Melee-idea

from StarControl Forums

Not sure, if the engine is capable on doing this but:

The bread and butter 1-on-1 melee is nice, and myself i wouldnt like it to deviate that much from that into huge battles. Keeping it simple would be nice aswell.

However it would be really cool if every ship had something like 3 different states: in good shape, in mediocre shape and in bad shape. The last one could be quite funny in the funnier races and a bit less funny in the more serious races.

Add to this, that whenever you hit into a ship, some stuff would get loose from the ship being hit. It would probably be easy to do it via some particle effects. Just when the ship gets beyond a certain health level, it would change the state to a different shape.

This would have the effect in the combat, that it would be really hands on, tangible and super cool. The extra-thing that makes it gratifying.

Thoughts on that?

14,843 views 1 replies
Reply #1 from StarControl Forums Top

Love the idea of visible damage and would be in favor of it. It's becoming pretty common in all sorts of games.

That said, Star Control always quantified ship health as "crew remaining" which makes partial sense, although I always thought it was peculiar that the ship remained in perfect working order even if only one crew member was remaining. It's too early to know whether they will maintain the "crew as a health indicator" dynamic or do something different. I'd really like to see something added to this.

I personally think there should be two metrics, hull (or shield) strength and crew remaining. To do a simple analog comparison of the idea, think of Doom where armor reduced incoming damage to your health. Hull strength would reduce the amount of crew you lose to an attack, while crew remaining would reduce the functionality of your ship similar to how you described. As you lose crew and/or parts of you ship, perhaps some features of the ship are affected (e.g. firing rate, turning rate, engine speed, etc)