The Next Expansion

[Sunshine!]

Rather than adding in a giant pile of new ships with every expansion (which will eventually make the game impossibly huge to comprehend), add in some additional depth to the ship types we already have?  I know global upgrades have been rejected before, but I think it should seriously be considered.  For a decently steep upgrade cost (3000 or so), you can upgrade damage, speed, armor, or hitpoints by 10% or so (maybe some other metric for armor, since 30 armor usually doesn't make much difference?), or a special ability.  There's only one upgrade in each category to keep it simple and keep someone from making their basic fighters UUUUUUBER.  Another upgrade branch could be used for turrets, possibly one for command stations to give them access to exoshields or some such, possibly one for starships.  Rather than adding it all in to the Science Lab foldout, a new building could be added as an Upgrade Station, which would be a relatively cheap stationary building.  Man, what if we could upgrade harvesters to have tiny defense cannons that can destroy those annoying one or two minipods or etherjets that are flying around constantly picking off your harvesters and not letting you auto-rebuild?

Some examples of special abilities upgrades:
Basic Fighter: Increase armor piercing.
Bomber: Increase damage multipliers by 1.
Frigate: Decrease reload speed.
Chameleon: Allow "debris form" while moving, but with very long "recloak" time and doesn't function in short range to enemies (3000 range or so).
MLRS: Increase missile shots by 2.
Bulletproof fighter: Becomes immune to an additional ammo type (to be determined).
Tachyon Microfighter: Increases tachyon range.
Laser Gatling: Increase ship cap by 10%.
Autocannon Minipod: Increase armor damage.
Raptor: Radar dampening 10000 or so.
Infiltrator: Radar dampening 8000 or so to keep them from getting wasted by fortresses.

You'd have more differentiation between ships, and more ability to choose differentiation between ships; rather than upgrading your frigates to level 3, you could instead upgrade your fighters to have increased damage and increased armor piercing, but you end up with a bunch less ships in play which can hurt you in the long run if you spend too much knowledge on upgrades.  Not sure how you'd program in global upgrades like that though.

[x4000]

Still a 0% chance of global upgrades -- those are never coming, sorry.

[Ozymandiaz]

I tried to go back to FF8, recently.  The thing that prevented me from getting very far was the summons.  Summons being absolutely needed, repeatedly, and with long and absolutley un-skippable cutscenes.  It's a cool game, and I remember liking aspects of it really well ("The Man With The Machine Gun" is one of Uematsu's best), but I never did finish it for reasons like that.

Indeed, but what did bother me most was magic, and its use. I used it to boost my stats and such, but if I acutally used magic in battle, I would need to find a new soruce and draw-grind it again. Just boring, and not well thought out mechanic. Imo a step down form the materia system in FF7 that I actually liked.

[x4000]

I thought that FFX had one of the best battle systems all around for the series.  In terms of actual fun and strategy.  FFXII wasn't bad either, and certainly FFVII is a classic.

[Ozymandiaz]

Yeah, FFX was neat as well. FFXII had some interesting mechanincs. I liked how they dropped the transition, and added gambits for a lot of automation. Kind of like programming your chars. That makes it more interesting and lets you manully interupt only when need be and during boss battles.

[Invelios]

I really liked the battle system of FFXII, but I really didn't like the license system. It felt kinda weird that I had to find/buy my equipment, and then unlock a license to use it. Especially when I had to go through a bunch of licenses I didn't need to get to it. I'd like another games with FFXII's battle system, but without the license system. I don't have any of the consoles FFXIII was released on, so if it was like that then never mind. As for FFX, I kinda missed the Active Time Battle system in that game at first, and even stopped playing it for a while and said I didn't like it, but after watching an LP of the game I played it again and really liked it that time. The Sphere Grid was really cool IMO, except those few times where you where out of Ability orbs and couldn't move your character forward since you wanted the abilities and didn't want to waste levels backtracking.

[BobTheJanitor]

Rather than adding in a giant pile of new ships with every expansion (which will eventually make the game impossibly huge to comprehend)

I don't think it would. Even if there were thousands of ship types, they are all easy to comprehend by reading their descriptions, and you will only ever see 10-20 different types in a single game, depending on how long the game goes on. And since you can easily limit by ship type, you can always pare down the list if it seems like too much to deal with. And I trust that they won't start adding ships pointlessly. We'll never get a ship that's just like a bomber, except its projectiles are a different color. Everything will surely have a niche to fill and be able to distinguish itself in some way.

[Toeofdoom]

Rather than adding in a giant pile of new ships with every expansion (which will eventually make the game impossibly huge to comprehend)

I don't think it would. Even if there were thousands of ship types, they are all easy to comprehend by reading their descriptions, and you will only ever see 10-20 different types in a single game, depending on how long the game goes on. And since you can easily limit by ship type, you can always pare down the list if it seems like too much to deal with. And I trust that they won't start adding ships pointlessly. We'll never get a ship that's just like a bomber, except its projectiles are a different color. Everything will surely have a niche to fill and be able to distinguish itself in some way.

While it might be comprehensible, having new ships with a nasty ability go unnoticed is still a huge pain. I recently checked for gravity guardians and saw none so I ran some transports through the system, then realised the AI came up with new spire ship that does the same thing and lost about 800 ships.

Actually, is there any chance we could get "priority markers" for ship types? I'm playing 5.000 so zombie and gravity guardians are priority 1 targets as various types of guard posts would be, but it would also let you easily tell when a new type of ship shows up, without trawling through all the stats of everything in the system. An additional display such as highlighting priority 9s would be nice too, but not essential.

EDIT: To be clear I don't mean your ships would actually target it with higher priority - just like setting system priorities it would help you keep track of what you consider important/unimportant.

[Hearteater]

Still a 0% chance of global upgrades -- those are never coming, sorry.

I think I've read all the reasons why you don't want to do global upgrades, and I agree.  Which of course makes me want to think up some kind of global upgrade that would actually be a strong positive for the game .  So maybe:

Every ship type would have access to a single upgrade.  This is an inherent part of the ship type itself, not something a player can choose.  So maybe Fighters upgrade with +Armor.  Bombers with +Damage.  Whatever.  In each game, a player only gets to research 3 upgrades total.  So if I improve all of my triangle ships, I will never get the upgrades on my other fleet units, not to mention my starships, turrets, and whatever other units have upgrades (not every unit would have them).

Upgraded units could then display with a + after their mark number.  So II+ would be upgraded Mark II units.  Since the only upgrade Fighters can have is Armor (or whatever) their power level should still be fairly easy to judge on the fly in the middle of battle.  There are no tiers to upgrades; you either have it for a given ship type or you don't.  Upgrades could possibly be bought per-mark of ship type, but would still be limited to only 3 ship types have upgrades.  Call it Improved or Plus versions of a ship type.

Of course their are issues with such a system, probably the key one being redundancy: If a Fighter II+ is a better Fighter than a Fighter II, isn't it really like adding half-Marks?  I think the decision-making in picking which ships to get "half-marks" of might be worthwhile, but another option would be to make the improvements side-grades instead.  So a Fighter II+ isn't a better Fighter than a normal II, but maybe has some other use (like Immunity to Reclamation).  So it would be useful to counter specific enemies or to exploit their weaknesses, not just to have super Fighters.

Of course then that steps on the toes of new ship types.  Eh, it was worth a shot.

[Ranakastrasz]

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Lack_Of_Ship_Upgrades

The only upgrades that could be acceptable AT ALL considering this, would be ship cap upgrades, but those are kinda already implemented with having the higher tiers. need more bombers? Unlock tech 2!