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Suggestions / Tuning levers
« on: January 23, 2020, 12:59:13 AM »
A phrase I heard years ago while following the development of League of Legends was "tuning levers." Riot used this phrase to describe a tool they create when they change something from binary to a more variable state. An example was taking an ability that was formerly simply point and click and making it require aim instead. This gave them new "levers" like projectile speed and hitbox that could then be adjusted, rather than just the final damage numbers or duration of crowd control. This concept opens up great avenues of gameplay and development alike by allowing finer tuning and asking more impactful player choices. Starsector could probably use a few more levers. One in particular springs to mind at the moment: maximum fleet size.
You can have a fleet of up to 30 ships, full stop. Why? I haven't been here since the starfarer days so I have to wonder how we settled on this number and more importantly...why is it static? What would the game look like if fleet cap was something that we could affect? What if the starting maximum fleet size was a much more humble number like, say...4 or 5? What if a size 30 fleet was a grandiose, almost unreachable plateau that required us to commit to our build and make sacrifices for it? It would open up options not only for progression but for balance, optimization (both fleets AND system requirements) and give us a meaningful choice to make, whereas now a size 30 fleet is basically inevitable. It would require a bit of algorithmic adjustment for the AI (who already basically ignores the fleet cap anyway) to compensate, but would that be such a bad thing in the end?
You can have a fleet of up to 30 ships, full stop. Why? I haven't been here since the starfarer days so I have to wonder how we settled on this number and more importantly...why is it static? What would the game look like if fleet cap was something that we could affect? What if the starting maximum fleet size was a much more humble number like, say...4 or 5? What if a size 30 fleet was a grandiose, almost unreachable plateau that required us to commit to our build and make sacrifices for it? It would open up options not only for progression but for balance, optimization (both fleets AND system requirements) and give us a meaningful choice to make, whereas now a size 30 fleet is basically inevitable. It would require a bit of algorithmic adjustment for the AI (who already basically ignores the fleet cap anyway) to compensate, but would that be such a bad thing in the end?