Equipment upgrades: Simpler or more choice?

[justkevin]

Interesting points about different weapon types. In my game the player's ship will primarily be attacking with a single, upgradeable turret, plus "smart" missiles.

How does your game handle switching between different weapons types (or does it?)

I'm currently leaning to having equipment upgrades + modifiers. So the player upgrades armor along a single path, but can purchase or find special artifacts that give bonuses, like 10% damage reduction, etc, 20pt damage thresshold, etc.

Regarding performance, so far I'm not really hitting any bottlenecks in terms of the actual game mechanics. The player's FlakController (defensive fire) averages ony 0.04ms per frame. For comparison, updating enemies is about 0.1 ms per enemy per frame.

What does hurt are sounds (8 ms per sound.play call) and graphical effects, which can be adjusted to match the user's machine.

[TOdorus]

How does your game handle switching between different weapons types (or does it?)

Actually it doesn't, as it's more of a strategy title. The turrets have one or more "Tubes". They're named after torpedotubes in submarines, but I also could've called them barrels just the same. These Tubes contain variables like maximum burst, cooldowntime, ammotype etc. If a turret locks onto a target and is aimed at the intercept vector, it calls the trigger function of the first tube that is ready to fire. Basicly a turrets can have different ammotypes by giving it tubes with different ammotypes, but I chose not to do that in my game. Switching would be as simple as to reassign which tubes are used.