Thanks by the way; For developing this game, seeing its development through still to whatever is the "end" point of the "final" fruits of labor of this project/program/game (I put quotes because gem games like SS with modding-friendly features age usually exceptionally well, IMHO). Thanks to all the good folk here who brainstorm with ideas to this game and to its mods and those who test the game to find bugs and issues to fix and thanks to all of them who have done/doing amazing mods for this game.
I have a lot of respect for Alex and for the modders because I myself, I can't code a script but I can mod the game due to easy to access game files that make sense enough to freely fiddle around to make something new to use in the game after some couple of hours working on that thing and finally seeing it actually flying or shooting or doing something one intended to make it a working thing.
Thank you! I'm glad you're having fun doing some modding; I remember enjoying that a lot myself for other games.
(And, indeed, I'm also very grateful to everyone that chimes in with feedback or suggestions!)
For instance, if one faction had exclusive access to the Hyperion, that would instantly make their fleets recognizable.
Ship systems/weapons that have a very unique gameplay mechanic are what truly differentiate ships, big or small. The reason why Hyperion and Scarab stand out just as much as Paragon and Onslaught clearly has little to do with their size or power. Teleportation, Time Dilation, the Fortress Shield mechanic and the Thermal Pulse Cannon all add so much identity to their respective ships.
Yep, I hear what you're saying. It's not that something like the Hyperion isn't unique, it's that it's not widespread in a faction's fleets, right. So if a fleet doesn't have one, then the Hyperion technically being avaialble doesn't do much. The battleships/capitals kind of get around that because they're almost always present in the larger fleets, the ones you're most likely to remember encountering. There's just more hull variety the lower the hull size is - a faction might have access to a couple of capital ships, but like 10 frigates. Since there also tend to be a lot of frigates in a given fleet, specific ones can get lost in the shuffle a bit, too.
I'm not quite clear on this: Are equivalent-tier fleets from all the factions supposed to be of equivalent strength? So e.g. a heavy TT patrol has a 50% chance to win against a heavy pirate patrol? That would feel odd, I think. If true, then how are varying faction/colony strengths represented by their fleets? Do stronger factions just produce more/higher-tier fleets? Or is it about nanoforges?
Right, yes - differentianting campaign power is the job of larger colonies, stability (which affects production quality), nanoforges, having the demand for ships & weapons be met, and so on.
I think it could be interesting if the more disorganized factions could only spent, like, six points on the warships/carriers/phase ships and officer quality/ship quality/number selectors. While well organized, powerful factions could spend eight. Then the player faction could start with a low number and get additional points as the campaign (and their industrial strength) progresses. That would make the Doctrine & Blueprints tab* more interesting too, since then it would not just be cosmetic.
Hah! Already planning to do something similar (great minds, etc?); I suspect pirates will probably get something like 1 in officer/ship quality, and maybe 2 in quantity. Doesn't make sense to do that with warships/carriers/phase ships, though, since that's just relative proportions, not absolute quantity.
As far as industrial strength progressing, the way it's set up now means that if you stack on ship quality in every way possible, you end up with some diminishing returns and an "extra" point or two to play with, since you'd only need 4 or 3 in ship quality to mostly get pristine hulls.
Another thing: Maybe as a player wins more of a faction's favor, he get's a say in their fleet composition? When they like you, you get to look at their Doctrine & Blueprints tab, which would be interesting. And once they really trust you, you could re-assign one or two of their points. Makes you feel more involved, especially if you don't plan to establish your own faction.
Combining that with the idea above, maybe even upgrade the number of points they have. If you become a pirate king, you could have the influence to improve their organization and strengthen their overall fleet power from six to seven points.
Hmm. So yeah, that's interesting. I'm not sure how "join a faction" mechanics would play out; this sort of thing may be worthwhile but it also seems like a bit of a pain to implement (the idea of how far you can stray from the base doctrine, UI support for that, letting the player know that it's even something they can do, and so on).
*(Btw, shouldn't start "blueprints" with a capital B after the ampersand?)
I've been leaning towards only capitalizing the first word in a button title in these kinds of tab buttons. It's a bit weird - in some places, that feels good, and in some cases (such as in the main menu, i.e. "New Game") having only the first be capitalized would be weird. I'm not sure whether that's just a "me" thing or if there's some larger principle here that I'm unaware of, but it certainly feels like consistency in this doesn't produce good results across the board. Although, if I
had to pick one, then "capitalize everything" would be the better option.
Well that's another high quality blog post, great job as always.
Thank you!
Have you thought about having a small rock-paper-scissors type relations between different fleet doctrines and ship types?
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I'm sure there'll be some of that naturally as far as the battles the player actually participates in alongside their fleets, but for autoresolve, I think it wouldn't be great. As others have mentioned, RPS works when it's a dynamic situation; if factions have fixed doctrines (which they need to, since that's their personality), then there would always be the same right answer for facing a particular faction, and that's not very interesting.