I had a couple ideas for what, I think, would be good mods for sins. I'm not 100% sure they could be done, or if done that they would be good/fun, but I wanted to throw them out there to see what the community thought.
1:) Star Systems as the focus instead of Planetary Systems
First, I've never really liked sins' odd maps, the way it focuses on the gravity wells of planets instead of full solar systems. I was wondering about ways sins could be modded so each gravity well was a solar system instead. At the center would be a star and instead of asteroids, it would be planets. The concern I would have about this is, it would be odd to "colonize" a star, and to have the main means of attacking an enemy solar system to be attacking the star itself.
One way to get around this would be to make the stars 'uncolonizable', but have the planets be colonizable or capture-able, like neutral asteroids, but if we stuck with the system currently in place, it means anyone could come along and grab your planets with ease. Like neutral asteroids lol. Now, I'm not sure if it'd be possible with Sins engine, but I think it would work if anyone could come along to an unclaimed asteroid/planet and "claim it", then once claimed, no one could seize it without destroying/bombing it. Again, not sure how this would work in Sins' engine.
Also, I'm not sure if you could then allow a planet to be up-gradable once you claimed it. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to give it the standard upgrade options for planets, but could you perhaps classify it as a starbase so it could be built up in 'some' respects? And ships wouldn't be able to do the same 'bombardment' method they have in the normal game as well, and I figure this is something that's hard coded, so it'd just about remove the need for bombardment altogether.
Also, this would of course have an effect on the tactical and logistic slot system currently in place and... well on structure construction in general. Again, I'm not sure how hard-coded this is into Sins, but might it be possible, assuming the changed colonization system were to work, to have each "neutral-asteroid-planet" be able to build its own structures, and have its own structure count?
I'd like to hear some other peoples opinions and ideas on how this could be implemented, assuming it could be. I'm sure people more experienced with modding than I could offer more insight into this concept.
2:) Missiles being treated as more important; more powerful, can be shot down by point defense, not just normal weapon type.
This one however, I think is far more practical. After reading some honorverse novels, I think missiles and point defense would be a cool thing to implement in sins. Missiles, rather than just a typical weapon type, would be launched from a ship, either as "strike craft", or mines or a deploy-able structure like the missile turret on the Sova. Missile launches would either be tied into an ability or just directly into the anti-matter of the ship. Now, they'd do ALOT more damage than normal weapons, not as much as mines of course. The trade off is, unlike normal weapons, there is a limit to how much each ship could fire them (again, using up antimatter or having them on a cooldown), AND they can be shot down by flak.
For those reasons I think, if this was made into a mod, using 'strike craft' as a basis for the missiles would work better, because they already have special targeting parameters hard coded in to where, not every ship/weapon-type can hit them. I think this would also open up possibilities for modders, because you could have 'missile boats' that are heavy on missiles but lower on other weapons so they might end up doing a lot of damage in the right situation, but when that ship runs out of antimatter, or if the enemy has a lot of flak, you'd be screwed haha.
This idea, again, could probably be improved upon by people with more experience than me, again assuming I'm not the only one who thinks it would be a good idea lol.
