Salvaging Starships: bold suggestions

[Hail]

I do not enjoy Starships in it's current form. the game has too much spend X to get more X next turn gameplay. Starships lacks trade offs and interesting decisions. not very fun imo.

right now Starships has two games cramped into one. a tactical game and a planet manager game. Sid himself said that the "center of gravity" of Starships is the starships. also Sid said that "a game should be series of interesting decisions".

Starship game design can also steer towards Pirates! in space. that can be fun too. Imagine capturing trade vessels and sacking planets.
but I am not going to dive into that.

what has to go:

• food and cities
• credits and the yield exchange market
• industry and the ability to build industrial stuff on planets
• wrap gates on the tactical map
• the torpedo mechanic and fighters
• 7 pt movement cap
• one fleet per player
• starship indestructability
• critical hits

what has to change:

• wonders are build with energy.
• rotation as well as movement consumes AP (*).
• ship's crew is decoupled from their ship. crew cannot die.
• a ship, whose hp count is reduced to zero, is permanently destroyed.
• planets have only two yields: energy and beakers.
• the AP (*) count is uncapped.
• sensors are passive.
• three weapon types: laser, cannon, missle.
• the tactical map should scale depending on how many participants are there.
• maybe add moons to planets and add a gravitation field to all planets and moons. moving toward a moon/planet should cost less then moving away from it.
• maybe throw out stealth, but limit a ship's vision to it's sensor radius. everything beyond the sensor radius is covered in a fog of war.

chassis
a very important concept!

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries picture

Spoiler :

is crossed with

Space Rangers 2: Dominators picture

Spoiler :

as you can see, this mech's chassis has slots of every type: cannon/laser/missle. some chassis will have all, some may have only laser slots, etc. think a corvette chassis, battleship chassic, etc.

the next pic (from Space Rangers 2) is a pirate chassis. the repair drone slot is unavailable. all five weapon slots are open, though.

a chassis will/may have the following slots (some are, obviously, mandatory): weapon, engine, shield, sensor, armor, energy (AP), special. each chassis has a max. capacity.

the special slots are the most awesome. they allow ships to outfit things like tractor beams (drag a ship toward the user), vampirics, repair modules, sensor jammers, etc.

ideas for specials can (should) be taken from Ascendancy. it has lot's of them.

Spoiler :

each module has a capacity attribute. the sum of the capacities of equipped modules cannot exceed the max. capacity of the chassis.

energy (AP) is spent performing actions like firing, moving, rotating, etc. energy (AP) is replenished every turn.
adding more engines to a ship increases max. movement points per turn.

some modules can be given to the player as mission rewards. most are researched. chassis, probably, should also be attached to techs.

add a dlc market to the game and sell OP and fun modules/chassis there!

spaceships can (will) die. the crew is immortal.

everything else should stay the same. do missions, convince planets to join your federation, research techs, upgrade ships, assign ships to fleets, etc.

 

[RonMar]

While I am considering getting the game, I have been watching some of the You Tube episodes.

I find myself with quite different opinions regarding the game.

I disagree with most of what you want to get rid of. Although the commodities market seems to need some better mechanics.

I don't think that wonder should need the same resource as ships and their components.

I tend to agree with a few of your suggested changes, but not the "may be"s, also, not the restrictions on what planets produce. The rest I have mixed feelings about.

Rather than remake the game into what I think it should have been, my approach to games is to work with what is there and hope for incremental changes which don't radically change the original design. If I took the first approach, I wouldn't get the game in the first place.

BTW I really dislike the graphics you chose to illustrate a more complex ship building process. I would prefer something more like SMAC.

It just goes to show that different people have different expectations. But, thanks for posting alternative ways the game could have been designed.