So I'll add my thoughts on a few of these remarks.tsunamayo wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 11:27 pmThanks you all for your contributions! This is all very interesting.
Just a few remarks:Ideally on top of Laser/Beam I should add custom-made missiles and kinetic weapon with custom-made shell. Plus maybe a couple of funny weapon that could come much later on (flame-plasma thrower, ect).
- Adding more block of the same base type will increase weapon power and energy requirement. No need for an "overload" or "power" addon block.
- Gimbal will start in the 5-10 range I guess (to be tweaked), but each addon or stacking will decrease the range and the speed at which it moves.
- Not a fan of multi-components gun, one block should be enough to have a functional weapon. Only exception is for ammunition, where I think it is ok to ask the player to link/pipe a crate to the gun.
- I havent played ftd
, but if one of you wants to make me a quick explanation that would be cool
- Each weapon and addon should have different energy/heat requirement, and also have a shield/armor or else damage profile, that way the weapon design would impact the ship design, but also the way combat are managed.
I'd recommend against automatic weapon gimbal. Maybe you could have a block which allows for a small gun to be gimballed easily, but if you add in automatic weapon gimbal then suddenly ungimballed small guns, like those found on most sci-fi fighters and real life fighters, become entirely pointless. Having a gimbal block does mean that gimballed small guns are slightly more expensive and slightly more mechanically complex than ungimballed guns, which gives both types of guns their own advantages and disadvantages.
I think, depending on the weapon system, having a couple of components make up a weapon would work. It doesn't make the weapon super complex or too difficult to explain to the average player. And it allows you to have interchangeable components as well, which allows for more customization within the same weapon system.
Going back to my gun idea, you could simplify it by combining the barrel and the chamber, which leads you to needing 2-3 parts (aside from the shellevators and ammo racks) to get a gun to function. But, again, that's not super complex, and it's easy to tell the player how to build the system. Tell them that the gun barrel is the main part of the gun, that a loader is needed to load shells into the gun, that a couple types of loaders need to have either a clip or belt storage to function, and that there are optional barrel attachments you can add to the end of the barrel to space-proof the gun.
Every single part has it's own role here (the barrel for shooting the bullet, the loader for loading the bullet, the clips/belts for storing rounds ready-to-fire, and the barrel caps for optional air-tightness regarding the barrel), which allows for the ability to swap out different components when building weapons (a more realistic approach than just having all weapon improvements be upgrades). This actually means that you can have a wider variety of basic-tier weapons, rather than all basic-tier weapons being nearly the same thing.
And that's why I think that most weapon systems should probably consist of 2-4 parts arranged in a specific order. It's not too complicated to understand, easy to explain and document, and allows for interchangable
components to get a wider variety of guns. It actually might be easier to explain and build a 2-4 part gun with interchangable parts than to build that same gun as a 1-piece weapon with 1-3 upgrades.
From the Depths is a naval vehicle-builder/strategy game. The vehicle building in the game offers a wide variety of possible designs and tactics to employ with said designs, but it suffers from bad AI, some unneeded complexity regarding it's systems, a bit of a case of the 1m block system-building issue, and a terrible meta caused by using 1m blocks along with other gameplay mechanics and balancing. It's actually a good game (along with Starmade) to examine when developing your own vehicle builder to see what it does well and what it does poorly.
And I do think you should have a couple of kinetic weapons. Normal guns and railguns function completely differently, and should be represented as different systems entirely in the game. And you could also go the route of having both coilguns and railguns instead of picking one or the other. Although these 2 types of guns operate basically the same way, so I don't think much would be different between them other than looks and maybe a few minor stats.