rannl wrote:The flagship and starting ship generation tool, while initiated from CE development, will work as a seperate tool which can work outside of CE.
Wow, that is amazing. While I think the CE stuff would make for an even more interesting flagship the fact that the tool will work with vanilla is awesome. I am glad because if the tool is dynamic then that means that other people will be able to create their own flagship designs and add them to the pool.
rannl wrote:Here's a question for the collective hive mind :
The work on the Flagship generation tool is coming up nicely, with the tool being very dynamic in nature - when released, a lot of content could be randomly generated.
So here's the idea I wanted your comments on :
How about adding a tool which randomized the starting ships ?
Each ship could have its starting weapons selected randomly from a pool matching the nature of the ship (burst laser for kestrels, beams for zoltans, fire weapons for rocks, crew damaging weapons for slugs, etc..).
Same goes for augments. Systems might also enjoy some variance, as well as the ship basic layout. Crew members as well. A small back story for each ship will also appear in the hanger.
I'd love your thoughts on this issue, so don't be shy
This sounds like a good idea just to add even more variety to the ships. It would be good for people who do not know how to mod. It doesn't sound as promising as the flagship randomization tool, but this is a good idea nonetheless.
If you made this tool, one thing that might potentially be awesome is an option to customize the "color" of your ship. I'm really not entirely sure if that is possible, but I was thinking you could maybe 1.) Have a slider that adjusts the hue, or 2.) Have a few pre-made re-colorations of different ships and an option to choose one of them. I just thought this would be awesome because I was messing around with the hue of the ship hulls the other day and found how easy it is to change the color.
Perhaps it would also be awesome to have a "construction" option where, instead of your ship being randomized, you have maybe a certain amount of "scrap" that you can spend on systems, initial upgrades, weapons, augments, and maybe even crew. So you can customize how your ship will start. And what would be really awesome is if you could make it so this is different for each ship type, for example zoltan ships would have a discount for zoltan crew, engi ships would have a discount on drone control and drones, etc...
And finally, if you're going to randomize the starting layouts, you may want to do that for every single ship. That way one run of the tool will technically give the player 16 new ships to play with, so that way they don't have to run the tool every time they are doing another run. You could also maybe have an option where players can choose which ships they want t randomize so the tool does not randomize a ship the player doesn't want randomized for some reason.
