Lately I've been planning how I want to implement ship design and damaging. I'm definitely planning to ships with modules that you can add to it and vary the modules for the role you want it to have as is mostly standard for 4x games.

Other than this I've been thinking about having a floor plan for each ship and you place components down on a grid within the ship, and you can place armor plates, ammo storage, weapons, etc. Positioning will have an effect on both the efficiency for nearby modules and their vulnerability. For example perhaps if you place ammo near your weapons you can increase the reload but been closer to the edge of the ship its more likely to get hit and could cause an internal explosion.

Here is a basic mock up, some components could have considerations such as if capacitors are destroyed they can also damage adjacent modules to a certain radius. All modules also have a density which can stop certain weapons from penetrating further. Obviously armor would have a really high density and that's all it is, but other modules may have a certain density too and be worth position between sensitive components and the exterior.

I am already planning to have directional combat, so if you manage to land behind an enemy ship you can attack their weak side (if the enemy ship is designed that way). This combined with only one move per turn hopefully will present good tactical opportunities\decisions.

I haven't decided if this is going to be to fiddly and micro managing or will add some worthwhile depth, obviously it will involve a lot more work then if I was just using icons and a listing space available to fit modules. Once I smooth out the main game play a bit more I might make a rough working model of this and see if it's worth it.

It's been a little slow lately, mainly been busy with working on my car on the weekends to get it driving again, but it's back on the road now so hopefully I can do a bit more on the game :)

I did have a go to see how far I could play in my game at its current stage... It was good actually I set about a full invasion of another empire and worked on taking over all their planets and see what are the most obvious issues that need resolving first. There is a bit to do, lol.

The main things were some turns the AI could actually take 2-3 mins for a turn processing, though most other turns were complete in a few seconds at most. This is not overly surprising because I haven't yet tried to any optimization to the AI code and could been stuck in some loops that aren't needed. So some of that could be easy resolutions, but the good part although sometimes took forever it never actually froze up or got stuck in a infinite loop, so that's a positive.

I'm still having some minor issues with empire borders redrawing correctly after taking over planets, a reload of the game fixes it but I don't think it will be to hard to chase this one down and resolve.

I'll see what I can get fixed with the current build then start adding the next features. I've been thinking about what I'd like for ship design and combat effects, that might be what I start working on next!

- Thanks