After having played this game since 2016, I always felt that fleet combat was lacking a more impactful element.
As an example to go off of, lets look at FTL:
-Fighting next to a star causes minor solar flares to burst out and cause fires and damage you ship if your shields are down.
-Fighting in a nebula causes your sensors to malfunction making it impossible to detect what and where the internals of the enemy ships are
-Ion/Plasma storms can cause your reactor to go haywire and fritz up
-Pulsars cause shield systems to malfunction as well as drones and other electronic instruments
-ASB(Anti-Ship Battery) attacks your ship while you are near a hostile planet, potentially doing incredible damage to your vessel
I feel like Starsector could be spiced up even more, whether by mod or by full addition to the game, with more effects when in combat based on location. Translating this into our game could look something like this:
-Fighting in a star's corona could cause micro CMEs to pass through the battlefield, causing EMP damage, but not hull damage. However, if you find yourself in combat during a solar flare, you'll encounter a very bad time, having flares pass through the battlefield damaging unshielded vessels?
-Nebulae already cause your ships to lose thrust and max speed depending on ship make and skill, but I feel like they should also reduce overall effectiveness of sensor based upgrades and/or cause glitches in your sensors. Maybe have it so that fighting in a nebula causes your sensors to show doubles or prevent you from targeting with certain weapons like missiles or other non-manual guided ordnance?
-Potentially a system-wide event that can happen every so often at random, plasma/ion storms(in SS's case probably plasma). During such events entering combat would be highly discouraged, as it would cause you to take additional flux from shield damage, or even slowly build up hard flux over time regardless of your shields being deployed or not? Potentially, they could, rather than previously stated make your reactors function at half capacity, reducing flux cap and venting by half. These of course would only happen in nebulae.
-Anti-Ship Batteries could also play a pivotal role in invasions. Currently the structure just makes the fuel cost for bombing a planet increase. I think that we could expand upon this by making it so that invasions are a three part battle system sorta deal. It could go something like this:
1.)The invasion fleet in question has to defeat the station and it's auxiliary fleet detachment
2.)The invasion fleet then proceeds to battle the planetary defense for with the aid of the ground based Anti-Ship Battery. (Defeating this stage will cause the batteries to be "disrupted" upon victory of the invasion fleet)
3.)The invasion fleet then begins the final stage of launching it's ground forced to take the planet.
(BONUS) Hyperspace, Deep Hyperspace, and Hyperspace Storms.
Currently, HS, DHS, and HSSs, don't seems to do much in the way of game play effects, with the exception of storms which allow you to hilariously propel your fleet in some direction. Here's what I believe we could do to expand on this mechanic:
-Standard hyperspace is fine as it is, with the exception that since it's described as "not quite space-time", doesn't anybody feel like we're missing out on some sweet anomalies that cause random events both in and out of combat? (insert "get out of here stalker" joke) Feel free to leave different anomalies in the replies, as I can't think of anything off the top of my head at the moment.
-Deep hyperspace could be an exaggerated experience to standard hyperspace, with more frequent irregularities and all-round weird crap happening in and out of combat. Again, post some examples!
-Here we are, the fun part... Hyperspace storms, not only will there be weird crap, but there will also be very deadly lightning that can strike your ships if they get to close to a certain angry cloud of "wtf-is-that?" These "lightning strikes" could wreak havoc to fleets if you're not a careful commander, strikes to armour and hull could turn very devastating if not avoided properly, and strikes on shields could cause EMP arcs to disable systems and weapons. Who doesn't like lightning after all?
Well, it's a mess of text, but here is my first actual post and suggestion to this fantastic game, hope Alex gets a chance to read this. I'm also looking forward to what my fellow Starfareres have to say, till next time.
See ya again, space cowboy!
Author
Topic: Environmental effects in combat and additional solar events (Read 476 times)