fuel for the ships. Kind of passive refining.
Speaking of which, what would bioships use for propulsion? Farting out products of rock processing?
I remember an article on what would bioships look like in real life and whether or not they are feasible. It said something about gravity manipulation as a mean of propulsion. Which brings me to warpdrives. Since organic ships
somehow manipulate gravity, they could use it to facilitate the FTL travel.
mobile shipyards/factories
I would say have a different kind of shipyard to produce organic ships. This would make building hybrid ships more difficult, since you'd need to build one portion of the ship first and transfer it over.
This makes the manufacturing and shipyard support structures that conventional ships require unneeded.
It seems to me that the idea of a biocore, with genetic template (organic blueprint) imprinted in it, would solve the shipyard problem, as ships could reproduce by laying "eggs" with core and all the materials needed to grow the ship.
Then the eggs hatch and grow into said ships. No shipyard required at any point.
For hybrids you'd just use a block that manages the growth of organic parts and allows designating what will (re)grow where, which eliminate the need for any "organic shipyard" and simplifies the building as you can use the organic build block in the shipyard designer.
The very same block could be a bioreactor and supplied with fuel to "feed" the organic parts.
Now, why would organic ships need factories? Seriously? Like any other organisms they build themselves from raw materials (refined capsules).
If we get polyp mining, it could process ores straight into the usable capsules during the extraction. All you have to do is suck it up with a big straw and grow more ships.
each tier would be in between the strength of each regular, non-regenerative tier
Still, this means that advanced bioarmor is weaker than inorganic counterpart.
Why are you forcing ALL ORGANIC SHIPS into this one niche of stealth?
This gave me an idea...
Perhaps you could add an opposite of organic manipulator for inorganic ships that allows to synthesize
simple inorganic blocks like armor, but only a layer or two, not farther, hardening the shell a bit and retaining regeneration, in a way. Would consume only raw (capsules that is) materials, but won't be regenerated without them unlike organic blocks. Also this would prevent cloaking unless the hard inorganic shell has a layer of bioarmor over it.
Additionally, since you and probably more people are/will be pissed about no-shield thing for organics, we could have some kind of damage mitigation mechanic in place. Maybe make armor reactive, hardening after the first impact for
n seconds, leading to reduced damage to reacted blocks? Maybe it affects neighboring blocks too. Just throwing in ideas for now.
Maybe pierce and punch don't do as much damage to organic hulls because they absorb and distribute damage differently than normal hulls?
It just seem to me that lesser density of the bioarmor make piercing
projectile more effective, on the contrary, beam energy is dissipated better by the organic matter, which reduces damage and, slightly, penetration.
Hm... Perhaps bioarmor is indeed better against punch-through, as it compresses, absorbing and distributing the impact energy. Coincidentally, this would mean it's also resistant against missiles and explosive effect.
Probably should elaborate on all that later.
Balance and content changes happen, buddy. Get used to it.
But not that massive.
What you are describing is literally just another cannon. It fires a simple projectile. Anything else should be done with secondaries and effects.
Also, 99.9% of damage? That sounds a bit much to me considering how it's already penetrating a decent depth into the ship through multiple layers of heavy armor.
And this is why you're wrong.
The projectile is not quite as simple. It is a bullet with very high penetration properties, which minimizes the damage done to blocks in it's path, and depth+time detonator to deliver the damage to soft internals.
Consider this: at some point in time, we had to "reinvent" hollow/soft-point ammo because the regular full metal jacket bullets would overpenetrate and deal minimal damage to the intended target.
Such tertiary effect would be useless on any weapon but the cannon, which looks rather silly if you ask me.
Plus it gives us a chance to see ammo system implemented, as ballistic weapons cannot simply make bullets out of thin air.
As a final touch, I would increase the range and muzzle velocity, and lower rate of fire due to balance and cooling, compared to inorganic cannon.
I'm sorry, but what the actual fuck are you talking about? Do you not understand what effects are or something?
2) Leech weapons that latch onto ships when they hit them, damaging based on effect. Ion ones drain shields, EMP ones drain power, damage effects burn away blocks in a radius around them, momentum effects continuously apply them, etc.
Sounds great. I think this would be a modular tool whose functions are defined by slaved systems.
First of all, it would act as tether, preventing enemy from escaping/hitching a ride on a passing ship. You don't have to hold the fire button as it stays latched with additional click making it release the target.
It could be used to transfer cargo between entities, when used on a bioport connected to storage, like supplying materials to growing biocore or emptying polyp's resource sacks.
Now, the military applications:
- Cannons... could reduce tertiary effect strength but increases it's "the rate of fire".
- Beam improves range. Most useless combo as usual.
- Pulse would turn it into a kind of stinger I guess.
- Missiles would create multiple tentacles, not doing anything by themselves, that would apply tertiary effects multiple times per tick.
- Acid injects acid (duh) into surrounding blocks. Difference between acid spray and this is that it affects blocks below the surface in a small radius.
- Biocannon makes it burrow into target and release napalm. Good anti-organic combo as organic tissues are resistant to acid but don't respond well to high temperatures.
- Disruptor reduces the range but makes the tentacle send pulses that disrupt shield regeneration.
As for the effects:
- Ion on enemy sends pulses that damage shields, on ally spreads damage to your shields/ship's bioarmor.
- Piercing leeches enemy armor and supplies it to an ally, albeit very ineffective for inorganic ships.
- Punch-through makes it slowly burrow into target, destroying blocks in it's path.*
- Push, Pull and Stop do what they're supposed to do.
- Overdrive debuffs all systems' stats on enemy and buffs on ally at no cost for them.
- EMP leeches energy from enemy, supplies on on ally at the cost of seriously increased fuel consumption.
- Explosive slowly damages enemy ship's armor*, on ally hardens the armor, as long as you're connected to him.
1) Flamethrower/Acid Spray type weapon that strips hull and systems off one layer at a time, sort of like a pancake missile. Radius increases with distance but damage decreases.
Make annoyingly too much sense. Here are the simplified organic weapons then:
- Acid spray - anti-hull weapon that doesn't damage shield on it's own. Fires in a cone with damage falloff based on distance.
- Biocannon - armor-penetrating* sniper artillery weapon. If shield is too strong, the shell detonates, damaging the shield instead. Middle ground between hull and shield-only weapons for organics.
- Disruptor - anti-shield beam-like energy weapon that shoots lightning. Automatically charges like scanners. Nigh harmless to hull. Devastating to shields and also disrupts (slows or halts) shield regen for 1/n of a second. Disrupts one random system, including weapons (one at a time) when shields are down.
And the two "support" systems - the polyp seeder and the leech, both of which can become a weapon in a pinch.
* Works only when shields are below n%.
