I dont have many suggestions, but lets hope the ones I do have are good :D


What if we made weapons take up a # of a type of slots, such as a gatling cannon(not the turret) would take 2 small slots? We could group the weapons like this:

Small Weapons(1 small slot):
Ion
Phased
Tachyon
Graviton
Yellow Jacket
Charge cannon

Medium Weapons(2 small Slots):
Guass
Sunflares
Screamers(lower the prox on a sceamer)
Stingray
Gemini<---------up the damage per missile here

Large weapons(3 small slots)
Jackhammers
Proximity Mines
Plasma cannon

Large slot weapons(1 large slot)
Avalons
Adv Gatling turrets
Lightning mines


Thats all the weaps I can think of to put down here, you guys tear it to pieces for me will ya?

Sort of like the inventory grid system thingy. I like. Very RPGish, in fact.

Ok, what is this intended to accomplish?

It is a good idea. Instead of creating some arbitrary "medium" slot for rockets and the like, it simply utilizes two small slots. It would look funny on the vult, though, with the rocket coming out from the middle and the guns on each end... :)

Celebrim, it's supposed to prevent quad/triple gauss/sunflare loadouts so people with gravitons and tachyons can actually have fun and survive in the game. It works just like any other RPG game, with the strongest weapons taking up the most space in an inventory grid system.

why is jackhammers rated higher than screamers? also why should prox on screamers reduced? 20m is pretty low.
and you lost swarms somewhere.

Might I suggest that under the above suggestion no one would mount sunflares at all? Which would you rather have, one tachyon and one sunflare or three tachyon's? A gauss might be slightly better than a tachyon or a graviton (and that's debatable) but it is certainly not twice as good. Not that anyone is using them now, but would anyone mount a prox mine or a plasma if they took three small slots? A jackhammer is a good weapon, but it isn't 50% better than a sunflare. More like 30%. So which would you rather mount in a hypothetical 6 small weapon ship - 6 tachyon's, 3 sunflares, or 2 jackhammers? Even without picking to heavily on his list, HtP admits that several weapons would have to be rebalanced in order to fit in the slots he puts them in. If we are going to have to balance all of the weapons to put them in his list, how is it any better than having to balance all the weapons now, and for that matter how does it make it easier to balance things?

If we are going to all of this trouble just to solve the problems with triple guass and triple flares (assuming that's really a problem), why not do the simplier thing and do as I and others suggested months ago and make several types of small slots - 'small guns' and 'small rockets' for instance. This would force players to carry mixed load outs. If the problem is only that you personally like tachy's and grav's and feel that they are weak, why not do the even simplier thing of playing with the numbers on the tachy and grav just a little and see if the three can acquire nearly even popularity?

Lastly, comparisons to the inventory grid system are bogus. Inventory is not the same as equiped weapons. A dagger may occupy two spaces in a grid system, and a mace may occupy four, but if they both are equiped in one hand then they are both small weapons. Inventory grid system has nothing to do with it. Most RPG's have two sizes of weapons - one-hand and two-hand. In most RPG's depending on the exact design of various other attributes like shield usage or quality, one of the sizes is almost always completely prefered over the other.

Little bug:

a screamer is 2x as good as a flare, why is it in the same slot?

Look, this isnt supposed to be perfect, Im only using this as an example here. And yes we will have to rebalance ALL the weapons, but guess what, WE HAVE TO REBALANCE EVERYTHING ANY TIME SOMETHING NEW COMES IN!!!

This is only a suggestion, not some high and righteous command from the gods, it is to serve as to diversify our weapons, right now I see mabye 3 or 4 weapons we all use collectively, if you know anything about anything.

WE NEED TO STOP, but just swapping out different weapons wont help, he need an in-game system to nearly force us to change our weapons.

I repeat, in case you havent read it: THIS IS ONLY TO SERVE AS A GUIDLINE AND EXAMPLE!!!

Hey, no need to shout.

You said: "Thats all the weaps I can think of to put down here, you guys tear it to pieces for me will ya?"

I never treated this as some sort of 'commandment'. I never assumed that you were trying to ram something down someone's throat. I never assumed that this was a final design, nor is my appraisal of the idea based on the assumption that this is the best that can be done with the design. I just took you at your word that you had an idea you were throwing around and wanted some critical feedback. You got it. Just like you asked for. If you didn't want it, don't ask for it. If you were going to be all prickly about it, you should have said, "Go soft because I'm emotionally welded to this idea and I don't take criticism well."

I don't think your idea serves to diversify weapons. I think it just encourages the swapping out of different weapons moving the problem with balance around from one weapon to another (which is all we've been doing since we started balancing weapons). I think the only responce you have to that is, "Well, we can implement the new system and then balance the weapons." I don't consider that progress. We may or may not need an in-game system to enforce weapon diversity, but this doesn't do that. In fact, it does the opposite. It _reduces_ the options of players and the configurability of ships (a simple count of permutations will confirm that). This doesn't increase balance. In your own post you had to alter weapons to get them to fit the new system, and even then even you admit that it isn't balanced and we'd have to work on it. It may or may not be a good design for a game, but it doesn't solve the problem at hand, nor is it necessarily the design for _this game_ which at some point we have to conform our ideas too. That is my honest appraisal of this idea and it has nothing to do with my opinion of you.

I think your emotion is effecting your logic. Your idea was noted. I'll keep it in mind. I just don't think it solves the problem, not that what I think matters anway.

Well, there is two ways that i can thbink of that can handle the slots thing:

The Diablo way, a grid, or the other way, just numbers, i would prefer a grid because you could be a slob with how you stored somehting in Diablo, but you wouldn't be able to carry as much, if you were neat you could store more stuff.

sorry there, Ive ben a little snippity throughout today.

The grid system would seem to me to be for inventory that you can carry only.
Its like moving stuff around so that you can use Ions ans lasers at the same time.

I beleive that instead of arbitrarily throwing down new types of slots, we could have this implemented as a workaround until everything is considered, changed, fixed, whatever, for newer slots. but by slapping down rocket slots, mine slots, laser slots. its like were back to 3.1. yes the _weapons_ will be balanced, but who would want to use a hornet with 2 laser ports, a mine port, and a rocket port over a Valkyrie with 2 rocket ports and a laser port?