For the most part Sector's combat system is marvelous, there is almost nothing fundamental I'd want to change, with one exception:
The shockwave from the destruction of a ship. This is the single greatest source of frustration in this game for me.
It is:
- often instantly deadly, without a chance to react. This is a game, it's all about reacting to things, isn't it?
- extremely hard to judge in its range since its invisible, varies with the destroyed ship and (visually) varies with zoom level.
- not understood by AI allies, which will destroy a target regardless of your proximity
- tends to happen most towards the end of a battle, when you have the most to lose by being hit
I suppose it's meant to discourage the use of strike weapons from point blank range (or facehug tactics in general), but it brought my game to an unexpected halt countless times in situations completely unrelated to that. When you use short ranged weapons the difference between your engagement range and your targets explosion radius can be a hairbreadth. Going after a fleeing enemy as fast as you can? Boom, dead. Your target gets knocked towards you by another ship? Boom, dead. Or just misjudging the distance by a few pixels? Boom, dead. As a remedy the shockwave's side effects are far too strong.
Some ideas how to alter it:
- The simplest (but imo not enough): change the damage type to kinetic, so shields get overloaded easily but you don't die quiet as often.
- Change the damage into shield-penetrating EMP damage/ knock back.
- Make the actual impacts of strike weapon hits generate shockwaves but reduce the strength of the final explosion. Would actually promote the anti-hug effect.
- A time delay. Possibly in combination with something else. I would not even mind a larger effect radius if I could just react in any way.
My ideal solution, both for gameplay and visuals, would probably be a number of secondary explosions with individual EMP damage shockwaves, culminating in one big explosion with knockback after a short delay.