Weapon and Armor Variety - Rock, Paper, Scissors
I want to solve a problem and increase the design space for ships.
The main problem is that when you build a ship, you just slap as many gatling turrets as possible on your ship and you win as long as you have more. Gatling Turrets have the most effective application as they are pretty accurate and their bullets have a long range and short travel time compared to missiles. So as soon as you enter the firing arch of an enemy ship, anything active component within range will be shot out. Which although sounds correct, remember that with only one tool you'll eventrually discover the best way to use that tool and all other tools will be considered pointless.
The most fustrating part for me as a player is that I can't get within range of a large ship with a small ship without having my cockpit or all of my weapons destroyed. (I'm of course talking about a ship with more than a few turrets of course).
So as a first step, I'd recommend a Damage Resistance modifier that is assigned to a specific projectile. For example, you could give the fighter cockpit an 80% bullet resistance but a 0% missile resistance. Thus allowing you to stay in control of your ship as long as you dodge every missile volley. The same attribute can be applied to thusters and non-turret mounted weapons.
This would open up the ability for smaller ships to take on larger ships that don't have small ship support and encourage larger ships to have a balance of weapons or escorts. The idea being that, bullets are good for overall structure damage (your ship can still fall apart even if the components aren't destroyed by gun fire). But getting hit by the more dodgable missiles can take you out of the fight.
With what I've described above I'd be happy with just that as it solves my main concern. But using this resistance idea, we can expand into new choices. First, lets open up some space for a third weapon type. Reduce the range of missiles but increase their damage (Slow high damage anti-capital ship weapon). Then lower the range and accuracy for gatling turrets (Harder to hit ships with a small profile, but also harder to speficly hit its target component and nothing around it). Now with that we have a gap in the long range weapon category.
To fill that gap, I'd like to introduce everyone's favorite request: Lasers. But what I'd also like to have along side it is a new type of armor: Ceramic armor. Think light armor, but with a laser damage resistance of 80%. The idea is that you can place ceramic armor in the front of your ship and charge at the target until you get into gattling/missile range. (To avoid the same issue above, we could give all componets a base laser damage resistance as well, making it mostly only effective against light and heavy armor). This is of course one example but you could also think of components or systems you'd like to protect from long range fire.
This could also be expanded to making an armor for missiles, but I think heavy armor does a good job at that.
So in conclusion, the idea is to provide design space where different tools (weapons and armor) can have different match ups against each other besides the current "more gatling turrets" design being prefered. Also getting your cockpit destroyed right at the start of the battle feels bad.
Also note that I said 80% resistance, but I don't know what the actual number should be. Please feel free to suggest numbers, blocks or designs that would benifit from this idea.
I like this feedback
It's been almost 4 years since I posted this. Just wanted to update my idea a bit.
The new weapons in the game are great, not targeting cockpits right away is great. Now we just need some interesting choices for armor and combat will be good all around.
I think heavy armor is pretty good where it is.
What I'd like to see is a variant of light armor that acts like explosive reactive armor in that it takes very little damage from missiles but then acts like light armor in terms of weight and gunfire resistance. This would allow fighters to be able to protect themselves from missles and then it'll be ok to add in homing missiles (which would be very expensive resource wise).
Then if some sort of laser weapon set was added there could be an armor type to counter it, ablative armor or perhaps shields could be used as a counter to lasers and projective weapons could bypass shields.
So a possible ship design could be heavy armor on the nose for rail gun defense, explosive reactive armor on the sides for fighter/bomber missile protection, and a shield that is toggled on once within laser range but left off to save power.
An interesting design could be to have a special armor (alien armor) that is all around good but also light and can only be found by mining on the alien planet. That way there is a reason to go there but also rewards players for mining on a hostile planet.
It's been almost 4 years since I posted this. Just wanted to update my idea a bit.
The new weapons in the game are great, not targeting cockpits right away is great. Now we just need some interesting choices for armor and combat will be good all around.
I think heavy armor is pretty good where it is.
What I'd like to see is a variant of light armor that acts like explosive reactive armor in that it takes very little damage from missiles but then acts like light armor in terms of weight and gunfire resistance. This would allow fighters to be able to protect themselves from missles and then it'll be ok to add in homing missiles (which would be very expensive resource wise).
Then if some sort of laser weapon set was added there could be an armor type to counter it, ablative armor or perhaps shields could be used as a counter to lasers and projective weapons could bypass shields.
So a possible ship design could be heavy armor on the nose for rail gun defense, explosive reactive armor on the sides for fighter/bomber missile protection, and a shield that is toggled on once within laser range but left off to save power.
An interesting design could be to have a special armor (alien armor) that is all around good but also light and can only be found by mining on the alien planet. That way there is a reason to go there but also rewards players for mining on a hostile planet.
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