I like all of these suggestions; hey has anyone here (surely everyone) played space rangers 2? I don't know if starsector is planning on modeling the campaign system something like that, however for me, it is the pinacle of a space trader/combat game; there are just so many things that you can do in that game; and the mini-games (choose your own adventure style) are brilliant. Seriously I could write a small thesis on how many features that game has; and they all work so well together, virtually no mechanic feels useless (The RTS battles were a bit of a sore point for me, but they reward well, so it's worth it to complete them, if only for the money and experience).
I guess I thought of space-rangers 2 when someone was mentioning the bribe system; that is pretty much how it works, if a pirate finds that it is not going their way, they will offer ever increasing bribes the closer they are to becoming space-dust (you can refuse the first bribe, and if they survive the next barrage of fire, they might offer you a larger bribe to let them keep their lives and the commentry change from when they first engage you changes drastically as they realise you're one bad SOB >
).
I especially like the idea Wyvern had on salvaging all player ships (that are disabled, but not destroyed; if the computer decides to turn that wreckage into dust, then you are still out of a ship) but with damaged sub-systems. Rather then have a skill which gives you a %chance to recover a lost ship, have that same skill determine the chance and how many sub-systems can be repaired after battle. Those faults are permanent like the D-class, but can be repaired to 100% given time and enough money (so in some cases, it may not be worth it to repair if the ship isn't particularly hard to come by). Apply this to weapons as well (I noticed that even when I managed to recover a ship from combat (Sunder), some or all of the weapons are lost for good. I had a very hard time finding small-needlers in game (I buy any I see) so the weapon loss was actually more of a blow then losing the easily obtainable Sunder destroyer). I reloaded (shame on me!) as I could not deal with the loss of my small-needlers (I only had found 2 and I was level 37 and they both were on that sunder).
Still there should be some loss in combat, perhaps when the AI disables a ship, depending on how busy it is, it may choose to finish the job and vaporize that wreck. This could make combat a bit more interesting as you try to manoeuvre forces to create a wall between yourself and the disabled ship to prevent it's complete destruction. It would probably be difficult to implement, but perhaps depending on the damage that the disabled ship takes during combat, increases the chance of damage to the sub-systems/structure that will occur after salvage operations.
I like the idea of making the CR timer part of the difficulty options, rather than a built in part of the game. If you want to solo the game in your frigate, perhaps give that choice to the player, no harm done (I did watch that video with the guy in the Tempest taking on that entire fleet, it was pretty cool, and if players just want to have direct control of one ship through the entire game, why not?)
Map clutter is something I agree with, but I'm pretty certain the developer already knows this and is working on it; it's impossible for me to target most stations as they are often hidden under fleets; so I agree with this.
The Storage bay idea is good as well; in another post I made i was thinking about accounting for supplies/equipment that are lost if a ship is disabled/destroyed. I would also like to extend this to being able to assign crew of certain veterancies to ships in your fleet. At the moment depending on the order of them in the fleet screen is how they are assigned; but this means that there can be a bigger discrepency between CR of ships due to the mixed crews (and you have no control over this). It would be nice to be able to assign crew members of different veterancies to each ship so that you could bring all your ships up/down to the same level of Combat Readiness.
I think the Travel speed option isn't too bad, but if there was higher time compression would that make slower ships easier to deal with?
In one other post (I feel a bit embarrassed about that one actually), I thought about having the Augmented engines bonus reversed and applying a +1 burn speed per size of ship class (ie +4 burn speed for captial ships). At the moment Augmented engines cost a huge amount of Ordinance points and benefit larger ships the least (who need it the most). They would still be slower (especially with regards to acceleration and manoeuvering), but they could start to keep up a little better with faster ships.
I would like to see a more interactive boarding mechanic; leave it text based as it is at the moment, but have certain actions increase your chance of successfully taking over the ship. Space Rangers 2 did this with a lot of the mini quests that were quite well done and it only required a bit of text and in some cases numbers; no tactical system with xenonauts level of detail need be implemented; just a well written interractive dialogue.
If we consider the earlier suggestion that disabled player ships are always salvageable, this should also be done with enemy ships as well. Perhaps at the end of combat allow the player to select from the disabled ships which ones to board (Perhaps have it so that soldiers becomed fatigued and can only be deployed once, so choose carefully), in some cases the ships will only have dead crew members, but a great deal of damaged systems which makes them almost garbage anyway. However during this process, a less damaged ship may be repaired and take the time to escape (that would be the ship that normally appears in the dialogue) and since you are distracted, you miss the chance to engage a ship that is in better condition and lose some of the resources you might otherwise acquire (as well as a better, less damaged ship; though if the ship you chose was fairly rare, then it likely did not matter).
The starting the game option will probably change i'm guessing. I think the wolf-class is probably too good a ship to start in; so perhaps having that ship should give you some sort of other disadvantage to make up for it; less credits, change in relations between factions (Space Rangers 2 does this fairly well, though some of the starting ships are just slightly too good to pass up).
