1. When a module builds, it tries to add itself to the control group of the parent starship, like any other builder, but the mod isn't actually selected when you take the control group - although it appears in the sidebar summary
Ah, thanks hadn't thought of that case, I'll just put in so that constructor-passes-on-control-group (and movement, etc) only fires on non-modules.
2. If you select a module and then zoom in or out, the module deselects
It's set up to not render or allow selection of modules from far zoom since the icons would get pretty crowded and you really should be able to do what you want on a large scale without caring that some ships have modules. Still, if you select a module, zoom out, right click a target it should wind up issuing the attack order to that specific module (it may not look selected, but it is, or at least was when I tested it).
3. If you select multiple Riot Starships, only the lowest number of hardpoints of any of them available is displayed in the build options
That was very deliberate on my part, though clicking on, say, the RFG build item will queue an RFG for all ships capable of building them. If y'all want it to display the highest number of possible construction instead I can do that.
4. EXPLOIT - put a Cloaker Starship next to a Riot Starship. Put the Riot Starship in low-power mode, or move it far enough away that it doesn't have any targets in range. The main starship unit remains cloaked, so the AI only targets the modules, which you can rebuild as much as you want.
Ah, yes, will need to have module doing something non-cloakable apply that to the parent ship (and vice versa), thanks for catching that.
5. Semi-exploit - Put 2 Forcefield modules on a Riot Starship. When either one of them starts to get damaged to red, scrap it and order the Riot Starship to build a new one - it's like a self-repair feature.
Yea, I'm not sure I see that as a problem, as rebuilding-in-combat is part of the idea (thinking of making it automatically rebuild a module on its destruction), but it should be a slow enough rebuilding that it shouldn't provide an excessive advantage.
6. Balance issue - the Forcefield Module takes damage like a forcefield, meaning that it protects the Riot Starship from what would normally be its natural enemies. e.g. Dreadnoughts normally chew up other starships, but they hit the forcefield instead, doing minimal damage.
Yes, and on the other hand the ff dies REALLY fast to anti-ff stuff since it has less than half a million hp compared to 9 million for a normal ff 1. I'm thinking I may need to split out the ship-mounted forcefields into a separate type with different rules and damage modifiers, because I don't want to give it ridiculous hp but I don't want bombers to render them useless. Lots of balancing to do there.
7. Modules probably should be immune to attack boosts
Maybe, but I don't think that's necessary with the reduction in the intensity of attack boosting. 400% boost would be too much, but 40% or 70% (early in the game, at least) isn't that big a deal. Certain modules will probably have to be made non-boostable, or have a low boost-percent cap.
The modularity is fun , but I actually don't think it's a natural fit for just the Riot Starship
Yea, I just had the module idea bouncing around and the Riot was the next ship in the queue thanks to the DLC poll, and people's ideas for the ship weapon were different, so it was a target of opportunity. Still, I think it fits ok because the Riot is intended to deal with fairly large numbers of small troublemakers so it makes sense to have a number of smaller guns.
- you're basically choosing between slightly different flavors of Riot Starship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm betting most people will get a favorite load-out and just always use that rather than really having a tactical choice.
That all depends on the balance of the modules, I think there is certainly the possibility that you will want different loadouts for different situations (system patrol vs. attack support, etc). As it is the laser and the machine gun are very different in which ships they are most effective against, though it may be that the laser is just better due to shield penetration (though it costs more, but probably not enough more).
It would be cool if modules were something you researched separately,
Yes, I'm planning on researchable modules; maybe the forcefield generator and/or tazer would cost 50-100 knowledge or something, and/or have higher mark versions of each module that would be available even for the mkI riot. Want to avoid the "it costs knowledge so I'll never ever buy/use it" syndrome though. There are a lot of possibilities
and then starships in general had slots for putting them in
The idea of modularizing the other starships certainly comes to mind, but it would need to be done with care to avoid recklessly changing a pretty large part of the game that's been around since forever. But I think each line of starships having a certain set of available add-ons to specialize them (so Leech Starships don't get the same available modules as Fleet Starships) could be interesting, and for one thing might help with the munitions/support boosting of fleet starships: allow them to mount a munitions boosting module, or an extra big gun, or whatever to make it a tradeoff and also make the munitions booster easier to target and blow up (unless you covered it with a forcefield module, etc, etc)... but one day at a time.
But that's more the kind of big feature that goes in an expansion. Hint hint
Yea, I had thought to hang on to the modular ship idea for the expansion but Chris said "well, if it is done we may as well release it" and "but, we can do more of that sort of thing with the expansion". So we'll see; I imagine that if people ask for more of this stuff in the DLC poll that they'll get more of it, but we may make more of a serious effort in the expansion. But first we need to sort out bugs, how to make the interface for it decent, get the behaviors polished, etc.
Thanks for the feedback
Keith