Subset Games Forum

Hello everyone,,
First off, I'm sorry if I didn't post this the right place, I couldn't find a suggestion forum.

I get this game for Chrismas, played it a little bit, then left it to rot. I'd say why, but I really don't know. Then the advance edition came out.

Building a station.

As you all know, there are some stations that are being assaulted by single scout ships and some that are being assaulted by full blown rebel ships; and some that are so well protected that a single ship could not possibly handle them (like the trade stations with over a hundred automated defense drones). So the universe certainly allows for the scale of the stations to expand.

Evolving scale:
You would start out being a small service stations, either fuel, missile storage, drone parts, science, manufacturing, defense platform for a small outpost, or a research station near an anomaly.
You would then expand into the other services, eventually becoming the general stores that can't be assaulted by single ships, or even a full blown orbital city.

Automated defense stations:
You can buy off station defenses that will keep you safe, until they malfunction or are hacked. There are safety in numbers, as a single malfunctioning/hacked defense station is no match for the rest of them, and if you don't like shooting down everything that malfunctions, you can hack it until it's repaired.

Faction reputation:
The federation is at war, and you need to chose sides. Do you give a discount when they arrive at your station? Or do you repair the cruiser that says it has vital information for free? Do you harbor pirates, or do you hide freed slaves from the slavers?

I realize that most people on these forums might not enjoy a game/gamemode like the one i suggested, but I would still like some constructive input on this, if nothing else then because it might lead to suggestions that could be used in the current game.

Thanks.

There's actually already a mod very similar to yours that has been around for a long time called Stations Jobs.

What you're suggesting is stations jobs except much more in depth and adding more content. Coincidentally, I happened to find the station sprites in this mod, with the exception of rock and maybe crystal, a bit sub-par. So I've been working on my own new station sprites.
Federation Station

Civilian Station
in order of shown; civilian station type 1, civilian station type 2, civilian militia station, and refueling platform

The refueling platform is still a work in progress, and only one of the civilian stations will be final (likely type 1 so it's different from militia). I may eventually compile these into an actual mod one day. The mods that these are intended to be used in (Project Coalition and a super secret one) also have station for other races/factions, but they aren't created by me.

basically, creating the ships for your mod is one of the only plausible things.

Now let me address some of the specifics you listed.

Hagni wrote: Evolving scale:
You would start out being a small service stations, either fuel, missile storage, drone parts, science, manufacturing, defense platform for a small outpost, or a research station near an anomaly.
You would then expand into the other services, eventually becoming the general stores that can't be assaulted by single ships, or even a full blown orbital city.

This would be an extremely hard thing to pull off.
The aforementioned stations job uses the mechanic of events spawning when you're out of fuel. Unfortunately, since you never advance to new sectors, you can only encounter the same events forever.
Although, if you wrote jumping to beacons off as something else, then choosing different sectors could be a neat way of choosing paths to go in. Just one idea of how to pull off something interesting like this.

Hagni wrote: Automated defense stations:
You can buy off station defenses that will keep you safe, until they malfunction or are hacked. There are safety in numbers, as a single malfunctioning/hacked defense station is no match for the rest of them, and if you don't like shooting down everything that malfunctions, you can hack it until it's repaired.

I don't really follow what you mean by this. Like, defense drones? You'll have to elaborate on how this would work.

Hagni wrote: Faction reputation:
The federation is at war, and you need to chose sides. Do you give a discount when they arrive at your station? Or do you repair the cruiser that says it has vital information for free? Do you harbor pirates, or do you hide freed slaves from the slavers?

This is an interesting one.
Through events only, you can't really do anything like this (although, if you are hardcoding, this would probably be pretty simple to implement.). However, if you can cut it down to only 3 factions, then you COULD use the augment system to do some magic. However, this comes at the cost of completely taking all other augments out of the game.
If you either aren't using any drones or any weapons, you could potentially have more slots, but again, that means no weapons or no drones on any stations.
Keep in mind that this is all assuming you want to keep the mod in the realm of "soft-coding", which would be really ambitious.


In summary, you're talking a whole new game. I think trying to use ftl as a base game here is counter-intuitive to your idea. Your suggestion is so drastically different from FTL: Faster Than Light than it would probably be MORE work to make it a mod than to just make a game from scratch.
Nevertheless, I hope this has helped clear some things up.