Hi folks,
just saw this game on kickstarter and was really happy with the concept of it.
So i decided to share my view of the game called Lone Star with you guys and do hope that someone and hopefully Josh will find some interesting ideas in it.
It is quite in early stage of writing and is more focused on content/assets than on gameplay but i do feel that some things will work quite cool in LT. (such as characters, factions, ship classes, weapons, fleets and hull/armor/shield system).

Please excuse my spelling as English is not my native language.

http://speedy.sh/jAAnM/Lone-star.pdf

@Josh: If you would like something from this concept be free to use in any way you like. I don't care for credit, just make LT a good game

Just by browsing the documents - the ships carry absolute ridiculous amounts of firepower (We're talking about 20+ turrets of various sizes for medium sized ships, along with up to 30+ subcraft!). Besides creating a pretty confusing lightshow in combat, how do you intend to balance this? Are the shield so efficient that they can stand the pounding of 40-80 guns for an extended amount of time, or are the ships by definition howitzers with eggshells?

First i want to say is that this concept is a bit old and sometime ago i made the same conclusion as you did, so guns count should be 1.5-2x times smaller for most ships. The one more thing if you read more carefully is that cap-ships are quite rare in the universe, so there will no be like 20 cruisers VS 20 cruisers. Cruiser are mostly flagships while Battleships and dedicated carriers are like uber-ships (think of Executor SSD fro SW).

So basic faction strike fleet:

1-2 Cruisers, 1-2 Destroyers, 4-5 frigates(+1-2 support) and some corvettes.
Note that due to weapon and shield/armor-penetration mechanics bigger ships can withstand a lot of fire of small/medium guns and as you can see not all ships carry heavy weaponry. Also despite many other space sims shield is only the first defense layer, then goes armor and then hull. So some weapons should destroy shields while others are devastating against armor so not all shots will be that effective all the time and not all guns should be used in the same time (especially energy weapon, as they have small fire rate and consume A LOT of energy).

Ships and weapons will be balanced for longer capital-ship fights with maneuvering , energy management, squadron control etc in mind. So no, ships are not "howitzers with eggshell"

EDIT: And one more thing, the mentioned turret/gun layout shows empty hardpoints, if you decide to fit resource-expensive weaponry you will not be able to install use all hardpoints.

Hardenberg wrote:Just by browsing the documents - the ships carry absolute ridiculous amounts of firepower (We're talking about 20+ turrets of various sizes for medium sized ships, along with up to 30+ subcraft!). Besides creating a pretty confusing lightshow in combat, how do you intend to balance this? Are the shield so efficient that they can stand the pounding of 40-80 guns for an extended amount of time, or are the ships by definition howitzers with eggshells?

I'll admit i did not read the design doc before posting due to time constraints, but i will say that scale is essential to design. you can have hundreds of turrets going off, and scale down the damage of individual weapons, or have just a few turrets doing much more powerful damage.

a perfect example is Battlestar Galactica, both in their games and in the shows. the scale of fire was enormous, making for some very beautiful combat, while the big damage dealers were actually nuclear weapon systems.

it really comes down to your game engine, your desired atmosphere, and what you can and cannot practically do.

Neo160 wrote:it really comes down to your game engine, your desired atmosphere, and what you can and cannot practically do.

More specifically, you might end up with a compromise dictated by the performance of the game. Too much fire may kill your framerate, because either the graphics engine or the collision detection is not up to it.