I'd like to have Vacuum's mechanic of basically making your own faction. The bad part of vacuum is, that which certain hull mods like heavy armor and the shield core removal thing, ships are literally indestructible. Like, you can't penetrate their armor. Especially with the Glaug ships. You could name your factions, add a different designation, like NLRW (New Lunar Republic Warship) and they're automatically added to any of the ships that belong to your faction. You can set which ships are produced by Omnifactories that you've built.
Also, I want to be able to manage colonies on the surface of a planet, kinda GalCiv or Stardrive style. Well, maybe more like SimCity, but on a much larger scale. You can, of course, build individual buildings like lone outposts, but there are preset cities and towns you can build that have specific functions, like mining for resources for manufacturing parts and weapons, refineries, Drydocks, trade ports, civilian structures, planetery defenses, barracks, farms, ect.
I think this would be cool in my opinion. I know it's not a very likely feature, as Starsector is all about blowing up all the things. But, while we're not doing that, or we're waiting for our capital ships to repair, as they should take a really long time instead of being instant on a station, we could manage our colonies. Also, you should be able to elect governors to manage your colonies for you, if your style of playing the game is Attack! Attack! Attack! and you don't want to do all that yourself.
Since we can set our colonies to be automatically managed, it's only fair that the AI factions can as well. You can bomb a planet or send colony ships to claim planets. Also, most factions should start out with a random planet, with a station automatically in orbit, some basic infrastructure, and a small exploration fleet, consisting of a handful of scout frigates and maybe a destroyer. There should be a few shuttles as landing craft as well, to scout out a planets surface, as scanning technology hasn't been researched yet. Yes, I want a tech tree for this game. Techs should cost time and credits to pay the scientists. Where you get the scientists? You can hire them or train them at colleges. Tech, meaning some factions will start out technologically superior to everyone else, like the Tri-Tachyons should have more scientists and more starting techs, like PD lasers and more efficient engines.
Also, Tech trees are
not linear. I'm borrowing the idea from a game called Limit Theory, which is currently in development and currently awesome. Most games go with the idea, "Oh, you researched this? That's it, you're done. You can't make this much better, until you get to the next Mk. level or whatever." I don't want that. The next mark level doesn't matter to me. You have to research the base technology, like Tactical Lasers or whatever you want, but you can improve on those techs by researching them again. Improvements can take far less time, and they can have bonuses
and drawbacks. Like, if they use less flux per tick, they have a chance to also do less damage. Not that improving a weapon will always have drawbacks, but they have a chance to have drawbacks depending on how skilled your scientists are.
This isn't even bring components into the equation. You can also fully modify your weapons. The first modification I'm going to talk about is for beam weapons. You can limit their range in exchange for doing more damage. useful if you don't want your PD lasers to focus on the enemy battlecruiser shooting at you, but rather focusing on the missiles it's shooting off at you. They'll also be able to shoot them down faster, but it's basically the same as if it were doing less damage and firing from farther away. It'll most likely be shot down within the same time-frame. You can also increase their range to have a sniper weapon thing, but they'll also do less damage, in addition to having increased flux costs to maintain the confinement field for the laser or whatever. Something fancy like that. All you Trekkies out there can come up with some random BS to use!
There would be more modifications you can do to weapons of all sizes and type, but I haven't thought of any more yet. Now, components are what your weapons are actually made of. Your starting light machine guns are crap, but when you're farther up the tech tree, you can replace the firing and reloading mechanisms to make them shoot faster, have a higher range, and the bullets just plain go faster, so they're more accurate, but the flux costs are virtually the same. That's replacing the internal components. You can add what I call tactical upgrades to the exterior, like more ammo canisters or laser sights, improving accuracy. They would add mass to the weapon making them turn a tad slower, but you'd rather have a better and slower turret rather then a turret that can track something moving at 500 SU a second.
Obviously, you don't have to upgrade your weapons manually. You can just upgrade them, make the previous version obsolete, then have your ships dock to have their weapons upgraded. You don't have to make the components individually, you get them for free, unless they dramatically change how a weapon works, or it dramatically increases a weapon's stats, for reasons of balance. You still don't have to make them, but they are expensive. And they'll probably take a while to install, so if you're refitting your capital ship that has mostly the weapon you upgraded, and you're attacked, you can't use that specific weapon and your battleship's firepower is greatly diminished. It's still operational, but you'd best get it to high-tail it outta there. You can also upgrade your weapon's armor, so they get knocked offline less often.
In the beginning of a game, you can only build low tech frigates and destroyers. As you progress, you can either find the blueprints for ships and make them, but they are very rare. The Hegemony actually starts out with a few planets in a system, and a few cruisers, but no Onslaughts. If you want an onslaught, you gotta find on on the surface of a planet, but if they are there, they most likely crashed and are too heavily damaged to use. You can still scavenge parts from it, though. Anyways, back on track, you need to research different classes of ships to be able to build them, but that takes a while and the classes of ships have to go through different stages of prototyping, which can take weeks or even months. You may buy ships from other factions. technically, you can reverse engineer it, but most of the time, they'll tell you not to do that, and if they find out that you're doing that, you're gonna have a major problem on your hands. Sometimes, they'll consider the ship obsolete, and they'll let you reverse-engineer it, and they'll usually actually give you the blueprint for the vessel.
Why only be able to upgrade your weapon's components? You can upgrade your shields, armor, engines, sensors, everything! But wait, there's more! You can also get different types of the things I mentions, like light or heavy armor. Their names are obvious, and one slows you down, but protects you better. The opposite holds true for light armor. Different shields can wrap directly around your ship, encompassing it entirely, but if you have really powerful shields, smaller ships can't cower inside them if they're being shot at. If you have a bubble shield, frigates can take cover inside your shield. Different engines, too. some are insulated and take less damage, but make your ship slower. Burst engines are very fast, but are pretty up-protected, as the amount of heat radiating would most likely melt any sort of armor. Sensors are just upgraded to have longer range and being able to tell you more about another ship.
Next thing. Cargo ships usually have detachable components. For example the Gemini has 2 frontal cargo pods. You can change the around to hold fuel, people, and obviously cargo. They can also be modified to have more weapons on those modules. The weapon mounts will severely limit any cargo space. Atlas' can do much the same, except they have a lot more space for different modules. Certain types of warships can have different modules as well.
Anyways, I think that's all for now.
-Luna
Author
Topic: Your own faction, colonies, non-linear tech trees, and components (Read 7296 times)