Alliance fighters need more module slots, if they only have 3 slots they can’t make use of their armour bonus as all the slots are used up for engine, weapon and generator. Alternatively give all alliance ships natural armour so that they don’t need to equip extra.
I want to make more suggestions and can’t be bothered to make a new thread so:
(Some of these suggestions are more serious than others but I’d like to see most of them in the game)
I want to suggest a new type of missile / module that allows missiles to auto acquire new targets should their current target be destroyed
Fighter cloak, think stealth bombers, gives bombers a free hit before they get shot down.
Extendible shields, have a new type of shield or module that is capable of extending a ship’s shield to other individual ships, boosting their shield strength or simply have a larger shield that covers other ships around it. (Having a larger shield area might also mean that more fighters or even enemy frigates can get in under them.
Similarly have a module that is capable of sending repair drones to adjacent ships to help repair them.
Life steal weapon, a weapon designed to steal shield strength from an enemy to replenish your ship’s shield.
Linking weapons, a laser or lightning based weapon that can link fire-power from nearby friendly ships to make your beam more powerful. Think the prism towers from red alert. Have a diminishing return on additional links.
Chain lightning weapon that bounces off enemy ships hitting several of them. Rather than have an accuracy system on it you can make the damage vary over a large range.
Missile jamming ECM is awesome but how about a race specific module that hacks the guidance / friend or foe system on a missile to make it fly back into enemy ships. Put some kind of chance to succeed or a long reload on it.
Scrambler missile that does no damage but slows down all the functions of a ship so that armour gets repaired slower and shields recharge slower and weapons reload slower etc.
Radar jammer, this module makes ships in the immediate area harder to hit, you can put a cap on the effect so that you can’t stack jammers in an area. Have a cool down on it so that it’s not always on.
Power surge bomb, designed to overload the generators of a ship so that they produce less energy for a while. For ships that have very little extra energy in their designs this would be devastating, not so much for ships with a little surplus. Maybe reinforced generators aren’t affected cos of their surge protectors.
Charge Blaster, a slow firing weapon that gets energy from shots fired by the enemy. Think Megaman’s blaster only it absorbs energy weapons fired at it while it’s charging.
A fighter cloak would be really useful for my torpedo bombers. They’re so slow that they often get shot down before even getting near to the bad guys (well, except for the bunch with two engines anyway…).
I’d like to see a corvett, a fighter with the same wepons/generators avalable but more slots, 3-4 wepons and 5-6 others and speeds posible better than a frigate but slower than a fighter in squads of 8.
I agree that fighters need more viable options. Right now, they either have all engines and rockets, or are slow as hell with lasers.
On the other hand, they are already very dangerous when used right, so they don’t need to be more dangerous as such, just more varied and fun to design.
Down the road, I’d like to maybe see a few more options for hull sizes. I’m tired of the standard tiny-medium-massive three size system that almost all space combat games seem to use. I’d like to see something a bit closer to the variation in real naval combat. It wouldn’t be difficult, since this game is built around a solid shipbuilding foundation of awesome.
Fighters would be a little smaller than they are now, but with more default power. You lose a slot, but don’t need a reactor for anything but a slow gunship or a crazy fast fighter. Also, options other than fast with rockets and slow with lasers would be a nice bonus. Maybe a laser weapon that carries energy like ammo, so that it doesn’t draw power? Give it zero shield penetration and almost no armour penetration, so that it’s only useful against other fighters.
Then, make one or two small ships per race between fighters and frigates – something like the Rebel Loki – with more default power and maybe a default crew, but armed with frigate weapons. Call them Corvettes. Maybe just give them a subset of frigate options so that you can’t make them into cheap long range guns or add power or crew past the defaults.
Frigates would be about the same as they are now, only maybe with better crew modules so that it didn’t take a Crew II and a Micro for almost every design. Call the largest hull in each race a Destroyer, just for fun – like the way the Rebel Atlantis is called a Bomber.
Cruisers would stay exactly the same, but the smallest hull in each race would be a Light Cruiser, the middle two Heavy Cruisers, and the largest a Battlecruiser. It would add flavour and let players see the relative size of each hull at a glance.
Then maybe, just maybe, add Battleships to the game. Or not.
You could mod almost all of that yourself, although the Corvettes would need to be done using some cunning ploys with fighters and hull bonuses, I think.