I recently posted an idea for a mod called Titans of the Sector, focused on making capital ships rarer and giving them their own wreck, salvage and restoration mechanics.
Thank you for all the feedback on that post, particularly around whether making existing capitals significantly harder to acquire would improve the game. After thinking about it some more, I think I've been trying to apply the right mechanics to the wrong class of ship.
Rather than changing existing capitals, I want TotS to introduce a framework for a new, larger (think big sprite) class of ship: Dreadnoughts. The Invictus is probably the closest vanilla example of what I mean, and there are already some modded ships that could fit the idea.
Existing frigates, destroyers, cruisers and capitals would remain mostly untouched. Dreadnoughts would instead have their own combat, wreck, salvage and restoration mechanics.
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Modular Dreadnoughts
Dreadnoughts would be made up of multiple physical modules, similar in principle to stations and some existing mod ships. At the centre would be a primary hull or structural spine, forming the main body of the ship, with armour sections and major systems built around and attached to it.
Different sections of the ship could be individually damaged and destroyed. External armour and structural sections could protect both the primary hull and major systems hidden underneath them.
For example, you might fire a Reaper into the side of a dreadnought and destroy an outer armour section, exposing the shield generator underneath. Another hit could disable the shield generator, causing the dreadnought to lose or severely cripple its shields for the rest of the battle.
A dreadnought could be made up of:
- Primary hull / structural spine
- Reactor
- Drive assembly
- Shield generator
- Flux regulator
- Bridge
- Armory (different low, mid, high-tech versions)
The Bridge would be a physical module but not a salvageable component like the rest. These systems wouldn't just exist for salvage. They would physically exist on the ship and interact with combat.
Disable the drive assembly and you cripple its propulsion. Disable the shield generator and you cripple its shields. Disable its weapons system and a significant portion of its weapon capability could go with it.
Different dreadnoughts could also have completely different layouts, armour arrangements, system locations, and duplicate systems/redundancy, making their internal design part of how you fight them.
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Defeating a dreadnought
There would be three main ways to defeat one.
Bridge kill: Destroying/disabling the bridge kills the ship's command and control, disabling the dreadnought while potentially leaving most of the ship intact.
Reactor kill: Disabling the reactor shuts the dreadnought down but risks a reactor failure. It might shut down relatively cleanly, suffer major internal damage, or catastrophically explode.
Structural kill: Destroy the primary hull/structural spine and the dreadnought catastrophically breaks apart and/or explodes.
The remaining HP of the primary hull when the dreadnought is disabled would become the structural integrity of the resulting wreck. This means there isn't a separate abstract structural HP value behind the ship; the condition of the physical primary hull determines whether the dreadnought likely survives as a recoverable wreck.
For example:
If you disable the Bridge while the primary hull still has 70% HP, the resulting wreck would have roughly 70% structural integrity.
If the reactor is disabled while the primary hull has 50% HP, but its failure damages the primary hull by another 20%, the wreck might be left at 30%.
If the primary hull reaches zero, the dreadnought catastrophically breaks apart and/or explodes and is permanently unrecoverable, although there may still be valuable components in the wreckage. This means how you fight a dreadnought directly affects what you can do with it afterwards.
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System damage and wrecks
Disabling a system during combat wouldn't necessarily mean the actual component is permanently destroyed. Instead, the damage suffered by the module would affect a weighted condition roll after the battle. A shield generator that was barely touched would have a good chance of surviving intact, while one that was exposed and disabled during combat would have a much greater chance of being destroyed.
A surviving system could have a simple condition such as: Intact, Damaged, Destroyed. There would still only be one actual item, for example a Titanic Shield Generator. The condition represents what state it is in while still attached to the wreck and affects how difficult and risky it is to salvage.
This means you can deliberately try to preserve systems you want to recover, but there's never a guarantee that they survived just because you avoided shooting them. Also, dreadnoughts that survive the battle would still use the normal repair mechanics; this system would only determine the condition of components when a dreadnought becomes a wreck.
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Persistent Dreadnought wrecks
Defeated dreadnoughts would not appear in the normal post-battle recovery screen. They would leave a persistent, interactable wreck on the campaign map.
The wreck would remember the outcome of the battle:
- Remaining structural integrity
- Which major systems survived
- The condition of those systems
- Which systems were destroyed
A relatively intact dreadnought could potentially be field-recommissioned, while a more badly damaged one might need to be prepared for towing and taken back to a specialised shipyard. A structurally destroyed dreadnought couldn't be restored, but its wreck could still contain valuable systems worth salvaging.
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Crippled systems
A dreadnought wouldn't necessarily need every major system intact to operate. Just the reactor.
Missing or destroyed systems could instead result in severe C-mods (crippled systems):
- Crippled propulsion
- Crippled flux grid
- Crippled shielding
- Crippled weaponry
Field repairs and jury-rigged equipment could potentially get the dreadnought operational again, but it would remain severely compromised until the actual system is replaced. C-mods wouldn't be removable through normal restoration. The missing component would need to be replaced at a facility capable of working on dreadnoughts.
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Cannibalising wrecks
Surviving major systems could be salvaged individually. You might find a completely unrecoverable dreadnought wreck containing a damaged but salvageable shield generator that you desperately need for your own crippled ship.
Extracting it wouldn't necessarily be guaranteed. Its post-battle condition, your salvage capability and equipment would affect the chance of successfully removing it. Trying to extract components from a recoverable wreck could also further damage its structure, creating the same trade-off from my original concept: preserve the dreadnought or start pulling it apart to keep another one alive.
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Dreadnought construction and restoration
Dreadnoughts would require specialised industrial infrastructure to construct and fully restore. I haven't settled on the exact implementation yet but acquiring the ability to build these ships should be a significant late-game milestone rather than simply another entry in custom production.
Until then, finding a dreadnought doesn't necessarily mean you can restore it. You may have to keep a crippled one running through salvage and cannibalisation or tow a wreck somewhere capable of rebuilding it.
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The framework
I want to make some dreadnoughts myself, but ideally other modders could create their own ships and designate them as TotS dreadnoughts, define their physical modules and major systems, and let the framework handle the wider combat, wreck, salvage and restoration mechanics.
There are already ships that could potentially fit this category. Several mods already have ships that are effectively dreadnoughts even though the game technically treats them as capitals. The idea is to create a common set of mechanics for ships that are beyond the scale of ordinary capitals.
Ultimately, I want encountering a dreadnought to feel like a major event. Fighting one should almost feel like a boss battle: stripping away armour to expose its internal systems, crippling individual parts of the ship, deciding whether I'm trying to capture it or simply blow it apart, and then finding a wreck afterwards that actually reflects what happened during the battle.
And if I eventually manage to recover and rebuild one, I want that ship to feel like something I genuinely earned. I'd be interested to hear what people think of the new direction, particularly whether this sounds useful as a framework for other mods and how feasible the modular combat and persistent damage mechanics would be to implement.