Hi, played RealSpace for the first time last night. I like the looks of it a lot! Much better than the original! And you're definitely on the same track as I am with gamepley. I changed a couple of the same things in the regular game and found it to play much sweeter. Mind if I share notes?
I did the faster ships for all by level/class thing, but I also differentiated by type- Civ vs Mil. Civ ships are always slower than military built ships in my "mod", with the fastest doing 120 vs most fighters 140 base (the desc of the civ ships is that of "workhorses", not "racehorses", and they do all have bigger cargo caps). Freighters are slower (60-80), except the pirate freighter which can do 90. Gunboats got slowed down a bit (60-70), but the slowest cap ships got sped up a tad (30-40). The heavy fighters got speeds of anywhere from 100 (civ BH) to 140 (Anubis), depending on their make/mass.
I did not change thruster speeds at all. As thrusters seem to almost double your speed, it seemed to play great with the Starflier doing 240 under thruster, the very heavy fighters doing 220 or so, regular fighters doing 260 - 280, and the nomads smoking along at almost 300
The gameplay in all battles seemed to be more exciting and varied- no two ships flying exactly the same.
I absolutely made faster MISSILES ( I think I set the acceleration to 120 for the regulars and 150 for the seekers) and it worked like a champ to spice up the battles! They actually launch forward of your ship, curve toward your target, and try to hit it just like a good little missile should
The regulars can get evaded with hard manuevers and afterburner (cool to watch the NPC do that in front of you), and you use countermeasures all the time in a fight, not just when a cruise disruptor is launched lol.
All I did then (besides remove all level requirements) was turn up the difficulty to 1.5, so that everyone was flying real ships and using real guns. Even the light Patriot fighters in one of the the later missions were able to slam my Hammerhead's level 7 Protector shield down to where I had to use shield batteries more than once. And I had to use missiles to catch the racy little b*stards or hit them on their head on runs lol. And the heavier battles- lets just say I had to fill up on nanobots after a lot of the later missions. It really felt like good gamepley
I will keep trying your mod, but I have to tell you, I did quit after not being able to destroy either one of a pair of rogues with the starting ship after a full 10 min fight. I am going to see how hard it is to try NO batteries or nanobots, instead speeding up shield regen by a bunch and maybe increasing hull strength a bit for the lighter ships. It seems to me that shield batteries and nanobots might be the problem to balancing battle situations, not the solution. They always seemed like kind of a cheap way out, if you know what I mean.
Any comments (or suggestions on how to implement the no batt/bot idea
, please feel free to comment! I'm up for anything that makes FL more fun
And I'll post more comments on your mod as time goes on. Again, kudos on the graphics work!