Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Camael]

Well, slots for everyone, slots for everything, slots are the future! Invest in slots now to recieve 50 Internet points as a reward! Should You not be content with Your investment in slots! You should have Your brain examined and will not receive any time/bandwith back, there is no guarantee here!

Now to the topic.


First.

Fighters still seem wonky to me. I can not refit them, so what are they doing on the fleet screen. They are entire wings, why do they have a shipname? I can not board them at all, so my option to get some cool rare uberfighter is effectively null. (Did I mention the game is sooo awesome except for the super frustrating boarding system punishment? Oh, I did.) Also, my fighters often have a lower burnlevel than the small carriers I use in the beginning of the game so I have the super-funny situation that fighters that are supposed to be stowed away in hangars for long journeys seem to be flying around with my capships, having their pilots in the seats for days and weeks without a break to eat or pee. Apart from fighters being short term high performance craft that plain and simply can not be designed for hyperspace-journeys. Also, I am still not certain when I can keep my fighters... if in combat they are shot down and I still have a carrier - even a small one - in reserve I can keep my wing, right? Enemy too. How... logical. Obviously my tiny little geminy has parts, chassis, ammo, trained pilots and everything else needed to repair and rearm, even rebuild everything from a Talon to a Xyphos. Obviously. At the same time. For up to a billion wings. Obviously. How else could it be?
Solution! Wonky hangar space computations? Superfat enginges on fighters? Remove fighters in general? No. Solution: Slots!

Why not turn fighters from wannabe-ships to superawesome premium weapon systems? Have big red squares on carriers to place fighter wings on them, maybe two wings per flight deck. That way

 - fighters could be lootet
 - fighters would be fittet to a specific carrier, where all the needed equipment is stored
 - there would be some logic as to which wing is lost and kept after a battle
 - the hunting every last carrier sport would end as killing the Astral means killing its fighters, not having to hunt a final condor to get rid of ten remaining wings
 - better fighters could get higher OP cost, making large, high-end carriers more interesting than many small rustbuckets with a flat area to land on in their hulls.
 - number of replacement chassis could be finite (like ammo) and still a wing type could be kept if the carrier survives
 - wings could receive experience like crew, getting better over time
 - there would be more slots to fill and less clogging of the fleet screen!

I think that would be awesome. My veteran Broadsword that soon might become elite is much more engaging to me than generic broadsword wing with random shipname. Also the wings mounted on a carrier could be modified by hullmods of said carrier - more active fighters, more replacement chassis, better combat value via a command and control tower mod (,...)


Second.

Then again. Why stop at fighters? It does not make sense I can throw heavy armor on every ship, wherever I want, free of charge, in space, as long as I know how heavy armor works. Also, the hullmods list gets long and convolutet and ugly anyway, over time. Especially as starsector is basically designed as a platform for mod-factions and their added shipsystems, this list will eventually become unbearable.
Solution: Specific Slots on ships for specific systems. Keep hullmods for general upgrades. Expanded Magazines and Advanced Turret Gyros modify the entire ship, they should still remain in an abstract list. But other things - why not have one or more engine slots for modifications, an armor slot, a shield slot, maybe a command and control and auxiliary slot for targeting AI or an added radar-dish? That way clicking the slot would pop up available -say- armor modifications and one could chose, without having to guess which other mods this would exclude - simply, there will be only one modification per slot. Finished.
Having several slots in one area would represent a more versatile ship design. Over-engineered super-ships, like, maybe the Sunder, would have few to no slots - the internal systems are so fragile and optimized, You can not jury-rig around in there without breaking it all. On the other hand, a mule, or a taped-together pirateship are considered sturdy, well undestood technology, that could be modified until it is virtually unrelated to the basic model and still work. Somehow. So slot availability should not scale with ship size or techlevel, but be an additional axis showing how sturdy, versatile and reliable a ship is, or not. Would make the bread-and-butter standard ships more interesting again, too.
Maybe number of slots available should have a set max per ship and then with skill level additional slots should become available in a reverse order... a ship with three armor slots might have the first one free on a skill of three in armoring, but a ship with only one slot should make that one available only on level ten in armoring, where the formerly mentioned ship would present a whopping three mod-slots.
Also, like weapon systems, these mods could then be sold at Orbital docks - costing credits and being unavailable somewhere in outer space. Even better - they could be faction specific. Tri-tachion will not install an unstable injector in Your paragon, dear god, but of course they might sell You augmented engines at a super-steep premium. Pirates in turn won't have any idea how to improve high-end shield systems, but of course they will screw together a jury-rigged shield generator and mount it on Your hound, why not? And that unstable injector... ah, trust me comrade, it's safe, my cousin only blew up because he forgot to monitor the 238 things that could go wrong every second properly... also, the hegemony engineers should be happy to strap on three additional layers of super heavy armor on every single frigatte for their friends, and maybe tape some aux thrusters on there as well, so You can at least aim Your burndrive... a little...

So

 - no more endless generic upgrade list
 - no more confusion as to which upgrades are compatible
 - faction specific upgrades possible
 - upgrades sold like weapons, just not for takeaway - so no more rearmoring in space
 - totally cool looking shipmods tab in the refit screen, next to a totally cool flight-deck tab!
 - more versatility with better skills, not more options I might not even want

Also, maybe the special systems of a ship could be included as a non-removable, generic mod as well, so they have a place and an icon for themselves, and do not run around as naked text in space. That is creepy.


My two cents. No time-back guarantee if You read it and regret it. Slots! Slooots!

[Debido]

With modding and the API available to you these things are already possible if you're willing to spend the time to code it.

[xenoargh]

Obviously my tiny little geminy has parts, chassis, ammo, trained pilots and everything else needed to repair and rearm, even rebuild everything from a Talon to a Xyphos. Obviously. At the same time. For up to a billion wings. Obviously. How else could it be?

Well, actually, it's hand-waved away in the lore; automated mini-factories can supply all of the parts necessary.  In gameplay terms, it's practically limited by fighter death ratios vs. available Decks.

Anyhow, as Debido pointed out, practically all of this is possible via advanced modding.  I even have a working example of a launch-able "fighter" in Vacuum (the Swift Launcher) that emulates the WWII catapult-fighter technology. 

You could even have "fighters" that are customizable via weapons changes and Hull Mods; it's just a little difficult and it'd be hard to explain to end-users atm, given the way the UI works, so I haven't bothered.

The only really hard part is the experience stuff; experience being tied to your crews as a whole, rather than to specific entities, is a core component of the system.  Alex has said that we'll eventually be able to have Captains that we can put into those roles- so if you want to have a Rick Hunter type in charge of your fighters and put all of his fighter-oriented buffs on them, go for it.

Lastly, Vacuum already has a working example of character skills that buff fighters, and fighters alone, which is something I'll probably keep expanding, since I like the idea of giant carrier groups being a valid path for players to take if they want to engage in more macro and less micro

[dmaiski]

basicaly what we need is the ability to add in new slot types

[xenoargh]

Yeah, it'd be really cool if we could add new ones.  But man, that would pretty much require that the entire Refit UI system be exposed in the API.  I'd much rather see Alex work on important stuff, personally; this is kind of modder-heaven stuff that won't really help push the core game forwards, imo