A few ideas have been running through my head since I've been playing Starfarer. I figured I might as well make an actual suggestion thread to pose my ideas in.
Weaponry in general:
Adding a couple more functions to weapons, and rename current ones. Basically, it'd be like this:
- Charge Up: The amount of time in seconds that a weapon must wait before beginning its firing cycle. This would let us have Freespace style beam weapons that pre-charge before releasing a beam all at once.
- Warmup: The amount of time in seconds it takes a weapon to reach full firing speed/power from the start of its firing cycle. In beams, it's the 'fade in' time that the current chargeup setting causes. For anything else, currently, it works as Charge Up does above. This would allow us to have gatling weapons that fire more shots as it warms up.
- Cooldown: Functions the same as chargedown does currently; causes beam weapons to fade away, and causes non-burst style weapons to reload. For sustained fire weapons, this could let them slow down their firing rate before stopping.
- Recharge: Functions like burstdelay, but works with any weapon. This would let us have constant beams that need to recharge after letting go of the mouse.
EMP: In just about every reference to EMP damage, it says it deals flux damage but that doesn't seem to be the case. That might be a holdover from an older version of the game, where ship systems couldn't be disabled, but I think it should make a return, or be another setting in weapons. Being able to add flux to an enemy, though a little at a time would make for some interesting tactical elements. But more than that, EMP weapons should be able to be quite effective against shields; at least in my opinion. At any rate, more options for modders to play with is more better, yes?
Armor:
A couple ideas sprung into my head for armor. And that was adding a deflect/absorb and penetration mechanic which would render weapons with low penetration effectively worthless against larger ships with more armor. Adding the Heavy Armor mod would make things less able to penetrate, and more apt to collide uselessly or bounce off. The other idea was splitting armor into quadrants. This would allow ships to be less armored to the sides and rear, and thus take more damage to those quadrants. Or whatever the ship designer desires.
Weapon AI:
All too often I've seen beam weapons fire just short of the target ship, because it thinks it's going to hit the shields when it doesn't. Well, I think the AI for any weapon should fire at the bounds of a ship, and not its shield dome. Speaking of shields...
Shields:
Two things. First: different styles of shielding. I like long, skinny ships, like WWII vessels, and with the perfectly round bubble shields, they tend to leave a lot of open space between the hull and the shield. It would be much nicer if you could have elliptical shields. Or even skin-tight barriers that appear along the bounds of the ship. That would be pretty cool. Second, the ability to use a more traditional shielding system. That is, bring shields up and they don't add to flux, and have their own HP that goes down when they suffer damage and slooooooowly recharges over the course of a battle. And when they reach 0, they collapse and can't be brought back up for a while.
Anyway, that's all I have for now, if I come up with more ideas, I'll post them here.
