![]() For one, yes, they’re not as good as regular versions of those hulls, but more importantly, they use up the same amount of supplies while providing sub-par performance. These are useful as lower-tier enemies for the player to face, but aren’t very effective in the player’s hands. In the rest of the post, I’ll be calling those “d-mods” for short. “Degraded engines”, “compromised armor”, “glitched sensor array”, that sort of thing. Mechanically, these hulls have intrinsic “hull modifications” that give them hefty penalties in combat. Backstory-wise, these are the result of either flawed manufacturing or poorly-repaired battle damage. Many ships in the Sector have a (D) version of the hull, the “D” standing for “degraded” or “damaged”. Another problem is that it only comes into play in a “failed” state – a consolation prize after losing, and it’s unreliable at that. It’s a way to get some of the ships you’ve lost back, but you’re still likely to lose some of the (often more important) weapons they were carrying. So, if we can solve this here, that’d be all to the good.įinally, a mechanic that half the time I forget even exists – the chance for disabled friendly ships to be repaired after battle. It was meant as a “nice potential post-battle bonus”, but unfortunately also turned out to be “best way to get specific ships”, never mind that it’s still bad at that. Currently, boarding can be used for that, but it’s a frustrating experience (win battle, hope the dice roll comes up good, fail, reload, repeat many times) because it was never designed for that in the first place. Let’s say you really want a Hyperion – a souped-up, high-tech frigate with a teleporter. Then, there’s the issue of acquiring specific ships. It’d be great if the player could recover from those more easily. Making officers stronger defensively is part of that, but something will still inevitably go wrong, and ship losses will still happen. Now that we know what we’re doing – recovering disabled ships after battles – any related issues we can resolve while doing this are much easier to spot.įirst off – as also touched on in the previous post – we’d like to encourage the player to deploy allied ships into battles more. And there’s all these other fleets with ships in them! The general thrust of the solution is pretty clear – disable those ships, send over a prize crew and fix them up a bit, and we’re good to go. So, the player needs access to more ships, and right away. This could turn into something related to outposts and manufacturing in a hypothetical future, but those would be later-game mechanics in any case, and we’d like the Industry player to have something to do before that point. What I wanted from that was clear from the start – using lots of low-quality ships and being able to handle ship losses easily. Let’s look at “industry needs its own playstyle” as a design problem, and see what else can be taken care of as part of the solution. A single solution that brings multiple systems together is going to make the design both simpler and deeper. However, if this is done too often, the danger is you end up with features that are only loosely related to each other – and you end up with a lot of them. There’s always an option of making a change just to solve a particular problem, and sometimes it’s the right answer. ![]() This is of course common sense (two birds, one stone) but for game design specifically, it can get tricky. ![]() Ideally, you want to solve multiple problems with the same change. That’s what I’d like to talk about here, but as part of a larger set of changes. In the previous post about the skill overhaul, I mentioned a different playstyle enabled by the Industry aptitude.
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