I'm sure you've all seen it, someone who sees any tutorial text and switches to TL;DR mode on it, who picks the guns that sound or look the coolest, who brings ships to the game that can barely do anything, or have a build that can but fly it in such a way that it won't work, simply because they don't know what it is supposed to do.
I have a simple suggestion that might help. When someone selects their loadout, the game should read which guns they have and what damage multipliers they have, then feedback into a pros and cons list. A simple, clear, concise way of telling someone what their ship does. This text could be coloured red and green to ensure it stands out.
An example.
All flak spire.
Pros:
- Extreme killing power once the armour is stripped.
Cons:
- Extremely weak at stripping armour.
- Extremely weak at disabling engines and weapons.
- Extremely weak at disabling balloon.
- Extremely weak at enemy crew disruption.
This would give a very clear readout to the would-be captain that his love for the echidna and typhon come at a very heavy price. Naturally, this kind of system would not be 100% accurate, as people can fly and target things in particular ways to make a singular role ship quite versatile.
Another example:
Goldish: 1. Carronade 2. Banshee 3. Gatling
Pros:
- Extremely strong at disabling balloon.
- Strong at enemy crew disruption.
- Moderate at stripping armour.
- Moderate killing power once armour is stripped.
- Moderate at disabling engines and weapons.
If moderate is listed as yellow, then suddenly you have a better looking mix of yellow and green instead of one green amongst a scary amount of red. All in all, a more effective ship in the eyes of someone programmed to look for simple solutions in what is, at first glance, quite a complicated meta-game.
It may also be possible, with a bit of fine tuning, to calculate potential bi/trifectas and add some kind of multiplier to determine the potential the ship has for different stats. So two gats on either side of a fish would contribute less to the armour stripping score than two gats in slots one and two on a mobula.
Different guns would add to values depending on their dps potential. For example, one banshee might move you up to "relatively weak balloon disable" but three might move you up to "strong balloon disable". Obviously guns don't stack infinitely, as putting three carros on a blenderfish is not really the optimal solution to all your balloon killing needs, but it would provide a nice, simplistic view of what a pilot is making their ship good for and might, if we're lucky, lessen the amount of virtually unusable builds taken by first-timers or I-play-my-way types.
Obviously, this is quite throwaway for more experienced players, but I feel this would still give newer players the feeling of freedom they get from designing their own ship, whilst giving a very basic evaluation of what they have come up with, without the frustration of not understanding why their ship isn't contributing.
Thoughts? Feel free to critique, defecate on or expand on this idea.
