Rework for turret slots.

[Crymson]

Currently turrets are tied to the essentially hardcapped system module slots.  I can understand that decision but in a truly sandbox game this is rather restrictive for ship design.  Virtually all other ship design elements can be controlled and scaled up as you increase ship size.  Assembly, cloning, fighter cap, torpedo cap, academy, shields, power, all these scale directly with the ship and can be controlled with great granularity in the ship design. 

 

Turrets do not scale endlessly no matter how you build the ship.

 

Here is my suggestion.

1) Require turrets to be mounted to turret bases.

2) Require more base volume not just face size for larger turrets.

3) Tie turret base volume to a ship power/processing power cost reflecting power feeds, capacitors, ammo feeds etc.

4) Make the costs for the turret bases scale so the more total volume of turret bases you have the greater the overall cost becomes in an exponential or logarithmic fashion.  Possibly with an inverse power cost versus processing cost for larger vs smaller turret bases allowing the player to tinker with how they chose to arm ships as they get larger and larger.

Perhaps turret bases could even reduce the overall processing power of a ship thus forcing players to make important choices between more guns or more module slots for upgrades, thus keeping that element of current gameplay intact.

 

In this fashion you could build an over-gunned small ship or the Executor Class Super Star Destroyer with its hundreds of turbolaser batteries, it would all be a matter of building your ship to handle the requirements to power/feed the gun turrets.  And when you get down to it one of the greatest glories of Avorion is ship design.

[FuryoftheStars]

I've been thinking of posting a similar suggestion as of late, though I'm still fairly new, so was still trying to learn everything. :)

 

I'm not so sure on this bit from yours:

 

Perhaps turret bases could even reduce the overall processing power of a ship thus forcing players to make important choices between more guns or more module slots for upgrades, thus keeping that element of current gameplay intact.

 

I'd maybe say don't let turret bases add to processing power, but I'm hesitant to say make it go negative.  Otherwise I really like this. :)

[Crymson]

Well assuming turret slots were no longer related to system module slots that would free up alot of room that would otherwise be taken by turret control modules.  If the Turret bases each "used up" some processing power it would make it a dynamic of compensating processor use by turret slots against adding processing power to the ship to compensate.  Also there would be fall off point as ships grow beyond a maximum size to processing power ratio where gains in size and processing power would outpace the need for system module slots and all that excess processing power could be diverted into turret deployment.

 

Most of my argument for reworking turret allowances is focused on availability of turrets beyond what the 15 system slots allow for very large ships.  At that point nothing natively existing in the game poses such ships a challenge.  The challenge then becomes allowing those who wish to deploy such ships to do so in a fashion that remains relevant "within" the gameplay loop.

 

It is easy enough to install a mod that provides modules with massive turret allowances and thus obviate this discussion altogether.  I am trying to propose a solution that would keep these choices functionally important within the game design.