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Can you equip other weapons besides lasers, cannons, and missiles? For instance, if you trade with an alien race to get a new type of gun or find an alien artifact.
The players default ship only has a laser, cannon and missile hard point for the planned scope of the game (possibly with end game opportunity to upgrade to a new special weapon class to replace the old hard point). However the code is highly modular and would easily support changing the weapon types to anything other than multiple missile systems (limitation of the pixel perfect engine because drawing the missiles uses a special char buffer, not the player/enemy beam weapon buffer).
More than 3 weapon systems for the player ship is not possible only because I don't have any room left on the screen to add more weapon status boxes, though if you watch the video in my sig you can see fewer weapons is not a problem.
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Are you going to make the game moddable in any way? I know you're doing ships configurations with text files. It would be cool if you or someone else could add expansions.
Not intentionally, however many of the utilities I'll be using to make the game like the random map generator, would be made available. Simple modifications will none the less be fairly easy (changing weapon stats, enemy ship stats, adding/removing planets/stars, changing most of the playerships stats, cost of upgrades, mineral spawn characteristics, adding special locations to planets) Though I would hope people still try to complete the game unmodified, only doing this for fun afterwards
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What about different armor or shield types that are more or less resistant to certain kinds of damage? Is there going to be anything like that? Or maybe some add on devices that do something similar.
Short answer is no because weapons only deal "damage" however certain game mechanics will drastically impact the effectiveness of certain weapons in certain situations, Shield systems, and shield threshold (the amount of damage the shields can absorb from a single strike) play a critical role in this. Just looking at the players weapon systems, The laser is a hard hitting weapon that does enough damage that similar classed shields can only absorb about half of the strike, this allows you to damage the target through it's shields to some degree. Conversely the cannon fires 3 small blasts, the total damage is higher than a similar class laser however since it comes in 3 short blasts most shields will be able to absorb all 3 hits. In this case, cannons are able to chew through shields faster than lasers, but don't actually hit the hull until the shields are down. Missiles have the most significant difference since all missile damage that penetrates the shields is applied to all sectors of the target ship, Missiles damage also is not subject to shield threshold, so the target's shields have to be down (or at least less than the damage value of the missile) for any damage to be applied to the hull. The basic idea here is, your missiles are on average 3-4 times more effective against the armor/hull of a target than their shields, so it's best to hold them back until you've knocked the targets shields down.
Tactically, what seems to be the best general strategy (and it varies greatly depending on the target ship) is to charge at it, unload your lasers and cannons into the targets forward shields hopefully dropping them, then get it to chase you and lob missiles into the hole you made.
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Do you have ion cannons or something else that can temporarily disable parts of a ship (or the whole thing)?
The game does have a weapon called the ion cannon, however it does not have any special system damaging effects, it's basically just a longer range lighter damage laser. To be clear though, all weapons that deal damage to the hull of a ship make a roll on that sector of the ships critical hit table, so certain weapons like cannons that fire rapidly produce a lot of critical hits against the target ship. All critical hits are significant, not just ones that destroy a system. If you damage the targets weapon for example, it increases the firing delay between shots. Damage their shields and they regenerate more slowly, damage their engines and they lose speed.
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1. Luxury items like exotic food, pets, devices, etc. These are very rare but have a high trade value.
Trade outside of what you do at starport is currently up in the air a bit. I'm not planning on having special trade goods at this point, however I am hoping to implement a large named artifact system similar to how SF had, where you find artifacts all the time, but most of them only have the purpose of being sold. This system might end up being similar to specialty trade goods to other races.
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2. Mass cannons that fire gravitons (or whatever half assed explanation you want to go for). They completely ignore shields and armor but don't do as much damage as other weapons.
There is a weapon system either called the neutron pellet gun (NPG), or the neutron blaster (I've called it both, I'll pick one soon) which has all of it's damage penetrate standard shielding. A special endgame upgrade might circumvent that at some point.
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3. Psychic phenomena. This is very much not a part of the games your basing it on, I just think using psychic powers to temporarily control and enemy ship or something would be cool. Also, literal ghosts ships that come from beyond to pillage the living.
I currently do not have anything like this, at first glance it doesn't seem like it would add much with how I have the game set up.
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4. Fighter bays. Launch a swarm of fighters that zip around and shoots lasers at enemy ships. They aren't very durable.
The problem with adding non beam type weapons is again the character buffers and the lack of size. If I had a weapon like this, it would be mutually exclusive to having a missile launcher and just reuse those characters, behave like a missile, however instead of exploding on the ship just tagging it with a bunch of shots. It could work but I don't think it would add much diversity. (it would basically be a missile that is more effective against shields)
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5. Alternately, you could hire wingmen. Although, I don't know if your engine could handle it or how many character tiles you have left.
While the idea doesn't really work for the game universe I have planned, the engine can support up to 4 ships (limited by free characters). With hard coding I could get it up to 6, but this would require a dedicated combat board for each encounter. With some adaptation I could set combat up into 2v2's or FFA's, if we ever got a netMZX that met the projects exact requirements (keyboard ID, server/client versions of the game) I imagine flying against other MZX'ers in custom ships would be pretty fun. It is however unlikely that even if we got a netmzx that it would be designed in away to make this possible.
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6. Heavy forward guns. These are variations of other weapons except that they do much more damage but can only target ships in a 60 degree forward arc. Manueverability is a must.
Since arcs are already calculated to determine which shield is being hit, it would be simple to implement limiting firing arcs to any weapon type. I don't have any current plans to limit the player ship's firing arcs, though it is likely you will encounter some enemies with this type of limitation.
A lot of these are good ideas that maybe just don't fit the game it's self, I have been kicking around the idea of a future project with a slightly more modular combat engine where you can fly different ship types with very specific player controlled design elements, in that case many of this sort of thing would be options.
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