To me the Bioships currently don't feel "natural" They need manual growing and when coming of age there are little to no changes that indicate "old age"
I suggest growing should be done based on the food given to the ship, with different kinds of food that have effects on the bioships' growth.
All food should generaly promote growth to everything but certain foods should be advantageous to grow parts of the Bioship. So there can be food that promotes the growth of weapons, other food promoting the growth of cargo space and yet another food that promotes growing armor. But all foods grow the entire Bioship. All growing is automatically but the player can still influence growth by the type of food he uses as food for the ship. Not feeding is not an option. because starvation will kill the ship.
As "old-age" sets in, the ship should show that as well, healing becomes slower, the ship becomes less agile, top speed slowly decreases, etc. but as the ship has learned a lot, there could be some advantages in scanning the area or something like that (old and wise). As all natural living things the ship will eventually die of old age. So you should retire it at some point and trade it in for a new ship.

cinnabar 23 Jan 2017:

I really like the idea of growth purely via consumption of different items. Currently a bioship is a rather hollow playing experience: most loot is simply sold and upgrading your ship is a matter of waiting (and *much* too easy). Obtaining particular rare/expensive materials to strengthen particular components such as your carapace or weapons would feel more engaging.

However, as VoTG currently stands, I can see problems with bioship senescence/death:
- Who would want to pay for a retiring bioship? Its sale would represent a massive loss of accumulated player effort.
- An immature ship would the player extremely vulnerable in high level systems.
- Forcing the player to trade a highly developed craft for an immature one would be a huge step backwards and alien to the Transcendence (or roguelike) experience.

A better mechanism might be bioship maturity/old age forcing some form of specialisation, e.g. in resisting/causing particular damage types, at expense of other resistances/speed/whatever. This could make it highly formidable against opponents in Tor Quan space but less so against later enemies. The effect would be to nudge the player into archaeotech (atm, mechanist/bio/archaeotech feel very much intended to be early/mid/late game) rather than forcing them to upgrade by killing their ship.

johnbwatson 24 Jan 2017:

I definitely like the idea of abstracting the growth process. Basing it on factors other than time and having the ship automatically prioritize based on the player's use of it would be a very worthwhile feature.

For example, growth could be capped by an 'experience level' of sorts determined by the number/power of unique enemies/stations the player has destroyed and the number of systems that the player has visited in that ship. The ship could modify itself and its weapons, distributing more growth points to weapons that are used more often and improving the armor segments that take lots of damage, if any.