The ship panels are definitely not final yet - we're playing around with various options as we speak!
Damn, Spiff. Your mock up looks legit as hell. Nice job.
+1.
I think Spiff is trying to get a job at >G. By the way if you haven't tried them, his deck boxes for SotM rock.
In the playtest forum someone gave a great thematic description of this mechanic that I really like:
Basically you start out with your unique ship, but once the attacks begin you start building your ship up more for war then whatever you were using it for before.
So in the course if each game's story you sacrifice some of your original ship tech and abilities to better fight the threat.
So I think the mechanic helps the story and theme (personally)
Ready for this game to come out, and decided to read some old threads.
A lot of talk in this one pertaining to the uniqueness of each ship/pilot, and how that comes through with the starting decks. Obviously, as the game goes on and new cards are added to the deck, the theme of those initial cards will be diluted. My question is how often can we expect to cycle through our decks each game? Are we talking 3-5 times, 10-15, etc?
In my experience, closer to 10-15 times most games.
Having now played the final release version (thanks to >G bringing some to Pax for kickstarters), I can verify that there's a lot of character differentiation between the different ship decks, mostly about what kinds of cards you want and what strategies you work best with.