First off, sorry if any of these are mentioned before, I’m sure some have.
A couple module ideas I had… I have a cheap cruiser design I use when there’s a lot of fighters involved, that basically has some shielding, and a fighter bay, and I just have it hang back. When I was getting frustrated by running out of repair material in my front line ships and there was a little radio message asking for a resupply, I got to thinking. What if there was a resupply module? It would hold a bunch of supplies, and if a ship got low it would send out a fighter sized craft to said ship with supplies on it. This ship could of course be destroyed, but it would be heavily armored. Also, you could have supply storage modules on ships. So if my repair module repairs things fast enough for my taste, but runs out, I don’t have to spring for a whole second repair module, just some extra supplies.
I think it would be pretty neat to have a “mothership” class. I saw a similar idea mentioned for deploying the admirals ship. It would essentially be a super cruiser, very slow, lots of hull integrity bonus, tons of slots, etc. The only downside I could see this having is that one could load it up with a ton of fast charging shields, throw in a couple weapons, and have a near unbeatable ship, so perhaps a limit to the number of shield and armor modules would be in order. Also, as I mentioned earlier, if battles where I employ a lot of fighters, I have a cruiser that hangs back and just has some shields and a fighter bay on it, so the mothership could take over that role as well. Could also throw a couple of those resupply modules on it!
I saw the idea for having 2 player on one computer battles, I think that’s a fantastic idea.
I would also really enjoy a map creator, where you set the price and pilot limit, as well as map size and special attributes (no fighters, etc). I would just love to have a massive price limit and have like, 500 cruiser battles.
A super weapon of sorts would be fun as well. Something with a medium range, and insane shield/armor penetration as well as damage. Obviously there would have to be a drawback, make it weigh a lot, require a lot of crew, or lots of energy, basically make it so if you have it on a cruiser, you have to sacrifice another weapon slot to accommodate its needs. It would have a slow tracking speed, fire rate, etc as well. The upside would be a weapon that you could expect to take down a fairly well shielded ships protection in one shot. A nuclear missile launcher would be interesting. Something that is fairly slow moving, but is fired into a group of ships for lots of damage to all the ships in the area.
As for the actual battles, these have both been suggested before, but I’d like to throw my support behind being able to zoom out more and something faster than 4x simulation speed. I know people say that it means older computers would have issues, but that’s as simple as an options setting, it seems. “Enable wide zoom, high performance PC’s only” etc.
I would absolutely love some live online play. I know it’s a lot to add, but I would not have a problem dishing out some money for an expansion pack that had that in it. Even if it was the only thing the expansion pack did!
Since the game has a tendency to declare you the victor shortly before you’ve actually blown every last enemy ship to smithereens (I’ve had it end with as many as 3 enemy cruisers and a frigate left) I would really like an option to watch my ships blown every last enemy to bits (since that’s what this game is all about!) before exiting the battlefield. I know you can just ignore the little dialouge box, but I’d like an option to make it go away completely.
An issue I had in one mission (which one it was escapes me now) but there were a bunch of enemy ships loaded with missiles that continued to tear through my fleets, while my ships happily engaged other targets. I of course told them to engage the specific ship type, but they got sidetracked by other ships a lot. I added retaliate, but these enemies would group together and attack one of my ships at a time, and what I needed was ALL my ships to attack them. I’m not sure of the best way to fix this, maybe an “attack ships that are doing the most damage or have the most kills” command?
I would like to be able to see enemy shield/armor/hull integrity status. Since I can’t control the ships during the fight, I don’t see why being able to see this would give me an unfair advantage.
Also, a game-play vs realism point, and in this case I land on the side of game-play, but I still want to point it out… if fighters can fly inside enemy shields, why can’t missiles?
Does anyone else get tired of hearing this compared to tower defense games? I mean, sure, it’s JUST like tower defense. Except the towers move. And you custom build them. And you can give them lots of different orders. And you can place them where ever. And they don’t shoot creeps trying to get from one side of the map to the other, they shoot other towers that are trying to destroy your towers.
Lastly, thank you Cliff Harris for making a wonderful game, and double thanks for taking the time to read our suggestions. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, something those big mainstream video games don’t do.
I’m sure I’ll think of more, so I’ll edit this as I do… only been playing a couple days!
