Spaceship Idle Next-Gen

First of all, I want to say thank you to all the players who have tried out the current Spaceship Idle demo, especially during the Steam Next Fest. After receiving lots of feedback regarding the current demo, I have taken a holistic regarding the gameplay and have made plans regarding the next prototype:

Remove Resource Management

• Weapons fire based on cooldown (and generate XP)

• Production buildings are removed

• Permanent element shards boost HP/Damage/XP stats (no more Production Multiplier)

Linear Tech Tree

• Linear and divided by ship class: Skiff/Scout/Corvette/Frigate...

• New ship classes are unlocked by reaching permanent element shards (prestige)

Unified Progression

• Remove XP limit for Quantum level

• Remove Quantum limit for battle

• Battle is a mechanism to farm XP and resources

• You need to win a certain number of battles to prestige

• Quantum is still earned based on XP and can be used to build modules or unlock techs

More Boost Mechanism

• Trait-based synergy (like auto chess)

• Booster craft (based on resources from battle)

• Small tech trees to unlock boost (like tradition, religion and ideology in CivIdle)

• More...

To sum up, I am making the game more of an incremental auto battler, rather than resource management. And my rationale is:

It's hard to get resource management and spaceship battle to work well with each other

• Completely different gameplay and strategy

• Very hard to balance

• Resource management is so simplified that it is almost meaningless

Radial tech tree looks cool but has several problems

• It favors specialization: i.e. going deep. Going "wide" is penalized

• Higher tier has more techs

• Hard to balance

• Hard to indicate "progress" and design around that

It's very hard to match make fairly with prestige progression

• A completely "fair" match would severely limit prestige progression and randomness

• With an algorithm, about 70% fairness can be achieved with randomly two spaceships

• Using spaceship battle as a progression gate will discourage experimentation and encourage an optimized build only

• It's better to make spaceship battle less punishing, more rewarding and integrate it as part of the progression mechanism

I'd like to hear your thoughts, whether you agree with my conclusion or not. I've already started to work on implementing these changes and you are welcome to join the discussion either in comments or on Discord.

Cheers, FishPond