I’m looking for everyone’s opinion about the control the player should have over the phalanx system on their capital ship. I’ve implemented a simple system where the player chooses the direction and width to fire their phalanx defence in order to shoot down incoming missiles. The skill comes from figuring out where the enemy is going to attack your ship and therefore where you should fire your phalanx system to shoot down as many incoming missiles as possible. The phalanx system is basically a group of large cannons which fire large projectiles towards incoming missile in the hopes of hitting and destroying them.

While this initial system works well, I’m unsure of the control the player should have when actually firing the phalanx batteries. The choices I can thin of are:

1. The phalanx fires continuously wherever the player points it. This is my least favourite option as it doesn’t add any depth to the game and isn’t what would really happen.
2. The computer automatically decides when a missile is close and automatically starts firing. This option is fairly realistic and is the option I’m thinking is the best so far. The problem being it doesn’t add a gameplay choice for the player.
3. The player clicks when they want to fire the phalanx system and when to turn it off. This adds a choice for the player however I don’t think it’s an interesting choice. Every time a group of missiles is close the player would always turn the phalanx on and then turn it off a little later. If I go for this option then I must make the choice an interesting one. For example, I could add a maximum time the phalanx can fire for before reloading. I don’t want players to be rewarded for just timing the firing of the phalanx to the nearest second and then turning off as soon as possible as this isn’t really interesting and would be better done by a computer.

So which of these options would you prefer, and can you think of any other options I can add to the list. As I said, I’m leaning towards option two as I can’t see a way of making this an interesting choice for the player. Please post any ideas as comments to this post or email me at [email protected].

Below is a picture of the phalanx firing from the ship. I don’t have the phalanx batteries on my model yet so I’m just firing from random positions on the ship.