[Karash]

This is inspired by a response I made to GrimGriz in another thread. What hit me is that Jumpgate always had hard rules on what was labeled a "Fighter" ship and what was suppose to be a "Miner" or "Trader". Part of the problem I think we had in Jumpgate is that (As GrimGriz stated) no one likes being the victim in any unwanted PVP experience. If you were in a Miner ship, you had little to no chance of successfully defending yourself against a pirate for example. While the pirate should always get the edge of initiative...what he supremely knew was that his target was incapable of defending himself.

I propose we change that by looking at the fundamental way ships are designed. Yes, I know that ND are most likely not going to go down this path...but ideas are flowing freely here and I must commit them to writing

The idea revolves around each Faction's strengths in building Spacecraft. There would be multiple ship hulls that players could purchase and modify to whatever goal they wish. Ships would simply be classified in a Small, Medium, or Large format, with better naming convention. Players could make a miner out of any ship (S,M,L), although its base stats may not make it a very good one.

For Example: An Octavian Pilot brings up the station market and sees there are 52 Available "Kilo" hulls, 42 available "Lima" hulls, and 9 "Tango" hulls. The "Tango" is a medium class hull, and he wants to put more guns on his ship even though he will be slower...he purchases the "Tango" and orders up some weapon selection next.

Note that nothing is listed about the spacecraft being a fighter, trader or miner. Octavia could have 5 or 10 medium class hulls, all with a different focus in mind whether it be armor, speed, energy grid, cpu, weapon mounts, etc... So picking one that gives you a base set of statistics, its just up to you to equip it for whatever mission/role you need.

For Example: The Oct has his shiney new Tango class ship in the Fitting Bay and he knows it will be a fighter. Weapons are a priority, so he fills up the weapon bays with "Hammerhead" class pulse lasers (his favorite), and adds some supporting capacitor equipment in his auxiliary bays (Modx) to help the capacitor with firing a full salvo of weapons. Additionally he loads up what missiles he can, but knows the "Tango" class hull doesnt sport many hardpoints.

With this system, each ship hull could have vastly different purposes even if they are the same ingame/inflight ship. One pilot may need to strip his ship and add cargo expansion bays, while another pilot might love the handling of it and try it out as a dedicated fighter. The key is to have each hull retain its own personality....whether that be added Armor (Octs), Shields (Sol), or Speed (Quants).

With this design method, the active community would almost self-balance itself out as new ship combinations are used and abused. Sure that small ship mining a roid might be set up with 4 mining lasers, but he also might just have 1 on...and the rest be weapons and ECM gear....making the pirate's day much harder.

We would obviously need a ton of useful and purpose driven equipment for all ships. Balancing of the base ship statistics would be much harder, but once done right...much more rewarding to the game. It would also kill the attitude of "Well there goes a Phoon, I wonder how many FFs he has on".

In this design, the only victim would be the pilot that sacrifices all defensive equipment on his ship to gain the ultimate economic advantage (cargo, mining, speed, whatever)....but thats a tradeoff he must conciously make.

Thoughts?

[Karash]

A proactive response to the "What about the Newbies" response.

There could already be templates for specific role ships made in game that can be easily selected until a new player gets the hang of outfitting a ship manually. I am just thinking more in-depth and post-newbie experience.

[GrimGriz]

I prefer specialty ships and passing different hulls in the spacelanes. I thought it was a travesty that the only reason to fly the turkey, hurricane, etc was because level precluded the "better" ship.

I prefer the 3 different ships to fill each role (mining/hauling/fighting/scouting) each with different strengths (thrust, ore extraction speed, cargo space, turrets), so that pilots can find the best combinations of ships to accomplish team goals.

[Ikeprof]

From a philosophical perspective, I totally buy into this. Not sure if it is due to a brainwashing effect from say..300+ hours of listening to you in TS while drinking beer or what.

However, with that said, I have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to make it work from a "limitations/trade and balance" perspective combined with the perspective of " in the end, how do you still avoid the cookie cutter best ship" perspective.

Take any game...for any "class", even if there are different variations of that class, there are still generally accepted "best of class" loadouts.

If your philosophy were to be taken to it's ultimate, I would prefer to sit in a sector, watch 10 ships go by where the pilots considered them combat ready and capable ships, designed to match their playstyle and not see any of those 10 be mirror images of the other in terms of loadout/spec. That would be the ultimate in design with the added benefit of your enemy having absolutely no idea what to expect when the confrontation began.

For all he knew, you had paper thin armor, 15 ammo based gun, no shield and an engine that maxed out at 20v. Or you had 1 gun, thick slabs of armor, 50% of your power went into a countermass device to offset the inertial/momentum effects and your drive unit would propel you at a decent 450v. Or you had saran wrap armor and small polka dotted ponies would shot out of torpedo tubes on your aft end.

Ok..scratch the ponies.


They itch.

Anyhow, I just cannot get my head around designing mechanics that would make it flexible enough to defeat the concepts of a generally accepted "best of breed" mindset taking hold.

I do like the idea though.

[Wild_Bill]

I like it too! Roll your own from a bunch of different ships. Take this, add that, move that other thing over there, remove this, replace that. Yeah, it would be hell on balance but I think it would be fun. Can you imagine a Nix with a Tangent engine? Or a Raven with 4 injustices? It probably would be too much trouble for the Dev's to program, but it would be FUN!

[Dedsquirrl]

A lot of this could be helped by allowing power management.

Overclocking of your weapons for more damage while sacrificing shield recharge.

Or increased thrust at the expense of fire rate.

Like Ike said, a lot of cookie cutters would probably spawn, but there would always be that opportunity to tweak your rig just a little to suit your style better.
Compound that with the versatility of a more customizable design and you could have endless loadout options.

[Istanbul]

if this idea could be made to work it would be awesome. if nothing else, being able to tweak the current type of ship config more than you can currently more would be a brilliant stroke.

[TexMurphy]

Personally Id like to remove forward firing guns from tows and freighters. Id like miners to only be able to equip mining equipment (mining should change abit se other post).

BUT

Id like to increase defenses for these ships. Tows, Freighters and Miners should have turrets on them (in later stages mannable by PCs till then AI cotrolled).

It should also be possible to post escort missions and if they arnt accepted by a player then a NPC should fill that role. Wana go mining in unreg get your self 5 PC or NPCs fighters to escort you.

Tex

[Aphelion]

I like it but it seems like it would be too much of a pain in the ass to design and balance all the equipment that would go in the "hardpoints." Mmm... it's a really great concept though, and I swear I've seen it before somewhere, either in a video game, or maybe even a board game. Maybe I'm just thinking of racing sims where you can tweak all your suspension/aero parts to get that edge though, which seems similar.

Eliminating cookie cutter "Oh, that's a tens, it has 4 FF's" is good. Balancing tons and tons of equipment... I dunno, maybe it would actually be easier. I get the feeling that the factional differences wouldn't mean a thing anymore if this happened, since you could just "modify," through equipment, your ship any way you wanted.

[Karash]

Originally Posted by Aphelion

I like it but it seems like it would be too much of a pain in the ass to design and balance all the equipment that would go in the "hardpoints." Mmm... it's a really great concept though, and I swear I've seen it before somewhere, either in a video game, or maybe even a board game. Maybe I'm just thinking of racing sims where you can tweak all your suspension/aero parts to get that edge though, which seems similar.

Eliminating cookie cutter "Oh, that's a tens, it has 4 FF's" is good. Balancing tons and tons of equipment... I dunno, maybe it would actually be easier. I get the feeling that the factional differences wouldn't mean a thing anymore if this happened, since you could just "modify," through equipment, your ship any way you wanted.

Its a fairly broad concept uses in other gaming designs...mainly Battletech/Mechwarrior. You never really knew what that MadCat Mech had on it, but you knew it was 'big' (75 tons) and generally nasty. But for all you knew it could have been set up for anti-vehicle work with small lasers and MGs.

Of course I did not post any numbers or anything, just the concept. Having multiple ship hulls be able to fill various rolls (some obviously better than others), would go a long way into providing a lot of 'legs' for the game. Couple this with a robust econ that has rarity as well as supply/demand would be great. That way there is never a problem when not using the best gear simply because there is no such thing.

[Karash]

One other note about factional differences:

I would design in the base stats of each hull the factional traits of that faction. For example, all the Octavian hulls would start with on average more armor and weapon hardpoints. They would start somewhat slower. Solrain would favor shields and more versitility (modx hardpoints), and Quantar would favor speed over all else, with several ships that have huge cargo bays for mining.

Just a rough sketch, but you could retain factional differences.

[Nohbody]

While the idea is appealing on a personal level (I fondly remember attacks in BT, with my light mech loaded up with flamers dashing in to overheat the "big bad-a$$ motherforkers" so my artillery buddies could mop the floor with them... at least before the then-local GMs got copies of the source books covering those damned Clan tech heatsinks ), I don't know if it'd work all that well from a gameplay perspective.

Also, like GG, I like seeing different hulls in space. While that may not be realistic from an IC manufacturing perspective (someone has to build all those hulls, after all, and just 3 g