I just came across this thread and read through it. Yes, please!
I would love to finally be able to choose which ships get used by which factions, instead of it being randomly picked by the game from a player's stored schematics. What if the pirates happen to load a super-dreadnought as their "common" ship, or the trading guild gets a bunch of flightless turrets with low stats as their "ships"?
This system would finally allow for some manner of control over which factions would get which schematics to use. Ideally, also what chance of spawning which schematic for which faction, to prevent dreadnought overload. However, being able to assign roles to schematics so that the game can automatically decide how many of it should spawn and where would be much better. For example, setting a small starfighter as "fighter" would mean it would be fairly common, while setting a super-dreadnought as "dreadnought" would limit it to a very rare occurrence under the assumption that it's massive and massively-powerful. Perhaps a spawn weighting system could be added in on top of this so that the server admin(s) can configure faction ship spawning.
If they ever did add a customizable faction schematic system, I'd also love to see the ability to spawn NPC ships for user-created factions, even if said factions can have player members (or leadership). Perhaps that could be balanced by requiring purchase costs for NPC ships as well as hiring costs for any NPC crew, before an NPC ship is "ready to fly" if being added in-game and not in server management.
Server management could allow for anything from "faction is unlimited in size, with X schematics and Y role/weighting for spawnrate" or "faction has X number of ships with Y schematics using Z role/weighting for deciding spawns" up to "faction has X number of ships, Y schematics, and each individual ship is assigned a schematic and/or name individually, with unassigned ships being randomly selected based on roles/weighting". Possibly even "faction has X number of Y role, with Z schematics available to Y role, with W roles/weighting".
Perhaps that could be how it could be set up. The config would allow admins to assign schematics to factions, and roles to each schematic with optional extra weighting per schematic, within each faction. They could also put a hard limit on how many ships from each role (or even schematic) could spawn for each faction, or leave it unlimited, decided per role (or schematic) in config. (Allowing for such things as fighter/drone carriers.) Player owned ships could be allowed to bypass role limits for a faction, instead being managed between players. However, they and any turrets/fighters/drones and NPC crew would still require normal purchase/hire costs.
Specific ships could be assigned and named in config, with any not specifically assigned being selected based on role and weighting depending on faction ship/role limits. (Perhaps even customizing any assigned crew, such as names or if ever possible, appearance.)
