Ship Design: Stars! vs Moo vs SEIV

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

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Ablaze
Creative Contributor
Posts: 314
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2003 6:10 pm
Location: Amidst the Inferno.

#181 Post by Ablaze »

Another option is to make mods increase cost by a fixed amount. So lasers might cost 200 unmodified, 230 with one mod, and 250 with two. You could make lasers long range or you could make them rapid fire, and it would cost 230 either way. If you added both it would cost 250.
Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

herbert_vaucanson
Space Floater
Posts: 37
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2005 10:47 am
Location: European peninsula

#182 Post by herbert_vaucanson »

I would vote for less ships designed a la Moo2. I really loved the combat system of Moo2, although it got a bit nasty with loads of ships...

Dreamer
Dyson Forest
Posts: 228
Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2005 6:44 am
Location: Santiago, Chile

#183 Post by Dreamer »

Hi! I discovered the existance of this proyect yust yesterday so before I comment any more: greetings!! and thanks for giving me some hope for a (finally) simple 4x game.

Well, back on bussines. One of the great things about moo1 is the scale of it. I liked to send hundreds of ships on massive battles and really feel like I command a real space empire. For those who don't know this was done simply by putting several ships of the same kind toguether, but you could separate similar ships in as many groups as you wanted. So here you've got task forces again making your commands simple (not having to handle EVERY ship) and allowing you to have real fleets. It doesn't change the gameplay that much but the feeling is totally different.

On the other hand things like "4 sides" and stuff becomes irrelevant, making the system even simplier. Any other consideration can be expresed in a certain "delay" before a weapon can fire again, call it targeting time, cooldown, getting into the right position, etc. This way you don't need a lot of specials for rapid fire, etc. you just change the firing rate of a weapon, multiply it by the number of weapons of the type in the task force, multiply it by a random number and apply this damage to the enemy TF. Eventually this can be used for real time fights with task forces, a feature I wolud really like., but even in turn combat it would be simple and fun.

Having this simplify ship design a lot. Even further I think that ship design shouldn't be about what can you put into a ship. It should be about what do YOU want your ship to have. So IMHO let the player add as many features as he wants on a ship and then calculate HP, Size and cost for it. It should be done real time so the player can see how big or expensive his ship is getting. The same with shields and the like, you should be able to say "I want my ship to move at this speed" and the game calculates the number of engines and stuff. I hate to say "shit if I have one more avairiable space I could put...". here you have also really different ships, not only 6 or so standard ship sizes.

Dreamer
Dyson Forest
Posts: 228
Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2005 6:44 am
Location: Santiago, Chile

#184 Post by Dreamer »

Sorry for the broken post. I forgot to mention that all the things before are considering a Moo2 design. I just assumed that the other 2 ways are too cumbersome and so forgot them completely.

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