It would be Gratuitously cool if there was a graphical snippet of what a particular weapon looks like in the weapon description pane.
I will go all out and reveal to all with only a bit of shame that it has sometimes taken me a long time to figure out what weapon is shooting during battles. For example, way back when I started playing, it took quite awhile for me to see that the hard-hitting cruiser laser was represented by those little dashes that looked much less significant than the big, colorful, solid-line beam weapons. quite awhile.
Another example is missiles–they come in various flavors and it took quite awhile to get to the point where I could watch a battle and say “You get used to it…I, I don’t even see the code. All I see is…blond, brunette, red-head…”
Yes, I know one can click on the weapon mount to see what it is–but that’s during the actual battle.
Even more Gratuitous if the graphical snipped were animated in the weapon info pane. Bwahahahahaha.
I could get behind this idea. Point of fact: it took me a long time to identify the different beams because I don’t always recognize the turrets on any race other than the Feds (I can always spot the Proton Beam, but that’s because it tells me what color it shoots in the weapon description). So a little “action shot” could be good. It could be like a mug shot for each weapon - one shot of just the turret, one shot of firing placed next to it. (“Turn to the right.”)
The other option (and of course I’m not saying better, just other) would be to change the physical appearance of the various missiles. But I would think this would be a ton of work. It would have the desired effect though.
Either that, or just allow the modules of enemy ships to be viewed like you can view them on your own ships. Its not like you can exploit it in any way as you can’t issue orders once the fight has begun, and you get the same information from after-battle statistics. It would just be nice to see things in action, including shield strength of each shield, how many spare parts the repair modules have, or the cooldowns of various weapons.
It would just be easier to understand watching it in real time rather than delving into charts and graphs later on.
But that takes away all the fun of challenges. The idea is to keep you guessing as to what the exact setup of your challenger’s ships are.
Maybe, if we keep things in line with MoO2, you could introduce a ‘battle scanner’ module that will allow you to see the stats you mention on enemy ships, but imo that takes away a bit of the game’s fun factor.
Easier isn’t always better. It’s more rewarding to guess right than to just peek
It will be a while before we see a graphical representation of space battles like in Battlestar Galactica, despite there not being any technical reason why we should’t already have that.
Do you mean a 3d presentation? There are a lot of reasons we can’t have that now, for example it would simply be too graphicly intense without sacrificing a lot of detail in the ships.
If you mean a 2d models on a table design, that was originally how gsb was going to look, but was dropped for the more realistic display.
