Awhile ago I was told by someone at Muse (cant remember now) that they had no plans to implement a way to customize stats on a ship (balloon, engines, hull, ect.). They do want to do cosmetic customization, but Im not sure on what the flavor would be (flags, hull paint, balloon paint, ect.).
This is correct. As the person in charge of all balance in the game, adding in more variables that change gameplay will be too much for me to do. I'll need another designer. That's just the bottom line.
The more important part of this is you may think that more customization options is better. This will always be a gut reaction for anyone who plays a game, including myself. However, flexibility and actually more meaningful decisions can be reached through constraint. More customization does not necessarily mean better when if most customization options just set you up for failure.
For example, the ways that our airships work is that their flight model is based directly off of engine power and position. This is real life physics at work here. If your left side engine is busted, you won't be flying straight any more. Making available the customization of every engine will set you up for failure if you're not careful to balance your engine power. This isn't exactly the kind of game we want to make, it's too in-depth. We're not in full out RPG land yet. The solution is to have engine sets where you change all the engines. So you get slow to fast sets.
The counter balance to this may be weight. Everything you equip has a weight, including weapons. To me, looking at all the variables... this makes things quite complicated. It's another axis that I have to deal with and I don't see it as beneficial at this point in time. What does it mean to guns if I have fast engines? Does it mean my fast engines are really heavy and I can only carry shitty light weight weapons? The weapons themselves are already balanced between themselves irregardless of weight. Even light and heavy slot sizes have been causing problems with perception and usage.
This is not to say that it can't be done. It just doesn't seem to fit the flow we're going for. Our matches are quick and snappy as we intended them to be. Adding all these things to customize sounds like it'll take longer than a match. You'll be sitting there futzing with weight or whatever and trying to min/max everything while people are waiting in match lobbies. That doesn't fit too well.
We will have more ships at some point but we're currently doing performance optimizations and measurements (ships are very very resource intensive assets) and designing ship cosmetic customization systems. Not until those systems and benchmarks have been completed can we work on a new ship. We don't want to design a new ship and end up changing or gutting a ton of it because our constraints changed. We need to do it smart and not waste time or effort.
tl;dr
—More ships will come when we figure out our cosmetic customization systems and performance benchmarking.
—More choice doesn't always mean good. For the feel and pacing of the game, I feel there is more than enough strategic and tactical decision making in ship customization. This will increase with every ship we make.
—Most importantly, who knows what the future has in store when we launch the next phase of the project. Stay tuned.
