Making faction colored ships (see examples here, here and here) for all playable and non playable factions is possible in FOC for galaxy conquest. This of course is only important for those ships which are common in all navies (e.g. CR90, EF76, Dreadnaught class heavy cruiser etc.). Please forget the original color markings, because they suck asps.
It has it's ups and downs:
+ starships are way easier to identify if they have a hull color (which could cause faction laser colors to be removed, as they are mostly there for interface purposes), new skins can look awesome, and could even differentiate between ship upgrade levels (e.g. rebel CR90d).
- colored starships count as new models for the game engine, which means new units. PR has so many units already (all upgrades of a unit count as a separate unit), it causes the game engine to lag.
To put it short: every new skin counts as a new unit, so if galaxy map lag is to be avoided, some units upgrades (which also act as separate units) must be cut from the game to equalize the unit numbers.
Do you think giving faction skins to a number of common ships is worth cutting the same number of upgrade levels? (please notice upgrade levels can be cut from any unit, so e.g. if you add a rebel skinned CR90 with 4 upgrades, you can remove 1 upgrade level from 4 snubcraft /which now have 10 upgrade levels per type, leaving them with 9 levels each/).
If you say yes, what starships do you think would need faction colors?
Edited by megabalta, 30 July 2014 - 08:55 PM.