Plea for Stronger Components

[Tampa_Gamer]

Most ships seem to evaporate a few seconds after their shields go. I would like to see stronger components so that tactics such as redundant components and repair bots might actually contribute to the fight. As it is right now it simply seems to be a battle of the shields.

Of course if we had an external data file for the components that we could mod, I am sure the community would quickly resolve many of these types of balance issues with a unverisal "balance mod" similar to what was done for the Space Empire series. That would let the community resolve various play-balance issues, and allow the programmers to concentrate on bug-squashing, etc.

[Data]

Excellent suggestions, both for the general wishlist and the modders one.
+1

[kenata]

I honestly would love to see the game move towards an xml based system for their systems. Like it would be awesome if all of the components and techs were defined in a simple XML format so that we could add, remove, and rebalance components and techs in the simplest possible manner.

[Ares106]

we can easily come up with and change all these components, but since this is primarily SP game, we will have to also modify the AI to use and deal with these changes.

Space empires for instance had a wealth of interesting components which could have led to some amazing complexity in tactics, nevertheless the AI would never take advantage of these, nor would they know how to deal with some of them, and instead resorted to building according to script instead of adapting.

[Sithuk]

+1 to putting as much data into an easily modable form for the community to do the balancing.

[Data]

That is indeed a sad story for any AI but even if we can have a highly adaptive AI there is still a trap in which it will always fall: it builds huge number of ships before any conflict so even after the first encounter (when it adapts) it still has to wait to lose a significant number of ships before spawning the adapted ones.

Maybe we should have an AI capable of retrofiting ships as well; very rarely did I see this in any of the strategy games that I've played.

[Bingeling]

The AI does suggest retrofitting all ships and bases to a human player. It is strange if all its ships are retrofitted.

Retrofitting is a difficult decision, though. A mass retrofit of all makes you vulnerable. And single fleets may have a limited number of nice retrofit times. I tend not to retrofit during war, and how often is the AI at peace? [8D]