Quick reference: https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=82503

The recommended slots may be fine for NPCs who have unlimited power and do not need reactor to power their ship, or extra devices to oppose the player. But for the player, the recommended slot limits for the smaller ships seem too low.

I agree with much of what the OP says.

I avoid gunships slower than Wolfen because four non-weapon slots are not enough. Those ships (especially Wolfen) tend to have horribly small cargo capacity. So cargo hold is important. Late in the game, being able to travel quickly is so good that slot four is taken by jumpdrive. If my ship is slower than .25c, I want an engine. That would be five slots, which most gunships cannot equip. In Eternity Port where starting as Wolfen is not an option, I upgrade from Raijin/Spartan to Wolfen as soon as possible due to lack of useful slots.

Minotaur has almost no room to spare. To exploit its firepower, I need three weapons. Then reactor and shield for obvious reasons. Engine because Minotaur is sluggish without one, cargo hold because of more cargo space (or fun stuff with mods like mine), and jumpdrive. Among the weapons, one is a WMD weapon (which is either Fusionfire or Lamplighter), omni weapon, and a launcher. Loadout is locked with no variation.

Ships need at least two weapons (Minotaur needs three to exploit linked-fire turret), a WMD weapon and another with an alternative damage type. Since all energy weapons (aside from Archura and exotic enemy weapons) have no WMD, that leaves blast or thermo weapons. Also, nearly all ammo weapons are blast or thermo. WMD is too important. (Important enough that I finally gave in and added WMD to most of my mod energy weapons.)

Agree with the OP.
There isn't a lot of flexibility in devices anymore.
To try another device you need to uninstall something.

I don't agree: smaller ships are supposed to be less flexible and the only way to do that at present is to put fewer device slots on them. The trade-off is in hull stats and price. Increasing device slots is only one way to tweak them, and I prefer a holistic approach.

We start as those "smaller ships". Unless the gameplay will change to force the player to upgrade to better ships, diverging from classic gameplay, they should have enough to function plus one or two more for fun stuff, sort of like things might have been for some of the starters. Currently, most playerships have just enough for the bare necessities and nothing else - not fun. Slow gunships with only four non-weapon slots really hurt.

@the_shrike: Even if you give 100 slots to Wolfen it will be still going to be played like Wolfen. tl;dr version of this post here.

The fact is with exception of Transdrive none of the devices alters the way the game is being played, let alone ship playstyle to break the balance. Let's look at the device kinds list again.

Quantum CPU
Patcher Arm / Patch Spider
Solar Panel
General weapon boosters
Specific weapon boosters
Transpace drive
howitzer loader
Thermo Autofac
ICX/Longreach defense

4 out of 9 device kinds are all weapon related and they are basically trying to achieve same goal; moar damage. It is all about looking numbers and exchange them from time to time in slots. Now, after we get rid of those weapon enhancers and Transdrive we left with these.

Quantum CPU
Patcher Arm / Patch Spider
Solar Panel
ICX/Longreach defense

Be honest and tell me; if both Wolfen and EI500 get all those four at the same time, are they going to be played same way?

Hell no. None of devices is going to change the fact Wolfen is an ultra-fast hard-hitting ship and EI500 being a slow moving armor-ridden ship.

Also, it is not just 'smaller ships'. With exception of Evern and of course EI500 all ships have same limitation of 8 slots anyway.

Now, this is already getting out of talking about device slots, but you mentioned "hull stats and price". Just where is hull stats that is important enough that all ships have to be inflexible?

Answer is none. The fact is majority of ships have very similar stats thus played in very similar way. Sometimes I feel it is literally nothing more than change of skins.

I have been deliberately using Wolfen as an example because it is really one of few.... who am I kidding, really just one ship that play very differently from others.

Look at the cargo space; pretty much all starting ships, now including Freighters, have same base 50 tons of cargo space which I feel just ridiculous. Nevermind there are ships that clearly have size difference graphically but they all magically start with exactly same 50 tons.

Not just that but pretty much all ships have same max cargo value. It is either 200 tons or 150 tons. I know some people may play differently, but pretty much all of players just end up getting cargo expansion and everything is once again 200 tons or 150 tons. Only exception is Wolfen and Freyr, out of current 9 starting ships.

This is actually such a regression from previous versions of the game. A long time ago EI500 was 'true' 200 tons ship. It had base cargo space of 200 tons, but you could not upgrade for more space because max space was also set to 200 tons, thus making the ship true 200 tons ship. We had a difference there. If you wanted to smuggle illegal items you were still going to get smuggler's cargo, but for EI500 you could choose to NOT get the cargo upgrade. Now in base game there is restriction that freighters cannot get rid of cargo upgrade, but it is such meaningless when pretty much every ship gets cargo upgrade regardless.

Even those 'advanced' ships from shipbrokers are remarkedbly similar. Centurions are essentially Wolfen with normal cargo space and things like Minotaur still maxes out at 200 tons despite it is a 'corvette' and no longer a smaller ship. Only ships that do have different stat are advanced freighters such as EI200 and Helgoland, but that is pretty expected.

I really should stop here because this topic is the next one I am writing and I don't want to burn out too early but you should get the idea. Cargo space is just one of issues that makes the game very blend. There is no need to be inflexible regarding ship configuration because there isn't any reason to be inflexible to begin with.

We need those ships to have actually interesting quirks, not trying to make the game more inflexible.

I'm sympathetic to kwm1800's point -- ships could certainly stand to be better-differentiated. Right now I feel like the most interesting differentiations in the vanilla ships are:
- Manticore: encourages a unique no-shields playstyle
- Wolfen: mostly by dint of being the fastest starting ship, but with the fewest customization options

I'm also sympathetic to the complaints about few device slots. Players want to be able to customize and personalize their ships, but at the moment there's several "clear best options" when it comes to devices, so there's not really much customizing to *do*. You either install this thing that will make you substantially more powerful, or you install the thing that changes how you play in interesting ways. Ultimately the game is about getting more powerful, so you always take the first option, unless you're intentionally choosing to be suboptimal as a challenge.

I think that ultimately, if we want to have well-differentiated ships that have interesting customization options, (and I'm emphasizing this)

*we must get rid of the "make numbers go up" devices*

and replace them with more devices that do more unusual things. I daresay there's good examples available in mods of other things we could do with device slots. But the critical thing is that so long as there's a device that makes your weapon 50% or even 25% more powerful, pretty much nothing else can compete.

For me, the biggest "numbers go up" devices I want are cargo hold (which has other properties beyond more space like mining computer or smuggling) and engines. After that, if it is a gunship with four non-weapon slot limit, the ship is done and cannot take anymore devices. Wolfen, and maybe Centurion-X with light armor, are the only four-slot gunships that are fast enough to not need engines (in which case, they get jumpdrive instead), and are better off than Freyr, Raijin, Spartan, and normal Centurion.

At least Restore means I do not need patcher arm, which is very convenient for at least the first half of the game.

Well, I dont think that all ships across the board need more slots. Some hulls could stand to get some more slots, while others probably should remain as-is (personally, I dont mind if the ship broker hulls are balanced stronger the later in the game you find them vs earlier game hulls or the starter hulls). There should probably be some rethinking put into device and invoke balancing as well..

@derakon : I personally do not like losing options for the sake for other options. Usually it does not work well (it gives me terrible memory from Stellaris which is really infamous for removing game contents).

And the game is not really all about firepower. If I were to equip only one non-essential device out of nine, that would be the transpace drive, not one of weapon enhancers.

If you ask me, instead of adding new devices we can reinformce devices what we already have, and frankly that alone may be enough for now. Here I summon the list of non-essential devices again.

Quantum CPU
Patcher Arm / Patch Spider
Solar Panel
General weapon boosters
Specific weapon boosters
Transpace drive
howitzer loader
Thermo Autofac
ICX/Longreach defense

Let's say normally ships get 10 devices instead of 8. As I said basic setup takes 5~6 devices so that gives us 4 slots. We have plenty of devices to force people to make choices.

Quantum CPU really can be something great, perhaps we can make more like CDM Shard from EP since now we have Near Star connector.

Even something simple like Patcher Arm can be very interesting. For instance, we can make Patch Arm to repair other ships or stations rather than just a player ship.

Think about the Charon system where you have to defend Korolov Shipping station. Right now the solution to keep the station alive rather than letting it destroyed is kill those missile ships asap. However with the Patcher Arm you can opt to keep repairing station until allied ships destroy those missile shops.

Or think about the escort missions. The ship you are supposed to protect is too damaged and it would not survive next attack, so you repair it instead. Korolov missions, for example, you can quickly repair the freighter when the ship is briefly stopped at the destination, so it can survive returning trip back to the Korolov station. Or we should be able to give specific command for the ship to stop so we can repair it, or even we can repair the ship while it is still moving.

How about that humble solar panel? Perhaps we can make it as installable (just like barricade) to create fuels. You install it near the sun with maybe some materials. Do some other business, and go back and here are fuels. You can grab the fuel to refuel yourself or sell it to ice farm for money. If there is an mechanics that can upgrade solar panel it can be even still usable for late game stage, no longer a super early game gimmick.

Thermo Autofac is also very interesting. I know a lot of people are crying it is overpowered, but I only see more possibilities. Perhaps it may be possible to alter the Autofac that it can make other thermo-related weapons. Suddenly things like IM7 is usable. Or it can create some special ammo, like creating thermo ammo for Akkan cannons (not sure that is possible with current game coding), which bceome ironically useless when finally their ammo becomes plenty.

Or it can be combined into certain launchers that can fire some very special missiles.

There are many ways to make currently existing devices to more interactive.

@wolfy

I think the slots are not really enough... really.

It is obvious I do not know how the development of the game is going, but it is clear that even first part of the game is not finished and more contents are being added, but the ships won't be able to equip those things. At best it will be frustrating just like how Quantum CPU is being used at current state, at worst they will be simply ignored.

I just think that the bigger ships should have more slots available. Currently most of the starter ships are fine as is in my opinion. But the Minotaur should at least have 10 slots available for its size. It should possibly be the only ship to be able to fit dual slot weapons like the APA.
Ships like the Centurion X and possibly the Manticore could use 1 extra slot.

I don't like losing options either, but at least from my perspective, it is completely impossible to consider any other device when there exists a device that makes me deal 50% more damage. That follow-on effects from increased offense are very hard to ignore: killing faster means less damage taken, which not only reduces costs but also means I can take on enemies that would kill me otherwise. So damage output is, in a very real sense, progression. As a consequence, so long as significant damage boosts are available in device form, I am losing out on all non-damage-boosting devices.

Like, there's a reason why many of my endgame ships end up with both the lithium booster and the howitzer speed loader, or both the lithium booster and the thermo shell nanofac. They're the best options available; nothing else comes close.

Now, I tend to take an extremely abstract view of games, as a collection of interacting rules and systems. And I also have a tendency to strip away (from consideration) elements that I don't perceive as contributing to playing the game the way I want to play it. Judging from conversations here and on the forums, other players share some of the same concerns I do, albeit perhaps not to the same extreme. I say this to make it clear that I'm not trying to say "my way is the only right way", I'm just offering my perspective.

What we could perhaps do is change the damage boost devices into changing how the weapons behave. Give +pierce to laser weapons. Make particle shots explode so each shot has minor AOE. Give subtle homing (or enhance existing homing) for kinetic shots. And so on.

@kwm1800 - My reply wasn't directed specifically at you, just to the conversation in general, but I'm confused as to why you're disagreeing with me when you yourself also said - to quote from your original post - `I also think advanced ships such as Centurion, Helgoland, Evern and Minotaur should have more slots. To think about it, we can keep current starter ships as they are and give extra slots to those advanced ships. This way we can also encourage players to use ship brokers too.` - Granted, I'm not sure the Helgoland specifically needs to focus on more (weapon) slots because of its role as a freighter.*

Its not mandatory for fun design for a device to be a good, or even viable option on *every* hull. In fact thats probably less fun, since then you're back to the current situation where builds become mostly the same. That said, every device should have some viable place on some hulls.
That again also isnt to say that some hulls shouldn't have increased slots, and that certain devices shouldn't have increased utility - both are things I suggested should be done or at least looked at in some cases.

*Also, in the event that running freight isnt viable for a freighter, the way to fix that is to fix the economic system of the game and how freighter gameplay works, not turn the freighter into just another heavy gunship. Currently the things we're working on aren't heavily focused on trade systems at this time, so we haven't really been flying freighters much to test them so I can't speak to the current state of trade, but if that is an issue, adding/removing slots is independent of fixing it.

As for the Helgoland being a specialty ship, it would be fun to have an extra slot on it dedicated to mining weapons. The big hold is ideal for hauling ores. The Omni rasiermesser slot makes it good for fending off enemies while mining.

@derakon: I mean, what you are purposing is essentially removing what we have (straight damage boost) for something new. We are still losing options for the sake of other options.

Something I need to tell you. If I were to choose a weapon damage booster or transpace drive for instance, I would choose transpace drive for 100% of the time, every single time.

And I had a talk with someone in forum who do not use any kind of damage boosting abilities at all. There are people who never bother to use those devices, and that's fine, because it's their chocie after all.

And there are people who would put the biggest weapon damaging as much as possible. If we remove damage boosters surely we will piss those people off because we just removed the options from them.

@wolfy : Yes, there were a lot of ideas once so I was a bit confused. Thank you for the clarification.

For freighters what they need is... well, cargo space. Essentially all three starting freighters are really in fact 50 ton ships. Not much difference because pretty much everyone else also gets cargo expansions.

I think if more devices were able to be removed/replaced outside of a station, the device slot limitations would greatly weaken. Maybe, for example, Quantum CPUs could be enhanced with ROMs, those enhancements stick and a player could swap Quantum CPUs but the QCPU takes 60 seconds to boot up when the player swaps it?

It also could be interesting if some devices were only able to be used by certain ship types. Say, only freighters could use a autoloader, or only Rasiermesser ships could use certain Raisermesser devices?