Originally posted by Bishop
May I give some golden advices?
How many Karats? j/k... go for it.
I player Armada2 for many many years, and Freespace2 aswell. In Armada2 you attacked your enemies with 200+ ships while in Freespace2 you never saw more then 1 Orion, 1 Deimos and 6 squads of fighters in a battle.
It depends how you played Armada 2. Freespace 2 also wasn't a situation that lent itself to massive fleet confrontations, due to the way that the NTF was spread out, and also due to the way the Shivans invaded.
My advice:
-Make shipbuilding very slow. 3 minutes for a deimos, 6 minutes for an Orion and so on. People who played the Starwars mod and who wait 20 mins for a Super Stardestroyer to finish know what I mean.
I actually have a 5 MB Excel spreadsheet I used to balance everything's costs. While the only "shipbuilding" taking place will be Non-Combat ships and fighters/bombers, Capital Ships will still have "build times" appropriate to their speed and rarity within the FS universe.
-Allow a limited number of crew to be used. Would be unrealistic to build 20 Orions. Give enough crew for 4-5 at most maybe.
Crew will no longer be gathered by planets, as much as it will be by stations. Also, crew is more of a "background" resource now. Command Points will limit the deployment of larger ships, as well as your control over a map's Subspace Nodes.
-Make ship speed low, at this way you got enough time to send fast fighters in to try and intercept the enemy.
Ship speed is accurate to FS2. So... the Orion goes at speed 15 (sllooww), while a Perseus flies at speed 80. Etc.
-Make fighters function in squads (not solo fighters) as is done in the B5 and SW mods for Armada2. This gives a more overseeable situation.
Since I made (or in B5's case, assisted in) those mods, I will definetely be incorporating some form of fighter squadrons. Probably simple flights of 3 fighters each. We'll see...
-Make nebula's harvestable, this could result into a more freespace enviroment.
Dilithium moons were replaced by Nebulas... but that's an interesting idea. I might just make all Nebulas have resources. Hmmm...
-Allow upgrades of weapons. Fighter Subach -> Prometheus etc.
Fighters will have static weapons loadouts. This is to prevent everyone from upgrading to Prometheus S+Kaysers on every fighter/bomber. hehe.
-Armada2 has the ability to fuse ships. (Borg cubes and galaxy-class seperation). Use this! Allow 3 squads of the same fighter-type to fuse into one squadron to have a slight advantage.
This doesn't work that well in practice. Trust me on that...
-Armada2 has wormholes, Freespace2 has Jump Nodes. It could be wise to make Jump Nodes in the game, acting as the wormholes.
Actually, Wormholes will be totally removed. Ships will have Subspace drives for travel "in-system", and there will be Subspace Nodes... but Nodes will really be, essentially, shipyards.
-What if you make a messon bomb and allow freighters to fuse with them into a freighter hauling a messon bomb? (Like making a Galaxy class saucer section fuse with the stardrive section). You could then unfuse where you wish to leave the bomb and click detonate to create a large explosion. If you could make an AWACS class of ship it could cloak the bomb and itself, resulting into an unlucky Orion flying by, being blown to bits. Tactics are what the GTVA is well known for.
One of the early ideas for a GTA superweapon was a Deimos loaded with 3 meson bombs. Of course, that was back when the Shivans could build a Knossos portal as well. hehe. If Meson Bombs appear, it will be in an extremely specialized role.
-At all costs, avoid the situation of: build that type of ship to win easilily. The starwars mod allowed 100 fighters to be build per minute. The players simply builded fighters-only or fighters + light cruisers to quickly overwhelm the enemy, leaving tactics to nearly 0. Freespace is known for: pop up behind the planet and kill the Ravana or hide in the nebula and ambush them with a scisor formation.
...
Ouch. I actually designed the Star Wars half of the mod you're talking about. Suprisingly, the build 1000 fighters tactic wasn't all that effective, and oftentimes judicial use of hyperdrive meant the difference between winning and losing the game.
But, I digress.
I've modded (mainly 3d modeling and texturing) since my 13th and I know some amazing things can be done in Armada2. Try to exploit these things to the max.
Thanks for the advice.

of it is actually already in the process of being implemented. If you know Armada 1/2 Mods, you've probably heard of Star Trek vs. Star Wars and/or Star Wars: Fleet Command. I was actually team lead on both those puppies

If you have, you know I'm going for quality and realism as much as possible. I also love to push the engine to it's limits as well (/me prays for Activision/MadDoc Software to release their grip on the A2 sourcecode)