Yes, this would also be a good way to approach it, especially the idea of making bigger ships slower. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Your English is good too, I wouldn't have known it wasn't your native language if you hadn't mentioned it!
Several people have asked for multiple ship types in the past. I'm not totally opposed to it from a game design perspective (although there is an argument that it's unnecessary). The main reason that I don't see this happening is because it challenges some of the core assumptions made by the code and the interface design.
For example, how does sending ships work if you have multiple ship types at a planet? You would need to be able to select and move ship types separately. This requires:
* The code to be modified to keep track of and display multiple ship icons at each planet, which is certainly possible but would be a fair amount of work.
* It would multiply the number of art assets required; now I'd need not one ship icon per player colour, but 3-5 or more, which is not comfortably within my budget.
* It's also quite different from the current ship sending controls, where you select the
planet. Again, this is surmountable, but these are not the worst problems.
How would rally points work with multiple ship types? For a complete solution, you would need to be able to specify the number of ships to leave behind on a per-type basis. For example "leave 10 fighters and 1 battleship here". But this is inflexible since it will never keep cruisers behind unless you change the settings; so you can't substitute 2 cruisers for your 1 battleship without fiddling with the settings. The entire rationale for rally points is to
reduce the amount of micromanagement (fiddling) that you have to do. There are alternative designs, like just telling the computer how much "strength" to leave behind (where fighters have strength 1, a cruiser has strength 5 or whatever, etc.) and then either hard-coding a preference for leaving behind "big" ships or "small" ships or alternatively have a setting on each planet so the player can choose.
You'd need a more complicated interface for upgrading planets. All the statistics and achievements based around "destroying ships" and "losing ships" would have to be re-thought. The "total ship count" indicator would need either scrapping or heavily revising. Almost every single piece of the in-game interface would need changing in one way or another, whether it's displaying numbers of ships or letting you send ships or set rally points or upgrade planets. It would be a
huge change.
Every little behaviour change required would cause significant chunks of code to need rewriting, and completely new interface design. Good UI design takes time and requires additional art. Art is one of my weak points and takes me
ages to sort out. It took a couple of months and some significant expenses just to get the new achievement icons done, and they were done by a contractor and didn't have much effect on the in-game interface (unlike art for UI design would). If I'd done them myself it would been cheaper but have taken
much longer and the results would be heavily inferior. I'm no artist.
Add that to the other commitments in my life (university, work, etc.) and I estimate that this would take me more than a year of my life. This is more than a year that I wouldn't be spending on fixing bugs, making other improvements to the game, doing business and marketing-related activities to increase the exposure of the game and breathe some more life into the multiplayer scene, and making additional games. In fact I'm sure it would introduce a ton of additional bugs, some of which I would fix during the year but others which would linger through multiple successive versions. And I'd probably have to spend a lot of money and/or attention on getting new art done. All up we might be looking at 2 years before all of the changes were final and mostly bug-free.
All this effort and all these problems to overcome, and the only two fundamental changes to the game would be:
* The addition of a few more strategic options
* An interface which is
incredibly more complex and thus difficult to comprehend and use
I think Mayhem Intergalactic is strategic enough as it is, and I prefer my user interfaces to be nice and simple.
So as you can see, I consider the benefits to be tiny compared to the enormous cost (for me, and indirectly for everyone else) of implementing such changes. Therefore I hope you understand why I won't be doing this.
Apologies for the really long explanation!
It
is a good game design idea. It's just unfortunate that it's weighed down by so many issues of practicality.
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