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Suggestions / Minor suggestions
« on: January 18, 2016, 01:25:03 PM »
1: Split up OP into a set of pools( for instance, weapons, hull mods, flux management with some omni capacity to plug gaps )
As it stands, having OP as one single pool means that everything trends towards a limited set of hyper-optimized designs, forcing more variety through splitting the pool should limit the min-maxing and should also help define hulls a bit more, it also allows for better balancing in general. And it should make some of the hull mods that exist less of a throwaway option, take for instance the flux hullmods, which are made mostly worthless by the Miniaturized Capacitors and Miniaturized Vents abilities. Basically, you suffer from everything having an opportunity cost because it interferes with ANY other choice.
2: Better control of a ships's engagement profile
Currently, the AI makes a best guess as to how it should use a ship's weapons and at what range it should engage targets, frequently leading to missile boats or support boats helmed by cautious officers not being very cautious at all, or assault boats standing off, currently it's mitigated by fiddling with weapon groups, but this is fuzzy at best. Perhaps the ability to customize how the AI handles a ship design would help make the AI a bit more effective ? ( you could have a broad set of roles that ships may take, that can be toggled on and off, as well as engagement ranges and priority weapons for those roles ) This should allow the officer profiles to still shine through, aggressive officers may attempt to get to the minimum engagement range of a role, and pick more aggressive roles sooner( strike, assault, tanking for a friendly ).
Another suggestion is to introduce AI profiles similar to those found in dragon's age, with the ability to set conditions for ability usage, you could apply this to weapon groups and innate abilities, maybe even roles.
3. Better fleet control
the current CP system is not optimal, I applaud the desire to limit the ability to command ,but this seems arbitrary as hell. CP should not be used while setting up your initial orders, a good limiting factor might be time before the ships start executing your orders instead?
CP might be better as a regenerating pool, with regeneration rate and size defined by the skill.
Formations add so much, use some of the stuff in gratuitous space battles?
Taskforce-level AI to handle formations and general behaviour, with finer control of what kind of role a taskforce has ?
4. Explosive weapons feel underpowered ( except for missiles as an alpha strike option once shields are saturated or flux capacity on the target is poor )
Generally, the ability to break shields effectively is crucial, if a ship can't manage that, it's incapable of taking out anything but fighters and low-tech ships, and if a ship can't maintain shields efficiently it can't really fight in the front line at all.( armor tanks are mostly exempt from this, but armor is relatively easy to break, and EMP completely destroys them ) This is partly caused by the fact that weapons are tied to shields through the flux pool.
It may be a thought to have shields be permeable to a degree, let them take away beam/projectile power and cause less flux( maybe 50% hard flux, 50% soft flux, but only block about 70-80% of a projectile or beam's power, you could let shield permeability and flux generation scale with flux saturation ) That way, explosive weapons would cause very little flux to the shield in question, but would still allow them to inflict some level of damage to shielded targets.
There's other stuff:
Adding something like the GSB challenge mode might extend replayability by a lot.
The endgame is lacking in general, the open world nature of the game means that you run out challenges relatively quickly, keeping interest up beyond that is a matter of mods and self-imposed challenges, I don't doubt this is something very much work in progress, but keep it in mind.
I hope this helps and good luck, fellows.
As it stands, having OP as one single pool means that everything trends towards a limited set of hyper-optimized designs, forcing more variety through splitting the pool should limit the min-maxing and should also help define hulls a bit more, it also allows for better balancing in general. And it should make some of the hull mods that exist less of a throwaway option, take for instance the flux hullmods, which are made mostly worthless by the Miniaturized Capacitors and Miniaturized Vents abilities. Basically, you suffer from everything having an opportunity cost because it interferes with ANY other choice.
2: Better control of a ships's engagement profile
Currently, the AI makes a best guess as to how it should use a ship's weapons and at what range it should engage targets, frequently leading to missile boats or support boats helmed by cautious officers not being very cautious at all, or assault boats standing off, currently it's mitigated by fiddling with weapon groups, but this is fuzzy at best. Perhaps the ability to customize how the AI handles a ship design would help make the AI a bit more effective ? ( you could have a broad set of roles that ships may take, that can be toggled on and off, as well as engagement ranges and priority weapons for those roles ) This should allow the officer profiles to still shine through, aggressive officers may attempt to get to the minimum engagement range of a role, and pick more aggressive roles sooner( strike, assault, tanking for a friendly ).
Another suggestion is to introduce AI profiles similar to those found in dragon's age, with the ability to set conditions for ability usage, you could apply this to weapon groups and innate abilities, maybe even roles.
3. Better fleet control
the current CP system is not optimal, I applaud the desire to limit the ability to command ,but this seems arbitrary as hell. CP should not be used while setting up your initial orders, a good limiting factor might be time before the ships start executing your orders instead?
CP might be better as a regenerating pool, with regeneration rate and size defined by the skill.
Formations add so much, use some of the stuff in gratuitous space battles?
Taskforce-level AI to handle formations and general behaviour, with finer control of what kind of role a taskforce has ?
4. Explosive weapons feel underpowered ( except for missiles as an alpha strike option once shields are saturated or flux capacity on the target is poor )
Generally, the ability to break shields effectively is crucial, if a ship can't manage that, it's incapable of taking out anything but fighters and low-tech ships, and if a ship can't maintain shields efficiently it can't really fight in the front line at all.( armor tanks are mostly exempt from this, but armor is relatively easy to break, and EMP completely destroys them ) This is partly caused by the fact that weapons are tied to shields through the flux pool.
It may be a thought to have shields be permeable to a degree, let them take away beam/projectile power and cause less flux( maybe 50% hard flux, 50% soft flux, but only block about 70-80% of a projectile or beam's power, you could let shield permeability and flux generation scale with flux saturation ) That way, explosive weapons would cause very little flux to the shield in question, but would still allow them to inflict some level of damage to shielded targets.
There's other stuff:
Adding something like the GSB challenge mode might extend replayability by a lot.
The endgame is lacking in general, the open world nature of the game means that you run out challenges relatively quickly, keeping interest up beyond that is a matter of mods and self-imposed challenges, I don't doubt this is something very much work in progress, but keep it in mind.
I hope this helps and good luck, fellows.