again, all as part of the future planned
Star Control: The Strategy Game
...

The reason why it doesn't fit is partly because the idea is way too expanded and takes over the game's style and focus.
I'm OK with things like, say if the main ship of each race gives a (flagship module with a) passive advantage in battle, so for example the Pinthi's main ship would be your "Hostpital Ship", or could provide a "Hospital Module" to the flagship.

Star Control: Origins can't become this Fleet vs Fleet strategy game, as it's meant to be an adventure RPG. You get your quests and story from dialogue and exploration (encountering events/objects). I don't want to talk to my various commanders on the ship. I'm the hero in this, i'm alone, and i make all the decisions. 

As brad said, and you followed with that thought, my flagship is my body, my RPG character where i pure in all stats, weapons, and modules i find. Some will support carrying capacities, some will support my Fleet of COOL ALIEN SHIPS (and not generic support ships), some will enhance the mothership itself. I don't think you need all this extra stuff to make the adventure game good/fun. You need emphasis on what you find while exploring, rich dialogue, balanced progression, and the combat ship themselves (it's not even fun to fight with them yet...).

IBN: I am always the first to say that a proffesional editor would make my story three times better than it is now.  Like anyone else, I am not an expert at everything.  My field is game and simulation design.  I also know a lot about history, the military and, of course, imaginary space ships.  Grammar and composition are not really my thing.  As a writer I get by.  There are mistakes I know I make and continue to make out of habit.  I often type conjunction words twice "and and", "the the", etc.  I most often get "too" wrong, as you point out, and almost always type "it's" even when I know it should be "its".  I try to catch and correct those when proofreading but often miss them.  I am no great writer, but with a lot of help from people like Neil Peart, Robert Plant, and (surprisingly too me) Belinda Carlisle I really like the story we've managed to tell over the last 20 years or so a lot.  You have no idea how much I look forward to a day when a professional editor fixes my elementary level grammar and composition and makes that story really shine.

Ishaan: Your opinion of what the game should be is just that, and I can't argue with it.  What you like is what you like.  I just think that the mothership of SCII is empty, bland, very incomplete, missing any "gameplay" too it, and just plain broken from the perspective of giving you way more than you need.  It isn't actually a lot of extra stuff, and creating variants is easy.  Add a visual component to an existing ship and give it a new paint job.  Variants are quick and easy for the artists to create because they are only very slight modifications (from the outside, anyway) of existing ships.  I think this vastly improves Star Control, but if they don't want to use it that is fine, too.  I'd actually rather introduce the modern gaming world to fleet composition through Manifest Destiny anyway.  But I'd equally like to see the SCO mothership use this because it makes the game so much better at every level.  It reaches into almost all aspects of the game directly from your character in the game that is always with you.  But I never argue with someone over their opinion of what a game should be, because every potential customers opinion is valid no matter what it is.

I'll give an example of the difference between the space ship games you know, and how it actually works based on real-world navies.  Using SFB as an example, if a casual SFB player winds up playing someone like me one of the big differences will often be fleet composition.  The casual player will take all front line combat ships in the mistaken belief that is the most powerful force that they can create.  As many of the biggest, most durable, best damage producing hulls they can bring to the fight.  But support ships are "force multipliers" and in that game against a "famous SFB player" they learn the lesson.

They take a CA (Heavy Cruiser), two CW (War Cruiser), and a CL (Light Cruiser).  I take 2 CW, a DWS (War Destroyer EW support), DWD (War Destroyer Drone support), and a CLG (Light Cruiser Marine/Boarding Party support).  They are bigger, bulkier, and have more firepower than I do across the board.  At the end of the game, they have been decimated and I probably even captured their Heavy Cruiser with the CLG!  On paper, from a pure durability and firepower perspective it looks as if they can't lose, but in the end they've been completely embarrassed.  

Force multipliers are fun;-)

It's not an editor you need, Kavik. You're 50 years old. Haven't you seen the words "to" and "too" used in sentences before? I know, I'm nitpicking, but I can't read a paragraph of that, I just can't.

So, most commonly:

"Too" means when there's too much of something, or a substitute for "also". 

"To" most commonly follows a word ending with "-ing" - walking to the store, flying to Paris, talking to your mom.

I only say this because, if you're going to continue schooling people on here about this and that, you don't appear too knowledgeable if you misuse the words "to" and "too".

That's all.

nt

Actually I do need someone who was born to write to edit the story, but I certainly wouldn't want them re-designing the games.  That's what I was born to do, like they were born to write.  They would be every bit as bad at what I do as I would be at what they do.  I will never be happy with my own story until that happens, and it is a waste of time for me to try and learn to be as good as that person would be at it.  Because they were born with that talent and I was not.  I could learn the rules of grammar better than I know them now, but I could never learn composition and prose well enough to be a truly good writer of stories.  I know it is a biased view, but I absolutely love my own story (and Cindy!!!).  And I am not good enough to do it justice and never can be.  Some things cannot be learned.  Writing, directing movies, designing games, being like John Elway on the football field... lots of things. 

In casual conversation on a forum, for example, I really don't care.  It doesn't matter as long as people understand what you are saying.  That's why it takes a team of people to make a game, or a movie.  No one person person is great at everything.  But just writing in casual discussions, like in a forum, it really doesn't matter.  I've never said I was any kind of writer, I was forced to become one to create my universe.  But I've always known that if it is ever published it will need to be gone over by someone who has a talent for that.  Little by little, of course, since it there must be close to 1,000 pages of it by now, haha!

It probably won't ever get made, anyway.  Not a single person has said a single word too me about it yet, which is pretty shocking considering the significance of Rube.  If you ever arrive at the fundamental basis of a phaser and a warp drive my advice is to immediately throw it in the trash.  You won't be missing out on anything, and you will save yourself a lot of frustration.  If nobody cares about The Matrix, a holodeck, cyberspace, and a self-programming computer with omniscient communication, nobody is going to care at all about a warp drive and a phaser either.  The world doesn't work the way we all think it does.  If you come up with something like this, not a single person in the very industry that should be interested will care at all.  That's the reality of how something like that works, and I've spent the last year and a half or so proving that beyond any doubt at all.

I'm not a writer.  I'm the guy who finally arrived at the final answer and holy grail of simulation design, which winds up resulting in the fundamental basis of what would be some of the most futuristic technologies in the world.  And nobody cares.  Why would I bother correcting my grammar if nobody cares about The Matrix?  I don't think that getting "to" and "too" right is going to make a difference when nobody cares about the ultimate achievement and decades-long dream of scientific simulations.  If a functioning simulation of God doesn't do it, better grammar certainly isn't going to do it either.

honestly i don't care about any of anyone's past around here.. this isn't about your or me, it is about Star Control. so you wrote your ideas, great. we can like it or not, but i suggest to respond to the matters that matter and not the BS around it.

Kavik - it's great that you can put your thoughts in great detail, but honestly it's a bit daunting and unnecessary. and it doesn't make them better, not for a forum where it's more about the discussion, there's nothing to discuss if all the details are already thought of... it then just becomes a monologue. i've repeatedly said that it should belong in its own thread, you might reference it in this thread but it just doesn't belong to the discussion we were having here. In fact it blocked any previous discussion that existed here.

and another one, honestly, we are not here to worship your ideas. I'm personally here about Star Control. That piece about the crickets belongs to your own personal blog where you can look at yourself in the mirror and make it all about YOU. This forum is NOT the place for that.

Ok my short and sweet 2 cents on super melee passives. I think instead of ships with passives you have an entire 3rd row at the bottom of the ship/fleet selection screen were you can, for a point cost, pick from passives, or either one shot or multiple use super effects, for instance a one shot super nuke, gravity mines, etc that the fleet commander can use at any time during the match.

Actually, it would be a bad idea to separate the discussion.  It is better to have it all in one thread, with the origin of it and where it lead all in one place.  That way, if anyone is looking for it later they can find it.  Otherwise, if someone goes looking for it later they only find the beginning of the discussion, and where the discussion led is likely lost (or very hard to find).  We have 40 years of experience doing this, forum etiquette is often a very bad thing in a game design discussion and this is a perfect example about that.  Separating this discussion is a bad idea, it will be hard to locate in the future.  You'll remember the original thread but have no idea where the second half of it was.  As always, we have a few decades more experience with this type of thing than you do.  And the fleet composition discussion is not a change of discussion, that's how you would represent the concept of "passives" within the context of a fleet of warships.  It is the same discussion.

I am not making this discussion about me, that last post was a response to being told that my problem is grammar.  I was pointing out that grammar is not the issue.  The issue is the lack of knowledge of simulation design of the modern game industry.  They don't know enough about the subject to even know that a simulation of God is the holy grail of simulation design because they believe that they invented game design in the early 1980's.  They've never even heard of scientific modeling, so they don't know that Rube is the ultimate goal of scientific simulations finally being achieved.  The end result of 70 years of work by at least 100 game designers.  And, of course, they become enraged by anyone who tries to tell them about game design that existed before they did.  That's what they get for ignoring us and re-inventing their own wheel in the early 1980's, they aren't even in our field.  They are playing in a sandbox at the edge of our field.

But I agree with you that this isn't the subject of discussion here, Cuorebrave just led it to this with the idea that grammar is the problem.  Obviously, if a functioning simulation of God isn't enough to get their attention better grammar isn't going to have any effect.  I am sticking to Star Control in these forums now, I have my blog for the little kids in the sandbox to ignore now.

EDIT: Also, I love how you think that detail in a game design discussion is actually a bad thing.  The ability to do exactly that is one of the primary differences between an amateur and a professional, you couldn't be any more wrong.  That explains a lot about the games that the computer game industry makes.  "Blindly blundering forward through trial and error, praying that things work out well in the end."