GSB Expansion - Wishlist

As you may be aware, in the future there may be an expansion pack to Gratuitous Space Battles. So what would you like to see in an expansion?

Here’s my wishlist:

Battleship Class (Limit 1 per fleet?)
Corvette Class (As large fighters or a separate class of ship)
Larger single player component (Campaign? Basic planet conquest mode? Defend space station mode?)
Super Weapon Hardpoints (With Super weapons and super modules)
More Modules (Assortment of Bridges?)
Gratuitous Tournament mode

Battleships? Hell, yes. Battleship deployment limits, aside from cost? Hell, no. :slight_smile:

Many frigates are already sufficently feeble that it’s hard for me to see a way to shoehorn plausible corvette designs into the grey area between them and the fighters.

“Super” weapons, modules, and slots for same? Hell, yes.

More “standard” modules would be welcome.

Additional scenarios concerning the defense or the assault of a fixed position (planet, space station, a crippled friendly warship) would be very nice.

Defense of civilian shipping would be interesting. Imagine a GSB-style convoy battle…that would rock! Either as the attacker or the protector. :slight_smile:

I am really hungry for some form of “space terrain” as a maneuver and firepower obstacle. Some terrains should also offer partial (or total?) temporary concealment for warships. Said concealment might not have a direct effect on the battle, but the dramatic tension played out visually would be pretty cool to watch… Asteroids, dust clouds, small moons, jovian worlds with ring structures, close approach to a white-dwarf sun, fast comets with long tails which ships could hide on the other side of, etc. Perhaps a scenario where irregularly-timed solar flares erupt across the map, spewing fast-moving gusts of protons in the solar wind. These could sandblast shields with minor to medium damage per flare, and also cause limited disruption of fire-control systems for all units on both sides. For an exception, only units with a Target Booster installed can achieve partial immunity, with everyone else shooting blind (or nearly so)? You get the idea, I’m sure.

HELL YES TO WHAT ARCHDUKE AGREED WITH! :smiley: (What? I guess we have the same wishlist xD)

Do I have to remind people that the closest that we can get with that right now is my mod? You know, you should at least try the mod out, Hybrinoid said it was a great mod, and there will soon be:

3 dreadnoughts per race.
3 corvettes per race.
3 capital ships per race.
3 destroyer class ships per race.
1 battleship per race. (will basically be the flagship of the fleet, big macho, super tough.)
1 more cruiser per race.
1 more frigate per race.
1 more fighter per race.

That is 16 more ship hulls for each race!
I may include some actual new ship textures. (new looking ships!)

Next mod update will include:
The first mission of 4 different campaigns for single-player! (basically 4 different campaigns against the 4 different races!)
A jury-rigged conquer the galaxy campaign (Basically Your Homeworld - Point A - Point B - Point C - Point D - Point E - Enemy Homeworld. It is very linear.)

There will be a complete weapon module revamp made by BlcKnight, and I will include it into my mod.

This will truly be a gratuitous mod!

hm, you really want to spread the word, don’t you? xD

All of the above sound great, but really all I want is either a mission editor for community-provided missions, or more missions built into the game. This was the best gaming purchase I’ve made in years, and it was only $20. I’m not so generous as to buy a second copy for no reason, but would be happy to buy misison expansion packs - say $10 for another dozen quality scenarios?

Would like to see different sized weapon mounts, light medium or heavy. Also, some of the federation ships looks like they have something like missile tubes or spinal cannons, I take a guess that these features were either cut or reserved for expansion.

  1. I would like to see some game mechanics that introduce new strategies and goals in general.
  1. Yeah, maybe just expand the frigate class abilities to allow them to scale down or scale up a bit more as needed. Too many ship classes is not a good thing imho.
  1. Oh hell yeah! Even better if the players can build some of these missions from a template as well. Mini-campaigns that chain together a few of these missions would be good too.

  2. Without direct control I’m not sure how well space terrain and concealment will work though.

  3. +1 to the mission editor idea as well.

  4. I’m not sure about more modules for the sake of more modules though. I’d love some new weapons, but at the same time there’s broken weapons and modules like the Quantum Blaster and Cloaking Device that need fixing too. The number of useful modules is what counts.

Also, this thread would fit better in the suggestion forum. :wink:

One word: Lua

I want ship orders to be written in Lua so I can make new ones.
http://www.lua.org/

(~10,000 lines of C code for a fully embedded, 100% free scripting language)

ho hum…

Cool screenie.

As for terrain (planets, etc), given the scale of the ships, they’d be sort of like the backgrounds, really, sort of pointless.

As for convoys, etc, that has some merit. Instead of direct control, the ability to add some waypoints, or a target point that the ships aim for might be possible.

This might allow interesting battles like one side has to reach the “jump point” to leave the system (yeah, I’m a traveller goon), while the other is to try and wipe them out before. The orders might then have a priority for flying to the jump point vs maneuver for combat. "fighters might have to be set to cautious, and they RTB at a point where a ship with fighter bays gets within X distance of the jump point.

Well I thought to limit Battleships to 1 per fleet since it is a choice between:

  • Balanced Battleships with specific weaknesses. This further stretches out the need for fleet diversity or knowing the enemy fleet beforehand.

  • A powerful single Battleship/Flagship, with ‘bonus in a radius’ modules and very special and powerful modules/weapons.

To cover both, how about a designated flagship design that can be equipped with special modules?

Oh, nice picture Mr Cliff. Would that be a Battleship, prudently fiscally reserved for an upcoming expansion, by any chance?

Just a new cruiser I’m afraid :frowning:

I think that artificial limits like “1 per side” are silly. Cost should be the only concern. BBs can simply be costly—or not. The ability to set up class requirements in a given scenario is enough. So if you want to publish a scenario where for whatever reason each side has only 1 BB, so be it.

Even if the game doesn’t concern itself with the strategic situation across a galaxy, I think that some concept of the context is useful, as are tactical concerns other than smash everything. Since the game is about the fights, a context for fights can make them interesting.

Here’s a terrain idea. Say we have a background of a planet just like now. Have the ability to set a region on that background template (like positioning a ship) that is someplace on the ground to be bombarded, invaded, whatever. Then orders can exist for a ship to “bombard” a planetary target. In this case, there is nothing to see, the AI treats an invisible point on the map as a ground target. It is none the less a “ship” with armor, whatever, even some weapons, it’s just invisible. The new class is just like fighter/frigate/cruiser, except the AI is set to ignore it by default. If one side has invasion orders, they add the order, and ships will do that task.

Give the ground “ship” a huge value, and in order to win, the invaders will have to destroy it.

The scale of something like that would be weird. These ships engage each other at ranges of around a mile or so; there’s no way they could hit the surface of a planet.

Now, stationary space stations or floating asteroids as mission objectives? There’s an idea.

True. Simple solution.

Have the new ship class (“planetary base”) be such that only specialized weapons can attack it. Then add new weapons:

“Planetary bombardment ordnance,” “Planetary attack beam,” etc.

So the range down to the surface would be abstracted in, but it makes no difference since it cannot be used vs other ships.

um… what the hell is that?!

It looks like a pair of Imperial Death Stars with warp nacelles on the side…

I’d like a few ships to fill in between the major ship classes.

Destroyer - These would be really great, as the current Frigate is sometimes considered a little underpowered, and sometimes you want something more mobile than a Cruiser.

The following would be great, but I’m not sure how it would affect the game. Ultimately, I’ll leave the decision on the Devs if they wish to implement them or not.
Heavy/Battle Cruiser - Heavy Cruisers are beefed up Cruisers. Battle Cruisers are Heavy Cruisers minus the extra Armor (Health).
Battleship - Need I explain?
DN - Ditto.

Also, an option to disable ships above/below a certain size class so we can create Frigate/Destroyer wars.

Another suggestion:
Spinal Ships/Weapons - Essentially ships with a really big mount that faces forward, and allows it to carry weapons intended to be used by larger ships. This IMO will make it easier to specialize Frigates. The idea is that they will do better than average DPS against heavier ships, making them relatively cost effective, but obvious weakness being that they are ships built around a gun, they may have issues tracking lighter ships or bringing their weapons to bear on a flanking ship.

I’ve long considered spinal mounts, which is why I started doing the converging lasers thing, but the pre-requisite for it is to get firing arcs into the game, if only for spinal mount weapons. That involves some head-scratching and debugging and serious thought, and it is that which is holding up spinal mount weapons right now.