Ideas for New Ship/Enemy/Boss Designs

Coderbus Suggestions
#1

This is essentially a collection of ideas for various different types of combat encounters. A few of these have the potential to be player ship designs, but most are aimed at being AI ships or boss encounters. (Bosses could be unlocked via investigating an ‘unknown signal’ on the star map, or by completing the three regular objectives and then choosing to continue the patrol.)

Asteroids with Rockets
There are a lot of asteroids floating around the sectors, so why not weaponize them? These asteroids act like long range torpedoes. They’ll lock onto enemy ships and go full speed ahead towards them. Upon impact, they do very heavy damage. However, they fly very poorly, and have a tendency to run into anything in their flight path, making them a danger to ally ships.

Combat Drones
Simple AI controlled fighters that a a threat due to their sheer numbers. They can be mass produced and then dropped into a sector for the next unlucky ship that doesn’t match the listed IFF requirements. Often in groups of up to ten, they’ll swarm and continuously attack any enemies they encounter. Not super threatening, but can make for good meat shields for a fleet.

Supply Ships
Not all ships are build for combat. Some are freighters or cargo ships transporting supplies. Also known as ‘loot ships’, destroying one of these will drop several pods that can be picked up by utility fighters with the search and rescue component, and will contain various things such as materials, weapons, medical supplies, or even rare tech.

The Orbital Defense Platform
The Orbital Defense Platform is a mostly stationary ship/station that is meant for being a sector’s primary form of defense. Armed to the teeth, heavily armored/shielded, and often flanked by a support fleet, this is what you get when you take a space station and design it for war. There are a few potential sub-types.

  • The Artillery Platform is equipped with an absolute massive amount of weapons. Expect it to have MACs, nukes, and high power laser weapons. Approaching directly is not advised, and it is instead recommended to use fighters to distract its more powerful weapons while the main ship finds openings in the flak to fire.
  • The Ship Yard is a more support focused platform. Any allied ships nearby can be quickly rearmed and repaired, faster than a carrier ships. It still has defensive weapons like flak and PDC, but is much easier to approach. The issue is the supporting fleet it’ll likely have. You can either pick off the fleet one by one, or try to rush and destroy the platform so the fleet loses its ability to repair and re-arm.
  • The Starbase has about the same weapons as the Ship Yard, but it makes up for its low firepower with it’s ability to launch several fighters at a frequent rate. Expect the ship to get swarmed. Although fighters go down fairly easily, the Starbase will keep producing and launching them until destroyed. Either get in quick and destroy it before it can launch too many fighters, or do your best to cull and control the incoming fighters so you can focus on the Starbase.

Abductor Mothership
Ever wonder where those little grey men come from? Well now you get the chance to see their mothership in person. Of course, they’re not happy to have been found out. The Mothership uses laser weapons, lots of them. They also have a shield that will regenerate over time if out of combat. Being the sneaky little b******* they are, they also have stealth capability, making it hard to spot them and only showing up on DRADIS when very close. The Abductors have one other trick up their sleeve. If you come too close to their ship, they’ll be able to beam a boarding party directly aboard your ship with the goal of forcing the shuttle call. Best have a security fireteam squad ready.

Critical Mass Blob
This is what happens when a blob is left unchecked for too long. This ship/station has now been entirely consumed by a blob organize, and it’s still looking to expand further. The Blob will launch a hail of spore clumps at any vessels that come to close. These act differently depending on the type of clump.

  • Blob Clumps act like torpedoes and do heavy damage when striking the ship. It may also leave bits of blob scattered around the impact site.
  • Spore Clumps will drop several spores onto the ship that will attack anything nearby. Very devastating if it takes out important crew.
  • Chemical Clumps will release a massive cloud of blob chems on impact, poisoning any crew caught in it.

There is also the danger of getting too close to a blob. If a vessel comes into contact with the blob, it’ll become stuck against it until enough damages is done to the blob to free the ship. In addition, any time a clump strikes the ship, it’ll slow it down for a few seconds.

Nar’Sier/Ratvar
On some distant Nanotrasen station, one of these destructive beings were successfully summoned. Now they’re wrecking havoc on all the nearby sectors, spreading their influence and accumulating more followers to further increase their power. It’s gonna take a lot of nukes to take them out. The summoned god acts quite different from a space ship, with their behavior depending on how they’re currently attacking.

  • Bluespace Disturbance prevents any ships in the sector from activating their FTL. Once you enter the sector, you have to fight the god.

  • Bolt Attack, either made of blood or bronze, will be shot at the ship while the god circles it. These bolts can be shot down, but do heavy damage if they connect.

  • Seize will see the god reach out and try to grab the ship. If successful, it’ll hold it in place and convert many of the ship tiles into corrupted tiles (Bronze or cult). This can wreck havoc if a door is converted, which essentially locks it to the crew. After which, the god will shove the ship away.

  • Death Ray ™ will have the boss aim at where the ship currently is, charge for a few seconds, then fire a devastating beam that has the same destructive force as a nuke. Better hit the turbo to evade it.

  • Minions act like fighters. They’ll primarily focus on other fighters, acting like an anti-air unit. They should be kited near the main ship so they can be shot down with flak and PDC.

The inclusion of this boss will see some changes to the way the cult works. If there is an active cult on the ship, the god won’t randomly spawn. Instead, it has to be spawned via the cult’s usual summoning ritual. If the cult is successful, the boss encounter begins, and any cultists on the ship get the option to spawn in as fighter minions. Should the ship be destroyed, the cult wins. (Think of it as the crew’s last stand.)

2 Likes
#2

I’ve only read half of it, and i already love the idea.

It’d be wonderful to have some diversity instead of only shooting the same black and red ships.

#3

This is really neat. I think I’ll use this!

#4

Bluespace Disturbance prevents any ships in the sector from activating their FTL. Once you enter the sector, you have to fight the god.

I really like this idea, too. It’d be neat if some ships could have an attack that’d disable FTL, then engineers would have to fix whatever was wrong. Minus boss-battles that would be un-fixable.

It’d also be neat if you could somehow prevent other ships from FTLing away. No one escapes NanoTrasen’s Border Patrol!

#5

Alright, I got another round of ideas. As usual, some are ship ideas, some are AI enemies, and some are bosses.

Mine Layer
This ship patrols a sector and occasionally drops IFF mines behind it as it flies. These mines will activate and home in on enemy vessels that get too close, exploding when they come into contact, deactivating when they fly out of range, or simply being destroyed by weapon fire. The threat here is that the mines are persistent. An enemy fleet with one of these may fly into a sector, drop mines, and then fly on to the next one, leaving a trap for any unprepared ship that FTLs in.

Scanner Buoy
An early warning system for whatever faction deploys them. These stationary devices sit in a sector and scan the IFF of any ships that enters the sector. If it detects an enemy, it will warn the faction they belong to. For players, this can display a readout on the command console that shows the name of the faction and the number and type of ships they have, giving the players an advantage via being prepared for the threat they’ll face. For AI factions, this can sound an alarm and reroute all traveling fleets towards the sector in question. Of course, if a ship is quick, they can destroy the buoy before it transmits its message.

Spider Clan Stealth Fighter
Just because they’re ninjas, doesn’t mean they don’t fly. These small, unassuming fighters come equipped with advanced stealth and strong cannons. However, they’re not the kind to fire indiscriminately at ships. In most cases, they’re neutral, flying through a sector on the way to their next target. In the case where they are fired upon, they’ll use evasive tactics to avoid most weapon fire, and will go after weaker targets light fighters first. Don’t expect the Spider Clan to be happy about you firing on one of their ships.

Hostile AI
Someone accidentally purged the AI’s laws, and now it has complete control of the ship. Those on board are either dead or being held captive, likely next in line to be borged. This ship could be of any standard design, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself fighting an Aetherwisp. This is mostly an excuse for normally friendly ships to be included in the lineup of hostile vessels. However, there is an additional danger of fighting this ship. When you enter the sector, a warning will be announced that a brute force hacking attempt has been detected and that failure to destroy the source of it will result in the ship’s systems being disabled (Think powernet reset random event, but the APCs can’t be restarted manually). This puts the ship on a time limit to destroy the hostile AI’s ship or be left defenseless for an extended period.

Emergency Response Team Fighters
Sometimes an issue isn’t worthy of an entire fleet. If that’s the case, Command may dispatch a fleet of ERT pilots to go to the sector in question and aid in combat. The ERT will arrive in a small AI carrier ship and deploy in a set of fighter. These fighters will be equipped with the highest tier of upgrades and come fully loaded with armor piercing torpedoes. After combat is over, they can then dock with the AI ship, and either be repaired, or enter cryo if their job is done. They can’t dock with the player ship. Once all ERT are docked (or dead) the ERT Carrier will FTL away.

The Chrono Legion Battleship
If you see this ship, then it’s likely you’re involved in something that is causing the destabilization of the space time continuum (Or someone/something is causing the server the die and the admins want to send it out with a bang). This ship technically isn’t there, being equipped with a temporal distortion field generator that allows the ship to ‘see’ into one time period while technically being in another. In other words, shooting it won’t work. Once the ship is in range, it’ll lock onto the player ship with a tractor beam, and then start erasing it from existence. If you’re on the ship, you best find a way to escape ASAP, because everything will be deleted over the course of about a minute. Once this is done, the round ends. There is one way to fight it though. Once the player ship is locked on to, this will put the player ship within the temporal distortion field. This is the only time your weapons will be effective, so you have to lay into it with everything you have. Just be warned, destroying the source of a temporal distortion field while inside of said field doesn’t end well. Expect time to… explode, likely followed by a server restart.

#6

The “unrestartable APCs” for Rouge AI might be a bit too OP, since if places like the CIC or engineering get shut down, you’re just fucked. But like the rest, it’s a great idea, might want to keep it at high disabled times instead.

#7

The time the APC spends disabled could be short, like 5-10 seconds, so the crew can somewhat deal with this by flying away from the AI ship when they’re about to be disabled, and then wait out the lockout while out of range of the enemy.