Currently, the plan is to have race-specific artwork for Constructed Hulls, and generic artwork for the others, which is used for all races, though if we get a bunch of professional, enthusiastic artists with a lot of time on their hands, I suspect race-specific ships for other hull types will be made available as well, with the priority on Organic hulls.RonaldX wrote:In going through this data and poking through the text files on the tech tree (ironically enough, FO won't compile on this computer, but I can figure enough out from the text files to understand it), my only concern is that if there are roughly a half dozen hulls of each type, then you're looking at around 20-25 ship models per race, times 12-18 races, is a crapload of artwork. Is there any plan to re-use certain hull type artwork? I don't see how there would be very much variance in energy or asteroid hulls, while I could see every race having it's own distinct flavor of constructed and organic hulls. Just doing that would cut the required amount of artwork nearly in half.
I completely agree. My current thoughts are that hulls with large external slots only come in late mid-game hulls, and hulls with large internal slots come in only fairly late-game, likewise with parts requiring such slots. I don't think we need to distinguish between "Heavy" and "Normal" slots/parts in the early game, but in the late game, really powerful ship parts, such as Stellar Converters, Nova Bombs, etc. would occupy a large slot.RonaldX wrote:The other thing is that I feel there may be a requirement in further separating the type of slots available. Rather than just Internal (systems) and External (weapons), it would be useful to have "Heavy Mount External" and "Heavy Equipment" Internal slots, to prevent players from loading massive weapon systems onto ship hulls designed to be small fighters or utility craft.
I think the simplest way to do it would be to just allow multiple (say, 4, so a large slot can just be a bigger square on the design screen) parts to be put in the same large slot. This would be pretty useless for non-stacking parts such as stealth and detection, but would be used for basic weapons and shield or armour, if their effects can stack.RonaldX wrote:Certain weapon systems might fit into both a heavy and normal sized mount, but likely with different properties. A normal mount "Laser Cannon" might become a more power "Laser Battery" when put into a heavy mount.
I think it's fine if the concept of internal/external slots would be the main engine driving ship roles. A ship with a few internal slots and no external slots for example, could have stealth, extra fuel tanks, and a colony pod, but wouldn't be able to have any weapons or detection equipment, making it almost useless in combat. On the other hand, a ship with several external slots and just a single internal slot can be outfitted for combat, but can't have both high stealth and extended fuel. Large slots, IMO, should be for really super components, and everything else can be made equal.RonaldX wrote:I would think that the concept of heavy/normal mount slots could also be the main engine driving ship combat roles. I would think that Long Range weaponry would mostly be Heavy Mounted Missile launchers or Mass Drivers, while SR and PD weaponry would be laser batteries. If it isn't possible to put a LR weapon into a normal mount, then ships with several heavy mount slots make themselves ideal candidates for "Missile Boats", while ships with large amounts of normal slots would be better SR ships. So hull balance would come down to juggling how many slots of each type are appropriate.
Again, if you use the large slots for such regular parts, then really super parts that could go in a large internal slot, for example Nova Bomb, or a super warp drive that allows ships to make starlane jumps without expending fuel, will be able to be mounted on early-game hulls. If only big, slow hulls can be used to carry a Nova Bomb for example, it makes trying to deploy it much more interesting, and more of a sacrifice, since when the system explodes, your big hull is lost as well.RonaldX wrote:As far as Heavy Equipment vs Normal Internal slots, normal internal slots would be useful for stealth/detection/etc. components (fancy electronic systems), while Heavy Equipment might be Troop Pods, Heavy Armor, Colony Modules, etc (things that take up lots of physical space/weight). Again, the uses come in balancing.
More discussion on the relationship between large and small slots would be useful, so that the progression of hulls and parts throughout the game can be more thoroughly understood.RonaldX wrote:Anyways if you're interested I'll work on this further.
I have a half-finished tech tree that I'm currently working on. Its purpose is to explore an entirely new layout and mechanics for the tech tree, with the primary goal being to design a tree that uses the MoO2 mutual-exclusivity and in which researching theories would be unnecessary, while using a tree shape that has a few branches and cross-category dependencies. It's also serving the secondary purpose though, of exploring content progression and other, future game mechanics, and as such, there are several never-before-seen hulls in various parts of the tree, as well as ship parts that use large slots. (This tree places no emphasis on story/fluff descriptions, so no effort is put into writing them, and names for techs are blatantly stolen from MoO2.)
I've uploaded the relevant files here. There are very few actual hulls and parts actually written, mainly because a lot of what I describe in the hull descriptions is simply impossible in FO's current state, so the only files I've included are techs.txt, eng_stringtable.txt and preunlocked_items.txt: