8. How about a ship design system?
Description
This article is from the netrek Frequently Offered Clever Suggestions list, by Tom Holub doosh@best.com with numerous contributions by others.
8. How about a ship design system?
Problem: Other games (e.g. xtank) allow you to change the way your
ship is set up. I want to be able to adjust my ship characteristics
according to the way I play. Proposal: Allow ship characteristics to
be adjusted by the player. Why not: This was implemented in a version
of the original Xtrek game. The tendency was to do things like strip
all torpedos, most of the hull, half of the engines, and all of the
cloaking ability from the ship and get phasers that could do 40 points
of damage to ships outside of visual range (but had to be orbiting a
fuel planet to fire more than twice).
Games quickly became ridiculous. Either your planets were being taken
by someone completely invisible, or you were getting destroyed by
ships you couldn't see. Nobody bothered dodging, because nobody fired
torps. Basically, this winds up removing strategic aspects from the
game in favor of tactical aspects, and that's not a good thing.
Any implementation will require carefully balanced limits and a lot of
play time before it would become widespread. Anyone who wishes to try
this will likely have to set up their own server and then try very
hard to attract players to it.
As a side note, Sturgeon has a feature somewhat like this: predefined
ship upgrades after you get kills. Unfortunately this can (and does)
encourage ratio scumming and runner scumming, because nobody with a
nice big fat ship wants to die. (It also introduced "upgrade scumming"
to the world: repeatedly killing a second login to get lots of
upgrades.)
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