I myself lean more in Dazio's direction - in the sense that I envision separate strategic pages at the end of the project. These strategic pages discuss the important aspects of the game without going deeply into how to use individual ship-types:
- The ship-triangle. From which a majority of bonus-ships derive their balancing philosophies.
- Fleet compositions styles.
- Fleet combat styles.
- Wormhole defense. Containing subsections on minor-threat defense, wave defense and exo-defense.
- Raiding a planet
- Assaulting defenses
- If the project matures further, a ship-type breakdown and categorisation. That is, lists of ships that are damage-dealers, raiders,
These pages will list the ship-types that are particularly useful for a strategy.
And then what I would place on the ship page is:
- mention their key roles in a sentence or two. I would like a player to be able to derive their own strategies and counter-strategies from this.
- then include links to those strategy pages where relevant for whose who like to study more.
All links should be bi-directional (to be noted). The thing that I prefer not to happen is players learning cookie-cutting strategies and then stagnating. I would also not guide players into making a small list of bonus ship-types they use (thanks to the wiki) and stick to them, since they can do that all to readily on their own.
A visual schema would be:
First mile-stone: Individual Ship page <-> Specific strategies page.
Second mile-stone: Individual Ship page <-> Ship-type categorisation page <-> Specific strategies page.
= = =
What this misses is a lot of player experiences with certain ship-types. For that I would personally prefer some separate section, like a discuss page or links to the forum. Meaning my ideal wiki system looks like this at the end:
Individual Ship page <-> Ship-type categorisation page <-> Specific strategies page.
/'\ /'\
| |
\./ \./
Player experiences using this ship <-> Player strategies
The top-half contains objective content that we can usually agree on, and try to place the overall page in a semi-useful light. The stats can be maintained by Dazio's script, and will generally be in-keeping with the most up-to-date version of the game. Stuff like version 4.000 and pre-4.000 strategies which currently exist on the wiki should not be allowed to remain here, but be shunted to the section below. When a ship-rebalancing event occurs, we make a note here and tag it for future updates.
The bottom-half contains the sum of player and developer comments, which may be directly transcribed from the forums or linked straight into the forums. They are allowed to be out-of-date, and biased. We can freely include opinions like GUDare's "pieces of crap" collection (which, by the way, might include useful context such as what difficulty he plays at as there are certainly ship-types which stop being useful at higher difficulties). All players encouraged to participate in the wiki should submit their comments in the bottom-half, and one self-appointed unbiased judge can incorporate the community concensus into the top-half.