It would be nice to have a like-meter of suggestions.
Devs and staff team votes 1-10, so you even get feedback that your suggestion was not completely shit (gets only 2-4 points but less than 5) when not accepted. Then these suggestion could be used as roadmap. 8-10 is likely implemented, 5-7 maybe later.
Armor type beneath a
shield hit must count. Optional shields musst not be 100% strength per hit, but let 20% damage pass and use max. 10% charge for a single hit (other charge for other hits). This enables better balance of alpha weapons and better combat.
* You still have 100% global shields, but they are more for catching a stray shot or when you don't min-max shielding for civilians.
* Global is easier to install, but 15% weaker and additional 20% against pure ion-weapons which are considered "dedicated PvP and military".
Economy should be buffed by environment.
Sectors near the sun produce more power on stations (50-100 default, maybe 200-900% buff on some servers which like strong stations)
Void sectors most distant from stars can have upgrades to stealth and gates and scan.
Sectors in asteroid belts can yield more refinery-products in station factories.
* You will have at least 5 types so that players are encouraged to build attackable outposts and use attackable trade ships on a regular basis.
Stations accross sectors (not accross systems) should have shared power/shielding when they are in the same system.
It doesn't change a thing - kill one station and you kill a bit of that pool - rather than having players lag-cluster ships in one spot.
You would still need weapons on each one, but really big stations would need more weapons too because they are longer than 1/2 weapon range.
Building should separate between millitary, civilian and "scavenger/survival" blocks.
Military is adv. armor, vector shields, etc - everything with special rules or reserved for PvP because of min-maxing.
Scavenger/Survival is everything which reduce mass or ressource cost. Scafolding and Player-equipment are examples.
Military is costly (uses rare minerals with 20% yield - 80% side-products can be used for non-advanced hull and all scavenger/survival).
Civilian gives 10% side-products being rare minerals required for military-grade modifiers like ion, punch, vector-shield settings block.
That way, you can keep min-max out of your mind when building ships which aren't combat ships. These will just be
a bit bigger.
You also get some civ ships out of military-focused production and some military ships out of civilian-focused production.
Factions should get changed a lot.
Every player should have multiple playable characters.
No logout and re-login required, just swap inventory and camera position to another sector.
Every player can join many factions this way - or even play more characters in one faction.
Your account name is the "family name" of all characters.
The chat send command is limited to the character's permissions you currently play,
... but you can watch all news from all factions you got an invite into.
Original players in a faction provide food for 3 side-characters, these need food to be played or act like NPCs. On survival, donate any plants.
Trading/Missions can easily be buffed.
Each scan can be sold to the trading guild. It will then become available for all players after 1 minute to nearby players, 3 minutes to players in the galaxy and 5 minutes to players which were out of galaxy or didn't got that update jet. (local copy of the newest-scans).
Each player can contribute to get daily (15 minutes of mining extra) and weekly (4 hours of mining extra) rewards to stay active, but it's per account+server, not per character. Additional tasks should reward less, comparable to a trader-with-NPCs and a miners income.
Chat and logic transmissions needs to connect players and encourage logic computers:
Server-chat should access Discord-chat or SM-chat / starmade global. (to bring in some life to game seassions)
2nd channel is server-wide.
3rd channel is listening-range of 3 sectors, near all trade hubs in 3 systems with one is in range and to other player locations with available gates. 4th channel is "local group" with a range of 3 sectors only.
5th+ channels are encrypted by "factionID+password+playerID+text" or groupID respectively.
Logic can parse messages and transform them before distributing them over gate networks, but players will see "interrupted message transmission" or "hacked message + text" when someone does not know the password (first 2-4 standard channels are player-input only).
Wireless modules also chat.
From ship to ship, asking for docking permission so that plex-doors are opened, or as a ship's broadast message to all targeting it.
To search for a target via logic you can use a channel provided by your scanner array.
Channels are integer values, but can have a name shown to players and which players use to select the fitting integer-value.
Logic may be used to send allies a critical-shield-value warning or report station status on a regular basis when a sector gets loaded and the clock is ticking. (transmissions are parsed once a destination sector is loaded again)
This cause missions to look for installations (with a little reward for loading that sector)
Logic should get an easy database ingame.
All entities logic and display blocks are stored and loaded from either 4 entries:
- Reset to build defaults (manual save-state of #4).
- Permanent setting (logic-defined default save-state of #4)
- Temporary setting (logic-defined last save-state of #4)
- Running cycle (can manage #2 and #3, but not #1)
This alone allows us to make all computers we want. #3 and #4 are only in RAM, not on hard drive.
Bonus credits to shema if #2 / #3 are exportable under names specified in some display block which can reduce block-count a lot.
Note: Made a lot of logic suggestions, but this is the most simple, most refined so far.
Default-Content like cargo-pods:
Shine staff should provide 4 standard fleets and update them regularily. (TG, scavengers, pirates, military)
They may accept help from builders in the community.
Because shine does not have time for that, they themselves can do a 2D sketch and add a length-number to it.
Peoples get an idea what to build and can use their own creativity to make alterations to it.
They can also add a list and numbers of what they thought of for that role of ships (number of beds, total weapon size % of the turret-weapon blocks % of small or big turrets, etc - whatever they like). But these should should be in the standard-catalogue in a shine-folder at least as 2D-planes with some displays and wall-lines on it in grey hull.
I don't ask for more, but it would really solve many problems of "having no aim in game".
Various HUD-improvements:
Select colour-sheme of your cockpit (first, second, third, colour).
Link your helmet's status display to a ships internal broadcast system. (Connect to broadcast "shipID+broadintern+channel names").
Depending on your status (pilot, owner, friend, faction-mate, guest, visitor), your helmet decodes all information that status can access.
Broadcast your logo (ascii-art using text).
Modify your ships logic or helmet to display that boradcasted logo for your selected target.
Advanced target information and filtering using display block regex as parser of player/faction-defined message formats.
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