Don't mind if I just brainbump here for a few minutes, do y'all?
So, ship customization (I shouldn't be focusing on this so much, but whatever. 6-page paper keeps leering over my shoulder anyway). My thoughts are as follows:
A certain list of preset modular items will exist, hopefully equippable on
most, if not
all, ships, and will apply some bonus to their combat ability. Ships themselves will of course need to have stats, which will go something similar to what follows:
- -=- Speed: How quickly the ship moves per frame (or some other unit of in-game measurement).
-=- Firepower: (possibly an average of the firepowers of each individual weapon on the ship)?
-=- Outer (Hull) Integrity: A measure of how well the Hull can hold up against firepower.
-=- Inner (Structural) Integrity: How well the structure can hold versus attacks such as ramming, collisions, and other strong kinetic forces.
-=- Morale (I'll get into this later; I was thinking ships could host command groups, rulers, military leaders, etc, and those would boost morale. Morale would also be partially based on the ship's outer and integral health).
-=- Garrison: How many troops the ship holds upon creation; used for boarding and deactivating other ships or bolstering friendly ships.
-=- Parts Capacity: How many equippable objects the ship can mount.
-=- Radar: How far the ship can see. Also determines ability to detect cloaked units.
*Note: Inner and Outer Integrity can be hit all at once, but attacks like this should be relatively few and far between; most often, a single attack will only be able to target either-or. Once Outer Hull Integrity is reduced to 0, however, all attacks can target the Inner, leaving the ship completely exposed.
So, ships will all have stats along those lines (nothing set in stone yet). Then, modular "equipment" can be placed outside of combat on certain ships (haven't decided if this will simply be select ships, batches of ships, or all of your available ships. Perhaps only the ships that survived the previous combat/campaign mission, and then for free-play simply have an allotted number of customizable ships per player that can be set in the free-play options?). Customizable ships won't have set "slots," per se, and obviously parts that are too large won't be able to be mounted on the ship.
Ugh, I ramble. Let me give an example instead.
So, here we have our Warbarge, unequipped and minimally damaged from the previous encounter.
Now, we decide to equip it with a few parts gathered from our latest research engagement: a large rocket pod, an expanded command bridge, and a sensory array.
So, the rocket pod is does exactly what it sounds like. It adds additional firepower to the ship. The command bridge would raise morale a bit and allow for multiple attacks to be split amongst targets (right click on the primary target, then left click on another enemy to set the secondary target?). The sensory array would adjust the ship's speed ever so slightly and expand its radar range.
As long as the Warbarge has the Parts Capacity to spare for three parts, this setup would work fine. The parts themselves would have a weight value that would adjust the ship's speed moderately, to keep players from simply stacking five parts on and going just as fast; that would lead to some really broken combinations.
Okay, done for now.
