Ideas I had for additions to Stars!

[Geoff the Medio]

MoO had a feature that would disable bits of hardware that got damaged in a fight. We definitely need that feature. I've found it to add a very down-to-earth sort of feel to strategy games.

Keep in mind we need to balance the amount of detail in ship design and ship status (eg. damage, ammo, crew #'s, morale, etc.) with how many ships a player has. If a player has thousdands of ships then it's not practical to keep track of this info for each ship. Read through the various relevant brainstorming threads for extensive discussions...

[Magus]

Well, even with a couple thousand ships, you could just add generalized damage to a ship. For example, when calculating damage or to-hit rolls, include current hp as a factor in the equations. Makes it simple, and requires no more variables or status than simple hp.

[Sapphire Wyvern]

Just to clarify, this is wrong. You could send ships for trips as long as you wanted (from one corner of the galaxy to the other). You could not send them too far from your colonies tho. I like this idea much more than special tech for long starlanes, it deals more with ships supplies far from home.

Okay so it was BATTERY technology you needed rather than engine tech....... Geoff got the idea.

I dunno about supplies though. Using mechwarrior as a model for ship design is certainly interesting, though. hmmm..... MoO had a feature that would disable bits of hardware that got damaged in a fight. We definitely need that feature. I've found it to add a very down-to-earth sort of feel to strategy games.

<pedant>Technically, we're talking about using Classic BattleTech as a basis for design paradigm.</pedant> Sorry, I like BT and I've got to take any opportunity to push it back into the limelight a bit...

Ahem. Anyway, CBT's design system is quite a detailed one. It was originally designed for modelling engagements of up to around 12 'Mechs per side in a tabletop boardgame... anything larger became quite a hassle as far as paperwork went.

So, I would say that something this complex would be best reserved for particularly large/complex/impressive ships. It's a stated goal of FO to have "epic scale" combat, which seems to be generally considered to mean ship counts in the hundreds to low thousands. This more-or-less implies that we'll have squadron-based ship organisation in tactical combat. While I'm a big fan of critical hits and detailed design, critical hits will pretty much average out in squadron-to-squadron battles.