Enemy spawning, systems.

[Crusade]

Hello there! I have a few ideas that might be fun to play around with.

ENEMY SPAWNING:

First off, what enemies spawn, at the moment it seem like it is a bit hit or miss as to what enemy will spawn. Most of the time they are minor annoyances. especially if you are in a large, powerful craft.

My idea is that enemies should spawn in different craft, depending on what you're flying. Say you have a small ship, enemies will spawn in a small ship. If you have the flagship destruction bringer of your fleet, the enemy will spawn in that, or as many smaller craft. The idea is to make pirates more formiddable. This may work better if you go ouff the price/mass of the craft. its cost per block will mean it is a higher class ship, organised into wieght classes for spawning.

SYSTEMS:

I love building ships, but i would like something a little more realistic. At the moment computers, cores and the weapons themselves seem to run on a futuristic wifi network. I think it would be amazing if wiring had to be connected to each group. Say you have a core and a weapons computer right next to eachother, you wouldn't have to wire them up, they are already touching. But from the weapons computer to the group of AMCs there would have to be wires laid. Now this could be represented by a line running through the blocks when you go into build mode. If you wire was broken, anything that doesn't have a connection to the core (or weapons computer if that's what you are controlling it from) gets disabled until it is fixed, either through repair of the broken blocks, or wire relocation. With this you could have very strategic fights, and call for a new block that allows you to see the wire paths in enemy ships.

 

[Visitor]

I am completely against enemy scaling in regards to player ship. Aside from possible algorithm fails (fighting great armadas when I just made big, but hardly functional or armed ship that was just to look nice or defeating puny, old buckets if I\'ll make a small fighter while pulling every trick from my shipbuilding book for maximum efficiency) it basically will provide no decent surprises as player will already know what enemies he\'ll find.

I\'d rather just have one day some known galaxy map, with different sectors where different factions try to exert their influence and thus - areas of greater and lesser danger. If one will want then a challenge, he\'ll go on full scale assault against pirate base reportedly hidden in the asteroid field somewhere in this or that sector or he\'ll explore and mine in uncharted space near borders of some strong and friendly megacorporation. Barring that, I\'d rather have what I have now if the alternative is scaling. Especially since you can up the enemy\'s strength by restricting them to use best blueprints.

The second idea is quite nice, though I am not sure about the wiring. While it is logical, it\'d restrict possible design solutions very, very strongly. What I\'d like to see one day, though, is more realistic and demanding propulsion system, so you cannot just hide a block of thrusters at the far edge of some ship, in a block of reinforced hull plating. I\'d like thrusters to need a bit of space behind them to work and actually propel ship mostly in the direction they\'re facing, with possible far, far weaker antigrav engines (working the way thrusters do now) for lighter and smaller of crafts which would probably have hard time fitting normal propulsion system at different points but at the same time wouldn\'t need too much thrust in one direction to move well. Right now everything, no matter the size and weight is also a nimble ballet dancer from FPP strafing school of dance as long as it has decent generalized \'thruster power\'.