After we had read through a bunch of the suggestions on the official discussion, my friend and I started talking about general game mechanics and what kinds of new/changed features we would really like to see. Since I really liked some of the ideas we had (go figure), I decided to organize and compile them all into one big list:
Suggestions to consider:
Weapon Types:
[*]Capped duration of beam
[*]Long charge time
[*]Emergency heat dispersion unit: not technically a weapon, acts as a way to quickly decrease internal heat (heat mechanics explained later)
*Note: It might be a good idea to have field of fire decrease as a weapon's size increases
Mechanics:
Miscellaneous/Extra Ideas:
Suggestions to consider:
Weapon Types:
- Ballistic: Bypass shields, low damage to regular hull, very low damage to hardened hull, low damage to a new type of blast resistant hull and average damage to everything else
Specifics:
Mid-ranged rate of fire - Low heat generation
- Low energy requirement (drain on resources)
- Requires ammunition
- Small field of fire (area in which the gun can hit something; imagine it like a cone extending out from the front of the weapon)
- Linear degradation of rate of fire per fire point in a group (a single gun will fire at a faster rate than two will; for balancing purposes)
- Anti-Matter: Very low damage to shields and average damage to everything else
Specifics:
High rate of fire - Medium level of heat generation
- High energy requirement
- No ammunition required
- Medium field of fire
- EXPONENTIAL increase of heat generation and energy drain for every extra fire point in a group past a preset number
For example, if the preset number was eight, you could have up to eight fire points connected to an anti-matter weapons computer without any penalty. If you add one more, you receive X amount of increase in heat generation and Y amount of power drain. If you add yet another one (total of ten) you receive X2 and Y2 penalty instead.
- Missiles: Low damage to shields, high damage to regular hull and mid-low damage to hardened hull, very low damage to blast resistant hull and average damage to everything else
Specifics:
Very low rate of fire - Minimal heat generation
- Minimal energy requirement
- Requires ammunition
- Field of fire is a line (what it is now; D1000 missiles fire in a straight line no matter where your cursor is pointing and the other two types change direction after being fired)
- Fast projectiles
- Decreased area of effect (radius)
- Disruptive: High damage to shields no damage to any hull type, if shields are down, disables regeneration effects of shield/power blocks for a set amount of time, disables engines, again, for a set amount of time, and drains power storage (no transfer) *ONLY if these blocks are hit! Shooting hull won't have any effect
Specifics
Low rate of fire - Low heat generation
- High energy requirement
- No ammunition required
- Small field of fire
- Firing temporarily disables your ship's ability to regenerate energy
- Beam: Cannot damage shields, medium-low damage to hardened hull, high damage to everything else
Specifics
Continuous rate of fire - Ludicrous heat generation
- Ludicrous energy requirement
- No ammunition required
- Large field of fire
- Restricted to a single connected group per weapon computer
- Restricted to high mass ships (we can decide what counts as a high mass ship later)
- Size of beam depends on layout of front most weapon blocks (3x3 layout will produce a 3x3 beam)
Supports different shapes of beams (circles for example, or hell, smiley faces) - Maximum beam size capped and total damage distributed evenly over beam area (3x3 beam does more damage per block than a 4x4 beam)
[*]Capped duration of beam
[*]Long charge time
- Bomb: Bypass shields, high damage to regular hull, average damage to hardened hull, very low damage to blast resistant hull and average damage to everything else
Specifics
Extremely low rate of fire - Low heat generation
- Minimal energy requirement
- Requires ammunition
- Field of fire is same as missiles
- Slow, destructible projectiles (i.e. you can shoot them down before they hit their target)
- No lock-on
- Restricted to low-mass ships (again, we can decide on what this means later)
- Ships mounted with bombs experience a decrease in maximum speed and turning speed
[*]Emergency heat dispersion unit: not technically a weapon, acts as a way to quickly decrease internal heat (heat mechanics explained later)
Specifics
Extremely low rate of fire (much MUCH slower than bombs)- Reduces internal heat based (amount reduced based on the size of the unit)
- Low energy requirement
- Requires ammunition (coolant liquid or something)
*Note: It might be a good idea to have field of fire decrease as a weapon's size increases
Mechanics:
- Heat and heat sinks - reduces heat generation of systems and increases heat dissipation from systems. Based on exposed surface area a group has to an empty block. In order to work with a weapon, at least one block must be in contact with a weapon block. Dissipated heat is transferred to the overall internal heat of the ship. Internal heat slowly dissipates over time; larger ships have a slower rate of heat dissipation but have a higher heat capacity before critical heat levels are reached. If there is no contact with a weapon block, heat sink blocks help dissipate heat over the entire ship. Ice crystal blocks increase heat capacity. If something overheats, it will cease to function until it cools off. Attempting to use something while it is cooling off will result in part of that system to explode with the size of the explosion based on the size of the system. If internal heat reaches critical levels, system blocks (the two power blocks, shield blocks, and engines) have a chance to explode, the size of explosion based on how much you exceeded the critical heat levels (just barely exceeding the limit might just destroy the blocks that explode and damage the surrounding blocks).
- Ammunition and ammunition blocks - ammunition blocks work as storage for ammunitions. Players cannot directly open these blocks or place ammunition into their inventories. In order to load (or reload) these blocks, purchase them at a store or dock with a structure/ship that has unused ammunition in storage. Players can produce ammunition on their own, though the final output will still store ammunition in an ammo block. As such, blocks are sold empty and have a finite storage capacity. Various types of ammunition have various sizes but ammunition blocks can only store up to a maximum size. However, ammunition blocks can multiple types of ammunition at the same time -- so long as the total size does not exceed the maximum size. To illustrate this point, this means that if a single ammunition block could store 1000 units of ammunition and ballistic ammunition takes up ten units of ammunition, then a single block of ammunition could store 100 rounds of ballistic ammunition. In addition, if a bomb takes up 500 units of ammunition, then a single ammunition block could either store 2 bombs or 1 bomb and 50 rounds of ballistic ammunition.
- Repair: Docking with a structure with a repair module or coming in range of a shipyard (suggested later), enables players to select a repair option. Repair would be based off of a schematic, and would need the required blocks (or credits if you were at a shop) to be present and over 50% of the ship you want to repair must match with the chosen schematic. This could also work to repurpose ships that use a common base model.
- Firing Mode: This would be an extension of the existing build and flight modes, in firing mode, the mouse no longer controls the direction the ship is facing, but instead act like when you are in a weapon computer. While in firing mode, WASDEQ would still function normally except A and D control the turning of the ship left and right. This mode would allow you to switch to sideways facing cockpits without flipping the ship around.
- Radial hull armor rating: A hull's health and armor is determined by how many blocks of the same type (regular vs. hardened vs. blast resistant) are present in a set distance. Basically, the more hull you have, the harder it will be to destroy
- Additional BOBBY AI functionality: add options to patrol and protect around a certain target, and escort and protect a certain target. Perhaps we could add a channel and faction specific drone control module as well.
- Extended Shield Management: Some addition like a quadrant section would be nice to see. If you are under fire from behind, you can divert shield strength to your rear. Likewise, if a shield quadrant is taken down, ONLY that quadrant is vulnerable wile shields recharge (you can still redirect shield strength to the quadrant that was taken down). You should also be able to equalize shield strength over all four quadrants. In addition to this, I propose that shields can be modified within the ship to be more effective against some weapon types over others (similar to how we currently manage weapon systems).
- Afterburners: Restricted to low to medium mass ships, afterburners would require special engine blocks that, when activated, would give a temporary but significant boost in top speed and acceleration. Afterburners would produce a sizable amount of heat and energy drain.
- Size-speed restrictions: What this means is, larger ships have lower top speeds and slower acceleration rates. Specifically, I think that after a certain mass threshold has been reached, maximum speed begins to decrease, bottoming out to a third of the server's indicated top speed. I also suggest increasing the default maximum speed to 75. (before you start disagreeing with slower large ships, read on)
- Warp gates: In order to combat the restrictions larger ships have, I suggest we add in warp gates. These structures would be completely player built, and a warp gate would require that it be built on a station with enough power to supply it. Each warp gate can only be linked to one other gate and in order to transport larger ships, you need more power and therefore, stations will need power storage units to transport exceedingly large ships. In order to construct a warp gate, players would need place warp gate blocks (the orientation of the first block placed determines the position and orientation of the gate; similar to turrets) and, a larger group of warp gate blocks will support a larger maximum height and width limit of ships that can travel through them. As an additional requirement, both gates on either side need to be the same size and activated by either the same player or same faction. I imagine that it would be an effective strategy to have the indicator for a warp gate's position to act in a similar fashion to the indicators used for the subspace nodes in the FreeSpace series (i.e. in this region, you can warp).
- Improved navigation screen: The addition of a 3D map that you can open up, move around, rotate, zoom in, and add waypoints with your mouse would be an excellent feature to have. It would also be greatly appreciated if the mini-map could be enabled to rotate on ALL the axes.
- Expanded NPC factions: Instead of having ONE type of shop, vary it up a bit by adding different types of shops run by different factions that sell various goods. Have the trading guild act as supply lines between the various shops and well as a security force, and adding a few new default ships might do well in adding life to the Star-made universe. Another nice addition might be randomly generated NPC structures and shops built on planets.
Miscellaneous/Extra Ideas:
- Improved UI to accommodate the suggested changes (the shields for example could be depicted as a dot surrounded by four wedges to indicate shield strength in different quadrants while keeping the current meter to show overall strength)
- Size limits to stacks of blocks, cause people toting stacks of 7 billion blocks is ridiculous. Perhaps a limit in the thousands would work.
- Transporters. Beam me up Scotty. 'Nuff said.
- Easy hull re-coloring in build mode
- Add small splash damage values to AMC cannons (still minimal compared to missiles) and piercing effects to ballistic weapons
