3. What IS a planet controller? Right now those are just "mini kings," really, and that's kinda boring. Badger has been pointing out that they need to be visually larger in order to be commensurate with their importance, and that does make sense. But we can't really make something larger without knowing what the heck it is. Is it a space elevator? Something that controls gravity in the favor of the owner? I don't really know. My thought, at the moment, is that perhaps these should be fortresses.
I think we're going to need fortresses to be able to travel between planets, as that's the most viable idea I've seen so far for "something to avoid the need to bring the fleet back to deal with a wave that was unexpectedly rough".
Another unit could be used, of course, but I think we'd be better off with one of these approaches:
1) Stick with controllers as the equivalent of AIWC command stations. Weak objectives that mostly just serve as the "flag" you plant on the planet.
- They could be renamed to Command Node or even Command Station, if that's helpful; in general we want a name that fits for the "terrain" objects that cannot be destroyed (only killed and claimed).
- Perhaps we make them upgradeable like AIWC's, which would make them more interesting.
or
2) Get rid of controllers, and make it so that planet ownership is taken away by killing all the Guard Posts (currently Power Distribution Nodes; maybe a better name would be "Guard Nodes" or "Command Nodes" or... heh, this just came to mind... "Control Nodes") and gained by claiming them.
- Due to the way the engine is written the controller entities will still need to exist, but they can be invisible, untargetable, off in the middle of nowhere, etc.
- Taking planets would take longer, which may be an issue for cases where the player can really just steamroll the planet, but possibly FRD would suffice for that.
- We'd also need to decide if the controller's current functions of being able to repair/claim anything else on the planet need to be retained in some way.
4. Is there a conceptual problem with having turrets all be tied to a single fleet ship?
It's a big move away from AIWC in that you'd only have 3 (+1 for the chosen bonus type) guaranteed turret types, and for the rest you'd just hope that you got the bonus types you wanted. The forced variety is easier to work around on offense, but turtles like knowing which tools are in their potential toolbox. This would also be more pronounced if some fleet ships have poor turret-variants.
It also wouldn't really achieve your goal of "the player should never need to spend science on non-offensive defense stuff" because the player would still have tractors, tachyons, gravity, and probably minefields and fortresses to research/upgrade.
6. As far as having more techs go, I do agree that I like the idea of that. I really really love the style of techs that a game like The Last Federation or Civ has. An actual tree, and affecting stats, and all that jazz. We had the model for that for both TLF and SBR, and my understanding is that that made things untenably slow in terms of calculating "how strong are my shots" and things of that nature, though.
- Trying to think outside of the box, though, I wonder if we had a more TLF-like "list tech tree with prerequisites built in" that is thematically-oriented rather than tied to specific ships, if that would be better. A given tech might give you some sort of bonus system to your Ark that does XYZ, plus it unlocks mark II of ships A, B, and C if you have them. With all the talk of making techs more interesting/varied, my thoughts immediately head in this direction. This is probably Way Out Of Scope (tm), but if a simple implementation is possible in the engine, the GUI should be easy enough.
I think we need to stick close to how AIWC did the techs; anything else is a pretty big upheaval at this point.
The only exception in what I've been thinking lately is the Ark-upgrade tree, since it would have forking paths and whatnot. That's probably too far. But what you said about needing another vector of competition, and the responses largely having to do with hacking, points in a good direction for that: have Ark-upgrades happen through hacking. So you have to expose yourself to danger to "level-up", so to speak. But details on that don't really fit in this thread.
That would be for the "change the Ark's core stats" stuff (by replacing the Ark's entity type). I'd still like to have the turret and fleet ship techs both contribute to the guns/drones of the Ark (once the Ark is past the first few core-upgrades), and for the the turret techs to contribute to the fortress and the fleet ship techs to contribute to the guard-post-drones. But none of this by way of a "bonus system" or "variants" or whatever: it just literally bolts on the same guns the turrets use, or gives drones exactly like that fleet ship (just with an icon in the drone style, for clarity).
That would be similar to how different turret techs in AIWC contributed to the Enclave Starship's drones; though that was less intuitive due to the crossover from immobile to mobile.
But even that kind of crossover may be too much at this stage. I think we may find it sufficient just to fill out the defensive toolbox with more of the stuff from AIWC (fortresses, minefields) and switch power-distribution-nodes over to guard posts.
