Ship Upgrades

[Evaders99]

Is there a reason to keep different versions of the same ship?

I was thinking it would be better to minimize the number of initial choices.

 

I don't know if you could change mesh based on the upgrades, but at least ships with the same mesh could have different variants through upgrades.

 

Say the Venator... it could gain "Jedi Commander" upgrade somewhere down the line instead of having two choices. Or the Droid Control Ship, which would start out as a droid transport (fighters) would gain battleship weapons as upgrades. I don't know if you could make upgrades "research-dependent" - but even things like advanced fighters would be nice to keep as upgrades. You only get the latest fighters if you've done the research/upgrade.

 

I think that could avoid some redundancy and still give people options....

Choices whether to enhance your battleship as a fleet carrier or a battleship or a planetary bombarder. Not to remove the uniqueness of each ship, but (as game developers say) give people more "meaningful choices" to consider in the game.

[EvilleJedi]

ship upgrade changes are global, probably could do an ability that triggers research, but it wouldn't replace the ship abilities or stats etc without a lot of work. Since they are capital ships they are highly limited to begin with, and I plan on giving them distinctly different abilities. It's something to think about but I haven't had the time to investigate how to pull it off.

[Deks]

hey Eville

 

1st off omfg awesome job with this beta mate, just signed up and played a 6 hour game as empire (superstar dreadnaught thing ftfw)

 

oh and dont worry i will be posting the 4 bugs i found

 

ok back to topic, is it possible you could make caps like entrenchment starbases? what i am getting at is that the starbases in entrenchment require research unlocks but then you have to purchase the abilities for each individual starbase.

 

if you could port this over to caps then what you would be able to do is give the player a choice about what systems they want to buy for each of their caps (ie more weapons but less shields and so on and so forth, further to this you could make the choices available for purchase level dependant so its in the players best interest to try to level up his caps to gain access to the more powerful upgrades. this would also make higher level caps a significant presence in any battle but also a bigger risk for the owner

 

i don't know if my idea is coming across properly so let me know if you get what i am saying

 

Deks out

[EvilleJedi]

afaik the capital ships upgrades hit all of the ships, the abilities can be leveled but I don't think they can be exculsive (IE shields up and hull down or whatever)

[Evaders99]

Can abilities give the same benefits as upgrades? Can they be permanent (or no timeout...)?

[EvilleJedi]

yeah they can be permanent and for the most part function as upgrades, however I don't think you can prevent the player from choosing the other ones as the ship gains experience (can't single track)

[Evaders99]

Cap the number of upgrade points.. so at least they can't get all of them in a "super"-ship

[Deks]

yea what if you had 10 upgrades unlocked via research but you could only enable 6 (similar to starbases)