With the revamped space travel coming, this would be a huge opportunity. More than just adding a cool FTL thing to the game, this could ensure players some very fun things: - A lot of replay value just dealing with and interacting with random ships across space which ever way the player wants to. - A great way to utilize Multiplayer and AI Crew Members to issue repairs on the ship during combat. - And to utilize mechanics such as Radiation and Oxygen when the ship takes damage and the Crew has to deal with it. Between traveling from planet to planet you can see AI ships doing the same, traveling about their business. Now let's say that the game has hostile ships flying around as well, different classes such as "Low Pirates" "Small Frigates" "Armada Class Vessels" and such, each encounter can be a randomized set of dialog options that relate to different classes and the player starts off with 3 options on every encounter. Each encounter pauses the game to allow the player to make the decisions. 1 - RUN. The player regains control of the ship and goes back to flying mode, and the screen-pause resumes real time. If the player has enough fuel (1000>) the player can easily jump to another system and that's that. So players that do not want to deal with encounters can easily avoid them. If the player how ever has less fuel than that, the player can try to outrun the vessel by manually flying around the system and attempt to make it to the edge of the system or into another planet, with enough fuel the player can activate Thrusters to increase speed, so that's what a player would do if the player was just a little under 1000 fuel and couldn't HyperDriveFTLJump into another system. If the player has little fuel, the player would be limited to just manually moving the ship at default speed, if the ship encounter is a small vessle that should be enough to outrun it but in case for bigger ships the player would fail. Upon failure the Encounter screen is triggered again, but this time without the RUN option, so the player has one chance. 2 - NEGOTIATE. The player can hail the other vessel and start a conversation. Note: If the player attempted to run and failed, the other vessel may not be so keen on listening or negotiating, or they could take pity on you and actually be more keen on negotiating depending on which AI Ship you encountered. The player can then interact with the ship and just like FTL you have basic randomized scenarios, the AI Ship could be a merchant or they could be pirates or they could be running from something and as such they have different goals regarding your ship and you can gamble and try to ask them to surrender/disengage and not attack/run. The player also has the option to negotiate a trade, trading some valuable resource such as Diamonds or Tools or Fuel or Weapons or Crew Members (If you have any) for safe passage against hostile ships, or to simply gain resources with a merchant type ship or a friendly civilian ship. 3 - ENGAGE. The player can initiate an attack on the ship. This triggers another paused screen where the player can use a toolbar containing all the player's weapons in order to damage parts of the AI Ship, aiming fire towards a certain section of the ship or what not. During combat with an AI Ship the screen is paused until the player makes a move, after that the screen is on real time and you can not pause it again, just to give the player a second to get ready. The screen can not be paused again due to what I am about to write. At this point, if the player ship retains fire and damage, it would be interesting for the player ship to be able to utilize multiplayer friends or AI Crew Members in order to issue repairs. A simple repairing tool of some kind that uses a certain resource (like iron or copper or what ever) to manually walk over to the on-fire-and-sparkly part of the ship that took damage and wield it back together. Depending on how good and quick your multiplayer friend is, or how many Crews you have, you could sustain a lot of damage. Otherwise your ship would start to fail apart and different systems such as Weapons or FTL Drive or the lights would start to faulter. Upon that, it would be interesting to see the already-in-place mechanics of the game start to affect the ship's crew, for example, if the ship is currently within a Radiated Solar System when the damage starts to get too big the players and Crew inside the ship would start to feel affects of Radiation (Just like you would on a Radiated planet) unless of course they all have their EPP Upgrades equiped. And if they don't, they would have to run to it to get it. Same goes for Oxygen levels and other radiation-like effects based on what Solar System the ship is. Maybe even affecting the gravity inside the ship so all your pets start floating around. A ship "dies" when it reaches a certain point of damage, at that point the player or the AI ship can opt to simply leave or collect some reward from the other ship, such as resources Crew members or weapons. The player in this case would have to drift to the nearest planet and beam down to collect some resources and issue a repair on the ship similar to how the Crew would during a battle and similar to how the game started, but this time of course with all the tools and experience you gained playing the game so it shouldn't take nearly as long. That would create an opportunity to add tons of different AI Ships and Dialog and Weapons and all sorts of fun things, while also allowing for a very cool Co Op Multiplayer mechanic, building your own Crew of friends, assigning different parts of the ship to house your weapons and such and assigning your friends to them, building little rooms for them on each part of the ship. Even maybe allowing multiplayer ship combat in some way too.
