End Game Variety

[mbp]

I love the variety that the different ships gives but I find that the variety dissipates as you upgrade the ships and get closer to the end of the game. The starting differences are not really enough to make a big difference to the end game.

I think it would be nice if all the different ships forced you to adopt a different play style throughout the game even at late stages in the game. This could be very hard to achieve in a balanced fashion but I think it might be doable. One way to achieve this would be to give significant bonuses to certain systems on each type ship. for example stealth ships could have a lower cool down on stealth or certain ships could have a bonus to certain types of weapon. The would need to be sufficient compensating disadvantages of course to balance things out.

[peke]

It's pretty common in traditional roguelikes to have very little variety in end game. For example, in Nethack you basicly had 1½ choices for pimped end game character; powerful hitters and powerful hitters who could cast spells. And before anyone goes there, doing non-pimping challenges resulted in much more variety. Anyways, I'm not a huge fan of ship-specific limitations as one game is very short, I feel it would give RNG way more power than it needs. I think better way would be encouraging players to not aim for optimal ship builds with global leaderboards, achievements and such.

Beat game without guns? 10x score!
Beat the game without killing anyone but the boss? 8x score!
Beat game without shields? 6x score!
Use only beams/missiles/bombs! 4x score!

etc.