Niklas Jansson
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Last Imperium - Ship Continuation
🕑 Added 2022-08-14 18:15:13 +0000 UTCI've been working on ship language and scaling a bit more.
A party is probably about 3-6 people, which might call for a Millennium Falcon sized ship. I'm generally not a fan of obscene ship sizes, so perhaps the current warp core technology (a single known working design?) puts a limit on the min and max size. This makes the player ship generally competitive in 1 on 1. If the ship is the character, there needs to be an upgrade system with expensive, high quality components (and missing, subpar or degraded components). The drawback here is that you can't tell from an encounter how dangerous a foe might be, but that's true for NPC encounters too I guess, with the level system.
I'm not sure if the ships can land, but I'm hesitant to design for that so I'm thinking most can't. Instead they use some kind of lander/shuttle system for the player party + a little cargo. Trading could be done mostly at stations in orbit (like in Elite 1). I drew a little section with people for scale. The lander could perhaps be a Wright plane design, kinda square and primitive to stand out from typical sci-fi shuttles. Maybe a drop-pod acorn? An ATV might come in handy, but with ships, planes and tanks... well, sometimes the players would need to be on-foot, trekking from A-B so the adventure works.
Comments
Niklas Jansson
I only ever played the Amiga version of Starflight, which was a bit different from the Megadrive/Genesis one. I borrowed the idea of the little ATV from Starflight. So did Mass Effect. SCII / Ur Quan Masters used a shuttle instead. I think Starflight might've gotten the idea for the meat eaters (Thrynn) versus plant guys (Elowan) from Traveller.
Niklas Jansson
It's based on the Annic Nova from Traveller and you're getting close to how they function in that Scenario...
Florian Hofmann
That sketch with the solar panels again screams gameplay opportunity to me. Depending on how simulationialist you want to get, they could provide a constant X energy but would take Y time to fold in for jumps and or combat maneuvers.
Chris Lomaka
I was a big fan of Starflight for the Sega Genesis - it had an extensive flying through the galaxy gameplay, but also the ability to land on planets (w. a shuttle) to collect minerals, parts, key story artifacts, etc.
