Loadout or More Ship Types?

I knew it would not be an easy choice. What we need is another programmer to tackle the feature. But we don't have one.

Any players out there with an opinion one way or another? If you had to choose, what would it be?

Any game in which 'leveling' is the goal of play (Elite, Privateer, etc.) is ultimately dependent upon the marketplace. The marketplace of useable items determines the upper limit of the game's lifespan.

Money is only a tool used to obtain goods and services. Once everything is bought, the accumulation of credits becomes worthless.

If loadout is removed, will this not also remove a large portion of products from the marketplace? Ship systems and subsystems will disappear, replaced by a lesser number of ships.

In my opinion, this would significantly reduce the play-life of the game, unless a greater number of ship styles (covering a wide range of price and quality) is introduced to 'fill in the void'.

Hey Shane, good to see your about!

Yes, your point is well taken. That is Cambragol's largest issue as well. Basically, we are not going to remove loadout for USpace because replacing the upgrade path with ships (or other features) could not be done in time. But for Traffic the option is still open. Hopefully a coder will ride out of the sunset to help out.

Well, why not a middle ground..? A reduced-detail loadout system but more hulls, perhaps.

I thought of that, but it would still require someone to step in and code it. GrandpaTrout has his hands full with many other things, and we would rather sacrifice loadout than those..other things.

It might even be enough to have a loadout that doesn't actually attach anything graphically, such as weapons, but rather just modifies attributes of the players ship. I am sure a loadout like that would be much easer to write than one that actually has to find docking points for weapons and attach them correctly oriented etc.

Um.
How about eliminating "less-essential" non-weapon subsystems first? For instance, instead of all of the more-specific - and directly simmed, I think, sorry if not ^^ - reactor subsystems, maybe a reactor (or whatever larger unit system) of some variable tech level with variable "upgrade slots". You can still track damage and loss of function to said reactor as a % of its, er, hitpoints but you don't track the subsystems at ALL any more.

Adding a similar upgrade path to any system, including weapons, should really cut down on the total number of systems. Kinda like the way Frontier: Elite 2 treated upgrades but with more (and directly simmed) detail.