Custom Ships

Long story short: ship design is not going to happen.

You want the long version, search for the bazzilion threads on the topic.

This game is an RTS, and there just isn't time in-game for this kind of thing.

But you can mod it so you could make additional stuff.   

It's been done before, it just wouldn't be acceptable in a game of this scale.

Yeah, I also reckon this would be great.
But it doesn't have to be ingame, have it the same as the Lord of the Rings RTS did.
Build the 'hero' unit outgame, before it starts, give it weapons, resize it, name it, color it, assign different textures etc, choose its looks, base it on a

The problem the Dev's have had with this is really an issue of time. They started the game with a ship design system incorporated, but found it detracted too much time from actually playing and eventually it got the axe. Event the simplest drag and drop system they found to just take too much time to play with while time flows in the background.

I would be interested to see if it could work out as a pre-game race-defining kind of mechanic, where you can work out ship designs and tech trees for your custom race prior to starting, like the Impossible Creatures Army creator. Still, I can see where that creates some pretty serious balance issues, so I'll just leave it at that.

If they already had it ingame, then its even easier to incorperate, It would only detract from game playing time if it was an ingame feature, having in menu would be alot better, and possibly increase sales as this is an awesome feature that many people love, but sadly few games provide.
I can't see any balance issue's in this, as they are mearly using pre-determined specs for the weapons etc, you basically painting your 'hero', giving it weapons (limited to a certain amount, based on ship model) and naming it, its incredibly easy to implement, and the point that they've already had it in, is a clear indicator that they originally wanted this, but the way the went bout it, to warrent axing it was obviously wrong.

Impossible Creatures did use a system rather like that, actually. You'd design you're particular army by mixing and matching the properties of different creatures available to you and play through with an army entirely your own. Balance problems arose, though, because certain combinations were found to be superior to others, and eventually everyone ended up using the exact same army. It defeats the point of the game having an army creator when everyone uses the same army, you see.

Like I said before, I'd like to see it. It COULD be fun. But I also see just how complex the problem can be, and why it did get the ax. If it should get consideration and eventual insertion, I will be the first to jump and shout. I won't be holing my breath, though.

What?! I never heard about that!



How so? Its been gone for four betas -- the code is probably deleted, and even if it were the rest of the codebase has changed so much you couldn't use it anymore.

yeh, BUT the code would have been there at one stage, so moddifying parts of it to work will be relativly easy

I think they should bring that back too. I want to attack peoples bases while they methodically design there pretty pink ships with modules of love.

If they had it and they chose to take it out, why are you trying to get em to put it back in? Who is making this game, them or you? I can easily agree there is no time to design ships in game. If you want to design ships try sword of the stars. You have turns to do it, and you can fight in real time.

No, it wouldn't. They cut the code. Its gone. Assuming they still have a copy, they'd still have the problem of updating it to actually match the rest of the code base -- which at this point, likely means reprogramming it from scratch!

code may be gone, but if they were smart devs, they would have backed up all code, including old code.
So they'd still have a backup, and its suprisingly easy to convert the old code to the new
It certainly won't mean programing from scratch

but what if the old code was like c++ and the new code is quantum binary?

then the game would have already been rebuilt twice.
And I highly doubt it has been

./agree

IC couldn't get the 4X thing going in this game .. So they opted for more of a RTS game instead.

As good as it sounds...it isn't nearly as good as you'd think, its not much of a boost because a bigger/better ship is always there so a modified lower one with different weapons and such. So you might as well wati for the new ship that is better.

meh