Spaceship Idle: Design, Build, Explore & Battle (tuxdb.com)

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Unique Weapons for Epic Space (Auto) Battles

Arm your ship with a vast arsenal: devastating autocannons, high-energy laser arrays, explosive missiles, and cutting-edge experimental weapons. Each comes with unique abilities and synergies. Send your spaceship into battle and watch it engage in automated combat against AI opponents—or even other players.

A Vast Tech Tree with Powerful Upgrades

Explore a galaxy of possibilities through a massive, intricate tech tree. Research advanced weapons and unlock game-changing upgrades—catalysts, add-ons, directives, and elements—each providing unique mechanics and strategies to power up your ship.

Bigger, Better Spaceships to Rule the Galaxy

Each prestige lets you construct bigger and stronger ships—expanding your reach across the galaxy, forging alliances, and defeating your rivals. The galaxy is yours to command.

Spaceship Idle Next-Gen

First of all, I want to say thank you to all the players who have tried out the current Spaceship Idle demo, especially during the Steam Next Fest. After receiving lots of feedback regarding the current demo, I have taken a holistic regarding the gameplay and have made plans regarding the next prototype:

Remove Resource Management

Weapons fire based on cooldown (and generate XP)
Production buildings are removed
Permanent element shards boost HP/Damage/XP stats (no more Production Multiplier)

Linear Tech Tree

Linear and divided by ship class: Skiff/Scout/Corvette/Frigate...
New ship classes are unlocked by reaching permanent element shards (prestige)

Unified Progression

Remove XP limit for Quantum level
Remove Quantum limit for battle
Battle is a mechanism to farm XP and resources
You need to win a certain number of battles to prestige
Quantum is still earned based on XP and can be used to build modules or unlock techs

More Boost Mechanism

Trait-based synergy (like auto chess)
Booster craft (based on resources from battle)
Small tech trees to unlock boost (like tradition, religion and ideology in CivIdle)
More...

To sum up, I am making the game more of an incremental auto battler, rather than resource management. And my rationale is:

It's hard to get resource management and spaceship battle to work well with each other

Completely different gameplay and strategy
Very hard to balance
Resource management is so simplified that it is almost meaningless

Radial tech tree looks cool but has several problems

It favors specialization: i.e. going deep. Going "wide" is penalized
Higher tier has more techs
Hard to balance
Hard to indicate "progress" and design around that

It's very hard to match make fairly with prestige progression

A completely "fair" match would severely limit prestige progression and randomness
With an algorithm, about 70% fairness can be achieved with randomly two spaceships
Using spaceship battle as a progression gate will discourage experimentation and encourage an optimized build only
It's better to make spaceship battle less punishing, more rewarding and integrate it as part of the progression mechanism

I'd like to hear your thoughts, whether you agree with my conclusion or not. I've already started to work on implementing these changes and you are welcome to join the discussion either in comments or on Discord.

Cheers,
FishPond

[ 2025-07-16 08:42:40 CET ] [Original Post]