Weapon Customization in Ship Design

Another Comparison to Master of Orion II

from GalCiv2 Forums
Hi all,

I hate to keep bringing up cool things from other games that I liked, but this one was very cool, and I haven't noticed it being discussed previously. When designing ships in Master of Orion II, as one's technology-level increased, so did one's ability to customize weapons during ship design. For example, one might have the ability to modify the "Phasors" weapon as "Heavy Phasors", "Point-defense Phasors", "Auto-firing Phasors", or missiles as "ECCM Missiles", "Hardened Missiles", "Fast Missiles", etc. Each upgrade would take up more space in your ship, in exchange for the added benefit that the upgrade provided. However, as your technology-level continued to increased, the cost of these upgrades would decrease over time, and new upgrade options would become available.

So, does anyone else thing this is a good idea, and is there any real likelihood of this making it into GC2?
20,813 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
GalCiv2 is currently going with explicit weapon upgrades. In MoO2, you got "auto-firing" and "continous" as you advanced that basic tech. In GC2, you'll research "Mini-balls 2", then "Mini-balls 3" explicitly. As things currently stand, anyways.

Either way seems to works. In MoO2, you got a weapon advancement as a bonus for advancing in that particular branch of research. But you didn't get any advances unless you researched a tech. 6 of one, half-dozen of another.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's probably the same - it was just fun in MOO2 to have all the upgrade options for a particular weapon available during ship design. I found it both a very effeicient and fun user interface to use while designing my ships.
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Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i agree. the "Fast miniballs" or "ultra miniballs" is not necessary for a good, enjoyable game. 1, 2, and 3 are good by themselves...
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Stardock has a lot of time to rename Miniballs 2 into something more menaingful till the release. And I am sure it can be modded so we could name the weapons Miniballs, Deadly miniballs and Repearting fire deadly miniballs from outer space if we like.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This is sort of off-topic, but the name "mini-balls" sound really stupid, in my opinion. The last thing I want on my newly commissioned state-of-the-art dreadnought, is to power up the mini-balls. Gah, that just sounds ridiculous.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'm just saying, "mini-balls" sounds about as sci-fi as having weapons called "Mega Wompers". I know this is only a game, and the devs like to use humor, which is cool. But seroiusly, if ship design is one of the new major features in the game, can't we have names for the ship components that sounds plausibly sci-fi? I mean, sure... Lasers, Phasors, Plasma Projectors, Mass Drivers ... they might all sound cliche, but I'd rather have that than cheesy names like "mini-balls".

Humor in the form of the GNN reporter I like - over-the-top silliness in the tech, especially ship components, just ruins the coolness of ship design for me. Seriously, if you're buliding a ship, what's going to make you drool more? Mounting heavy particle cannons on your new cruiser, or pasting "mini-balls" on the hard points?

Having retarded component names just seems like an obvious killjoy to me.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Don't sweat the names in beta 1. In the beta for GC1 there were many names for many things that were just "place holders" that were rather "cheesy".. Stardock dressed GC1 up for release. Stardock has already said that the emphasis for Beta 1 is the code, not the names of things.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Mass Driver Cannon
Matter Accelerator
Particle Velocity Redistributor
Reactive Force Array
Impeller
Pop gun
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Actually, miniballs get replaced by other weapons with better names not far up the tree.
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I truly hope that the name mini-balls simply fades into the beta sunset, because if Stardock is trying to get new people into this game, if they start off in ship design having to use silly weapons called "mini-balls, then they may just get turned off right there. Because one obvious evolution of mini-balls would take it down the eventual path to "mega-balls". And so the race will be to see who has the biggest balls o fthem all Funny, but not very sci-fi.