Individual vessel upgrades

posted on March 3rd, 2011, 3:57 pm

An idea i had in the restore special energy topic which i think deserves its own topic:

E.g. a ship (let's take an Intrepid as example) could opt to increase shield strength through an upgrade although that upgrade would take time for each vessel and decrease the fire-power from the vessel.

Or a vessel could upgrade its weapons at the cost of weaker shields or lowered speed.

Upgrade toward higher speed, but damage to structural integrity as a result.

But individual upgrades are probably worth a topic on their own.

Obviously this would need work for balance, but it could reflect the players preferred game style.

posted on March 3rd, 2011, 4:44 pm

I think it would be nice if Feds got refits, but would have to have the ship go into a yard to get them (Roms already have the anywhere refits.)
I don't think we'll see refits for changing stat distribution (Intrepids need all the shields and speed they can get later in the game) really.

posted on March 4th, 2011, 1:38 am

From the standpoint that I like to modify my game a lot, I hesitate at the idea of seeing several more variations of EVERY ship in the game when there are already over 9000 odf's...

On the other hand, I was thinking about trying something like this limited to certain ships - maybe just the larger ships that would have lots of excess power to shift around.  It also comes to mind, though, that the focus of the game is already on combat and most of the ships would already be diverting everything they have into the relevant systems.

The most useful aspect of this might be being able to "divert power" from a system that is disabled - stop recharging the shields after they fall to increase weapon power, or dump weapon power into the engines to escape if the weapons go offline.  It would be really cool if there was some sort of automatic transfer when a system goes offline.

How about a more generic approach?  Would it be possible to make the system upgrade research reversible, and only be able to choose one system at a time?  Each player could choose whether shields, weapons, or engines are the priority for all ships without the need for a ton of new odf files.  Maybe set up a generic research as the basis for the upgrade, then make the system upgrade itself instant so the player can change back and forth fluidly.

posted on March 4th, 2011, 1:47 am

I don't really care that much, so I'll just respond to the ODF thing: I think it would be nice if the devs could change things a bit so that a ship has one odf that specifies all the bonuses it gets with rankups and other things leading to huge numbers of odfs per ship. I don't think it would be very high priority, but would be a nice feature for modding.

posted on March 4th, 2011, 9:23 am

The most useful aspect of this might be being able to "divert power" from a system that is disabled - stop recharging the shields after they fall to increase weapon power, or dump weapon power into the engines to escape if the weapons go offline.  It would be really cool if there was some sort of automatic transfer when a system goes offline.

I do really like that idea  . Imagine a ship that loses its engines. It would be really cool if it automatically got an increase in either shields(Feds) or weapons(Kli, Dom) or special energy(Rom). It would represent that the Captain prepares his crew to go down with honor or to outlast until help arrives. Same could happen for weapon system - get a speed increase to get home fast.
The next step would be to introduce reserve energy as we saw it on the shows very often. However, that would make the Defiant really imba  .