My thoughts on each of the ideas suggested in this thread, from the point of view of an amateur modder:
dcx wrote:-The mod set a low fuel limit/capacity like 5 for example but possibly room to increase it in some form later in the game
Curiously tricky. You can make the cost of new fuel very expensive, and you can restrict the number of events in which you can get it.
The only way to fully refuel is to go to a star which may or may not lead to battle
You could modify the "DISTRESS" beacon to instead indicate "STAR", and alter the events seen at "STAR" beacons to always provide the chance to refuel (but maybe only after a fight)
-You get long range sensor at the start (because I hate playing blind :/ )
Easy to do.
-You start with a full 8 crew member but no opportunity to recruit, buy, join any more. Once they dead they ARE dead.
Easy to start with 8 (although the hangar doesn't display it very well). Altering events lets you remove most of the ways for crew to join, but there's still shops. You can crank the prices way up in shops for hiring new crew though.
-Not too sure about weapons but there's no missiles foe player but put more into burst laser weapons but similar with the fuel it's limited and need to go to the sun to also recharge.
This isn't really doable per se, but you could alter the "missiles" ammunition display to be "laser charge" or whatever, and again make it that only "STAR" events can give you replacement ammunition.
Hull repair in any form will be insanely expensive
Doable.
ChemWarrior53 wrote: First change all of the races to the races and professions in Stargate universe for example the starting crew could be made out of scientists, military personnel, and engineers. Scientists could have a boost with manning systems, engineers could have quicker repair time, and military would be good at fighting boarders.
So the gameplay attributes of the FTL races are fixed and not moddable, but their images and description are. So you can reskin Engi as Engineers for the quicker repair time, and reskin Mantis as Military, no problem. With a little tweaking of the text you might be able to come up with some flavour whereby Scientists (reskinned Zoltan) can use systems more efficiently (hence they need less power).
The drones could be re-skinned as the drones appearing in SGU, and would be the games main antagonist (rebels). These drones would be blockading the stars needed to refuel, and the drones all have drone controls systems to launch smaller drones.
It's easy to modify enemy ships to make drone launching more frequent.
If possible add resources like food and water (perhaps in place of missiles, drone parts). These resources would then be acquired at specific planets such as earth-like or ice planets. It would also be cool to add the shuttle, perhaps with the advantage of not requiring drone control to operate.
You can reskin missiles and drone parts to anything you like, and you can easily make events care about their values (add and remove them at least). But if you reskin missiles to be "food" then you probably want to remove all player-usable weapons that fire missiles, and if you reskin drone parts as "water" then you want to disable the player's drone system and stop them buying one.
I'd assume you want bad things to happen when a player runs out of "food" or "water". That's not very easy. It would require modifying every event the player can encounter to make it that, say, they take a lot of damage if they have 0 food or 0 water.
Also consider re-writing events (use both original events and events similar to the series).
This is of course the heart of a story-based mod like this. It's doable, but FTL has a
lot of events, so it's quite a lot of work.
