Upon reviewing correspondence with Our Benefactor, it appears that we first discussed stations … quite a long time ago. The conclusion to that exchange was to put off further discussion until “the time was right”. I mean, this is a space game, of course we’re going to think about putting big stations into combat. It’s obviously an awesome idea. But how would they work? We knew from the start that stations had to rotate.This is actually largely covered by Alex’s post, Orbital Stations In Combat, but I’ll repeat a few points in my own words because they inform the artistic direction for battlestations: There were a few core mechanics for stations that followed logically from the concept of stations in general and considerations of combat mechanics in Starsector in particular. Stations also need extreme weapon range so that they don’t get stuck in a place that rewards long-range player ship builds plus tedious combat grinding.What to do? Make the station rotate! (Like in Master of Orion 2! Which also had separate directional shields, which we also stole because it’s a great idea.) But movement is supremely important to defense in Starsector and an immobile target is an easy target. So: the player must close with the station. There are still degrees to which range comes into play, but you’re (almost) never going to be able to kite/snipe a station battle. This means they’re like one big Starsector ship with a bunch of smaller ships attached at various points. From an art creation standpoint, this means that I don’t have to draw ungodly huge sprites 4-5 times larger than the largest capital ship and make every little piece unique. So there we’ve got the imperatives for stations in Starsector.
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