I'd also like to see it be a submarine hunt-type thing, where most ships have cloaks, and some could be scoutships, with some sort of ability that would reveal cloaked ships. (perhaps an autotarget beam that would constantly fire and make some sort of symbol on your radar when it hits something. something like that) Each side could have their own style of scoutship.
Also, some ideas about factions:
Earth:
I think HVDs should be changed. In my opinion, they're too weak under the control of the AI and too strong under the control of humans. Maybe give them worse turning, but very long ranged weapons (maybe about double the range) and give them some more missiles instead of their beams. Or we could replace them with missile destroyers, which my plans would be:
Shielding: 3500 or so
Turn: 1-1.5
Speed: 4
Weapons:
Pulse:
Medium Missile Launcher
Beam:
Medium Missile Launcher
Special:
Cloak
Colonist Faction 1:
I think they should also have some very high-powered short range weapons with some weak missile launchers, and they could be the ones with the pirates in their system.
Colonist Faction 2:
They sound good. It'd be cool if their largest ship was designed like a heavy cruiser. Maybe it could have some form of slow warp. It'd also be cool if they had tougher and smaller transports than most people, so you'd really have to look out and be ready to kill them before they landed. Perhaps in their system they could have some barbarians, that run about with fleets and sack stations and cities. The barbarians could have ships that are also decently fast, with very little shielding and very big guns.
Colonist Faction 3:
I'm adding this one in, 'cause some of my ideas (see the aliens section) need it. Also, Earth only taking two smaller colonies seemed a bit easy. Anyway, I think they should have some fast, tough ships with powerful short range guns and no cloaks, and some slower ships with plenty of long range support weapons. So their up-close ships would duke it out with enemy fleets, while their support ships rained fire in from a distance. The support ships should have more powerful guns, compared to their prices, but ones that aren't very good for close-up combat. Their support ships should have cloaks.
Astrominers:
Going on strike in the system with colonist faction 1. They don't think they have enough protection from pirates. The military was sent in to break up the strike, and things got violent. Their ships are very maneuverable, but not too fast, and they're tough but have weak guns (need to be able to collide with asteroids, but their weapons aren't meant for destroying ships). Their ships don't have stealth, but instead can mine asteroids (I haven't gotten it to work before, but it supposedly can.) This extra resource boost means that they can mass-produce ships much better, but their lack of stealth means they can only hide by staying near asteroids. Their transports could be just rerigged astrominers (we could set it up somehow that to get them, you had to turn one of your astrominers into a transport) It'd be easy to make a variety of different miners. They could also have some sort of tractor beams (meant for holding asteroids in place to make them more easily mineable) on some of their ships.
Pirates:
I'd be sure to make them very maneuverable and set the AI to think they're weaker than they are (pirates would be very careful to look out for their own skin). As stated above, somebody in the system with the first colonist faction decided to try piracy, and it caught on more than it has in other systems.
Barbarians:
As I said before, decently fast, very little shielding (maybe a quarter of the norm) and very big guns. They could also have a variety of transports, (some could be faster and tougher, some could have more loads of evats, some could be very combat capable, etc.)
Aliens:
I think the story could be that they were already in the system that one of the colonist factions (I was thinking of faction 3) is in when the colony ship arrived, but with only modern-day technology, and the colonists decided to try to conquer their planet, to get access to areas they wanted access to (maybe they had more resources, or they had tropical areas or something). They've been copying faction 3's tech, so they have a lot of things that are slightly worse versions, and their ships are similar, but they tend to be worse and cheaper. Also, their ships could all double as transports or assault transports, and maybe a few of them could be able to capture other ships while in combat. The only humans they've ever known of are the colonists, so they think all humans are the same, and try to save themselves whenever they see humans by going to war with them.
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"United we stand, so I wandered off and got me a chair."
(This message has been edited by Mag Steelglass (edited 12-29-2001).)
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