Subset Games Forum

It would be really awesome to be able to include a new mode in the game where you could create your own ship in a balanced way. Im not talking about a no-holds-barred mode where you can create the ultimate fighter and plow through the game but a mode that limits to how much you can start off in a ship so that the game is still balanced. For example, you recieve a set "total" of points to work with and weapons, outside bay doors, subsytems ex, will all have a cost that you have to work with. If you want a fully-upgraded cloaking and stealth weapons system you can do that but it would mean huge sacrifices in other areas like weapons, etc. This would be a very personalized experience, and could really break new ground in this game.

Sounds like it would require a hell of a lot of work to do that.

They had something like that - I think Justin said that's what the useless <bp> stuff was in weapon and system blueprints. Two main problems they ran into - an "optimal" design where anything else was just gimping yourself, and that it was apparently too easy to make a flawed ship - forgetting to install an o2 room or medbay, no airlocks, things like that. They eventually pulled that feature.

I think a lot of us would love to see it back in, but it would need some heavy tweaking to overcome these problems, if they can be overcome at all.

Kieve wrote:They had something like that - I think Justin said that's what the useless <bp> stuff was in weapon and system blueprints. Two main problems they ran into - an "optimal" design where anything else was just gimping yourself, and that it was apparently too easy to make a flawed ship - forgetting to install an o2 room or medbay, no airlocks, things like that. They eventually pulled that feature.

I think a lot of us would love to see it back in, but it would need some heavy tweaking to overcome these problems, if they can be overcome at all.

Fixing the forgetting to install a medbay wouldn't be too hard. They could just add a popup that says 'Your ship requires an O2 room!' or something.

DCChuckles wrote:Fixing the forgetting to install a medbay wouldn't be too hard. They could just add a popup that says 'Your ship requires an O2 room!' or something.

It'd be easy enough to simply require the player to add every basic system, have atleast 1 airlock, etc.
The real issue is having an optimized design that flies through the game easily, which will turn up in any customization scenario. A decent workaround is having mutually exclusive things, so you can make a really good ship, but not an unbeatable one that has everything (Ex. Artillery Beam and Cloak).
Having an airlock in every single room might seem a bit too useful also.

Kieve wrote:They had something like that - I think Justin said that's what the useless <bp> stuff was in weapon and system blueprints. Two main problems they ran into - an "optimal" design where anything else was just gimping yourself, and that it was apparently too easy to make a flawed ship - forgetting to install an o2 room or medbay, no airlocks, things like that. They eventually pulled that feature.

I think a lot of us would love to see it back in, but it would need some heavy tweaking to overcome these problems, if they can be overcome at all.

Of course they can overcome issues like that, they make far more complex modes in games than that. It would take a lot of work but it wouldnt be hard to figure out a proper design. First you construct the ship by choosing a template, you would not be able to create this.. It would just be a choice of choosing the outside look of the ship and the layout grid that would fit accordingly into the template you choose. After template, you construct the rooms, you would place where the teleporter, med bay, weapons etc. would go as if ship was fully upgraded. You get a minimum of four airlocks with additional ones costing points. After all that, than you move on to choosing what your ship begins with and this would be the real balancing act in the dev cycle. Choosing systems and weapons and which upgrades you want- all costing points and allowing you to specialize in one area at the sacrifice of another..