Ship design is not a step you have to spend time on. People are not encouraged to build aesthetically pleasing ships. Flying box always will be functionally better. It's not that i think people should spend several days just planning their ship: it's that i think that people who do spend this time should have better ships. Right now any aesthetics is counter-functional.
The game should not force people to build in too specific a way- this limits people, and reduces (not improves) the aesthetic possibilities of the game.
Combat is too shallow. In current system, there are no ship specializations and they can not show up on their own.
Completely, utterly false. There is a massive amount of ship specialization. And why exactly are people being unable to show up on their own a bad thing? Teamwork should win every time.
Current system encourages gigantism.
Agreed. However, your suggestion is a poor way of fixing that.
Degrading functionality during combat. I want to be able to damage other people cannons or go for their engines, and to do so knowingly. This means that somehow the game has to make ship design mandatory - i should be able to see where are the engines on your ship and where are the cannons or drone bays.
Now, I realize this is pre-HP update, where this kind of stuff wasn't as important, but... damaging other people's cannons, engines, power, whatever? That's a pretty big feature now.
No giant unstoppable juggernauts of destruction, armed with every system in the game. This is the most vague of all of my wishes, but it is the only one that can be fixed through number tweaking.
Jack of all trades, master of none. A small, specialized ship can easily take down a much larger vessel. My faction had plans to take down a massive ship with one much smaller with specialized systems tuned to take down its shields, damage the jump drive before it could flee, and rip out the weapon computers so it couldn't fight back. And it would have worked, if the server owner hadn't shut down the server before it could happen.
Weapons have to be cuboids. I believe that cannon >::::::::::::::< is visually recognizable as one and is aesthetically pleasing, and cannon > ::::...< is a very tiny weenie on a very big nutsack.
Why cuboids? Because this is the only computationally easy shape to check against. Because it allows for easy and fast calculation of its dimensions, which are used below. Also, thanks to weapons being cuboids it's possible to mark the whole side of a weapon as its output, so now you can fire 2x2 cannonballs and giant rockets.
And what exactly is your plan for what happens when shields go down and weapons rip into the system and change it from being a perfect little box?
All systems have some sort of "best-shape". This "best shape" should provide mechanical benefits to the group, or it won't be used. Your ship is nice? Well mine is powerful. A single Brett guy on a server will either make other people leave or force them into same brickships as his own.
Ah, yes, a very specific "best shape." That definitely helps creative builders.
How to fix? Relatively easy.
-= Intersystem interference =-.
Every system decreases its functionality for every block of other systems in its bounding cuboid, which for this check is treated as increased for every several blocks of the system. This is computationally easy, cached operation that needs recalculation only on block destruction; the cache is held by the ship rather than by the block so it takes little memory. Block destroyed? Lookup which group it belonged too, lookup systems that were intersecting with said group, then re-evaluate their power. Seems quite possible even for large ships and populated servers.
Sounds fucking obnoxious, and will also increase the lag of the game, because it renders every exposed surface even if you can't "see" it. You'll need to either have lots of empty, laggy space inside your ships, or stuff your ship with filler blocks.
Reconnaisance and industrial espionage are relevant now.
These are already relevant.
Any offline system can be toggled on. Depending on the size and type of system, its activation time differs. Say, the larger the cannon - the longer it toggles on (up to several minutes for titans),
Toggling systems on and off to save power? Sure, I can get behind that. Taking forever just to "boot up" my systems? That's fucking obnoxious and boring as hell. "Oh, shit, another titan! Quick, activate weapons!" *two titans proceed to spend 5 minutes doing fucking nothing while weapons charge.* Yeah, that sounds really fun and exciting.
Ability to balance jump ships and cloak ships. Now i can make a ship with a very fast-charging jumpdrive, but due to enormous jumpdrive energy requirements i will have to ditch shields, weapons and basically everything.
The game is literally already set up like this.
All in all, your suggestions are either a) already in, just maybe not in a way you've realized, or b) not actually helpful to aesthetic builders in any way, even harming them. Your suggestion promotes people to basically just build their ships from a bunch of different systems, all in the same shape. Build with weird shapes? Guess you're fucked, then!
EDIT-
Since I now need to think about whether or not shields would be effective if they were placed here, or there.
Already in the game. Already been in the game for a long time. A smart builder already puts shields up against their hull, since shields are effectively dead weight, useless systems, once shields are down. So, you primarily put them near the exterior so they can absorb most of the damage that WOULD have hit systems that are still important when shields are down- weapons, thrust, power, etc.
There's nothing about this suggestion that could be config eddited, though.
Is this a joke? You could definitely modify the blockconfig to support specific shapes for a lot of systems.
