Cultural Influence on Ship Design

[Emraldis]

It's a fantastic idea on paper, but boy, that is going to be a lot of modeling, texturing, animating and a lot of developer resources to flesh out a feature like this. And then having to do that all over again with each "Style" (Fungoid, mammilian, etc...) of ship, that is a lot of permutations to do.

It could just imply making a bunch of accessories for each ship type, and then making places to add them on the original ship chassis.

 

[WhiteWeasel]

It could just imply making a bunch of accessories for each ship type, and then making places to add them on the original ship chassis.

That would be a lot simpler.

 

[faljen_isus]

they could use the modders to do it and reward the best design for each permutation with 100€

if i got it right, there are 52 permutations and 5.2k€ for a company like paradox wouldnt be an issue as they would probably bill the shipset package at least 10€ and there will probably be over 1k copies sold

 

[TerrBear]

lmao the difference between xenophobe and xenophile ships would be more/less windows!
I'm pretty sure the difference would be one would have xenos in it and the other would have them splattered on its hull lol

 

[Zwollenaer]

This sound very cool, but it would be so much work that I'd rather see this much art budget go towards completely new ship styles instead of variations of existing ones.

 

[Ralius]

Aren't they already doing something like this by adding more colors to the ships in Utopia? I think they should do something like that what they did with the fallen empires and make each ethic have a special color scheme. I sure wouldn't mind that awesome black/red menacing style for my fanatical purifiers.

 

[Pharo212]

Aren't they already doing something like this by adding more colors to the ships in Utopia? I think they should do something like that what they did with the fallen empires and make each ethic have a special color scheme. I sure wouldn't mind that awesome black/red menacing style for my fanatical purifiers.

1.5 is making it so your empire colors will affect ship colors and engine trails, it looks like. So not quite the same, although you can make your fanatical purifiers black and red if you like.

 

[EleventhAvenue]

Sadly, I don't think we'll see this very soon, but I really like the idea.
I would think that egalitarian ships should have decorative/colourful patterning (think separatists from independence war), and authoritharian ones national insignia and/or large ship 'registration numbers' in blocky red/black text

 

[Kayden_II]

The general Idea of Making the Ships more diversive isn't bad ...

I mean, the Colour of the Ships are based on the Colour of the Empire in V1.5 (Banks) ...
A next Step could be, that the Emblem of the Empire is shown on its Ships.

 

[PalmettoExplorer14]

This is a very good idea.

For example, a militaristic ship design would be something similar to the Kilrathi from Wing Commander or the Bulrathi from the Master of Orion remake.

While spiritualist ship design could be I guess be something like the Mrrshan from the Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars. Even the Elerian ships could work for the spiritualist design

The Human Republic ship design from the Master of Orion remake could work as the Xenophile design while the Terran Khanate's ships (from the same game) could work for the Xenophobe.

 

[Arizal]

I concur with many others. This is a really good idea, and I think the art department could very well make ship extensions showing the traits you proposed.

However, I also think you should be able to personalize your ships based on those models. If you want an agressive empire which looks absolutely harmless, you should be able to.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Did somebody say windows?

 

[Aurtose]

Personally, I think that the proposed idea is too much work and would either irritate players or add more complication to race creation.
However, 2 alternatives come to mind:

1: ethics-based additional greebling as suggested above. Just have textures/pieces specific to each ship type-ethic combination that can be added/removed from ship hulls randomly on ship design, this will also help otherwise-identical ship classes appear distinct. So, for instance, authoritarian ships may have your flag appearing on the side, or militarists may have additional armour plates.

2: non-phenotype based ship sets. I think a reasonable number of players would pay for 8 new ethics-based ship sets. If releasing that much in bulk is too much then having each one released separately as an ethic aesthetic pack, including new race portraits and clothing for each phenotype (functionally identical to plantoids) would also work, though I'd hate to see how the community would react to the release order.

 

[Haccoude]

I've previously asked for non-phenotype ship sets in the suggestion subforum, so I definitely agree with the sentiment behind this. At the same time, I have to wonder if the exact suggestion wouldn't be overly labour intensive.

Aurtose's suggestion of "Ethos" DLC where each ethos gets a ship set and alternate clothes (universal across all phenotypes) seems reasonable, unless I'm underestimating Paradox's willingness to implement a shipset equivalent to an RPG character creator.