If stock and custom modules could be differentiated between by the game engine, it would be really cool to allow a way of creating say, 5 custom modules for each category of module, perhaps even on a per-race basis.
When uploading a challenge, a player’s custom modules are included in the file. When downloading, the challenger gets access to all of the same modules. Better yet, have an additional ‘module exchange phase’ in a challenge, and after that both players have full access to one another’s custom modules.
These are obviously general ideas, and full of potential holes.
Ideally, perhaps the game could have been designed from the ground up, letting the players design all of their own modules, and balanced such that the tradeoffs involved in designing a given module type would make it difficult for any one player to get a definitive upper hand over potential opponents.
What I’m trying to get across is that, if players were able to self-design and readily share modules, within the context of the ‘official’ game (as opposed to running their own private module mods, but limited to their own computer), it might open up a whole new level of competition, and perhaps more importantly, variety.
What if there were a giant, public module database that player could both tap into, and contribute to, and based upon a given module’s parameters, it could be assigned an accurate cost to reflect its capabilities?
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