V1.18 brings us unlockable races and hulls via the honour point system.
I find this to be an excellent improvement to the game. No longer must the player complete the entire game in order to be Empire! It’s really excellent work and the scaling of the costs means that those small fleet, massive honour wins have suitably priced unlocks to absorb that extra honour. The casual player doesn’t need to unlock all races and hulls in order to be able to complete all the missions. Although the least skilled players have no method of endlessly increasing their fleet strength until they succeed. But at least now, even the weakest players have the ability to obtain any unlock that anyone else can obtain. They only need to save enough points. The mission structure doesn’t introduce game strategies in the explicit way that I would have liked (e.g. Enemy missile fleet on Hard or Expert, prior to the player obtaining point defense unlocks). But then, if I was making the campaign, I would be introducing the player to their first shield module on mission 3… The game such immense potential for a single player campaign. But I feel that is for an expansion at this stage.
So, what would I like to see in the future?
Perhaps more hulls should be locked, with a lower unlock price for each? Reduce the players’ initial options to allow a more gentle immersion into the game. Lower prices means more frequent choices over a nice new module or a nice new hull.
Honour caps. So players cannot get too much honour from any one mission.
The ability to assign specific unlocks to be unlocked on completing a specific mission at a specific difficulty. (Good for mod campaigns).
The ability to have an honour cost on the aforementioned unlocks and honour specific only to a single mission for buying those unlocks. (E.g. Score over 3000 honour over Normal,Hard,Expert on one mission to afford a Star Destroyer Ion Cannon that is only available to that mission).
Implementation of campaigns within the game. Consider the current missions as the main game campaign and provide a menu for selecting a new one.
Something needs to be done about mod missions affecting the race unlocks, assuming they still unlock when all hard or expert missions are completed.
Implementation of mission unlock control. (E.g. Complete mission 1 on normal unlocks missions 2 and 3. Completing mission 3 on hard unlocks 5. Completing mission 2 on normal unlocks 4, on hard 6 etc).
Implementation of mission descriptions or a briefing text. (E.g. The Battle of Endor. We are deploying your fleet into the Endor system. Intelligence reports that…) (E.g. Past tense: The Battle of Endor. The battle of Endor was a critical battle in the Rebel - Empire war that gripped the galaxy in…)
But the game can be released without this feature too, it’s not that critical.