Thanks for writing all this! It's definitely a helpful set of insights.
One thing I'll say is that right now you're seeing about half of the initial push into the Age of Discovery. There's a lot of stuff where I share your frustrations with where things are and where they have been. I haven't been inspired to do more than prod at it, myself, either. I haven't had any sense of discovery or scale (in sense of type of things I might encounter, not number of units, which is fine), which is what this new section is all about.
A change from the past is that I'm no longer concerned about area-of-effect things like munitions boosters. I have a new idea for how to draw those, and to show which units have those bonuses at any given time. The actual calculation of who is in bonus range is something that is a lot easier to do now, because Keith has everything so wonderfully segmented on the background threads. So performance should be something this laughs at, which is good.
I'm still not interested in a ton of shield bearers for the simple fact that it looks incredibly ugly (and the forcefield drawing is performance-intensive, too). But things that have a similar effect will definitely be something I want to have in there, now.
When it comes to all the hull bonuses and whatnot, I'm planning on stripping all that away really really soon. Next couple of days. The first game got really clogged up with a lot of "this does something SUPER specific, and these other guys have like 10 different immunities and bonuses to read through." It was all very multiplier-sy. In a very... non-organic sense, I suppose I'll say.
I'm not even sure we'll have hull types at all, coming up soon, to be frank. I'm still on the fence on that.
Instead, there are things that I'm focusing on that are individual stats on a ship: general hull thickness, engine armor, personal shields/deflectors/whatever for each ship as in TLF, and a few other stats. These things take the place of all those crazy multipliers and immunities that the other game had to do, and make it way more organic instead.
With something like snipers, as one example, they'll do a ton of damage to the personal shields, but less to hulls. So they're for softening up targets more than anything else. Fighters are going to be getting a rename, and will have tougher hulls as well as a new slowing effect on their shots so that you can kind of trap enemies with them. Bombers will hit through personal shields without damaging them at all, but also not being blocked by them. Structures will in general have high shielding, but low hull health, and THAT'S why bombers will be good against them -- not because bombers have an arbitrary bonus against the structure hull type.
I plan on bringing in a variety of other abilities for ships, too. Things that are boosting their neighbors -- this would be starship-level only, and guard posts on the AI side -- and things that get bonuses for shooting from further away from the center of the gravity well, things that have the implosion ability that does more damage to high-energy-consuming targets. Things that hit with plasma charges that actually slow the firing rate of targets they hit. Compression damage that absolutely crumples thinner hulls, but doesn't do as much against other types. Etc.
My goal is that instead of reading dozens of immunities and weaknesses on a TARGET ship, there's just a half-dozen or so constant stats that are always there. Then on a given attacker, they have one or two particular strengths (I crush thin-hulled ships, or shoot through personal shields, or both, or whatever). So it's something where you can look at the attacker and know what is going on with less text being thrown at you, and look at a target and understand what is happening based on one set of stats that have a lot of implications per stat rather than looking at a ton of flags that each do one thing.
With that sort of thing, plus I'm sure adding more abilities and such as we head towards and into EA, I think that this will be just as rich or richer of a strategic experience as the first game, but vastly easier to understand. Part of the problem with the first game was you had to know too many things to know anything. Here, if I look at a ship and see that it does extra compression damage against hulls that are 10mm thick or thinner than that, then I just glance at the targets and see which ones are most ripe for being hit with it. Boom, I now understand that one part of the game without requiring any extra context. In the first game, I might have a ship of my own that says it has like 12 different immunities, and as a new player I would think... what do I do with this ship, then? It's immune to all these things, but what has those things? Should I be cross-referencing that now? Etc.
Obviously you'll still have those "what do I do with these ships" moments here, and that's a good thing, but it shouldn't feel like you need to learn an encyclopedia's worth of info in order to get there. Chess can be explained to someone pretty fast, but the implications of what all those pieces do is something that takes a long time to fully pick up. I'm going more for that feel here.
This also plays into the procedural ships. For most of the fleetships and starships, and all of the guardians and guard posts, I'm going to be having those be so heavily procedural that you're never running into the same ones in two different campaigns, and thus have to figure out how best to use those ships in the context of the game you're in. What is the AI using over here, some of which you've never seen before even if you've played 100 hours, and what do you have available to you this time, again some of which you've never seen even after 100 hours. That way that "figure out how to use a given ship line" experience is part of it for everyone in every game, versus just something for newbies and other people fall back on their tried-and-true favorites.
Things like EtherJet Tractors and Parasites won't be making a return, but instead will be showing up as all sorts of other ships. You might be running into a Gravitic Raid Starship that you get to use, which bends space around itself and goes super fast and so on. Or you have Reinforced Tachyon Space Tanks, which are slowish but super tough space tanks with the EtherJet-Tractor-style tractor beams. How do you deal with that, either playing with or against those? Etc.
That's part of what interests me about playing, and what has me excited about the things coming up. It's why I called this the Era of Discovery, because the idea is that there will be more things for all of us to discover in every campaign, and thus to feel excited about exploring and exploiting.
Regarding the spire, neinzul, and zenith, those are just out of scope for the game right now, in the main. There are spire ships that are third party factions, and you can get a couple of spire ships by capturing them like you do the zenith golems. But none of the fleetships or starships are going to be of alien origin pre-1.0 in this game. There's just only so much room in the scope. That is something I want to get to in expansions and post-release content, but that's a job for another day.
Oh, and to your question about tooltips, my intent is that they get more explicit, while still being brief because of the new way things will be working. So you can see the exact stats, but only so many stats are relevant on any given ship. You don't have to worry about engine health on EVERY ship, just on the engine armor, probably. And for the engine damage, you'll likely see that as more of a "how long does this disable engines on the target at baseline engine armor." Rather than it being something where the engines get permanently damaged only after a lot of shooting, it's more tactically interesting to have them get immediately disabled but not forever, I think. It keeps the number of stats down, too -- engine damage is just one of many mechanics, and shouldn't have so much interface room all on its own. Based on engine armor levels, other mechanics than just engine damage should be possible for us to think up, too.
And... I have a long list of other things I want to get done in this same sort of vein for ships and structures. I want that feeling back, personally, of it being this big unknown universe where I don't know what's waiting for me or what what's waiting for me can do to me. I want the thrill of finding brand new units for the first time.
Hopefully this gets both of us over the hump of just playing it to test it out.
