If I understand you correctly, I have to agree.
In my opinion, they should make the same for suits and weapons as it is for ships.
I got a lot of ideas how this should look. It is not anything original however, but I tried to translate it into the game mechanics as we currently have them. The way I imagine it is:
Suits:
1. You have different suits designed to excel at a certain field. Just like ships.
2. Each suit has different module layouts, that you can kind of A grade and customize them to your liking.
Just an example:
- Combat suit - more slots for armor "modules" stronger shield, additional ammo pouches etc.
- Exploration suit - more slots for for exploration material gathering, better life support, better jetpack module slot etc.
- Maverick suit - bigger backpack, a module that enhances the arc cutter, making cutting faster etc.
3. Although I am not too fond of material gathering, its a game mechanic that will not go away so... when you are satisfied with your suit customization, you go to the engineers and tweak it, excatly as your ship, more to your liking. Stronger shields, stronger armor, better jetpack, etc etc.
4. I think the devices being locked by the suit is not a good idea. I would like to carry an arc cutter with my with my dominator suit, although I would know i could gather less materials because my backpack cannot be as large as the Maverick one. But hey, maybe I am looking for specific materials and not gathering every junk I find?
Weapons:
1. Weapons should have at least basic attachment slots, that can be bought without engineers.
- Foregrip slot (at least 2-3 types of foregrip)
- Scope slot (holo sight, 3.4x Acog style, long range scope, NV scope)
- Extended magazine
- Silencers
- Laser sights
All those would affect the weapon handling statistics. I think the grades for weapons should be scrapped. The dmg should be tweaked by adding maybe basic ammo types. For example AP rounds for kinetic better armor penetration, some kind of superheated plasma rounds that fire slower but have bigger punch and dmg shields and health BOTH in the same time.
2. Once you are satisfied, again with your weapon, you go to the engineers and tweak it. This is where the grade system can kick in, exactly in the same way as we have it in the modules for ships currently.
The weapon would be divided into parts that it is built from, and all of them can be given an upgrade + an experimental effect.
- Gun barrel (with an effect that the projectiles fly for example faster and an experimental effect that due to some coils etc. the kinetic bullets do a bit more shield dmg)
- Battery/ammo chamber (effect that enchances plasma damage for example or distrupts shield regeneration. Dunno maybe some damage over time?)
- Butt stock (further improving handling and making ADS more stable)
3. Suit energy think. Im not sure about this one, but running around and having to constantly recharge batteries in 3300... it sounds pretty off to me. On the serious note, suit energy should be connected to the life support module in your suit. The weakest lasting for 20min for example, and the strongest stock one to 60min + to this you can use the energy batteries to recharge the suits, when on a long on foot journey.
Or the suit energy thing should be scrapped in general. Full base going aggro is enough of a concern, there should be no need to worry why duracell suddenly has 20% of battery.
As you can see the list goes on. This only shows how much potential there is in here. All in all i think the suit/guns mechanics should be reworked, but I think the idea I have given above would give a lot of options. It would simply give the CMDR the option to customize the suit to his/hers liking, and the feeling of things being forced on the CMDR would not be as severe.
This is at least how i see it and I do not claim that my ideas are perfect, but I do think it would give a lot more options for us, commanders.
