One thing I was thinking about… if it’s possible to limit the number of an item that can be fielded.
For example, armor or shields or engines may be unlimited but you can only have, 20 plasma launchers of any type or 20 missile launchers of any type, etc. Ideally it would show the limits on the fleet screen and you can see it tick down as you add ships, to make it intuitive.
One of the things that I see limiting the fun of the game is that Challenge fleets are almost always one type of spam or another, and the counter is to spam it with the particular counter to that spam. But posting that fleet is fairly useless, since it’s so specific.
For example,
There’s one highly rated challenge that has basically a fleet of fast frigates/cruisers with short range weapons that basically drive up into you and blast you to bits from under your guns. The solution I found was to build a fleet of ships with high armor – he used so many of the same weapon type that his ability to beat high armor ships was pretty limited.
But I don’t see much point in posting the fleet I used to win, since the first missile spammer or laser spammer would easily beat it. It’s feeling a bit too rock-paper-scissors. Like a game of “what’s your one weakness, okay, I’ll build nothing but that”.
Perhaps a little forced diversity is called for.
Alternatively, what about an “Adaptive Shield”? A mediocre shield, but one which is completely immune to any attack that is identical to it’s previous attack. e.g., you get hit by [size=110]missile[/size]-missile-missile-missile-[size=110]laser[/size]-[size=110]missile[/size]-missile-missile-missile-[size=110]laser[/size]-missile-missile…
Only the bold ones don’t match the previous hit, so only they do damage. Could even say that if the next hit is completely identical (same weapon model) then the damage is ignored. If the hit is similar (a different type of missile, but still a missile) then it counts but at greatly reduced damage.
Just a thought.