Master of Orion 2 has the capability to design ships with whatever weapons and subsystems your technology allows you to, and it's a very advanced system for the time.
The subsystems give your ship mostly passive bonuses: +to hit, +to pierce shields, more space for components, missiles switch targets if their initial target is destroyed instead of vanishing, auto-repairs and so on.
The weapons's systems are much more customizable. You have to consider which kinds of weapons to mount (missiles, beams and gimmicks such as the tractor beam), their facing and their firing arc. This is important as without the appropiate techs, turning a ship around takes time, wider arcs increase the size of the weapon and each kind of ship only has so much space for components.
The meat of the customization system is in miniaturization. For each research level you achieve in a field, the size of components obtained in previous research levels is reduced, down to 20% of their original size 5 research levels later. Also, each miniaturization level allows you to mount weapons with diverse modifiers - while initially you can only choose to mount heavy or point defense variations of beams, later you can mount variants such as burst-firing, shield or armor piercing. While missiles also get variants such as fast, armored or MIRV.
>>16248078
>Starsector
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