Subset Games Forum

I have no programming experience or knowledge really but I had an idea the community could kick off.

Pirate ships, total conversion
These are just initial thoughts but I think it would be great fun.

Some of the changes would be simpler (not necessarily easy mind): Renaming races or factions in the text, nebulae to fog, asteroids belts to reefs. sounds, music and backgrounds to fit the mood.
Others need more thought

View is from the back of the ship. (cross section) rather than from the top down.

O2 becomes Flooding. A waterline lies at some level on the boat according to weight calculated of everything on board. (ammo, people.. even water that leaks in) if a breach happens below the waterline, the room fills with water and someone has to bail it out after fixing it (similar to how things are now but people have to work at the room to get air back in. no auto systems) or perhaps that would have to wait until after the battle.

Weapons systems become cannons:
rather than have many types of weapons in 4 slots. Different ships have different limits to the number of slots say. min 2. max 8
Cannons are activated and poke out of gun ports on different "floors" of the ship. Especially on bigger vessels. they can be damage while exposed and the open gun holes can let in water if the waterline rises to that level.

there are types of cannon shot. Grape/chain/normal/double/fuse. these might be modded from weapons that already do more damage to crew (grape: mod some bombs?), sails or mast , pierce the hull (mod the missiles with a fire or breach chance, or hull type weapons) and systems (bombs)

I'm guessing instead of just missiles and drone parts an ammo counter would be needed for each ammo type

Cannons fire like they do now in FTL.
Reload: Individual to each cannon. Triggered after firing. (even if retracted behind the gunport)
This bar only fills when a cannon is manned (extra crew manning the gun and their experience reduce this. more complicated selections of shot take more time to load than others)

Engines become Sails: instead of dodge chance how about this.
Have 2 cool-down timers. reload was already mentioned but have one that is applied to the ship as a whole, ships need to move into position.
let's say both ships have 5 sail (engine) and cannons are completely reloaded.
As the volley starts the cannons in slot 1 can fire, then slot 2 a second later etc. of course you can wait 4 seconds and fire all at once.

If your ship had fewer sails in this example you would forfeit one cannon per sail missing.
(this part might need more complex maths. maybe only the square root of the difference rounded down or something)

Shields: Pretty much the same. but it represents light damage that can be quickly fixed up with tar if you have tar and someone assigned to repairs.

Piloting: higher piloting gives initiative. or remains as an evasion chance. or adds to the bonus from the sails.

doors: Crew can open a door, allowing water in to put out fires (the water allowed on also has weight meaning with enough weight the ship can just sink (insta death). They can then bail out that water.

teleport: grappling hooks for boarding actions

drones: N/A
Stealth N/A

crew: repairs combat manning and xp all work similarly to normal FTL.
Races could be voodoo fantasy style, human, undead, etc or just different nationalities and/or ethnicities. Perhaps with a semi-randomised professional background. that give a bonus to different things like HP for a soldier)

All of these are just initial ideas remember. If anything has been left out or unclearly explained (probably) ask away. add anything you want, take out things. I'm not sure about the professions system. I'm sure that we can do this as a community.

If you want to play pirates, why not just play Sid Meier's Pirates! and get it good? Why put all this extra effort of transforming a space game into a pirates game when there's one that already does a better job at it?

For the same reasons that FTL and Nexus: the Jupiter incident can both exist. They provide a different experience.

This would be an experience far more focused on ship to ship combat. No trade goods or exploration on foot, sword fighting (except the as it is in FTL) romance etc.
This experience would be a shorter faster, far more difficult than Pirates!, meaning most decisions can be game changers and take the feel of the mechanics of FTL, an older-school 2D affair. And I don't remember water level and fire being an issue in that game but it's been many years. So I don't think the same audience applies

Staying too close to FTL wouldn't work. I agree there's something to be said for changing it until it's different enough to work as a naval battle. If it ends up being like SM's Pirates! then there's no point, true. I think it would play differently though. If it turns out that people would definitely prefer to romance governors daughters and dance etc then. true, there is no point recreating mechanics for that... It could be a random event though.

If it doesn't appeal to people, it won't happen. I understand there's a lot of effort involved but I wanted to make the suggestions

Yea,it does sound more like old Pirates! Gold than the new one. But still, most of this falls out of scope of changable things; and it's heavy on the art part.

The game just isn't that mod-friendly. We can't change any of the mechanics really. We can't even change tooltips, so even the "Engines to Sails" isn't possible. You will level up engines which will say they give dodge.

P.S. I modded Nexus: TJI too. I heard there's a sequel coming out. Can't wait to dig into it too

altho I see Nexus:TJI as a RPG where characters just look like ships. Positioning was a factor in that game, unlike in FTL or your proposed pirates mod.

Oh well. Nevermind. I never got round to old pirates, I'll have to look that up.

Positioning was something I did think about and thought maybe with higher sails you got a few seconds advance on firing.

Does your mod of TJI have an entry on moddb or something like that?