Donations Inc. has moved it's headquarters to Sirius several weeks ago, and has just now spotted a one of a kind opportunity to once again meddle subversively with local politics to enlarge their profits in the new environment...
(A couple unsorted suggestions and observations of a newcomer. We are aware that with 1.6 in the works some of the below might simply already not apply any more, but this is beyond our knowledge and we act with best intentions. We are deply apologizing beforehand for statements that have been discussed earlier and overlooked during forum research, ideas that have already been ruled out as impossible to code and formulations that contain some irony. This is a highly addictive mod, and all of the following should be understood as an attempt of being constructive, not offensive.)
- a word of warning: the sound sample used for the "bullets whizzing past your ear" effect when going up against coalition fighters contains tremendous peaks that are quite able to damage a more expensive loudspeaker system, let alone being terribly annoying.
- coalition turrets could do with some custom fx, given they're the most powerful turret mounts.
- the train container system seems to follow a somewhat half-hearted concept, atm it's little more than a decorative bonus really. Containers could either be "empty", say quite expensive "cargo volume upgrades" that allow for ~1000 extra cargo volume units. Or, expanding on the current way of implementation, the containers could be the main source of income, with much bigger amounts of money involved and some reasonably large profit margins... and the train only having a comparably small "free" cargo space for generic commodities.
- cargo volumes could be tweaked to generally reflect the outer appearance of the ship better, say, bigger ships should have bigger cargo holds and vice versa.
- some general documentation of the crossfire mod would surely be appreciated and save both you your potential customers tons of headaches. A ReadMe or webpage manual with some basic explanations of the additions made to the retail game, which upgrades can be mounted on what ship for example ("Noob warning: don't buy a shield upgrade for your train, you'll only lose 70% of your money..."), that like. During my "career" the most frequent response to my questions, even from server police, was "read the forums". Now, let aside that this was only helpful in less than maybe a third of the various cases, imagine calling a helpdesk with something like, help, my video recorder exploded and all you get is "oh, it's all in our forums" and muffled sniggering. You get the picture. Some people start building letterbombs after a treatment like that.
- an ounce of polish is worth a ton of additions. While introducing another two digit number of new ships, how about a thorough review of the existing ones? Two thirds, if not more of the people online fly a Shroud, does it have to be this way? On the one hand you have ships with excellent stats, some even with all lvl10 mounts, that are either clones (Deimos) or have the charming visuals of a flying ikea kitchen unit (Seething Fury, Ceptyr) or some rush-job texturing (Elder...), on the other hand you practically waste some sleek designs with comparably high-detail texturing because of stats that are nothing short of too much of a desas... drawback to accept in trade for good looks (Raven's Claw...)
- which brings us to the tricky thing that balance is in general. Crossfire appears to be a grown, not a designed project. It has reached a point where PPC's are as common as dirt on the streets and Nomad guns put down as a kind of fun commodity at best. Now, everybody flying the same outmaxed ship with the same number of uber guns mounted might be an effective way of guaranteeing fair chances during server events, but it's strikingly odd that with all the talking and discussions and most curious tweaks in the name of balance the most powerful guns have not a single drawback and are even more so freely available. Big, bigger, biggerer, biggererer. It has something of the common tv show issue, "we already saved the town the country, the world, the galaxy, the universe... where to get an even more impressive bad guy after satan himself has ben slewn twice?". Unfortunately, we currently don't have any solutions to offer.
- missile-only weapon slots could make for some diversity, be an interesting means of balancing out an otherwise extremely powerful ship, given this is possible to do.
- it seems that almost all of the work on this project is done by a single person, which would easily explain some mildly uninspired copy'n paste actions (identical commodity settings in several new systems, rushed ship texturing, extremely similar or non existent short text descriptions of ships, planets, items etc). The community size looks promising, how about outsourcing some of the minor tasks?
- server events are a great idea. period. the very reason to come back and login every day the schedule allows for it. elaborating on the existing ones is surely not a wrong thing to do.
- "even when its ready it does not mean that i will release it then. i said i will release it when this community does fix its probs". While egocentricity in measured amounts befits a skilled artist, statements like this could help a seasoned public relations manager to crying fits. 
- the escape pod system has certain flaws, but this has been discussed extensively in other threads.
- how about replacing the battleships with gunboats? Would retain most of the "big hunk" feeling while solving some of the obvious problems like docking, weapons, camera clipping, difficult maneuvering aso
- weight reduction kits might reduce the mass of a ship, but regarding this as useful is a serious case of self-deception, since they do in no way increase maneuverability/affect the turning speed, that which is what one really does expect from them before the purchase.
- some systems (sovietskaya...) are big enough to activate autopilot and go read a newspaper. There sure a reasons. I read on some clan webpage that they're using "gun runs to coalition space" as some kind of punishment. I recon that was the original intention behind it...
...
maybe some more later on
regards
- Don
