Starship Corporation

I love this game and have some ideas.

There are many cool ideas in this forum and if somebody merge them in to one thread, it will be great

Here is my incomplete list of new things for ship editor:

1. No walls between rooms. Somebody already mention this in another thread, no walls between rooms will be great. For example two cargo bay next to each other, or generator with relay. Bigger crew quarters…. Lower cost vs bigger hazard.
a) At small cost player can place thin partition, they can be easily breach and don’t help against decompression, but can slow fire for a while.
2. Airlock, hangar door, blast doors, cargo hold doors
3. Maintance corridors and hatches, cheaper and only takes 1x, crew can’t move very quickly in them and marines with power armor can’t use them.
4. Cargo corridor, u can place cargo hold inside hull and access it with 3x corridor, very expensive but usefull for military and hi sec ships.
5. Starsips need some kind of dampening field generator or very strong internal gravity generator for reduction G effect when ship accelerate or decelerate.
6. Power generators have in alfa limit only 10 rooms per generator. In future, you can thing about another layer (roof) for power, lifesuport and fuel conduits. Military vessels need double-redundant or triple power conduits and you can’t do this in current editor.
7. Hangars and cargo bays should have two deck height, but this may cause problem with current ship in editor, its not have enough decks
8. All starships need captains and XO, captain cabin needed At last two CE for ship and CE requirements for bridge will be enough for me
9. Automated defences in coridors and checkpoints with bunkers.


Combat

I do not know how combat exactly works in this game, but this is what I want to see in space combat:

1. All military vessel crew should (maybe civilian too, if they have funds) have sealed suits and with limited lifesuport in vacuum. But in normal operations, and when part of crew resting, they don’t wear it. So they need to get to crew quarters and suits up. Trained crew suits up more quickly.
2. Military personel have three types (icons of troop should be diferent and not only dots be different)

A) light sealed suit like normal creew for weapon operators, equipen with sidearm, no armory needed.
B) Body armor suits, more resistant to fire, extended lifesuport and fire resistance, pulse rifles, breach equipment, ability to breach walls (slow)Armory needed, can take cower like rest of normal personel. Can fight in decompressed areas.
C) Powered armored exoskeleton, heavy weapons, can move outside ship (If ship is disabled), they are quick in long coridors, cant take cover, cant move maintance corridors, required morgue (bigger armory where suits are stored). Very expensive, can breach through walls more quickly, resistant to HE weapons.

Ratio can be 3 or 4 marines to take out one marine in exoscelet and depens, if marines can take cower or flank.

In non-combat situations, marines can help tech crew with maintance and take of fires and other hazards.

3. Crew can decompress chosen area of the ship, if area have airlock, action is very quick, if not, its take long time to decompress and need active lifesuport.
Emeny can breach hull and destroy doors to decompress.

In limited area near breach, personnel can be suck out. Exoskeleton is immune and personnel can grab something and survive.


Interface:

Custom hotkeys for some rooms (very useful for hatches and coridors)


Scrolling only in chosen category will be very useful.

Hi I like you ideas and I have some input to throw in.

2. Airlock, hangar door, blast doors, cargo hold doors
To what end would an airlock function for? I get blast doors and cargo hold doors

3. Maintance corridors and hatches, cheaper and only takes 1x, crew can’t move very quickly in them and marines with power armor can’t use them.
Similar to the jefferies tube concept in Star Trek?

5. Starsips need some kind of dampening field generator or very strong internal gravity generator for reduction G effect when ship accelerate or decelerate.
Not sure what this would bring to gameplay other than make spaceship construction more complicated than it needs to be.

6. Power generators have in alfa limit only 10 rooms per generator. In future, you can thing about another layer (roof) for power, lifesuport and fuel conduits. Military vessels need double-redundant or triple power conduits and you can’t do this in current editor.
Not following what you mean here. You can place multiple generators which can be your redundant systems on your spaceship. Presumably military class ships will be bigger in size to facilitate military forces for boarding and defence.

7. Hangars and cargo bays should have two deck height, but this may cause problem with current ship in editor, its not have enough decks
Again how does this help develop the game any? Do the Cargobays take up less space on the same plain?

8. All starships need captains and XO, captain cabin needed At last two CE for ship and CE requirements for bridge will be enough for me
I would not agree ALL starships. In fact I would not agree it would be a requirement but something that would increase crew morale.

9. Automated defences in coridors and checkpoints with bunkers.
Nope. Starships could be too easily defended with this. Crew should be used to defend corridors and rooms. The starship plans already have armouries that have automated defences in them and should be included in your ships room layout if you want this kind of placement.

Not going to talk about combat as we have yet to see it's conception.

Thanks for input, many my ideas do nothing to gameplay or make game to complex, but they can give some inspiration:)

2. its logical, ship have some entry point and for game play purposes, its depends what training module allows: I can think about main entry point for boarders, allow quick decompresion to kill fires or personnel and troops can go outside of ship (armor repairs)

3. yes, something like that, but if I building ship, I do something when personnel can stand and carry some equipment, U can think about it as narrow version of standard corridor (1 meter wide).

Or simply something like star trek concept.

For gameplay purposes, it is cheaper version of corridors, to use where you don't have space for normal version, can be used for connecting distant unimportant rooms.

Cons: slow movement, so this type of corridors is unefficient for patrol routes.

And i like to see, if this corridors can be placed directly to rom (no spaces)

5. its ads more to realistic feel, but not much to gameplay and i think engine can do this effect to.
Ship with disabled dampening field cant run and if generator is disabled when ship accelerating, its kill crew instantly:)

6. curently, if you have big generator nad have emought power to run 100 rooms, you can still only power only 10, so you must build more small ones. Its more bug. And some kind relay can help here.

For reduntant systems, its option for future, if game have conduit planing (something like sim city water and electric planing).

7. only realistic purposes, and i thing its not usable in current hull.

8. I thing all ships needs some commanding structure and almost any current ship have captain.

9. Firs we need to see, what combat allows

Military class vessels should be only assaulted with exoskeletons and they have heavy weapons to take out strong points. Also Marines can breach trough walls, so you can avoid this areas, also you need power to operate automated defenses. Bunkers are more for slowing attacker, so defenders have more time to prepare.

Ships are supposed to be easily defended with defensive structures, defending should always be easier than attacking. If there is no proper defensive stuctures available combat will be pretty much "the biggest army always wins" and that also means nothing but building military quarters will effect ships combat performance. For normal cargo ship that is not an option so having soldiers/security becomes completely un-necessary, why waste recourses (remember, it requires not only the quarters themselves but also the armories, generators, life support, air tanks, water tanks, etc)on few defenders when they are going to get slaughtered by any force that might consider attacking it? Its the same problem as with having normal anti-ship guns on cargo ship: why bother when only thing you can fight with few guns is another cargo ship and another cargo ship won't attack you? solution: flak guns, defensive weapons for shooting down attacking enemy boarders or at least buying the ship some time to escape and/or get help from friednly crafts made for fighting. Allowing spesialization to defensive combat gives cargo ships at least a chance in boarding combat and makes the combat actually require a bit more planning than simply zerg rushing trough the closest hatch.
Defensive turrets would have several down sides that balance them: They should be expensive and need power so if generator is knocked out the turret turns into expensive furniture. Also the turrets should be controlled by AI or bridge crew which means that if enemy destroys the computer core or the bridge the turrets will be useless. If enemy boarding party manages to take over the bridge or computer core the turrets will turn on the defenders, theres also the chance of computer revolt that also turns the turret on the crew.
Bunkers would be pretty much the same in smaller magnitudes: They cost money, space and energy but less than a turret. If enemy comes from unexpected direction or defenders hasn't had time to get to battle stations (which isn't that unlikely in boarding combat) the bunkers will help attacker against counter attacking defenders. Another thing with defensive Structures is that they have no offensive capability, they are just military resources tied to pure defence.


Here are some examples of different design philosophies the defensive structures would allow:

1)A large carrier style military craft that has couple bunkers to help defending the most vital systems and instead uses the resouces on manpower, it can easily attack and defend against most enemies with it's superior numbers and won't lose its combat performance in case of power or AI failures and is not very vulnerable agains AI/Bridge invasions or AI revolt.

2)Anti-Ship space combat spesialized military craft that has most of its resouces used in ship-to-ship weaponry, medium sized marine force for boarding civilian ships, some bunkers defending key areas and some turrets to break the boarding enemy's spearhead or defend if the marines have been sent on attack or have been lost. Its has some boarding capabilities but has a lot of its recourses tied to defense and will lose the turrets in case of power/ai failure.

3) Large longs-range civilian cargo transport with sceleton crew (minimizing the need for space and money consuming life support stuff) with majority of resouces used on cargo space and fuel. It has only a small security team for hauling drunk ensings to the brig and several turrets and some bunkers (and couple extra generators to power them) for the actual defense. It has no offensive capability but can well hold it's own against any other cargo ship and pirates/small military crafts. Almost the entire defensive capability relies on power plants and AI/Bridge being functional and in case of AI revolt the crew is pretty much gone.


And a hypothesis of how this could affect the actual combat tactics:

1) No defensive structures available: Battle between large military ship and long-range cargo hauler begins, military ship doesn't even bother to use its guns on the cargo ship (cargo ship hasn't even bothered getting guns because it knew something like this would happen) and instantly sends all its marines in hoping to get them onboard in one large horde that can kill the defenders, not giving them time to make enough damage to kill even one attacker (just like in any convetional rts). The attacker then quickly makes its way trough the ship in one huge ball of death and in couple minutes they have themselves an almost new ship ready to fly into sunset, with only couple nasty stains on the bridge carpet.

2) Defensive flak guns, turrets and bunkers available: Battle between large military ship and long-range cargo hauler begins, the military ships starts combat by scanning the enemy ship trying to locate all it's defenses, power plants, bridge and AI core, the ship then starts shooting at the said systems hoping to make the boarding feasible. When the military ship believes it has weakened the defender enough (and doesn't want to risk dsetroying the ship) and sends in the marines. One of the boarding crafts gets hit by the remaining enemy flak gun but rest make it onboard. The main attack force lands to the cargo bay on the largest boarding crafts (that don't fit in elswhere) but gets stuck at the cargo bay corridor, protected by turrets and security personnel. Attacker could just overpower the defenders if it wanted but it would cost him a lot of troops (This could badly slow down the rest of the operation, giving cargo ship's friends more time to get there). At the same time several smaller boarding teams are either stuck elsewhere or are trying to find lightly defended way past the bunkers and turrets that protect the computer room. Attacker manages to take over the computer room and tech specialist then hacks the computer, turns the defensive turrets on the ship's guards, letting the main attack force move out of the hangar bay unharmed. After quickly wiping out the last few fortified defenders the attacker has itself somewhat damaged ship with cargo holds filled with the tasty fruits of victory. The attacker has lost some marines and a boarding craft, but the loot is well worth it. The cargo ships engines are destroyed so the attacker quickly starts moving the cargo to it's own ship in case some enemy answers the distress signals sent by the cargo ship, by now the enemy might be well on it's way given the time it took to invade the cargo ship.

PS. Damn that turned into a long text... Takeeta's fault as usual