Postby Boomboofer » Wed May 21, 2014 7:17 pm
If you're actually going to make some kind of multiplayer for FTL, have my heartfelt thanks, for long have I waited for this day. I'd vigorously suggest making it in the spirit of XCOM: enemy unknown multiplayer. In other words, just make it possible to have a simple duel between two player ships. I think the duel mode should simply have all the equipment available, balanced by their prizes, somewhat differently than in the actual game (due to no rarity factor, for example BL2 should be more expensive) and both players would get a set amount of money to shop with (the amount would be choosable by the players). Also, the ships chosen out of the 25 should possibly start completely empty, without oxygen, without engines, without anything.
I'm pretty sure that that kind of game mode alone would open a plethora of variety and it could be built upon later. Also, I think this is something you can't go wrong with since it has been already proven to be a working concept (assuming the XCOM multiplayer works well, which I actually don't know).
What would take a large amount of work would be balancing all the weapons, drones, systems, crew, augments (and maybe ships?) by prize. I would imagine this could actually be done by keeping a record of all the battles (of beta-testers?) and what equipment the winning player had in each fight and using that information, but I don't know how hard that would be.
Also, for the pauses, wouldn't it work if both players simply had two buttons, one for pausing and one for unpausing and the time would only flow if both players were in unpaused state? I don't see why this wouldn't work, it would be a minor inconvenience though, having two buttons, but that would be negligible. Or maybe the same would work with one button? Good luck with your project!