Artifacts- special

Don't know about the artifacts, no way you can get a cockpit view since most ships do not have cockpits, but bridges. The smallest frigate is actually quite big. Just compare a fighter next to the scout frigate.

Artifacts should be handled... differently. The ones i've found are great! But, it seems something is missing.

I know its passe and everybody and their mum wants a deathstar, but an artifact should be a center-of-the-empire-extremely-valuable-megaawesome-thing-that-must-be-protected, and not a box in a window.

Well, if you lose the planet the artifact it's on, you lose the artifact Plus, when you find it everyone knows, which usually makes those planets quite juicy targets

I liked them when they were researches :/

But still not quite a game changing (for better or worse) occurrence. Just an extra 10% boost to something usually (some are nice though) that other's don't get, but usually most people end up with something.

They would have to overhaul the way that that artifacts are found/aquired if they made them have a larger impact. I mean it wouldn't be very fun if the only artifact in ur system ended up in the heart of some other guy's empire and he gets a 25% dmg bonus or something like that.

Personally, I wish that the Artifact research screen was really brought back into play. Ie; you Explore a planet, find an artifact, but have no clue what it is. Thus, you 'research' it -- low cost, but time consuming (relative to other technologies). Only once you've finished researching it do you find out what it does, and gain the affects of it. Essentially learning how to turn it on and integrating it with your race's technology.

As is.. just kinda seems.. lacking, like its tacked on. Not sure why it feels like that; probably because there's no input required other than the investment into exploring planets.

For the record, you can, and it would be easy to, make an artifact the prerequisite for a ship as they are just handled like normal research.

I miss the research as well. Perhaps you could gain a small bonus just for finding it and increase that bonus twice to its maximum through research. And if you don't think artifacts can be game changing you haven't found the +12% damage one yet . That plus the 50% antimatter used in phase jumps makes your fleets far superior.

I think having an artifact linked to some kind of unique tech/ship would be good. Also, having to research what they do makes more sense, if they're supposed to be from a lost civ.

Although I was looking thru the research entity files, and it looks like adding in extra techs is more complicated than just tacking in a line in a file; there are a number of files that would have to be edited/added. I'm hoping the full mod tools automate some of that a bit, as I don't have too much time with work atm to play around with things. On the plus side, looks like it's not too bad to change things, so I'm looking forward to seeing what people get up to.

Thanks for commenting everyone.