A big problem with the game I and others have noticed is how much of a pain it is to manage equipment. This is a new thread because I want to discuss my idea for a
specific solution to the problem, Aquohn's thread
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13836.0.html is for more general griping.
I think we need something like the "optimize" button in FF6, which finds the best equipment for a character.
I would take inspiration from Sid Meier's Civilization 4: Colonization [1] in this one. In case you're not familiar, Colonization is a Civilization-like game that takes place between the arrival of Europeans in the New World through the Revolutionary War. (If you're into games from the mid-90's, this is actually a modern remake of a DOS classic [2].) When you build a colony, you can put your colonists on the adjacent squares to produce different things. For example, coastal squares allow fishing, mountains produce ore or silver, and prairie can grow food or cotton. But managing all your colonists' positions in every one of your colonies is tedious for players, so the game provides a governor to help you by automatically positioning your colonists.
Part of the colony management screen is shown in (i). As you can see I've ordered food and cotton to be emphasized, while furs and tobacco are de-emphasized. The governor has decided to make two of my colonists fisherman (producing food via fishing in the upper right) and one colonist in the lower left to produce cotton (in the lower left). (The cotton guy looks different for an interesting reason which I won't go into.)
If I don't like the governor's decision for a colonist, I can override it by dragging him to a new square and selecting what I want him to do there. For example, say I drag-and-drop the bottom left colonist on the next square above. That square can produce any of four things, and the game prompts me which one I want him to work on, this prompt is shown in (ii). Afterwards, he appears with a "lock" icon, as in (iii). Any or all of your colonists can be locked, and that simply means you've manually positioned them where you want them, and the governor will not reassign them until and unless you unlock them.
Positioning colonists in pre-Revolutionary America, and positioning equipment in exos, are actually pretty similar when you think about it. You should be able to select what attributes you want to maximize. So maybe Bionic Dues should have something like this:
The new column to the left of each stat is that stat's relative importance to the optimizer, I'll call it the "optimizer multiplier." It's multiplied by the stat's current value to get the optimizer points from that stat. So this exo would have e.g. 1300 optimizer points from sensors and 1650 optimizer points from damage reduction. The optimizer multiplier is the same as the "deemphasized / neutral / emphasized" choice in Colonization, but using numbers instead of words gives it a more sci-fi feel.
The optimizer adds up the total optimizer points over all exos' stats, then tries to trade equipment from one exo to another, and from one slot type to another, and from the player's inventory to exo slots. The optimizer will only trade equipment in ways that result in a better optimizer point total than the current configuration. The optimizer also isn't allowed to move any equipment the player has manually locked. The optimizer tries a bunch of different trades at random (maybe a million or so, whatever you can do in a second) and gives you the best result it could find.
Hitting the "optimize" button kicks off the optimizer, it tries to find a better disposition for your unlocked equipment and comes up with a report like this after a second or so:
You can then either cancel or confirm the proposed equipment modifications. Of course it should have a way to hover over individual gear and see its stats.
Importantly, optimizer points don't directly affect the game mechanics in any way, they're just a reflection of how good the optimizer thinks a particular equipment configuration is. They shouldn't affect game balance because anything the optimizer does, players could do manually with enough patience. Players can still make strategic decisions about which attributes are important to which exos, by changing the multipliers. (Each exo should have its own multipliers, because e.g. stealth might be more important to exos that have close-range weapons.) And the player can always lock equipment in a slot, or even disable the optimizer entirely in settings, if the player actually enjoys micromanagement, or think the optimizer isn't good enough.
The equipment in this game is complicated enough, it's probably impossible for Arcen to program an optimizer that's always guaranteed to find the best solution [3]. The situation can be explained in-game by an excuse along the lines of "if the optimizer was any better, it would become sentient and attack us." And it actually encourages the player to remain involved in their exo's equipment decisions if they know the optimizer is good at what it does, but not perfect.
I think this idea automates enough to get rid of the tedious micro. But equipment isn't a black-box that randomly changes their stats -- the player can still see what's going on. It doesn't turn the player into a spectator either -- they'll still need to set the multipliers to something that agrees with their playstyle, or move equipment around manually.
[1]
http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/colonization/[2]
http://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_colonization[3] Because the best possible solution might involve moving item A from propulsion to shields, which doesn't change the exo's stats, but frees up a propulsion slot for item B. Or items C, D, and E might not be very good on their own, but they might all have bonuses that boost each other's stats enough to make them very powerful when combined. And power management is its own issue -- a reactor that provides a lot of power but no other bonuses might enable lots of power-gulping improvements that make up for a power slot.
