With Co-op approaching closer and closer I'm beginning to wonder if they are going to add a bit more world building and interactions into this expansion. One easy way they could do this is by having your little privateer crew only start out with limited equipment and have to purchase or earn access to the other ships or equipment.
ex when you start the game, you can only choose the Goldfish, pyra, or junker. The only light weapons you can put on them is chaingun, mortars, Artemis, medium carronade, and a flamer. The heavy guns you'd have access to would be heavy carronade and the heavy flak.
when you successfully beat a co-op mission you would gain money, favour from the faction you completed the mission for and experience. The experience would just determine your level so people can judge when teaming up with you in the lobby, money is what you would use to actually unlock new equipment and some equipment would be locked until you earned enough favour with the factions that had access to it.
For example you first start out with your crew so you just run acouple games using the pyra with chainguns and mortors cause that's all you have access to. you earn 200 gold (or whatever is used as currency) and go to the shop and buy the light flak. Now you can put the light flak on any of your ships so you can run a junker with 4 flak canons if you really wanted to. Play a bunch more games for various factions earning a little favour for all of them and a bunch gold, so you buy yourself the hwatcha to use on your goldfish.
Now you have the hwatcha you think I should get the galleon so I can fire 2 at the same time, you may have enough money saved up but the galleon is a Yeasha warship and you have not been doing enough jobs for them to earn any large amount of favour. So now you have to do a bunch of jobs for them before they will let you into their shipyard so you can buy a galleon.
They could make the system more alive by adding other features as well such as a loyalty multiplier, so every consecutive job you do for a faction will multiply the favour you earn, EX first mission gives 10, second gives 20, 3rd would give 30 and so on. That way sticking with one faction earns favour faster, doing a mission for a different faction will reduce the loyalty multiplier by 1 and doing something against the faction will reset the loyalty multiplier to 1. EX you do 8 missions in a row for the yesha empire so you have a loyalty multiplier of 8 with them so completing another mission would give you 80 favour and increase the multiplier to 9. doing a job for the Arashi league against the Fjord Baronies would drop the loyalty multiplier for Yeasha to 7 and if you were to say raid a yeasha convoy or defend an Arashi base from Yeash attack then the Yeasha loyalty multiplier would drop all the way to 1.
Make it so that the the match rundown stats came in the form of a letter with some flavour text unique to the factions and I feel a lot of people could get invested in the world even if most of what we see is lobbies and match screens
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