Ship design constraints

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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LienRag
Cosmic Dragon
Posts: 2148
Joined: Fri May 17, 2019 5:03 pm

Ship design constraints

#1 Post by LienRag »

When I played Alpha Centurii quite a few years ago, I was quite excited by the Skunkworks (irrc) that allowed to design personally one's military (or non-military) vehicles.
And then I was quickly disappointed by the fact that the way it worked (quite similar as the ship design panel works in FreeOrion) it's mostly a question of putting part B in slot A, not real design (not even an approximation of it).
Also it has a quite small amount of permutations, most of them either driven by the state of the art in technology (once one has Death Rays, not many reasons to still uses Mass Drivers, so the choice is mainly between a weapon and an armor part) or quite useless, leading to not that much diversity in ships actually played by various players.

And then I read that blog article and stars lighted my eyes again.

Obviously it won't be for 0.5, but if someday we can find a ship design mechanism that makes the player think as hard than this article does, we'd have reached a new level of gaming...

I don't know if some of you ever played Car Wars ? The game itself was unplayable (either you had one car each and there were basically no tactic, or each player had a small fleet and then it took several IRL hours to play a few in-game seconds) but the car design system was amazing - not for its realism, of which there was little, but for its immersion.

We really should strive for that type of mechanisms in later versions of the game.

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Oberlus
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Re: Ship design constraints

#2 Post by Oberlus »

Not for FreeOrion.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

(Review your memories. Skunkwork's SMAC/X didn't unlock unit design, only removed the +50% cost of prototypes.)

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