| Description | In AI War Classic, you could choose your starting ship type PRIOR to starting the game, which is something that puts the cart before the horse for new players in particular. That said, having unique ship types every game was a really awesome feature that made things quite differentiated.
That said, we saw a number of behaviors: players clicking through galaxies repeatedly until they got a layout that they liked AND the type of ship they wanted, for instance. Just letting them pick the location they like is a big improvement in this game that is already there, and I think that just letting them choose the ship type they want would be a good improvement in the same vein.
THAT said, I don't think we should ask them in the lobby. It would be much more interesting, and much more time-appropriate, to make it so that after a player captures a planet for the first time, it gives them some sort of "design template blank check," so to speak. At that point they can open up an interface that lets them choose from any and every available bonus ship type in the game, regardless of what other players have chosen, and they then get that type. If you and I are playing together, and we both want vampires, then fine, we both get them.
Deferring that decision should make things easier for new players, while still making the early game nice and varied (just not the very first planet capture -- but that's incredibly fast for most experienced players anyhow). Paired with that, letting them choose absolutely anything gets rid of that incentive to go "welp, I captured my first planet, but now I'm not happy, so time to restart!" That's definitely no good. |
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