As I’ve been watching the videos of I:BS, I’ve repeatedly been thinking about how cool land battles (in my head they’re mostly involving mechs, because mechs are awesome) would be in this engine.
I understand that the main goal of I:BS is first and foremost to deliver a space combat game, and I really appreciate the laser focus the development have taken.
That being said, I would love to see ground warfare in this engine, perhaps as DLC in the distant future. I think the enormous and dynamic landscapes would make for interesting and varied mech combat, and it would be so cool to see ground forces struggling for assets such as factories or AA batteries in order to help support their teammates in space.
I’m sure the devs have considered this already, I’m just a mech fanboy looking for an excuse to talk about them.
You can scan the surface of a planet for good resource locations to build installations and you get rough estimate of the available resources in any given area. However if you land on the planet and then roam it in some form of atv you can get a much more accurate reading on the resource makeup of an area. So using a ground vehicle here would greatly improve your chances of finding a better area to develop.
Well, you have to keep in mind that the i-novae studio is a small team, and in all honesty, i admire and respect their mentality, and their understanding of their reality, that they have a vision, and if they keep adding features to that vision it will get bloated, and probably become bigger than they can chew.
That said, I:B will support modding if they reach the 800k stretch goal, if that’s reached i’m guessing modders will add ground play eventually, and perhaps if one of these mods is good enough, the studio’ll pick it up.
Perhaps if I:B reaches well above minimum funding, and most of the features have been developed, then the devs will look into ground combat. It’s going to be hard to balance ground vehicles against spacecraft though, with spacecraft naturally being more powerful. Maybe once the devs add more detailed vegetation, ground details, etc.
Here’s hoping! I’d love to see it as part of the official game too, though.
Definitely a long term goal - I much prefer inovae’s plan to deliver a space combat game sooner rather than a feature creeped mix of game types later.
As for balancing mechs/ground vehicles vs aerospace, I think it’s fine if mechs are inherently weaker than ships by virtue of their restricted mobility. Maybe they can cost fewer resources, have beefier armor/shields, and/or have heavier weaponry for their cost in order to make them enjoyable/reasonable to play.
Something I’ve always wondered, is it possible that if/when modding becomes a thing, the dev team would be willing to look at player mods submitted for review and use in the official servers? I feel that a lot of the community has a large amount of talent, and if the old forums were any indication a lot of gameplay could be developed for little in the way of compensation.
As mentioned above we would leave it to modders to create these sorts of experiences that are far outside the game we’re trying to build. We believe people could create some truly incredible mods with our tech!
