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[Gelsamel]

This is a thread for my suggestions, feel free to comment and discuss them.




Suggestion 1 - Pulse lasers that act like lasers should act:
I was very pleased to note that many of the laser weapons in this game actually act like lasers. Ie. they travel at light speed (well I guess in the game engine it's just 'instantly'), think of how the graviton beam or other constant lasers turn on. However all the pulse lasers in the game act as though they're shooting off little projectiles... now I could understand this if it was a (charged/uncharged) particle beam but the ones I'm talking about just aren't. Pulse lasers should act like the graviton beam does, except in sharp distinct powerful pulses that end almost as quickly as you can see them.



Suggestion 2 - The ability to join ongoing battles in campaign mode:
Currently if two forces engage eachother the battle is resolved instantly. It would be great if this game could move towards a campaign system similar to Mount and Blade. If two forces engage the battle should take a certain amount of time and within that time frame you should be able to join in to either aid one side or attack both sides, or even simply just to watch.



Suggestion 3 - Leading on from suggestion 2.... Pretty much everything that the Mount and Blade campaign mode has, factions, politics, player owned locations/assets, seiges, blockades etc. (Mount and Blade is a good place to look for Character Skills too).



Suggestion 4 -Campaign mode's strategic battles are contrived, make them non-contrived:
Currently when you enter a battle with a large fleet the strategic locations like Nav and Comm bouys are basically just randomly generated. This feels really odd because if you stalk an enemy to empty space and attack them suddenly there are random strategic locations you need to secure? Waiting to engage in a location where you don't have to worry about securing locations is strategy in and of itself and should be a valid playstyle... plus it just feels really contrived to have objectives pop out of nowhere like that. So, make the battle map based off where and when you engage. If you engage near a friendly station, you would have to secure that and it's other assets floating around. If you engaged near a planet there might be stuff too. If you engage near a minefield, then stuff related to the mining ops would need to be secured. But if you engage in the middle of nowhere, there shouldn't be any reason that suddenly now you have to secure these random bouys that appeared out of nowhere.



Suggestion 5 - Stealth engagements:
You should be able to sneak up a fleet and engage in a battle that results in a battle map where the engagement distance is very very short (because the opponents didn't realise you had snuck up on them).



Suggestion 6 - Persistant Ammo Reserves:
Currently your stocks of ammo are regenerated each time you go into battle... so if you run a missile boat you could jump into a fight, launch all the missiles then after all your missiles hit simply retreat and reengage and you'll have all your missiles back and you'll regain the distance between your forces. The solution is to simply make ammo management a persistant inventory management thing, much like with fuel and supply.



Suggestion 7 - More specific and more customizable engine, power, shield, and other modifications than the current generic 'Hull upgrades':
Currently the only way to affect your armor, ammo capacity, shields, power or engines is through the generic 'hull upgrades'. Why not give us engine hardpoints and engine variants to equip our ships with that have unique abilities? For instance some might be resistant to, or immune to, flameout but otherwise be slower or weaker than other engines. Same goes for shields, power, ammo capacity, etc. Basically my suggestion is to make shields/engines/power/ammo capacity/etc. use the same equipment system as weapons currently do. You should also be able to customise the type of armor plating your ship has and whether it has any special active defense systems like explosive reactive armor, self repair, or radiative heat dissipation.



Suggestion 8 - The ability to take personal control of boarding ships:
Of course I realise this involves a ridiculous amount of coding, but no act of piracy is complete without actually getting into the fight yourself and taking down the opposing crew who are putting up their last effort of resistance. If you could control your character (or your officers when they get implemented) while having shootouts in the nigh derelict ship that would make this game amazing. Of course it goes the other away around too; if your ship gets boarded you should have defend yourself. This plays into character/officer skills well.



Suggestion 9 - Electronic/Information warfare weapons (or modules, see Suggestion 7)
We should be able to disrupt tracking, homing, lower turret turn rates (or shut the turn down all together), disabling engines electronically, locking down visual and other detection mechanisms, etc. We should also be able to use informational warfare, like fake signals on the radar etc.



Suggestion 10 - Active defense mechanisms that are neither point defense or generic unexplained 'shields'
We should be able to launch probe like ships that expell vast amounts of opaque and possibly magnetised particles to make a particle cloud that prevents the transmision of light. Think KASUMI/IKASUMI from Starship operators, or alternatively a smoke bomb that you throw in front of you that fully attenuates the laser before it reaches you. You might also be able to shoot a probe that simply intercepts or deflects ballistic ammuniation with it's body.



Suggestion 11 - Active Salvaging of Wrecks
It would be interesting if you could go out and salvage wrecks in a way similar to mining might be done. If Suggestion 2 is implemented this opens up the possibility to join battles in a salvaging ship simply to steal all the goods for yourself.



Suggestion 12 - Realistic Missile (and projectile?) Physics:
Currently missiles move extremely slow for what they physically are: Warheads attached to giant engines. It's strange that a ship which has much much more of it's mass dedicated to non-engine related things could be faster and more manuverable than a missile. Perhaps this should also be extended to projectiles as they too move very slowly compared to ships. I can see that part of the reason this is so is for balancing reasons... but it seems a bit silly at times. Perhaps you could take a page from the book of EVE and make certain weapon types do less damage on things that move faster (due to tracking, missile explosion radius, etc). The other solution is to make all ships a whole lot slower and less manuverable, but that might be an unacceptable hit to the speed of combat.



Suggestion 13 - Non-projectile Kinetic Weapons
If your ship has a lot of momentum (momentum, not necessarily just speed!) then it would be awesome to be able to mount a large blade or spear type thing to the front of your ship so you could physically ram other ships for massive damage. It might even be possible to add special effects to the weapon like explosive charges or electric discharges or EMPs or whatever. But even if you don't do that it would be neat to be able to ram other ships with weapons meant for that purpose. Of course, while the damage should be momentum based it'll be difficult to hit anything if you aren't very fast so this would be a weapon designed for frigates or cruisers probably.



Suggestion 14 - 'Natural' bonuses from strategic objectives
(See Linked Post)

That is all for now. More later.

[CrashToDesktop]

Not really up for suggestion 1, it sorta takes of the fun of tracking a target with repeated blasts.  Maybe the speed can be affected by how long you charge it? eg. the longest charge would result in the fastest beam, the lowest charge results in the slowest beam?

Suggestion 2 is all the way up, it's really cool to just watch the AI battle is out.  Now, I'm not sure if you mentioned salvaging the ships anywhere (that's quite the blob of text you have there, no offense, I'm sure to have missed something) but maybe you can take a small share of the spoils of war if you partook in direct combat (two options, join in or watch the battle maybe?).  Same goes with suggestion 3, but it's fine to me.

Suggestion 4, I haven't seen this for myself yet, but this sounds reasonable.

Suggestion 5, Not so good.  It's not like you can sneak a hulking Onslaught Class Battleship into a Pirate scout.

Suggestion 6, I agree. Maybe you can purchase an item in the orbital station (eg., "Ammo") that would replenish your ammo to a certain extent each time it's used.  Or maybe you can simply wait for your ammo to replenish automatically over a certain amount of time.

Suggestion 7, Can't say much about this because I rarely edit my ship's hull modifications.

Suggestion 8, Yes, but we all know this isn't gonna happen anytime soon. :PIt would be a great addition, and it could be relatively simple.  Wouldn't have to be like a real first-person shooter, just a top-bottom view with a bunch of soldiers and crew in a map relative to the ship.  No momentum when moving and most are armed with a pulse laser-ish thing or machinegun.  Just a suggestion...

Suggestions 9 and 10, just crumpled these into one section.  Starfarer isn't all about killing you opponent's weapons, it's about going headlong into a battle knowing your guts are about to get ripped out by the enemy.  Nah, just kidding. These might be a nice addition, although they'd be rare in battle and have very little ammo.

Suggestion 11, Ahh, you did mention salvaging.  Overly mentioned idea, but nevertheless a good idea.  Goes hand in hand with send mining drone to mine asteroids and gaining some money.

[Zarcon]

Hmm, interesting, I'll briefly give my opinion on each of these, just cause I can.     ha

#1:  I really hope not, I love the current iteration of Pulse Lasers, and the tech in Starfarer doesn't have to 100% follow our current understanding of science/logic.   

#2:  That would be fun, if it isn't too hard/complex to implement. 

#3:  No comment, as I do not know too much about M&B.

#4:  Hmm, interesting points, I guess you make a lot of sense on this one.

#5:  Do you mean with stealth/phase ships or just a normal fleet?  I guess I don't understand how you could sneak up on another fleet in space without using stealth/phase ships.  Hmm.

#6:  I would actually like something like this, as it would introduce the whole munitions ship thing, not sure Alex will go this route, but it makes sense to me. 

#7:  I really like this idea, but I don't remember Alex ever talking about doing something like this, I wonder if he would go for it, or if he prefers the more streamlined and simple system currently in place.

#8:  No comment, would be 100% speculation on my part. 

#9:  I think Alex eventually has some ideas along these lines, and he also will be adding in special abilities for certain ships, like Blink and EMP blasts, etc.

#10:  Uh, no comment or opinion on this.

#11:  Not against this, just not certain if it would add any fun or not.

[Gelsamel]

Hi guys, thanks for the comments let me address some of your responses. Of course everyone has their own opinion of what would be fun but let me explain my reasoning a bit more.


Suggestion 1
It makes more sense this way. Lasers that don't act like lasers are silly. If you want to have a weapon identical to the pulse laser then you could easily make a weapon that is a charged/uncharged particle cannon. But if you want to keep it an actual laser it should act like one.

On the topic of tracking... essentially every weapon that isn't a missle already does this. You need to track with constant lasers and you need to track with everything ballistic, so it would add some variety to have a weapon you wouldn't really need to track. Of course, I propose suggestions for other countermeasures in later suggestions so it's not like these weapons would be overpowered, but if they were a bit powerful for being so quick you could easily balance it by lowering their damage.

An example of a pulse laser working like a real pulse laser would (except for the glowing with it charges) is Halo's Spartan Laser. Like I said it wouldn't glow when it charged, capacitors don't do that when they charge or anything... but how the laser comes out it how it should for pulse lasers in Starfarer.

Suggestion 2
Not only would this open a lot of gameplay options but it also just makes sense. I know some people may not care for engaging in 3 ways or helping allies (If they go the M&B   route and let us join factions and stuff) but some people do have fun doing that. Some of my suggestions here aren't because I'd personally find it fun to do those things, but because others might and it makes sense within the theme and mechanics of the game. Games that enable lots of people to play the way they want to (within the bounds of logic and the mechanics) are not only good games but are successful ones.

Suggestion 4
Another suggestion that is about the game making sense... but it also adds in more playstyle options for people who might want to play that certain way. I don't personally mind about securing strategic locations in the battle but someone might like direct confontations better, so they'd wait until you don't need to worry about comm and nav bouys to attack someone. Of course large fleets may often simply camp near strategic goals because it suits their combat strategy. If you add in player owned assets this suggestions adds new gameplay (which is always good) as you'd have to erect the strategic locations yourself and maintain them as well. If you could destroy those bouys it would also be interesting becuase it adds a way that a hit and run small fleet can do damage against certain defenses, since they'd have to be repaired.

Suggestion 5
It might be difficult to sneak a hulking big ship up to a small ship but that would be accounted for with character skills/ship statistics. Big ships are already slow enough that they basically can't catch small ships but if they used a stealth/cloaking system and camped a particular location they might be able to intercept small fleets and pop out of nowhere to destroy them. But they also just might detect you before you can intercept them if their scanners or scanning skill is high enough. But more importantly small stealth fighters/frigates could be used to sneak up on bigger fleets and take out a few ships before they have time to do anything. This allows the player to use a hit and run playstyle if they wish to, though of course it may take certain ship types/setups and character skills for that playstyle to be successful.

Suggestion 9, 10 and 11
I'm sure many people wouldn't end up salvaging wrecks themselves or using layouts on ships that include EWAR or Active Defense... but it's also certain that many people won't care for mining or securing bouys or building huge fleets. While you personally may not find any more fun in the game by being able to salvage or being able to have ships that use EWAR or Active defense in your fleet. I know many others certainly would. Like I said above it makes sense within the context and logic of the game... If something isn't out of place and it would make more players happy, there are only a few reasons why one might not want to implement that. Point Defense is already implemented so I see no reason why more active defense types shouldn't be added. And EWAR is in it's own way a hybrid of active indirect defense and offense.

[Mathias]

Gelsamel, you make some really great suggestions and I am in agreement with most of them, and would like to add a little more suggestion to some of them.

#1- I agree with the deecision to name lasers that actually act like lasers, if it does not move instantaneously call it something else, a plasma cannon, particle accelerator, etc

#2- A big yes from me. Joingin in ongoing battles would be sweet, allowing you to pick you allies (if any) before the engagement and lending support to one side, or just hunting for scrap and or boarding ships (related to suggestion

#3- Haven't playe mount and blade, ergo, no comment

#4- I agree that the battle should more strongly reflect the environment you are in when you initiate battle.

#5- I like that idea. I would suggest that you could use clestial phenomena (the suns corona, nebulae, asteroid feilds) to hide in and then spring up on unsuspecting fleets, or you purchase some sort of stealth field generator that can hid your fleet if it remains still.

#6- While I think that persistant ammo reserves is more realistic I do not agree with its inclusion into the final build. Having to micro-manage every ammo source for every ship for every engagement is a lot of work. A an idea could be that you could customise what each ship held in its hull (rather than being an inventory screen with no real allocation of resources) so you may want to balance between cargo, marines and ammunition.

#7- I agree. Space Pirates and Zombies has a reasonable degree of customisability without being too overly complex, a similar system could work quite well.

#8- I really like this idea. I am all for more involvement in ship-boarding actions. My first encounter with a ship-like game was pirates of the carribean, which had surprisingly good ship to ship combant that incorporated boarding actions, where you took controll of yourself (sounds odd I know) in a 3rd person perspective where you could fight with swords and blunderbuss. A similar system would be highly desirable, or a RTS boarding combat could be easier for the developers to implement. The marines could be represented with a particular set of icons, the crew (I like the battlefleet gothic idea of press-ganging the lower ratings into boarding actions or into defending the ship with crude close combat weapons), with another, and the officers can be assigned to various units.

#9+10- Sounds good, a few of them would be a nice addition, for micro-managing players.

#11- As with suggestion #8 I like the idea of active involvement in the boarding of ships and the salvaging. Fighting over scraps sounds quite desperate and reminds me strongly of Firefly.

[Gelsamel]

Hi Mathias, thanks for the comments.

For those of you who have not played Mount and Blade... basically it uses a similar movement system to the current Starfarer campaign, the bigger your army the slower you move across the map and when you engage with another army you first get a dialogue box where you can talk to them. It has your main character who has a bunch of stats and skills that affect various things as well as companions (like officers) who also have various skills and stats that affect things. They have many different kingdoms with various political relationships and you can join them as a vassal of the king, or rebell against them etc. There are many villiages and towns and castles and you can be friendly with them or you can burn them down or seige them.

I think virtually everything that is in the Mount and Blade campaign mode could be ported to Starfarer's setting quite easily and it would make the game exceedingly fun.

On the topic of Suggestion 6 while I don't think it's ideal (honestly I personally love to micromanage equipment and ammo and fuel/supplies and stuff like that) I'm sure you could implement it the way fuel/supply is currently implemented. Ie. just have one big inventory that holds everything and gets used up from. You might also make it that you just buy "Ammo material" and it is slowly used up (similar to how supply is for repairs) to replenish ammo via in-fleet contruction mechanisms. Of course, like I said, I'd prefer a more realistic inventory management but I wouldn't fault them for going the way they've gone with fuel/supply with ammo as well.

[Iscariot]

No stealth. Please no stealth.

Yes to ammo stocks though. I really don't like how there's no real point to high cargo ships currently. I like the idea of having supply ships to replenish your magazines. Hell, maybe even do it in battle.

[cardgame]

Sieges in space would be... interesting.

[Gelsamel]

Hi Iscariot, thanks for the comments.

Is there any reason in particular why you wouldn't want to have stealth? Of course you wouldn't have to implement it yourself if you didn't want to play like that. It would certainly be restricted to ships with cloaking/stealth capabilities and character skills which you don't have to invest in. But I'm curious as to your  point of view in this matter.

Supply ships in battle would be an awesome idea. I can imagine them sitting at the back of a fleet and shooting out little probes/shuttles full of missiles to restock huge missile boats. That would be awesome.

Sieges in space would be... interesting.

Indeed. It would also be interesting if you could board stations with marines just like you'd board ships. That way you'd be able to take over stations like you can take over castles in Mount and Blade... although having the crew to man an entire station and defend it would be difficult so this would probably be a late game thing... especially because you'd probably have to go through a huge fleet to get to the station.

[Mathias]

On the topic of Suggestion 6 while I don't think it's ideal (honestly I personally love to micromanage equipment and ammo and fuel/supplies and stuff like that) I'm sure you could implement it the way fuel/supply is currently implemented. Ie. just have one big inventory that holds everything and gets used up from. You might also make it that you just buy "Ammo material" and it is slowly used up (similar to how supply is for repairs) to replenish ammo via in-fleet contruction mechanisms. Of course, like I said, I'd prefer a more realistic inventory management but I wouldn't fault them for going the way they've gone with fuel/supply with ammo as well.

I could get behing an ammo system similar to supplies, as I do like the ide of having to manage some of the ammo. So long as you dont need an ammo type for each individual gun.

Yes to ammo stocks though. I really don't like how there's no real point to high cargo ships currently. I like the idea of having supply ships to replenish your magazines. Hell, maybe even do it in battle.

I would like to have a "realoading" mechanism in game, where perhaps a support ship could send a shuttle with more ammo to a ship. The support ship could also have some sort of ability to assist in repariring otehr nearby ships.

[Rygart]

I'd like to be able to 'brand' or customize ships. Being a faction based game, it would make sense.

[Iscariot]

Is there any reason in particular why you wouldn't want to have stealth? Of course you wouldn't have to implement it yourself if you didn't want to play like that. It would certainly be restricted to ships with cloaking/stealth capabilities and character skills which you don't have to invest in. But I'm curious as to your  point of view in this matter.

Supply ships in battle would be an awesome idea. I can imagine them sitting at the back of a fleet and shooting out little probes/shuttles full of missiles to restock huge missile boats. That would be awesome.

Huh, I honestly didn't expect to get a direct reply. Thanks.

Anyway, I don't like stealth for two reasons. The first is that I think it makes no sense, scientifically, or even from a common sense perspective. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow warships riding large plumes of hot particles and gas to simply eliminate their heat signature. Even if you could hide the body of the ship from view, you couldn't hide the plume of your engine exhaust-- and before someone tells me you could just stretch your 'cloaking field' over your exhaust plume as well, consider this: we see things by having photons impact on the cones and rods of our eyes. A large component of exhaust is the heat and light-- if you're preventing that heat and light from going out, then you're keeping it in. In, where you'll charbroil your own ship.

I understand that fiction allows breaches of science in the name of interesting things, but in Starfarer's case, the game is thematically grungy. It isn't Star Trek, with new technobabble of the week. I certainly don't see the point in breaching science to allow for this particularly frustrating (explained further below) trope. I don't see the point, lore-wise.

The second reason is that I don't think that stealth is fun to play with. To preface this, this is, of course, my personal opinion and I don't claim to speak on objective terms or for anyone other than myself. To be more specific, I don't think that stealth is fun to play AGAINST. You either have the sensors to reveal your cloaked foe, in which case, the only thing you get is a-- presumably-- easier fight, or you don't, in which case you have to contend with this tedious, unseen foe that keeps hitting you and your fleet. It's not the same as being outspent-- as you are with a bigger fleet-- outgunned, or outflown. It feels like they have some arbitrary magic on their side and there's really not much you can do about it. You could say that only the player has stealth, but I don't think that's fair or congruous with the lore.

It's frustrating enough to fight ships that can hit 270 speed, like the Tempest, when they can outrun your missiles and all but the longest range guns, but to have to put up with the possibility of a ship that fast that can also cloak would be unbearable. And it almost certainly would be the small fast ships that would have cloaking, not the large and heavily armed ones.

[Gelsamel]

Thanks for taking the time to explain your views, Iscariot.

Of course as a physicist myself I share your concerns about the scientific believability of Starfarer, hence my complaints about laser weapons. But Starfarer already allows for physical shielding... including shielding that covers the engines, so I don't see why that should be acceptable but a cloaking field may not be. Of course, there is the issue of heat dissipation however if you are really concerned about the viability of that then I think Mass Effect handled that well... simply make stealth limited because if you stealth for too long then you'd get fried.

That being said, there are more than one type of stealthing. It may be difficult in Science Fiction to justify radiation stealthing, however you might be able hide your ship from various forms of scanning/etc. much like stealth planes currently do in real life. In Suggestion 5 I simply talked about stealthing before you engage in battle (ie. on the map/overview section of the game where you chase down fleets) which would result in a closer engagement distance. This would be analagous to hiding yourself from various types of scanning, like a steath bomber does, and then the engagement starts once they have a visual lock on you, ie. closer than usual. Of course, I think complete radiation cloaking may be justifiable given the existance of shields in this setting, however that type of cloaking isn't necessary for my suggestion to be implemented.


Edit:

Actually now that you mention missiles being outrun...

Suggestion 12 - Realistic Missile (and projectile?) Physics:
Currently missiles move extremely slow for what they physically are: Warheads attached to giant engines. It's strange that a ship which has much much more of it's mass dedicated to non-engine related things could be faster and more manuverable than a missile. Perhaps this should also be extended to projectiles as they too move very slowly compared to ships. I can see that part of the reason this is so is for balancing reasons... but it seems a bit silly at times. Perhaps you could take a page from the book of EVE and make certain weapon types do less damage on things that move faster (due to tracking, missile explosion radius, etc). The other solution is to make all ships a whole lot slower and less manuverable, but that might be an unacceptable hit to the speed of combat.

[Iscariot]

I think the difference between shields and cloaking is best expressed, from my perspective, through a cost/benefit lens. I would argue that shields, point defense, and armor form an important trinity of gameplay defenses against being damaged. So, despite shields violating about as many tenets of believability as cloaking, shields form a central gameplay role, while cloaking is much more likely to be an auxiliary gameplay aspect. I am, again, not opposed to the violation of my personal standards of believability and verisimilitude, but I do want it to be for a good reason.

Your idea of strategic cloaking, rather than tactical cloaking, is interesting, but I think large fleets were intended for invasion or defense of gravity wells, where you can actually catch things. Giving larger fleets the ability to sneak up on a little one would make things even more dangerous than they already are for starting players, and it'd make things even easier for players with bigger fleets.

It also raises other questions. If you have tactical cloaking, do ships react differently in an attempt to corner you and gun you down? If you have strategic cloaking, do factions start sending fleets out to sweep for you in a particular way? If they don't, then cloaking is a largely unbalanced gameplay factor. If they do, we're talking about devoting considerable time capital on developing, again, an auxiliary feature.

It's just not worth it, in my opinion.

EDIT: By the way, I agree on your suggestion for active protection systems, and I basically suggested it myself in the thread 'Improved Guided Munitions' with 'interceptor missiles'. You could probably have a 'flak interceptor missile' that would be a proximity fuze countermeasure for missiles as well as torpedoes and fightercraft.

[Iscariot]

As a side note, I think it would be really cool if you had to crack an arc open in your shields to burn, and if you couldn't move your shields rearward if you WERE burning. It'd certainly make those snarky Tempests less smug!