BP NEEDS the ability to support customizable units. I (Havoc) believe this would set BP apart from every other wanna be MMORTS and make it the obvious king of the hill. (:wink:)
I do not yet pretend to know how units are managed within BP (I'll need to wait for the code to go public and have someone tell me!), but I believe the idea I'm about to lay out to be the easiest to implement in the short term. I'll tell you at the end what I'd really love, but read this first!
Available from the Main Menu would be a Unit Attributes button. Clicking that would give you an array of (approximately) 20 slots/buttons. Each would represent a unit you can produce at the factory/airfield/dockyard. Clicking on one of those slots would bring you to the same type of window we have already for the defense settings (Note my cobbed attempt at creating what I'm thinking below). The drop down list would give the option of picking a chassis, one of the ones we have already to make things easy. The chassis should be classed by role, i.e. "land to land", "land to air", "air to everything", "non-combat". Underneath that would be a total pool of points available for that chassis, say 100 for the tritank. Under that would be attributes with boxes to the left. In the boxes, the player can place points from the pool, with all the boxes summing to the total at most. Each attribute says basically what it does. If there are more attributes the game uses, it would probably be the most interesting to add all of them.
Each property that is linked to one of these attribute boxes would start at a base line for each unit, i.e. the tritank would start at 1000 health and with maybe 20 points added to the box become 2500, it's firepower could start at 50 damage, and with 20 points become more like 170, you get the point. I think it would be appropriate if the initial amount of points, divided by the number of attributes (in our case 100 / 6 = ~17) put in every box, gave the player the default unit we have now. There should also be a maximum amount of increase made to the attribute, i.e. the tritank could have a maximum of 60 points put in each box.
I also think we could tie in extra research to this add on, if possible. I think it would be interesting if the player could research the total amount of points that come with a chassis, so say to upgrade the tritank from 100 to 120. In the same line of thought, the maximum amount of increase could be researched and heightened, instead of 60 points maximum in every box, 70 points. I'm not sure if being able to research the base attribute value would be good or not, but would be interesting.
This whole idea works on the assumption that every unit has it's own set of properties once it's produced. I doubt that being able to change the distribution of points on active units would be good, but I don't yet see a problem with changing them before the unit is produced. However, should there be a limitation in this regard, giving the player only a certain number of "lines" could be an option. Once a "line" was designed and produced, in order to redesign the line, all of the units from that line would need to be destroyed. If a system like this is required, it would be good to have several tools to manage these lines. Here's a picture of what I'm thinking for the Unit Assembly Line window.
The first box would display the default name for the new unit, that could hopefully be set in the unit customization window. As they are produced they can be numbered, but this would allow for easier identification of unit types if the player can name them something specific. I would also love the ability to rename units in game at will, but that's another topic, sort of. The Modify button would allow you to enter the customization menu, it would only be available when there were no units of that type in service. The next button would act like the surrender button, but specifically destroy just that unit type, this should also require a your password. The last button is something I'd appreciate, but not necessary, it could also do one of two things to be effective. The defensive settings button could either set the default settings for all units of that type produced (preferable) or, set every active unit of that type to a certain setting.
Eventually I'd love to see the ability to completely customize units, meaning, the ability to build a chassis from the ground up given a pool of parts, wheels, tracks, a hot spoiler, wings, etc. and then pick out the components that give the unit it's attributes, engine, drive train, weapons, armor, etc.
