SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Renegade 13]

Timstone said:
I hope the game will be released in a jewelcase. I really hate the paper "bag" that came with SE IV Gold.



I definitely agree with that!

[Timstone]

I think the biggest problem for MM is that each jewelcase costs more than the stupid paper bag. But hey, if the total price of the game rises to 2 dollars more, you won't hear me complain.
Let's ask Aaron this in the Pre-Christmas Chat. Unfortunately I can't be there, so is there anyone who would like to ask this?

[Ed Kolis]

What if you could send voice Messages to other players, with moddable modulators in each race's data files? Voice modulation is possible in DirectX, isn't it? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Aiken]

Imagine if someone will decide to send voice message in the pbw game. I'd prefere embeded text-to-speech engine and option to disable it.

[Bobcito]

A) If you capture an enemy ship, you should be able to:

1 Research the unknown parts via a long, long tech tree, then be able to repair the newly researched parts.

2 Capture a planet belonging to the alien race that built the ship, and have it repaired by them.



B) If you capture an alien planet, you should be able to:

1 After the period of rebellion, have them repair ships built by their race.

2 After the period of rebellion, have them build ships that were known to them at the time of capture. The ships would appear in the build choices but only from the alien planet......... Maybe they would not be able to build any of ships from my race until after I build a College or University on their planet.



C) If you have enough mine sweepers in your fleet to sweep a mine field, then no ship in the fleet should sustain damage.

[Fyron]

Bobcito said:
C) If you have enough mine sweepers in your fleet to sweep a mine field, then no ship in the fleet should sustain damage.

What do you mean? Isn't this how it works now? Personally, I'd rather see the absurd all or nothing system removed. Let mines have a chance to be swept by the sweepers, so there is never a 100% guarantee to sweep every mine in existence without fear. A minesweeper could have a percentage chance to sweep a mine, rather than 100% chance. Mines could have new components that provide a penalty to that sweeping chance, sort of like ECM.

[Mayday]

that would certainly offer more customisation of mines, and present a greater sense of trepidation in approaching minefields.

[Renegade 13]

How about a better handling of plagues by the AI?? As it is, if a plague breaks out on an AI planet, it never tries to stop the plague, and once the population is decimated, it never seems to repopulate the planet.

[Ed Kolis]

In the combat report log entry, instead of just the final damage percent for each ship, show the beginning and final amount, so you can tell if a ship was damaged in that combat or it was already damaged:

COMBAT IN AETHER
LUMINOTH SOCIETY
Planet Aether 0% -> 35%
U'mos 0001 (LC) 0% -> Dead
U'mos 0002 (LC) 12% -> Dead
ING HORDE
Planet Dark Aether 0% -> 0%
X'helar 0001 (BB) 0% -> 0%
X'helar 0002 (BB) 16% -> 16%
X'helar 0003 (BB) 95% -> Dead
Drexel 0001 (SB) 0% -> 0%

[ajvar]

I would like to see ship commanders avaiable for hire, like MOO2 has them. that would realy be neat
and that those commanders would gain experience from their actions

[Naranek]

These are some ideas, and a few problems I met in some games, specially in multiplayer. It's a long and probably unsorted and bad explained list, but I hope you can understand these ideas:

- Waste of construction capability in spaceyards. Having 4500 of capability when building --for example-- monoliths means each 3 turns the spaceyard 'loses' 3500 construction points of capability (4500 * 3 - 10000). It would be desirable that the construction have a similar behavior to research / intelligence queue projects, with the "ability" of placing other objects in first position of the queues without losing completely the unfinished / partially built objects.

- Fixed planet position. I would like to see how nearly all objects (planets, moons, asteroids... ) rotate around the star(s) of the system. Objects like nebulae or warp points should not be affected, or affected in a very small amount. In tactical combat, also moons should orbit around their planet.

- Poor tactical options in a fleet. In this point, I have some ideas:
- It would be desirable to have different squadrons in the same fleet, each one with diferent orders. For example, escort, bombardment,command, attack squadrons, each one operating independently of the others.
- Some squadrons will have some bonus. For example, an escort squadron can provide defensive bonus against every shot which should traspass it to attack other vessels behind it. The command squadron can provide ofensive bonus for all attack squadrons in battle.
- The posibility of place every vessels in a fleet in any squadron, every squadron with different formations and every ship in the position in the formation wanted.
- A formation for each squadron and a formation for all squadrons in a fleet.
- Special "components" for command vessels, as "fleet command bridge". From it, the "admiral" pass the offensive bonus to the attack squadrons.

- Line of sight.
- Some objects in tactical mode (planets, moons...) should block LoS from the other side of the object. Aditionaly, big artificial ship/bases (like starbases or baseships) should block LoS for smaller objects. Only "ELINT" vessels can "see" to the other side of the blocking objects.
- Some objects in strategical mode (planets, wormholes, stars...) should block LoS. Only "ELINT" vessels can "see" to the other side of the blocking objects.

- Satelites should not be grouped staticaly in a unique point of space in tactical mode, but they should encircle the main body, orbiting it. The same should be applied to bases. If the satelites are placed in an empty sector, they also should be "orbiting" an empty point, or at least, be placed in a "loose" area of space.

- Planetary shields should be a general, costly, technology avaiable for everybody, and be a lot more powerful than the ship component equivalents.

- The imposibility of upgrading units (satelites, weapon platforms, troops, mines...)

- The surface combat mode is too simple, comparing with the space combat mode. It should be a bit more complex, with special buildings as fortress, bunkers.... Some ship weapons like planetary napalm could be used in special mode of orbital support. ¿Perhaps a tactical "ground" mode similar to the tactical "space" mode?

- The Point Defense Cannon is too much effective. It should be more loose, specially against fighters. The same for the Talisman. ¿Perhaps 2-3 levels for talisman, making it an overpowered combat sensor?

- Special damage mode of Area of Effect. It would work in a similar way of real artillery barrage. Some powerful AoE weapons could create an impassable/harmful area of space which could disipate in a few tactical turns. Some weapons should be able to target regions of space, not enemy fighters/vessels.

- The stealth mode is a bit strange. One sensor is able to discover every possible form of stealth, and one component is able to hide with every possible form of stealth. It should be done a more complex way, with stealth components too bulky so they are unsuitable to attack vessels, or passive and active sensors. The Last ones should add a defensive penalty for these 'ELINT' vessels, and "active" sensors make any "hidden" ship highly "visible".

- The idea of infinite supplies limits a lot the strategy from the half of a game. There should be only some supply ships which can pass supplies from resupply depots to ships/fleets. It should be transferred from/to the
supply ships in a similar way to the cargo.

- Only a sort of "supply" thing is a bit strange. For engines/energy weapons, it's admisible. For missiles it's a bit strange, except if there is a sort of builtin missile factory in every ship. Also there should be a diferent sort of "food" supply. The "matter" weapons, as the DUC, should have a different, cheaper, supply source.

- Having heavy repair components in ships. A ship should be able only to repair some 'minor' components (armor, some light weapons, a few engines...), but not able to repair, with time, all damaged systems in any
ship. For costly/bulky components, the damaged ship should go to a repair base.

- 'Free' repairs. Every repair should cost a percent of the undamaged component.

- Master computers too much 'effective' and affordable. Past certain tech levels, the ship designs are a lot better (cheaper) with master computers than with bridge/crew quarters/life support combo. Combat ships should
receive a penalty for having exclusively computers aboard, and they should not receive experience for combats. Also, they should not receive "neural net" bonus.

- The minesweepers should have a posibility to fail. Having only one ship with 20 minesweepers per enemy per fleet is enought to avoid every possible minefield in the game. The minesweepers should have a posibility to miss some mines in each turn, and/or make the mines a lot cheaper and increase the minefield size limit to make passing through a dense minefield a costly and time-consuming task.

- The fighters could have the posibility to carry heavier antiship weaponry, as missiles, torpedos or 'free-fall' bombs, so the idea of doing 'fighter only' raids against enemy fleets far beyond the fleet anti-air
defenses sounds more interesting.

- Newtonian propulsion. It's odd that having only 40TM dedicated to propulsion (2 QEIII and a SolarSail III), a baseship can move at the same speed than a cruiser, having the baseship 3 times the mass of the cruiser.

- Also, the solar sail shouldn't give its movement bonus in tactical combat.

- The spionage system is a bit strange. I don't know well how to resolve it, perhaps with "spy" agents more than a so abstract thing as "spionage points". Add the posibility of having double agents.

[iaen]

Naranek said:
- The surface combat mode is too simple, comparing with the space combat mode. It should be a bit more complex, with special buildings as fortress, bunkers.... Some ship weapons like planetary napalm could be used in special mode of orbital support. ¿Perhaps a tactical "ground" mode similar to the tactical "space" mode?



I have some difficulty imagining what surface combat is going to be like, what with tactical combat being realtime 3d and all. If the surface combat from SE4 is used, you'll probably have to pause the tactical combat or otherwise things will get confusing. That means you'll just have conquered a planet in a matter of minutes.

I'd prefer a system where you'd just drop the troops in tactical combat, and when you are back in strategic, you'd have to manage your forces on the planet. That way it would also be easier to let firmly entrenched planets drag the battle out for a year or more. That seems a bit more realistic to me. And then you can also get stuff like reinforcements for whichever side. Big tough planets could also produce their own reinforcements for a while. Ofcourse the population's happyness is also going to be sinking fast. And something like a log message each turn updating amount of enemies defeated, casualties suffered and collateral damage (population/facilities). Hmm, reminds me of the Messages you get with plagues.

Looking back at it, I don't even think it would need to be the micromanagement hell most of the things I think of become. It would work with a simple surface combat system like there is now, only slower. Features like orbital support fire etc. could be added reasonably well.

[Timstone]

Naranek:
I think you're losing the point of this wonderful game. It's supposed to be an EMPIRE building game, not a micromanagement adventure.
Many of the things you suggest are good points, but don't forget that this game must be accessable for the more inexperienced people too and one game shouldn't Last a couple of months.

[Fyron]

iaen said:
I'd prefer a system where you'd just drop the troops in tactical combat, and when you are back in strategic, you'd have to manage your forces on the planet. That way it would also be easier to let firmly entrenched planets drag the battle out for a year or more. That seems a bit more realistic to me. And then you can also get stuff like reinforcements for whichever side. Big tough planets could also produce their own reinforcements for a while. Ofcourse the population's happyness is also going to be sinking fast. And something like a log message each turn updating amount of enemies defeated, casualties suffered and collateral damage (population/facilities). Hmm, reminds me of the Messages you get with plagues.

Looking back at it, I don't even think it would need to be the micromanagement hell most of the things I think of become. It would work with a simple surface combat system like there is now, only slower. Features like orbital support fire etc. could be added reasonably well.

You can set that up in SE4. Make militia a lot stronger and more numerous and set ground combat rounds to 1. Only one round of damage will be done, and you will need a lot more troops. Both sides can have a chance to send in reinforcements, and it can take quite some time to conquer the planet. Pirates & Nomads, Gritty Economics, and Adamant Mods do this. I think Proportions might, but not sure on the length of ground combat. Ground combat in stock SE5 definitely needs a lot of improvement. It would be great if things like range and rate of fire actually mattered...

[Suicide Junkie]

Note: Strong as-in-hitpoints, not damage.

In GritEcon, I used values on the order of:
1 round ground combat.
100% damage factor.
Militia: 1 damage/30hp. 1 militia per million population
Infantry troops: 1-2 damage, 50-70 hp (depending on design and cost) Average build rates are hundreds/turn on planet yards.
Light Tanks: 10-20 damage, 200-300 hp. build rate of a handful per turn (5-10 or so)
Heavy Tanks: 50-100 damage, 300-400 hp. About one a turn probably.
Artillery: 300 damage, 50 hp. A turn or two each.

Two evenly matched infantry squads would give you trench warfare Lasting forever as they wear each other down at the same rate.
Basically, you need bigger tanks or artillery to kill things, and you need lots of infantry reinforcements to act as cheap ablative meat armor for your tanks.

When dropping from ships, the bigger units have the most damage per kt-space, but lack in hp per space and are the most expensive by an exponential factor.
You need to either drop a pile of infantry first to sop up the massive hits from the defenders and establish a beach head for your heavier units, or drop mixed troops from your boats http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

-----

As an extra bonus from the 1 round GC, having lots of small, lightly shielded transports deploy your troops is a valid strategy. The idea being that the enemy can't nail all of them, and they're cheap enough to replace often. It works because you know your troops won't all be killed before the single round of GC ends and next transport drops its troopers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

PS:
Making orbital bombardment and glassings expensive and time consuming is a key part of the scheme. Otherwise they'll just sweep through, glassing and recolonizing. The troop hitpoints above help that a lot. Adding some heavy-armor "bunker" platforms to boost planetary hitpoints can help too.
Just be sure to remove planet-based weapons. If you leave them in, players will have way too much trouble getting their transports to attack, and they'll be forced to use a glassing strategy. Without planet based weapons, the transports will merrily charge in and drop while the orbital battle rages.

-----

In one game against SkyAshton, we did some nice fighting over a chokepoint system. I surprised him with an early assault on a key spaceyard planet before he started building infantry. Then with waves of ships duking it out across the system, I had my transports running in with infantry. Ground combat broke out on most of his planets, effectively blockading them from the inside. Meanwhile, in space my fleet was held off, and with a massive maintenance defecit, they fell apart. As I worked at home to rebuild the fleet with more maintenance-efficient hulls, Ashton has the chance to fight back (build cost is proportional to size cubed while maintenance is constant independent of size).
He started with only the infantry he could Ebuild before my waves of troops hit, and his militia would have been getting thinned out pretty badly by now.
However, now that he held most of the system and could dump reinforcements from his homeworld and its stack of BSYs, time was on his side.
The spaceyard I had captured managed to fight off his attack, though, as it had been busy building some anti-ship fighters and sats(modded 50kt base hull). I came back with carriers full of anti-ship fighter-bombers and a few medium warships. With the help of the spaceyard I pushed him to the warppoint and held there while I flooded the system with troops in an attmept to secure it.

Most of the planets had fallen to my light tanks by the time Ashton had come up with another counter; kamikaze rammers.
Since I was close to his homeworld, he could pump out tons of tiny ships and not be killed by the maintenance costs, since they would all die ramming huge holes in my ships on the same turn. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

The game ended before he had a serious chance to attack the chokepoint system again.
Overall this was about 50-70 turns, about a third of which was pre-meeting expansion and buildup.

[Timstone]

Cool story of the game SJ. I like that.

[Getix the Cromist]

Weel, maybe a basic AUTODESIGN for ship.. Like Colony Ship & so on..

It is funny to design BA, BC, DN.. it is not funny to design Colony Ship..

Then a Research like Moo2: when you finished in Shields, you can go on and have a miniaturization bonus (don't know, 5 tech level = 5 less Kt, stop this when component is 50% smaller tha original).

A "Fill queue" for all planets, so i do't have to manually buld 10 LC at 10 differente planet by clicking on them.

A more realistic land combat -> land combat like space combat.

For now, that's all.

[Suicide Junkie]

Although not typically exciting, Colony ships are trivial to design. Throw on the basics, and hit upgrade when you need a tech update.

You could turn the design minister on for a turn to get a basic set of designs, or even tweak the designcreation file for your shipset to get just what you want automatically as tech improves.

---

There is a "Fill Queue" button already. Just fill one example queue, and you can save that list of projects.

[Baron Munchausen]

Since 'heros' have been confirmed in the chat I want to make some points about how they ought to work.

The first thing that worries me is that he is saying their inclusion in the game will depend on the artwork getting done. I sure hope that the current design doesn't call for huge 'unique' portraits for each 'hero' like some sort of RPG game. This is not MOO II. These 'heros' are going to be only a small part of a really huge and complex game. They don't need individual characterization beyond a name. They are simply slightly more talented officers/politicians among vast numbers of more ordinary operatives. I would be perfectly happy with a 'generic' image for all ship commanders (captains, admirals, or whatever you want to call them) and a generic image for all 'governors'. Don't hold up this useful game feature for the sake of fancy artwork. The scale of this game is completely different from MOO II where each leader could be a unique character.

Since I'm not concerned about the portrait or other 'RPG' features of these 'heros' I hope we'll have more than a few of them? The limit of four of each type was OK in MOO II but that was a small game with only 80 systems max. I'd say about a dozen will be the absolute minimum required for SE V given the scale of the game. It would be best to provide for the possibility of every single system having a 'hero' governor and every single fleet having a 'hero' commander. Not that we should _expect_ to always be fully staffed like that... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif But the game should allow for it. That could mean hundreds of them.

As for their effects in the game, I hope we don't go 'overboard' like MOO II and have magical renaissance erm, creatures who can do everything from fleet strategy to engine repair to original scientific research. They should have specialities related to their 'profession' (fleet strategy for the fleet commanders, population management for politicians) and not much else. What would make them interesting is if they have loyalties to their species and their home planet/system -- and populations should have loyalty to them, also! -- so that they can have reactions to events in the game and their reactions can have effects in the game.

[Ed Kolis]

Aaron said there would be a minimum of 3 leader portraits per race. 3 isn't a lot. Presumably this would have to cover, at a minimum, one fleet commander, one planetary governor, and one other type of leader (master spy? general? system overlord?) So I think the leaders are going to be fairly generic, as you wish.

[Phoenix-D]

Open request:

If the leaders are left out due to art reasons, leave the code for them in and let the modders turn it on if they want. Some of us don't mind ugly leaders. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Atrocities]

I would love to keep the hero's stuff too. (Especially if it is the concept I proposed. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

[tomk]

Weapon mount size increase reduces the probability of hitting for smaller targets.

Example: If a ship/base/etc. has a heavy mount and it is shooting at a target that can't have a heavy mount there would be a reduction in the hit chance. The below chart may better illustrate:

................................................Si ze
Mount.....ES......FG......DS......LC......CR...... BC......BB......BN......BA
Normal..-00
Large.....-15.....-10.....-05
Heavy....-30.....-25.....-20.....-15.....-10.....-05
Massive.-40.....-35.....-30.....-25.....-20.....-15.....-10.....-05


Rationale: currently there is no (or very little) downside to always having the largest mounts that the ship/base will allow. This suggestion should force more trade-offs in the design making process that should result in more balanced designs with a mix of smaller and larger mounts on each ship/base just as we find a mix of different weapon systems with the designs of current day navy vessels.

Comment: we may want to have an increased chance of hitting for smaller mounts shooting at larger targets but with the idea that we "never get something for nothing" there should be an offsetting consideration such as reduced damage per hit. For example, a 30% increase hit chance results in 30% reduction in damage done if there is a hit. An example of reduced damage applying in real life might be a single bullet having the real possibility of seriously damaging or destroying an airplane while a single bullet having the same size and velocity will have virtually zero chance of seriously damaging or sinking a battleship.

chart with smaller mounts getting bonus against larger targets:

................................................Si ze
Mount.....ES......FG......DS......LC......CR...... BC......BB......BN......BA
Normal..+00....+05....+10....+15....+20....+25.... +30....+35....+40
Large.....-15.....-10.....-05.....+00....+05....+10....+15....+20....+25
Heavy....-30.....-25.....-20.....-15.....-10.....-05.....+00....+05....+10
Massive.-40.....-35.....-30.....-25.....-20.....-15.....-10.....-05.....+00

[AMF]

Ok, I'm having a brain fart - I can't find your post on heroes.

As for me I absolutely think that the artwork shouldn;t be a factor, simply becuase it isn't needed - I would say that you just need a "hero" image for each race in the game, which would just be one of the portraits, but perhaps with a different coloured background to let you know it represents a hero. The potential heros would only be from existing races, and so you could just use extand portraits with a
slight change.

Now, the question is: do hero's only work for their races, or can they work for others? That's a design/game play issue, and I can think of good arguments on both sides, but it really depends on what sort of philosophy Aaron is thinking about heros as...are they "legendary
star-wandering mercenary types" or just "really really extraordinary members of your own race"?

In any case, the artwork, I would think, would'nt be relevant really.. .just a "filler" image. Preferably a small one.

But can you point me to your post AT?


Atrocities said:
I would love to keep the hero's stuff too. (Especially if it is the concept I proposed. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

[Naranek]

Iaen said:
I have some difficulty imagining what surface combat is going to be like, what with tactical combat being realtime 3d and all. If the surface combat from SE4 is used, you'll probably have to pause the tactical combat or otherwise things will get confusing. That means you'll just have conquered a planet in a matter of minutes.




Well, I was thinking on the "ground" tactical mode, of course. I was thinking in something like Imperium Galactica 2, in which surface combats are similar to space combats. The defenders have special buildings in the colony (fortresses, bunkers, ...), and the attackers with gained space superiority can have access to orbital bombing or quirurgical strikes from the fleet fighters.

[Atrocities]

Ground combat should be simple.

Make it like space combat in SE IV, except replace the star field with a terran map. The ships with top down troops images, and so on. Have tactics and strategies like in space combat, but for ground combat.

I proposed this over three years ago and it still stands as the best way to do it.

[Mayday]

Thats the IG2 method. Excepting of course that that was fully 3d and required all planet to space weapons be destroyed before landing.
Of course, this would limit the planetary takeover time to just that battle. Though in such a technological era, we can expect that the victorious force would have devastated the resisting military into surrender.
In order to make this a bit more balanced, I suggest that the population resist, ala Civ3, for a length of time decided by the population size (causing riot status), and that this would be offset by having the military presence there. This should obviously be a changeable setting.
Also, the demeanour of population in pop transports should be recorded so that one simply couldn't lift most of the population off a planet to shorten the time to sort out complete order. Indeed, putting the population back down should send them back to riot status, or at the very least Angry, with a military presence there, if the average happiness was lowered enough.

[AgentZero]

Components that increase the abilities of other components. ie:
Shield Booster: Increases shield generation by x%
High Energy Focus: Increases energy weapon damage by x%
Recycling Plant: Increases supply by x%

Another thing I'd like to see, which is something I've modded into my own SE4 game is that Base Space Yards have a higher construction rate than Planetary ones, however they can only be built onto Bases. Ships can carry Space Yards, but they have a significantly lower construction rate. This makes sense to me, since I would think that it'd be easier for a massive starbase to construct new ships than it would be for a planetary facility. The only thing I'm having trouble modding is that I want the Baseship to be able to carry a Base Space Yard.

Certain ships should have 'inherent abilities'. At the moment, I don't use many of the specialized hulls (ie: carriers, transports, colony ships) because of the restrictions on their construction. So, I suggest that these hulls have a certain advantages to outweigh the restrictions.
ie:
Colony Ships: Provide 10M colonists. So by using the colony ship hull instead of a LC or something, you basically get 10M 'free' population for your new colony. This would have to be coded so you only get the free 10M when creating a new colony, otherwise it'd be too easy to build loads of colonizers and fill a planet with free population.

Transports/Carriers: Get 50% extra cargo space per Cargo component. This way, a Transport/Carrier with 10 Cargo comps each with a capacity of 100kT would get 1500kT instead. Thus, using a Transport/Carrier hull would be more beneficial than using a 'normal' warship hull.

[Ed Kolis]

AgentZero said:
Colony Ships: Provide 10M colonists. So by using the colony ship hull instead of a LC or something, you basically get 10M 'free' population for your new colony. This would have to be coded so you only get the free 10M when creating a new colony, otherwise it'd be too easy to build loads of colonizers and fill a planet with free population.




There is a field in Settings.txt which controls this; it's called Automatic Colonization Population, IIRC. Not sure if it actually works because I've never tried it, though, and it would affect colonies created with any ship, not just a colony ship...



Transports/Carriers: Get 50% extra cargo space per Cargo component. This way, a Transport/Carrier with 10 Cargo comps each with a capacity of 100kT would get 1500kT instead. Thus, using a Transport/Carrier hull would be more beneficial than using a 'normal' warship hull.



Something similar is in Adamant Mod. Colony modules are 3000kT so they won't fit on any normal ship, but colony ships have a scale mount which allows them to fit. Also, fighter bays are 60kT rather than 30kT, unless you put them on carriers, in which case a mount is available to reduce them to 30kT.

[AgentZero]

Ed Kolis said:Something similar is in Adamant Mod. Colony modules are 3000kT so they won't fit on any normal ship, but colony ships have a scale mount which allows them to fit. Also, fighter bays are 60kT rather than 30kT, unless you put them on carriers, in which case a mount is available to reduce them to 30kT.



See, even that would do fine, except without having to fiddle around with mounts. Carriers/Transports would just get an automatic size reduction for Cargo/Fighter Bays, so the same sized hull could hold a lot more. I'd still like to see inherent abilities make it into SE5, just because it would make for all kinds of modding fun.

[Atrocities]

To many mounts. The components need to have a key or something that allows the modder to set the hull type and cost. If the component is mounted to specified hull then X cost, if not, then Y cost. (If allowed for any other hull at all.)

Also we need the ability to specify for each hull mandatory components that must be added in addition to the current Bridge, Life support, etc ones.

[Baron Munchausen]

Atrocities said:
To many mounts. The components need to have a key or something that allows the modder to set the hull type and cost. If the component is mounted to specified hull then X cost, if not, then Y cost. (If allowed for any other hull at all.)

Also we need the ability to specify for each hull mandatory components that must be added in addition to the current Bridge, Life support, etc ones.



This is why I suggested to MM that mounts be changed to attach to each given hull type, and/or even the mounting point, rather than being 'generic' and kept in a single list. We will have literally thousands of mounts in SE V given all the special situations we want to create. Instead of having to go to a seperate menu to get available mounts in ship design, you should be able to right-click on the component and select from a list of mounts that can be used on this component in this location.

Hopefully the 'requirements' and 'exclusions' that were promised in SE IV but never implemented will also be finished for SE V.

[Q]

Supply transfer:

Not automatically within a fleet like in SE IV but manually as for cargo. This would also allow to fleet units like drones without allowing them to be resupplied: transfer of supplies from/to each vehicle type could be allowed or not in the vehicle text file.

[TurinTurambar]

As this thread continues to explode with information, I wonder if Aaron's migraine follows suit?

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gifTurin

[Suicide Junkie]

Atrocities said:
To many mounts. The components need to have a key or something that allows the modder to set the hull type and cost. If the component is mounted to specified hull then X cost, if not, then Y cost. (If allowed for any other hull at all.)

Also we need the ability to specify for each hull mandatory components that must be added in addition to the current Bridge, Life support, etc ones.

Oooh, and arbitrary penalties for losing them!
Supply leaks, shield depletion each round in combat, only AI orders allowed (for destroyed radio/comms).

[AgentZero]

Atrocities said:
To many mounts. The components need to have a key or something that allows the modder to set the hull type and cost. If the component is mounted to specified hull then X cost, if not, then Y cost. (If allowed for any other hull at all.)

Also we need the ability to specify for each hull mandatory components that must be added in addition to the current Bridge, Life support, etc ones.



I think there should be an 'Allowed Hulls' option as well so we can create components that can only be mounted on certain hulls. It'd also be a bit easier than using Min/Max Tonnage, if one wanted to create a component that could only be placed on say, an Escort or Dreadnought, but nothing in between.

[Atrocities]

I would like to see the ability for a SUPPLY BASE to be able to resupply a ship much like a Resupply Facility does.

(I wonder if I can attack the facility ability to a component?)

[Baron Munchausen]

Atrocities said:
I would like to see the ability for a SUPPLY BASE to be able to resupply a ship much like a Resupply Facility does.

(I wonder if I can attack the facility ability to a component?)



Yes, we wanted this very badly in SE IV. Let's hope that SE V allows us to have resupply and 'ordnance' available from bases as easily as from planets, since he has already stated that so many other wishes like facilites and colonies in space structures have been implemented.

[Kana]

A few things I would like to see in SEV:

1) Since it was announced that detection/line of sight is going to be distance based, then it will allow for a 'fog of war' effect. Basically you will only be able to see what is currently in range of any sensors/scanners you have available, and in case of stellar objects, it will be visible when you first come into 'scanning' range of the object, and will only get updates of changes to object if there is a 'scanner' within range when viewing. This in conjunction with the ability to set cloak Ratings for Warp Points would allow hidden WP's or WP's that have to be searched for with specific sensors...

2) A second dialog box for when launching units (mines, drones, fighters, satellites, etc...) that will allow you to launch a specific amount of the unit when launching, up to the max launch limit of the component.

3) Yes a supply component that we can put on bases so we can have supply points would be great as well.

Kana

[Admiral Grover]

This has probably already been said but in regards to supply, have only planets have unlimited supplies. Bases/Ships can still have components like the quantum reactor, but instead of the supply showing as unlimited, have a finite amount that gets fully recharged every turn. The Quantum Reactor would sill add to the supply pool for the ship/base.

This way, you can't have a small space station being able to refuel and entire 100 ship fleet in one turn, because realistically, where would they all dock? In this case it would take a little longer due to the amount of supplies the station has each turn.

Hope this made sense http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Ed Kolis]

Aaron has stated that even planets will have only finite supply capacity to give to ships, so I'd assume that stations would as well http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[AgentZero]

How about a 'Station Construction Kit' component? Basically, you equip a ship with this component, send it out into space somewhere, and when you activate it, it creates a space station. The station created would be one of your existing designs, and the component would have a very small construction rate, so it would only realistically be useable to set up small resupply bases.

Also, I think Bases built in 'empty' space should have to get their construction materials from somewhere. At first, it would only be possible to have Space Yards construct things if they're built in asteroid fields or around planets (colonized or not). Eventually you could research something like 'Mining Drones' which, when equipped on a Base would allow you to build the base anywhere you wanted. As for how to get the base there in the first place, see the above suggestion.

[Baron Munchausen]

It would make things interesting to require some sort of special infrastructure to be present in the system before space yards can build anything away from a planet. Either require a Supply Depot or invent a new special. Call it a 'Construction Support Facility' or something like that. For building in systems with no planets, you could have a ship-based component that enables construction at a high tech level.

[Davemac]

I'd like to see something along the following lines:

-Ability to build all classes of warships (DDs to BBs)whatever the current research status is. I think that as the research improves, the cost/weight of the ships should become less. Speed should also be improved over time.

-In addition to above, I don't think that planet shipyards should be able to build large class ships (CAs up). Perhaps they could be used to support orbital space yards (such as allowing the player to dedicate planetary shipyard building points to supporting orbital facilities - i.e. building modules for the larger classes) Also, size of spaceyard should determine the number of ships it can build at any one time (definitely ought to be more than one).

-Some sort of supply line system where the player has to build merchant ships/freighters to keep colonies supplied until they can stand on their own. Also can be used for economics/industry. Sort of like USN's MS pipelines. This would also allow for piracy, cutting supply lines, wastage, etc.

-Some sort of research for a ship component to allow use of the warp points. Initially this would be an expensive energy hog but come down in size/cost over time.

-OutPosts/military fortresses to be built on planets/in deep space that can act as resupply depots/early warning systems. Also establishes your claim on the area.

-Detection ability is too good. Should depend on current state of sensor abilty and proximity of sensors. This allows ships to sneak into unguarded systems.

-A better battle system for space combat. Particularly the ability to escape if you have the distance/speed on the opponent. Factor supply into it as well (low supply, low chance of avoiding combat). Nothing worse than getting stuck in the corner on the space combat screen.

-Ability to put some sort of points into economics/research/intel etc. With costs for not doing well in them (restive populations, revolutions, research dead ends, intel disasters).

-A method for capturing ships that run out of supply and a chance of discovering tech from them. Also, some sort of commander override (ship's commander decides he/she ain't going to sacrifice his crew for your greater glory) that prevents the player from sending ships on suicide missions without paying for it either in lower morale of fleet or politically (newspapers calling you incompetent/massive discontent in your political system).

-Weaker mines (they're way too powerful).

-Better planetary defenses.

-Troops would exist from start. Only research would be improvement in weapons and capability to combat assault planets.

-Ability for planets to surrender rather than face extermination. This would include the ability to land troops without combat assault.

[Aiken]

Several empire management suggestions:

1. Ability to add custom amount of units to a construction queue (just a small popup box with a textfield and a OK button).

2. Add Commands to a construction window. First obvious command is "Upgrade", which will pop up a small window with existing obsolete facilities, so you can select which ones you want to upgrade and which ones you want to leave as is. Second command is "Wait X turns", so build queue could look like that:
----------------------
Super Dreadnought
Defensive WP x 12
Wait x 5 turns
Mega Transport
----------------------
Third command is notification command which informs you that queue is empty. 4th - "Scrap facilities". Imo, scraping facilities should not be instant, and require at least 1 turn to accomplish (similar to scraping of ships). Certainly you can think of more commands and ability to make custom commands (directly in the Facilities.txt) will be appreciated. It makes sense to add Commands right to the Build Items list, under the Commands group. Just make it so that they will be always ontop of the list.

3. Empire-wide uprades: move this from Construction Queus window to Colonies window and name it "Uprade Facility Types". Should function identicaly to "Scrap Facility Types" command.

[Randallw]

Has anyone suggested this,

a base with artificial wormhole generator that requires a code to pass through. You can make wormholes and only your ships or allies can use them.

[Baron Munchausen]

Randallw said:
Has anyone suggested this,

a base with artificial wormhole generator that requires a code to pass through. You can make wormholes and only your ships or allies can use them.



This is 'Warp Gates' as we have requested for ages. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif It would only take some small changes to the way Warp Points currently work to implement something like this. I hope that SE V will finally do it.

[Ed Kolis]

Aaron did say in the Last chat that effects of components could be set to limited durations, so you could always mod in warp point generators that create warp points that Last for 1 turn... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Mayday]

How about those system protector facilities (name currently slipping my mind) being able to be turned off temporarily, for, say, a turn? This would allow the creation and removal of warppoints of a protected system, while exposing it to risk of infiltration for that one turn. This would be good in conjunction with ships that can fly between systems without warp points, though of course at slower rates.

[Yef]

The ability to chose whether to play with Warp points or with free warping, like in Star wars.

[Kana]

Currently I believe that ship names are taken from the ship name txt file by alphabeticaly order...or it could be random...

Would it be too difficult to have this set up so that certain ship class/type would only use a certain set of names? That way ship names would be consistant by class.

Kana

[Atrocities]

Yef said:
The ability to chose whether to play with Warp points or with free warping, like in Star wars.



This would be very nice, or have the option to have both. It has been suggested before but I think we will not see it in SE V. Warp Points are a defining feature of the Space Empires series. To have a game that would allow you to not use them is well, not space empires.

[Aris_Sung]

Hi,
I'm new here. I was just wondering if ground combat was going to be a little bit more 'beefed' up. Now I don't know too much about the process of making games, so the answer to my question could be as simple as it takes too long to make or something like that.

From my point of view, the dropping of troops and battling it out with the enemy reminds me of 18-19th century warfare, where armies would line up and shoot at each other, hoping that their superior numbers and better equipment will win the day. That was when the soldiers had inaccurate musquets. Space Empires is set in the 25th century, and weapons are definately alot more sophisticated. So shouldn't the warfare be just a tiny bit more in depth.

So here's my idea: a (space tactical combat)-like map could be used; on the map, facilities could be cities with people living in them and troops can move from city to city to weapon platform or even patrol normal land areas; then depending on how complex ground combat would want to get, you could add some areas such as forest(light foliage, normal, dense vegetation) or mountains(can only be travelled by infantry), ice floes(only light weight units can traversed), volcanos, etc. This areas could be used for hiding off/def troops, the chance of guerilla warfare, etc.

That brings me to my final point: different units. There could be unit typess such as infantry, tank, arty, helos, and fighters they already have. Each type could have different levels and then depending on size, they can only carry weapons of certain weights, so that their chosen engine can still move them. Having a map, you can move around will actually give the weapon ranges some meaning to ground combat.

Basically, we're in the 21st century and our ground combat is not standing in a line and shooting(although I'm sure the Americans would like to do that with the insurgents in Iraq right now). So if anything, 25th century combat should be the same if not 'combat evolved'.
Comments would be appreciated. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Aris

[Randallw]

It is certainly a grand idea, however Malfador would have to basically build a complete land combat game within a game. It would take twice as long to make then.

Edit: I include relevant chat transcript for your perusal.

[05:13:41-PM] Renegade13: Are you planning on having a more detailed ground combat system, and if so, can you give us some details or hints about it? By the way, thanks for taking the time to do this http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
[05:13:43-PM] Baron_Munchausen: Just have them _close_ formation when ships are destroyed and that would be an imporvement,
[05:14:38-PM] Malfador: To be honest, Ground Combat is still much as it was in SE4 (or will be, haven't quite written that yet). My hope was to put it in but time will be the telling factor.
[05:14:50-PM] Renegade13: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
[05:15:04-PM] Malfador: At present, there's just not enough time to squeeze in something that doesn't come off as half-done.
[05:15:10-PM] ekolis: maybe at least slow it down so it takes multiple turns?
[05:15:10-PM] Fyron: Ground combat in SE4 is one of its weakest points..
[05:15:43-PM] eorg: maybe in se5 gold? like drones in se4?
[05:16:28-PM] Malfador: Yes, but one of the reasons companies don't like Space Strategies games is that its really two games in one. You have the strategic space portion, and then the tactical space combat. That's why some of the previous space strategy games have had pretty simplistic space combat sections.
[05:16:50-PM] Malfador: Having a detailed ground combat is like having a third game which is devoted to ground combat.
[05:17:04-PM] ekolis: use the space combat system with no banking ? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
[05:17:08-PM] Baron_Munchausen: You could at least give us some orders/policies to issue to our ground troops, like strategies for ships.
[05:17:08-PM] Fyron: At least details such as weapon range and rate of fire should be relevant factors... It can still be simulated
[05:17:18-PM] SJ-Laptop: Even a one-dimensional march and shoot ground combat would work as a nice extension to the current zero-dimensional system.
[05:17:48-PM] ekolis: yeah - ever played Anacreon? make the ground combat look like Anacreon's space combat http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
[05:17:50-PM] parabolize: maybe add it as an option that can be turned off?
[05:17:52-PM] Atrocities: Would it be possible for ground combat to simply be like space combat is now with SEIV, but use ground terrian instead of space, and have both sides meet like in space combat?
[05:18:14-PM] Malfador: Yes, but a very simple one-dimensional march and shoot ground combat would look very unfinished next to the more robust areas.
[05:18:22-PM] Renegade13: good point
[05:18:32-PM] Malfador: My philosophy is that if you aren't going to make it detailed, what's the point?
[05:18:49-PM] DavidGervais: We do want the game to have a very consistant quality.
[05:19:06-PM] Fyron: SE4 has very inconistent quality in regards to ground combat

you can find the whole thing at

www.spaceempires.net (http://www.spaceempires.net)

Edit 2: by the way welcome (hey I get to do it for once http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif). I would warn you about using phrases like americans lining people up (even if they are insurgents) and shooting them, though.

[Suicide Junkie]

Hmm... What about that old idea about allowing external programs to run combat and feed back the results?

[vanbeke]

<font color="blue"> [05:18:14-PM] Malfador: Yes, but a very simple one-dimensional march and shoot ground combat would look very unfinished next to the more robust areas. </font> .

However, I would rather see something unfinished rather than unstarted.

[Ed Kolis]

I suppose with a powerful enough scripting engine you could do almost that... not really run outside C++ programs or anything, but write your own "external" programs in the scripting language based on "hooks" in the game:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
// the "hook" is the function name CalcDamage
// calculates damage of a ground combat attack
function CalcDamage(Weapon weapon, Troop attacker, Troop defender, Planet planet)
{
integer range = attacker.rangeTo(defender);
// no damage if out of range
if (range &gt; weapon.maxRange) return 0;
// get weapon type from a modder defined attribute list
else if (weapon.attributes["WeaponType"] == "Projectile")
return weapon.damageAtRange[range] - planet.atmosphere.density * coefficientOfDrag;
// projectiles affected by drag
else if (weapon.attributes["WeaponType"] == "Beam")
return weapon.damageAtRange[range] - planet.atmosphere.density * planet.atmosphere.composition["Hydrogen"]
// beams must be powered down when there is volatile hydrogen!
else if ... // more weapon types and interesting code
else return 0; // failsafe in case weapon type is invalid
}
</pre><hr />

(Please note I'm completely speculating on the syntax of the scripting language; I'm just assuming it's going to look vaguely like C or Java - for all I know it could be Lua http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)

edit: sorry Atrocities! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/fear.gif

[Atrocities]

I would love for there to be included in SE V, and perhaps one made for SeIV, a ONE click process the turn option. For example I am playing a PBIM (Play by Intstant Messanger) game with Intimidator and I have start SEIV (via the mod a launcher) to process the turn manually once I get his turn.

Tis a pain in the ***. It would be a lot better if all I had to do was place his plr file in the save game folder and hit RUN TURN. The turn would run and then I could send him the Game file.

[Suicide Junkie]

Wouldn't a batch file or even just a shortcut do fine for that?

I have a little LAN helper program that does something similar for two players... (point it to two files, and when both are present it processes) Uses the numlock/capslock/scroll lock lights to show which files are present.
Its mainly for when you're just spamming turns back and forth, and best when both people have access to the savegame folder, such as a shared dir on a lan.

[Aris_Sung]

Hi Randallw,

Thanks for responding to my post. I thought as much that making ground combat more complex would have that effect.

Aris

P.S. Thanks also for the warning, though you may have misinterpreted my intent. But that's ok. I'll remember to refrain from making those kinds of comments.

[Atrocities]

Don't make me fix this page!!!

[Ed Kolis]

About the scripting language...
I'd like the script files to be something other than .txt. Maybe .s5s (Space-empires 5 Script) or something. That way, those of us with cool multi-function text editors like Scite or PSPad can create language templates for SE5 scripts without having to rename them to something else to get the editors to recognize them as something other than regular text! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Fyron]

Can't you just select a template after loading the file?

[Atrocities]

My Hero suggestion is still, IMHO, the best way to incorprate hero's on a grand scale into SEIV.

[Aiken]

Imperator Fyron said:
Can't you just select a template after loading the file?

It means 1 or 2 additional clicks, and I'm sooo lazy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
Good idea Ed, and it's easy as pie to implement in se5.
And I would love to see se5 syntax free of spaces in keywords (like Shield Generation). Most syntax hilighters don't understand them (pspad is the one which does), and I still don't understand how to hack scintilla component to enable this. Utilization of "_" symbol is better.

[Ed Kolis]

Automatic name generator for individual ships!
Instead of "Paladin 0001", "Paladin 0002", "Paladin 0003", etc. for your Paladin-class ships, you could have automatically generated names from name fragments (i.e. you combine "USS ", "Ran", and "dall" to get "USS Randall") much as character names are generated in Angband, though perhaps with some more sophistication: you could have more or fewer than three name fragments per name, and name fragment choices could be determined by the role you assign to the ship (e.g. you could designate all attack ships and scout ships to be "USS Whatever" and all transports to be "UPS Whatever" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif)
Would help with role playing in larger games when it's not possible to name every ship manually, and I don't think it would be too hard to implement http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Atrocities]

Ed Kolis said:
Automatic name generator for individual ships!
Instead of "Paladin 0001", "Paladin 0002", "Paladin 0003", etc. for your Paladin-class ships, you could have automatically generated names from name fragments (i.e. you combine "USS ", "Ran", and "dall" to get "USS Randall") much as character names are generated in Angband, though perhaps with some more sophistication: you could have more or fewer than three name fragments per name, and name fragment choices could be determined by the role you assign to the ship (e.g. you could designate all attack ships and scout ships to be "USS Whatever" and all transports to be "UPS Whatever" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif)
Would help with role playing in larger games when it's not possible to name every ship manually, and I don't think it would be too hard to implement http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif



Well As least the auto option to specify the lead name such as USS, IKS, or other. The names should come from a file like the class names. But do you know how large that file will have to be? We are talking 20,000 names at a min.

But having the ship come off the assembly line with the USS 0001 or IKS 0001 would be nice.

[AgentZero]

One thing I was thinking that would make ground combat a bit more interesting would be if Range and Rate-of-Fire actually mattered.
Here's one nince, simple way it could work.
Attacker:
Weapon 1: Range 3, ROF 1, Damage 10
Weapon 2: Range 2, ROF 1, Damage 50
Weapon 3: Range 1, ROF 1, Damage 60
Defender:
Weapon 1: Range 2: ROF 1, Damage 20
Weapon 2: Range 1: ROF 2, Damage 100

Combat starts at maximum range so in Turn 1, the Attacker takes no damage, being out of range, and inflicts 10 damage per unit on the defender. Round 2, the defender inflicts 20 damage per unit on the attacker, who in return deals out 60 damage (50+10). Round 3 and both sides inflict 120 damage on each other. Round 4 and the attacker does 120 again, but the defender only manages 20. And so forth.

Simple, but at least then range and ROF would be a consideration in troop/WP design.

On a vaguely related matter, I'd like to see a fighter component like 'Atmospheric Stabilizers' that give fighters the ability to conduct precision attacks against planets. When you give an attack order to properly equipped fighters, you'd be given the option of:
Attack Population Centres (kill people)
Attack Facilities
Attack Troops
Attack Fortifications (Weapons Platforms)

This would add a strategic dimension to fighter use, since they would be perfect for softening up a planet before invasion, while orbital bombardment from ships would just cause widespread destruction, and end mostly end up damaging the things you want to capture intact.

[Atrocities]

Agreed. That would be nice.

[Ed Kolis]

Atrocities said:
But do you know how large that file will have to be? We are talking 20,000 names at a min.



Large file? How so? Let's see, if we have two prefixes (one for military ships, one for civilian ships), twenty name beginnings, twenty name middles, and twenty name endings, that gives us 2*20*20*20 = 8000 unique ship names! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif And each name part will usually only be a few characters (e.g. the name "USS Enterprise" could be formed from the parts "USS ", "Ent", "er", and "prise"). Granted you will get a lot of nonsense names (such as "USS Trollumforce" to use a few synonyms http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) but as long as some lexical rules are applied (at least for the human ship names) you won't get anything really silly (like "USS Zxbnft", which might be a good Xiati or Drushocka ship name were it not for the USS part http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)
Basically, the principle is to get the most out of your data entry. 8000 ship names at an average of 12 letters each would take up 96 KB of space, which would take a long time to type in; 8000 ship names in the 2x20x20x20 scheme I suggested earlier would only take 186 *bytes* (assuming each name part happens to be 3 letters). And if you add another name part to the list, it adds not just one name, but hundreds! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

[Baron Munchausen]

I think it would be good enough to allow multiple lists to be given for different types of ships. Having early scouts, to mid-game troop transports, to battleships, to late-game stellar manipulation ships all recycling the same names takes some of the sense of 'characterization' out of it. We need to at least be able to give 'warship' names and 'utility ship' names as distinct lists.

[Fyron]

Ed Kolis said:
Large file? How so? Let's see, if we have two prefixes (one for military ships, one for civilian ships), twenty name beginnings, twenty name middles, and twenty name endings, that gives us 2*20*20*20 = 8000 unique ship names! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif And each name part will usually only be a few characters (e.g. the name "USS Enterprise" could be formed from the parts "USS ", "Ent", "er", and "prise"). Granted you will get a lot of nonsense names (such as "USS Trollumforce" to use a few synonyms http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) but as long as some lexical rules are applied (at least for the human ship names) you won't get anything really silly (like "USS Zxbnft", which might be a good Xiati or Drushocka ship name were it not for the USS part http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)
Basically, the principle is to get the most out of your data entry. 8000 ship names at an average of 12 letters each would take up 96 KB of space, which would take a long time to type in; 8000 ship names in the 2x20x20x20 scheme I suggested earlier would only take 186 *bytes* (assuming each name part happens to be 3 letters). And if you add another name part to the list, it adds not just one name, but hundreds! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

This is why I like programs like Everchanging Book of Names, which do all that fun stuff for me. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif It is how I made a bunch of Tolkien-themed files, like Quenya, Sindarin, Black Speech, etc.

[Ragnarok-X]

Where can i find that programm you mentioned, Fyron ?!

[Kana]

Ability to have a guard or escort function/option, in the strategies and mainscreen. So that a certain ship, or unit can follow or guard a another ship or unit.

Kana

[AMF]

Yeah, I did the name generation thing for the QConflict game. I just went Online, found a bunch of "klingon clan names" and a bunch of "klingon words" from some silly "klingon dictionary" and so had two columns of words to combine. With 50 clan names and 800 klingon words, I've got a whole mess o' names to use...now, if it were only automatic so I didn't have to input them for each ship that would be nice...

[AMF]

A cool thing about heroes, especially if they're pretty rare, is then you open up the field to intel projects built around them. Assasinations, subVersions, misdirections, etc...

Also, I would think that heros should have a single, or at most two, stats that they affect. Some examples I think would be good:

Local heros:

Hero Admiral: + 5-20% bonus to ship offense, ship defense or both.
Hero General: + 5-20% bonus to ground combat offense, defense or both.
Hero Governor: + 5-20% bonus to planetary production rates
Hero Administrator: + 5-20% bonus to one or two planetary resource production rates
Hero Marine: + 5-20% bonus to ship boarding actions
Hero Scientist: + 5-20% bonus to the research production of a planet
Hero navigator: +1 movement for a single ship or fleet of ships
Hero engineer: +1 repair rate, or + 5-20% to space-based shipyard rate
Hero Explorer: has 10-50% chance to avoid stellar damage (ie from storms, black holes, etc...)

I don't think heros should be "mercenaries" - they don;t get paid, and would only switch allegiances if your enemy ran a sucessful "subvert leader" intel operation on them. Neither should they stack - two hero admirals wouldn't give you both their ship combat bonuses. Only the highest.

Also, I would hope that the heros would be treated just like ships in that you could name them, move them, etc...

And, I think there should also be Empire-wide heros, such as below, which would be limited to no more than 1-3 per empire I would think (since they have empire wide effects):

Hero Spy: + 1-5% bonus to spy points, (or perhaps allows new missions, or can do missions on their own?)
Hero Trader: + 1-5% to trade amounts gained by your empire?
Hero Diplomat: +5-15% in diplomacy with neutral races (NOT AI empires)

And, once again, I don't think there is any need to have unique hero
pictures - just use the racial portrait pic, maybe modified slightly,
for all the heros in your empire.


Thanks,

Alarik
Ps: cross-posted to SE4 yahoo group

[Suicide Junkie]

Heroics shouldn't be routine, I think.

A big bonus randomly achieved every now and then would be better http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[AMF]

Like, as a random event?


Suicide Junkie said:
Heroics shouldn't be routine, I think.
A big bonus randomly achieved every now and then would be better http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



This brings up something that I have been thinking of for a while. There are things that are treated as random events that shouldn't be. That is, the driver for some of the events are things that are under player control and so can and should be modeled if practical. Specifically, I think that component breakdowns should be based on the amount of maintenance you are spending.
I base this on my work, which involves analyzing US navy readiness and maintenance, among other things. Ship components break down all the time, constantly.

So, I would like to see maintenance be on a slider, the middle of which would be "100% funded", and then perhaps it would range from 50% funded to 150% funded.

Paying 100% would result in some level (call it X) breakdowns per turn (determined by some algorithm, with a random element)
If you took your maintenance budget down to less than 100%, then X would increase comensurately, according to some settings in the data files. On the flip side, if you increase your maintenance over 100% then X would decrease.

Therefore if you're in a tight spot, you could assume the risk of breakdowns in order to fund your entire fleet, if you're flush you can spend resources to ensure your ships are at a higher level of readiness.

Frankly, I'd actually like to take such a system further: Aircraft and vessel maintenance and lifecycles generally follow a bathtub curve, wherein after commissioning they have a period of time with many breakdowns (the "break in" period), then a longer period of time with a few breakdowns, and then, as they near the end of their service lives their breakdown rates increase greatly untile they undergo a major maintenance overhaul or something similar.

So, I would say that ships should have an age (tracked from when they were built) and their breakdown rates should vary depending on their age and the maintenance budget slider.


Also, I would like the maintenance budget to be on a non linear scale. There is only so much money/resources you can throw at the maintenance budgets but you'll always have some sort of breakdowns going on. So, perhaps do a logarithmic function of maintenance, or something else (I'm not a mathemetician) that results in a decreasing return to maintenance or an increasing breakdown rate as you reduce the maintenance budget...

I think I'll leave it at that for now...

thanks,

Alarik

[NarfsCompIsBack]

To much micromanagement.

[AMF]

No no no, I didn't explain it well. The *ONLY* thing the player has to do is either keep the maintenance slider untouched at the base of 100% or modify it. That's it.

I think Europa Universalis had this system, and it worked quite well there...



NarfsCompDied said:
To much micromanagement.

[Puke]

rdouglass said:
1. Save mid-turn games.



this has been a feature of se4 since the final patch was released.

[Shadow1980]

Kana said:
Ability to have a guard or escort function/option, in the strategies and mainscreen. So that a certain ship, or unit can follow or guard a another ship or unit.

Kana



I like that idea. Currently I add ships to my "attack fleet" and remove them when we arrive at the destination I sent them to.
A simple "Guard" option would indeed be better.

Additional request:
In human vs human games better ability to enter a battle *together* rather then both attacking something and one battling it out with the enemy and leaving the other out of it.

[Shadow1980]

* the option to control battles yourself instead of the computer doing it in multiplayer games.
Note *OPTION* as this should only be available in TCP/IP games as it would be FAR to slow in any other form http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
(Note this would require the TCP/IP option to be further developed and improved for stability in order for this to work correctly)
One majorly fun part of Moo2 was doing battles yourself :-)

On a sidenote: PLEASE NO REAL TIME BATTLES!!!
I am a *huge* master of orion fan but threw moo3 into the trashbarrel. Didn't like it at all. Of course real time is mostly for the thrill and eye candy so a much better compromise between real time and turn based would be the Birth of the Federation method. All sides issue orders to their ships, press "done" and the orders are executed in real time that turn. Then the combat paused, and allows players to issue the next orders, etc.
Of course if you dont get to control your units at all during battle proper real time is the way to go. Or at least an option tio "play" the battle without having to press next turn every single turn. Add a "pause" and "stop" button to this which u can press at all time and voila, a great working system http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Fyron]

Shadow1980 said:
On a sidenote: PLEASE NO REAL TIME BATTLES!!!
I am a *huge* master of orion fan but threw moo3 into the trashbarrel. Didn't like it at all. Of course real time is mostly for the thrill and eye candy so a much better compromise between real time and turn based would be the Birth of the Federation method. All sides issue orders to their ships, press "done" and the orders are executed in real time that turn. Then the combat paused, and allows players to issue the next orders, etc.
Of course if you dont get to control your units at all during battle proper real time is the way to go. Or at least an option tio "play" the battle without having to press next turn every single turn. Add a "pause" and "stop" button to this which u can press at all time and voila, a great working system http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Or realism and play balance... those are major advantages to real time combat. None of the absurdity of one side firing first, or the tediousness of watching each ship or weapon from each side firing, one at a time... There are a few turn based models that can approach real time in terms of balance, but they tend to be tedious and complicated in execution.

Most likely, SE5 will have the ability to pause the combat and issue orders while paused, so single player battles will be at whatever pace you want them to be. No possible problems here. Multiplayer PBEM games will never have you controlling the battle, so it doesn't matter from the player's perspective how the AI executes the combat (in terms of real time or turn based). TCP/IP probably won't have player-controlled battles simply because this would really screw over games with more than 2 players, or even 2 player games when combat with the AI occurs. Hot seat games could have player controlled combat, but there at least you are physically present to whap your friends when they are taking too long in any case... A simple auto-execute X seconds of combat then force pause with turn-based like phases of each player issuing orders will eliminate any problems with hotseat real time combat. It will make the combat function like the best of turn based systems, only better, because there will be no limitations of turn based combat on play balance at all.

[Ed Kolis]

Have component and facility pics specified by *name*, like the event pics and sound FX, not by number. Also, get rid of the "Components.bmp" and "Facility.bmp" for the minis and just generate the minis on the fly by shrinking the portraits. This will save much space on imagemod patches, because then you don't have to download the entire Components.bmp again every time you want to update the imagemod! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Also, if the shipsets are stored each in their own directory, don't require the race name to come before each of the file names! It's already in the directory name! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

Actually, what would also help is something like this - in place of the limit of 1 alternate pic per vehicle size, allow any number:

Name := Light Scout
...
Picture List := LightScout, ScoutLight, Scout, Escort

[Atrocities]

I have an idea for a new component, a required component, that every ship and base must have. A power component is a logical component to have. Normally that would fall to the engines, but as we all know when engines are knocked out the ship weapons can still fire. By having a power component, or reactor that powers all components on a ship, if it is knocked out, then the ship is for all puposes dead in space.

Make it increadibly strong, say shielded.

Shields, Life Support, engines, etc can all be powered by a reactor.

You can even have a weapon that targets reactors specifically. Thus giving way to a new compents that Shields reactors, or better reactors that are 50/50 amune to such weapons.

[Mayday]

Here's a funky idea, how about a component that, when activated over a warp-point, will change it to being distorted, or back again? Cheaper that building a bunch of mines, and rather damaging to a big fleet trying to get through. You could, of course, have a minefield as well, but because the number of ships getting through would be reduced, the minefield would be exhausted less speedily.

[Atrocities]

Mayday said:
Here's a funky idea, how about a component that, when activated over a warp-point, will change it to being distorted, or back again? Cheaper that building a bunch of mines, and rather damaging to a big fleet trying to get through. You could, of course, have a minefield as well, but because the number of ships getting through would be reduced, the minefield would be exhausted less speedily.



Warp Point destabalizer. LOL interesting idea.

[Timstone]

Remember Ascendancy?
I was making a mod of it, but becasue of the limitations and timecontraints I stopped.
In Ascendacy there are very interesting ideas, the Lane Destabilizer is one of them.
When SE V comes along, I plan to continue the Ascendacy Mod.

[Atrocities]

I never played the game. Hell I didn't even find out about Stars and SE III until 2000. I missed out horribly.

[larrybush]

You don't realize how many times I've wished this!!!, I see the same folks still in this forum, hello again, to all you forum "oldtimers" as it were, as I don't come by too often, but SEV is still number 1 on my game waiting list. And I still play SEIV!

1) Transparent LAN play, no host processing as it were. I push next turn button, you push next turn button game turn advances, like MOO II but one that works (HA!)
2) Ability to use multiple FTL drive types, not in the same game necessarily. Warp points, Warp drive, Warp generators, Stargates, Hyperdrive etc. or at least the ability to modify the worm hole properties, so that it could take a special component ability to use worm holes.
3) Bigger map editor (for bigger maps of course)with more editing features. And with the ability to randomize the planets and starting locations on premade maps, for increased re-play ability in specific star maps. Ability to see Star name and star type only instead of "unexplored", at least your empire would have the star name and know what kind of star it was.
4) Ability to create scenarios with multiple start planets and fleets already built and located on the map. Possibly some sort of event creator (editor)to move a scenario along with scripted events. To allow the AI to follow a story line of sorts, ie like the First Tholian War or Assault on Hoth, or the Man/Kzinti wars.
5) A better form of ground combat... Could you link to a simple turn based hex map &amp; military unit counters??

These are my top 5.. Yes Yes I know, pretty tall orders, but its my wish list. I like to play in various SCI-FI worlds, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bab5, The new Battlestar Galactica, Man/Kzinti wars, Starship troopers, Space 2300 (First Bug (Kafer) war. So having more than one way of traveling FTL would really be cool to correctly simulate all the various FTL drives. Unfortunetly I'me kind of a realism freak (I am an engineer in a space flight program)So my mods tend to stick pretty close to my vision of future conflict. But SEIV still rules them all!

[Atrocities]

Hey LarryBush, been a while. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif You really should post more often. A fresh perspective on things is always a good thing to read. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Atrocities]

Here's an idea. A ship log. The player has the option of activating a ship log. Each ship will keep a history of its exploits. Traveled to X location. Was involved in battle X - destroyed such and such ship. Suffored damage on such date at such location. The file would be kind of large, but would be very interesting. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Baron Munchausen]

Atrocities said:
Here's an idea. A ship log. The player has the option of activating a ship log. Each ship will keep a history of its exploits. Traveled to X location. Was involved in battle X - destroyed such and such ship. Suffored damage on such date at such location. The file would be kind of large, but would be very interesting. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif



And very useful in certain circumstances. If MM allows detailed 'scripted' orders for transports (instead of just 'repeat orders') we would then be able to review the log of activities instead of having to look at each ship during each turn to see if it was doing what we wanted it to do. Pick up 'x' number of mines from planet 'm', take them to planet 'n' and leave them there. etc... It would be very helpful to be able to turn on a 'verbose' log for certain ships and see every single event in order to 'debug' the script or just watch the progress of certain things.

[Suicide Junkie]

How about some stacking ability modifiers?

Example:
Mines have a base cloaking of 500 points/levels/etc.
Each warhead stacks a -1 to that ability.

So, your small minefields will be hard to impossible to see, and if you pile hundreds together they become easier to detect.

[Ed Kolis]

And multipliers... maybe each warhead would halve the cloak level of the mine instead?

Come to think of it, remember how in Stars, cargo mass affected things like cloaking and fuel consumption? That is, a 100kT ship carrying 100kT of cargo would have half the cloaking ability and double the fuel consumption of the same ship running empty. (Actually Stars! used some funky cloak-per-kT vs. something or other chart to determine the visibility radius... oh yes, cloaking will be radius based, won't it? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)

[Elowan]

#1 - Editable Waypoint names. Currently the only choice is 'Rename' which wipes the current name. It's not that hard to make that dialog a drop down list wherein a list of possible names (like vessel type/name is now)is displayed to choose from.

#2 - Allow us to rename a system instead of just a planet within the system.

#3 - allow editing of facility 'Fill Queue' list. Right now it's all or nothing and if you misspell something it's Delete and Redo.

--- it would be nice if that list was read into the game from a text file so that it could be edited. Thus Facility Construction Fill Lists could be constructed before game play and then reused with any game. I understand that the current list is saved with the Empire so that different lists can be used for different races - but putting the Fill Queue list into the Race folder solves that problem.

#4 - when using fleet formations - tag the command or lead ship with some sort of designator.

[larrybush]

With the log maybe a symbol on the map showing the site of a famous space battle.
You know a map bigger than 0,12 X 0,12 would be nice more rings, more graphics. Maybe even open up the game code to allow sensors and scanners in that map for some "cat and mouse" or "destroyer vs submarine" detect and destroy play! Might even use "unknown" style ship icon on that map until ship is detected &amp; identified. Possibly allow game code to utilize stealth values in component design/hull design, not cloaking but just "quiet" ships with low EM emissions, maybe even seperate modes for active and passive scanning, you know EMCON mode for quiet travel active mode for active scanning. Kinda crazy are'nt I, just think the big system map is good for detection and close then the tactical map for actual combat. Give fast ships with good electronics suiets a chance to withdraw if outgunned.

[bearclaw]

Adding the ability in tactical combat to let the computer auto control some ships while leaving others on human control. Instead of the current all or nothing system.

[Baron Munchausen]

bearclaw said:
Adding the ability in tactical combat to let the computer auto control some ships while leaving others on human control. Instead of the current all or nothing system.



Excellent idea. We ought to be able to play as 'commander' of one ship in our fleet while the others are under AI control.

[Atrocities]

I would like to see a program that allows us to view the combat log outside of the game.

This way we can share the combats with others who are not in the game, and such. This would be a very helpful tool to have.

[Nodachi]

Rather than something that can read the entire log I'd rather be able to export the replay I'd like to share. That way you can avoid any kind of security issues, you can learn a lot from a replay.

[Suicide Junkie]

Plus if you can export it to AVI or MPG or something with user-specified camera angles, you can splice them together into SE movies!

[Atrocities]

Suicide Junkie said:
Plus if you can export it to AVI or MPG or something with user-specified camera angles, you can splice them together into SE movies!



My thoughts exactly. Well put SJ. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Randallw]

I'm not familiar with starfury, but it would be nice if vessels were proportional in size depending on their class. I recently watched footage of Dominion vessels while researching for a game, and they have massive Battleships which dwarf the Battlecruisers, and Escorts hardly show in comparison. Perhaps huge vessels could fill up a few grids.

[Atrocities]

I would love the ability to sort ships within the fleet menu by various options such Speed, Cost, Supplies, cargo, etc. Would be very helpful when needing to drop slower ships from the fleet.

[Suicide Junkie]

Randallw said:
I'm not familiar with starfury, but it would be nice if vessels were proportional in size depending on their class. I recently watched footage of Dominion vessels while researching for a game, and they have massive Battleships which dwarf the Battlecruisers, and Escorts hardly show in comparison. Perhaps huge vessels could fill up a few grids.

(Presuming its anything like SF)
There are no grids in combat.
Ships have what is likely a spherical "hit-box", and fly around in real time coordinate-space with the projectiles and beams.

A good feature would be to have deformed spheres, in order to accomodate long, skinny ships for example. Or multiple hit boxes for really wierd shaped vessels.
In the interests of fairness though, you'd probably want to keep the cross-sectional area of the hull independent of shipset.
You could still have a racial trait choice for different hull designs, though...
Option 1: spherical hulls
Option 2: wide,stubby hulls
Option 3: thin,long hulls
Each providing a different set of vehicles that sport different hit-box regions...

Due to the mod's placement of hit-boxes, the thin hulls would have a lower chance to be hit in head-on attacks, but very vunerable to flanking attacks, for example.

[Tnarg]

larrybush said:
With the log maybe a symbol on the map showing the site of a famous space battle.
You know a map bigger than 0,12 X 0,12 would be nice more rings, more graphics. Maybe even open up the game code to allow sensors and scanners in that map for some "cat and mouse" or "destroyer vs submarine" detect and destroy play! Might even use "unknown" style ship icon on that map until ship is detected &amp; identified. Possibly allow game code to utilize stealth values in component design/hull design, not cloaking but just "quiet" ships with low EM emissions, maybe even seperate modes for active and passive scanning, you know EMCON mode for quiet travel active mode for active scanning. Kinda crazy are'nt I, just think the big system map is good for detection and close then the tactical map for actual combat. Give fast ships with good electronics suiets a chance to withdraw if outgunned.




I like the idea of a system being so large that it requires sensors to detect aproptiate areas of space. Use of a planet facility that is dedicated to sensing a particular range (depending on technology level) of space surrounding the planet, or satelites placed as survey probes, or starbases and ships that have a components that both scan passively at short range, and actively at long ranges.

Having graphic circles representing these sensor ranges would add a depth for strategic operations of hiding ships and dodging particulary dense sensor sweeps. Hiding ships behind planets or within dense EM signatures of populated planets or high energy sources such as stars would require a survey vessel to get close and determine an ID.
Also when a ship first enters a system it would need to do a survey rather than just knowing automatically what the system is composed of and fleet strengths. A fog of war in a sense. The more advanced the sensors or choosing to go to active vs. passive the quicker it can survey the system.

[Tnarg]

Ships that control other ships! Borrowing from ID4 and the Star Fire novels(?) ideas of propulsion and data links.

1. A series of ships linked to one that is the sole power source. So you have one large (preferably well defended) ship that houses an imense power source that is beamed to other smaller ships which are all in turn linked and dependant on the larger ship. So you eliminate space required for propulsion and power on the smaller ships and if captured the enemy can't use them unless it has the power source ship.

2. Data links that enable all ships in a fleet to concentrate their fire into a single target at once or provide adequete screening against fighters or missiles. One ship is designated as a "smart" ship that coordinates all other ships in the fleet with the adequete link package installed. I know that the AI in SEIV kind of does this when ships are placed in fleets and a strategy is determined already, but if it could be implemented furhter and ships with out it would have very little coehesion and fire randomly at targets of opertunity. In a sense it could automatically set formations to deal with appropriate threats especially in real time. Once the AI determines that a large force of fighters are closing in on the fleet, networked ships would automatically create a formation that sends all ships with PD to the front. For instances of attack say long range attack is set, all ships with long range weapons would get into appropriate firing formations and fire at once so that all fire is concentrated on a single target or mutliple targets designated.

Sorry for the wordy post!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I dont know if anyone has already posted any of ths, but what the heck.



I liked the "modular ship design" idea, but only for the outward appearance, not for components. this otherwise defeats the kT-per-ship size principle.

Colony ships that *don't* disappear when you colonize. I mean, when you start, I can understand, but when you've got an empire the size of half the Galaxy, technology to flit between the stars in an instant, battleships the size of some of the larger asteroids, a population of over 3000 trillion and a monthly production that could actually be enough to buy Microsoft out, and you can still not use colony ships more than once? I mean, ever heard of Colony Drop Pods or something?

Colonist quarters that can carry only colonists, or people.

Separate storages for cargo types. I mean, you can store fighters in colony modules and population in fighter bays? C'mon!

More in-depth ground combat.

Things like Dropship Hangars or something - launch dropships (similar to fighters) from a distance to carry troops to the plant safely. say an enemy has got a massive amount of cap-ship-missile sats, you can sneak your dropships through their defenses. you just need to watch out for pdf cannons though

Ammo for things like missiles and depl-uranium cannons. you can't fire without ammo. Must also be coupled with the appropriate supply ships to resupply in space. Also handy for missile-pod fighters.

Resources that do NOT flit between the stars instantly, like they moved in another dimension or something... I mean, use auto-generated ships or custom-built ones to ferry your goods between the stars. Makes for interesting situations... blockades, pirates, loss of resources through disasters...

Actual travel time through warp points. For short ones (&lt;100 ly), instantaneous, for larger ones, several turns to travel. Somewhat more realistic, and more interesting. Also, if you open a warp point from one side of the sector to another, this means your forces can't flit instantly towards something 500 ly away. Also, gives you nice options; a higher-level warp point closing device than can close warp points when ships are traveling through them... that way, if you've got only 1 system, and a massive enemy fleet is incoming, you can destroy it utterly simply by closing the warp point they travel through.

Racial tensions... ie if your race was at war with another for, say, 130 years and you force them to surrender and place their population on one of your worlds, your population gets angrier and angrier until the world erupts in civil war between the races and you need to send in ground troops to calm them down.

Covert contacts. If the enemy has captured your homeworld and relocated part of its population to make room for its own, you can contact your population on their planets and incite them to civil war or have them sneaking out of enemy territory and back to your planets.

Slave labor. Ie you capture enemy population and set them to work on, say, a very harsh desert world with massive mineral deposits. You then have them extracting the materials faster than usual, at the cost of some of their lives. You can set the scale of overworking on a slider.

Civilian weaponry. You can arm your civilians with varying degrees of weapons making them more effective in planetary defense - or civil war. Smuggle in weapons covertly to your opressed people, to allow them to capture the planet easily when you incite civil war.

Neutral or covert organizations, AI controlled. Like smugglers, pirates, mercenaries, espionage agencies...

Planetary raids (can also be on ships, bases) not to capture the planet but, say, perform an attack on enemy facilities to for example destroy facilities or construction queues, or to raid planetary warehouses for units or resources, destroy these things, or simply to abduct a part of the population - i.e. take them away as slaves.

Planetary surface use. This is not only for allotment of space for facilities/cargo/population, but can also mean that you have a huge sized planet with TWO colonies from different Empires. I mean, such a situation is very likely, don't you think? And this can also mean you can share Ringworlds and Sphereworlds.

Racial Events during gameplay. This can be a lot, for example;
-Primitive races inhabiting planets. You can have them work for you, take them all away as slaves, or obliterate them. Or, of course, you can colonize the planet and assimilate them into your society. This can be handy to gain extra bonuses, for example they may be Psychic or something, or they can even open whole new fields of research.
Primitives can be at the level of development of Amazone indians, or modern-day North America. This Last thing means thay can attack you with space-based missiles, nuclear or not, and that they may have sats or small space stations in orbit (think Mir or ISS). They might also have colonized their moon or a nearby planet.
-New races appearing at random. Some custom races state they were marooned in this sector by a warp point or a one-way colony mission, so why can't it happen during gameplay?
-Primitive races developing into space-faring Empires. At first they can be Neutral races, later they can develop into larger Empires.
-Neutral races venturing out of their system to become space-faring Empires.

You can also sometimes choose to start a game between highly-developed empires, making you dependent on trade and diplomacy for survival until you can make your move and secure your place as one of these larger Empires. That could also be your goal.

Start off as Neutral Empires or even primitives, while the rest starts out normally. Then you have to research certain things - think like "Steam Engine", "Flight" and "Particle Accelerators" to become a Neutral Empire, who then eventually needs to research something like "Interstellar Navigation" or something to exit your system and start plying the stars.

Missions. I.e. "quests" generated by the AI inside an empire, a neutral organization, or an Empire. For example, one of your planets might suddenly experience a Famine requiring you to ship a certain amount of Organics (dependent on planet size and population) for your citizens to stop starving and start loving you. This can be internal, but also external; the message might also be sent to another Empire. If that Empire then sends an Organics shipment there first, he gets control over the planet.
Or a player might create one saying, for example, "Whoever can close the Black Hole/destroy the Nebula/etc. in system [...] first gets 10000 Minerals and 25 high-tech Fighters." This could also be done in SEIV, but only to players you know, whereas an actual Mission might be sent to ALL players, AIs and neutral organizations.

Play as not an Empire but, say, an organization or a single ship! If you play, for example, a covert smuggler organization, you need to be able to produce and transport illegal goods, make connections with Empires, rebels or other organizations, and use this alternate form of diplomacy to win - or just to play on endlessly. Even if one empire destroys all the others, it could still be fun - smuggle goods for rebels, pirates, spies, trading organizations and the like.
If you play as a single ship, you need to be able to conduct diplomacy - transport goods on assignment, hunt down pirates or smugglers, join an organization or an Empire, trade in your ship (and a substantial amount of credits) for another (not one you design, unless you buy an independent Spaceyard, but one that is for sale - it may have been constructed, or sold by another captain-player, or it may have been captured... Your ship can be outfitted with all of the normal components. This means you can have a massive battleship, or a stellar manipulation vessel, a cargo ship, a boarding vessel, a minelayer, even a base. Some things are more exciting than others - piloting a battlecruiser is more diverse than keeping a resource-extraction vessel in orbit around a planet, and the former usually pays more, but is more dangerous. There is a far greater risk of getting killed when battling than there is when extracting resources, and you're not always assured with an assignment, however most empires would like to have a certain amount of resources per turn for a certain amount of credits, and you have a constant influx of money, not just one-time wads of cash.
You could also need to keep an eye on the morale of your crew; if you pay them more, they'll be happier, and when you deprive them of R&amp;R for too long they will start complaining.
You can also buy Colony Ships, but they are extremely expensive - more expensive than a Starbase or a stellar-manipulation Baseship. When you have a Colony Ship, you can settle on a planet and start an empire of your own, which is when the gameplay changes from single-ship to Space Empire mode.
If this is too much like Starfury, oh well. But I don't think Starfury would allow you to start your own Empire.

Interplanetary/interstellar weapons!!!!! If you have interplanetary missiles, for example, you can initiate a bombardment of another planet from afar. You could even have a full-blown missile duel as guided or ballistic missiles are fired from and at two planets. Interstellar weapons would be even cooler; firing a missile that extinguishes a star from ten systems away is very handy. These missiles are similar to drones, only about the size of between Escorts and Cruisers and you could design them yourself. These missiles are not like drones, however, you select a target and then you lose control over them like you do over drones in battle.
You could also have planet-based weapons that aren't MDWs, but simply a means of obliterating an enemy ship three sectors away, or clearing an enemy minefield.

More components for Mines (and larger Mines). Like advanced cloaking devices to render mines even more difficult to see (coupled with better scanners) or something like a Self-Replication Unit. This would have to be larger than the second largest Mine and about 10-20kTs smaller than the size of the largest Mine. In ST:DS9, self-replicating mines were used to lay a minefield in front of the Bajoran Wormhole. Each time a mine detonated, it was replaced by a freshly replicated new mine. These components need to be very expensive so you can't lay 500 self-replicating mines, and there needs to be a mines-per-turn limit, so that if a minefield with 100 of these mines is reduced to 10, you won't have 90 more mines in one turn. The limit should be as large as the number of remaining mines in the minefield, and no mines need to be replicated after one turn, so you won't have to forget about the minefields because they will grow back to original strength in a couple of turns. Also, no mines which have been cleared by Mine Sweepers will be created. This way Minesweepers are still useful.

More intel. DEFINITELY more intel.

More comprehensive intel.

Research projects that enhance a component or component type or several components. For example, "Small Ion-Rockets" would upgrade seeker missile speed (so crystal torpedos and space parasites don't benefit) and would extend the range of seeker missiles and Rocket Pods slightly.

More types of shields.

Something which allows modders to put in things like "hyperspace" or "warp drive" and sub-space communications (i.e. communications which cannot be intercepted/jammed/redirected/detected/etc.)

More types of random events.

A higher maximum limit for ships. MOST DEFINITELY a higher maximum limit for ships. I mean, if you've got an Empire that spans half the Galaxy and another one of the same size, wouldn't it be nice if you could have fleets of tens of thousands of ships fight against each other?

Fighters that can jump through warp points.

More types of vehicles/units.

Facilities which you can design - like weapons platforms, only then not with just weapons but also things like cargo space, resource extraction devices etc.

Nanotechnology. You can do so much with nanotechnology. Nano-storage is one thing - you can nanominiaturize objects so that you can store a helluva lot more on planets and in cargo bays, smaller components, sturdier ships, automated hull repair nanos built into all vessels which repair the hull and armor automatically but don't repair internal components, nano-jamming devices to disrupt the operation of nanotechnological devices...

If you build a ship/base, the empty hull is placed directly in space and then the components are created - like in SEIII. This would mean it would be handy to have repair in place at construction sites so large ships get done sooner.

Starship docking bays. In ST, starships can enter Starbases and dock inside. It would be nice to have a component like this in SE. Then, if you've got a Starbase around a planet, and it has a scanner jammer, an enemy might attack it unsuspectingly and suddenly face an entire fleet of starships.

Retreat from combat like in SEIII. In SEIV you can't cross the border of the combat sector, so you can't run away if one of your most vital convoys is attacked by an enemy Dreadnought which has just dropped out of cloak.

Cloaking during combat.

Reinforcements - i.e. ships with movement left around the battle sector can move into it to assist in combat.

Some sort(s) of valuable materials/money/standardised exchange rates/etc. like credits, Spice, gold, platinum, other sorts of rare metals yet to be discovered, etc.

Secondary material production. I.e. some planets can also produce other materials next to the standard resources - for example, mining stations can also mine things like titanium, Spice, etc. which will make production of certain objects cost less or which are required to be able to build certain objects in the first place, or which serve as money, etc. Farms can extract things like nitrogen, carbon, atmospheric gases etc. which can be used to, for example, make construction of atmosperic reprocessing facilities cheaper and which make the process Last shorter. Radioactive extractors can create rare isotopes that aren't your average Radioactive resources. If a mine mines uranium, for example, the uranium can be processed into the more effective material plutonium. You can also have things like Secondary Resource Processing Plants which can do nothing except extract and process secondary resources. This involves not only refining uranium into plutonium, but also things like creating alloys, prefabricate component parts for facilities or components, etc.

Pollution. I.e. you could have several types of resource extraction facilites. For example:
-The standard Mineral Mining Facility.
-An improved Version of the facility which extracts more resources but produces slight pollution.
-A large mine which produces very large amounts of minerals but which generates rampant pollution.
-The standard Organics Farm.
-Organics Growing Centers which grow more organics but which produce more waste in the form of organic and chemical residue and leftovers.
-Organics Extraction Centers which directly extract organics from across the entire planet but which totally obliterates the environment.
-Standard Radioactive Processors.
-Nuclear Reactors requiring uranium or plutonium which produce a far greater amount of radioactives but which cause large amounts of radiation.
-Large Nuclear Reactors requiring plutonium which can rapidly produce immense amounts of radioactives but which can reduce a paradise planet to a highly radioactive uninhabitable wasteland within three years.

Strip mining. Orbital ships which rapidly extract massive amounts of materials but which degrade the value immensely. You can only strip mine so much; then the planet is only a core, which will explode because of the energy generated inside. This will form an asteroid field.

Random events like the sudden collapse of moons or even planets, inhabited or not, into warp points, stars, storms etc.

Combat inside ships. Similar to planetary combat only then with marines. This would require the creation of more types of marines, but would make boarding action much more complicated.

Marine Infantry Troops which are strong on planets but even stronger on ships. They can be carried by ships to assist in boarding action or defense. You can design your own marine troops with things like body armor, zero-gravity armor, atmospheric insulation suits, assault rifles, demo charges, machine guns, plasma flamethrowers, etc. etc. etc.

Guerilla warfare. Covert operatives on enemy planets which can commit acts of sabotage, espionage and assault. This in accordance with the Covert Operatives I described.

Religion. You can have several levels of religious devoutness:
-Atheist; no religion
-Lightly Religious
-Moderately Religious
-Deeply Religious (the advanced trait should be renamed "Apllied Religious Beliefs" or something)
-Psychotic Devoutness (i.e. all other religions / levels of devoutness are heathens, and must be utterly exterminated)
This scale also influences the need for religious structures on planets. Lightly Religious people don't actually need much, though a planet with 5000M or more might require a minor centralized temple, Deeply Religious people will demand several temples of different types, which increase as the population grows, while psychotically devout people might actually want more than half of the planet's facility spaces filled with religious structures - like Temples, burial sites, meditation centers, religious educational facilities and so on. There can be several types of religion; large religions that have followers in several empires, smaller ones confined to a single one, religions that exist only on a single planet, etc.

More Advanced Traits that unlock tech areas.

More moddability... not possible, you might say, but I'd like to have the ability to renamy Minerals, Organics and Radioactives and would also like to be able to add new types of resources.

Tugboats.

Criminals/pirates/refugees/enemy spies/etc. and police/FBI-ish thing/Special Forces/etc.

More may be coming.

[Baron Munchausen]

The idea with colony ships is that it's a huge effort to build all the infrastructure for a settlement in a (trans)portable form. If you could have units of some sort that are as expensive as colony modules but can be launched from some really huge ship instead of the ship itself being consumable that would probably be workable. You're free to build warship hulls with colony modules, after all. So it's not like the game requires that all colony ships be slow and vulnerable.

I agree that the completely universal interchangeability of cargo space is a bit much. We need 'population quarters' to be reinstated, at the least. Some additional cargo classes might be good or might make the game unnecessarily complex. Remember that the AI has to be able to play the game, too. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Yes, we've been asking for more detailed ground combat for a long time. He claims it will be 'slightly' more ocmplex than SE 4 was, but doesn't give details yet. It would be nice if you could recover troops from a planet if it looks like they are going to lose and be slaughtered.

Ammunition apart from generic 'supplies' is in the game, as 'ordnance', and has to be generated just like generic supplies.

Having the actual freighters that move supplies in the game would be a nightmare. It would make a bit more sense if planets that were blockaded couldn't build with anything but locally produced resources, though. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif And when your empire gets cut into large chunks by stellar manipulation the chunks ought to have to function independently rather than having resource transports magically bridge the gap that your warships cannot.

Races should have a much more persistent sense of identity, yes. We are hoping that the AI for SE 5 will be more advanced and cause alien populations to take much longer to settle down and accept citizenship in a new empire, especially if conquered by violence. The same goes for 'slavery' of various sorts and even 'xenophagy' by predatory types like Kzinti. Many people have asked for more complex interactions of populations. Hopefully that means MM is motivated to develop it.

MM has stated that it will be possible to have populations and resource gathering in space so at the least we will be able to play 'nomads' properly. Perhaps some other types of play will be possible, as well.

Mines are badly in need of some articulation. The 'all or nothing' problem so prevalent in the SE series is really bad with mines. Yes, we need mines to have actual rules for variable chances of detection and variable chances to hit a given ship. So far MM has not said anything about if or how mines might change.

Boarding combat is very small scale for a game like SE 5 to cover in any detail. Sure, it ought to take more than one round to decide. It ought to be possible for a ship to spend many rounds being fought over and possibly unable to actually attack anyone externally. But going into details of weapons and defenses for boarding troops is really getting micro-management crazy.

Yes, retreat is supposed to have returned in SE 5.

Whew... I'm out of replies for now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I agree with you, but I still think that it is handy to use resource freighters, if then only for enormous amounts of resources. This would make blockades (and blockade runner ships) much more useful and important. If you've got a massive fleet yard in a system with only one warp point, and the enemy blocks that warp point, you've got two options in SEIV:
-Open another warp point (but let's say you can't, you haven't got the tech or you've disabled it in the setup screen)
-Fight it out.

But your fleet yard is on the far side of the warp point, and the enemy fleet is very large.

I think it would be handy to be able to "run the blockade";

Build small, fast resource ships in fleets of about a hundred with a high speed and a small individual carrying capacity, load them up with resources and run the blockade. You might lose a few craft, but you're almost assured a lot of them (and with them a lot of resources) get to the other side. Then, use your fleet yard to build more blockade-runners, and go on like this until you've got enough materials in your fleet yard to construct an assault fleet big enough to destroy the blockade.

Also I'd like to see something like "hyperspeed" or "afterburners" during combat, i.e. sudden bursts of speed that might put you at an advantage; attack an enemy fleet head-on and hyperjump a few of your ships to the rear of the enemy fleet. They'd have to defend two sides. This would make the odds more favorable to you.

And, fighters must be able to jump. In SW, fighters have small hyperdrives of their own, and in ST, even small administrative shuttles have warp drive. So why can't you simply send your fighters through a warp point? Gravitational stress? Design a component that's fairly large but which provides "Gravitational Shields" so that the fighter can cross interstellar distances. The sheer shock/psycho-horrors/neural energy fields/etc. that will kill a pilot/drive him mad/etc.? Same as above.

You also need to be able to lay mines in combat (to protect your supply ships, for instance) or to determine the pattern of your mines. I.e. a hollow cone in front of a warp point might be more difficult to lay (less mines per turn) but might be harder to detect. A cube would be easy to lay but also easy to detect. A hollow-cylinder-sort of shape would be harder to lay but would increase explosive effectiveness (damage) of the mines.

You could also have something like a "control net" or "delay detonator" for mines to allow for greater effectiveness. If a mine explodes when the bow of a ship just peeks into the minefield, it would not inflict much damage, and the ship would turn back immediately (which it doesn't in SEIV) but if the explosion delay is larger, the ship might be well into the minefield before the mines go off, making sure it's severely damaged or destroyed.

Mines don't need to destroy ships outright. You could set them to disable enemy vessels so you can capture them and tow them to your territory for analysis. (did I spell this right?)

How come you know EVERYTHING about a ship as soon as you enter combat? You shouldn't be able to see everything, least of all the weapons, of an enemy when you start combat. Then, when you expect the enemy to fire an APB, you'd be very surprised if they fire a Graviton Hellbore, and vice versa. Just because a ship is brimming with ugly-looking bLaster turrets doesn't mean it even HAS bLasters.

You should also be able to modify the appearance of your ship as such. I.e. if you've got a freighter, put some nasty-looking things that look a lot like weapons batteries on it, so smaller enemy raiders might be deterred simply by its look. You could also design a warship without any external signs of weapons - retractable "lids" on the weapon muzzles that slide open when ready to fire, engine nacelles that provide nothing but topedo fire (or are torpedos in themselves) - to lure a smaller enemy ship into combat, making it believe it's attacking an unarmed ship, and then kick its ***. Conversely, you might design a battleship with all weapons clearly visible and use it as a freighter/convoy/colony ship/etc. escort to deter enemy attacks.

Two words: Boarding Shuttles.

Ship sizes that require certain types of weapons to be on the ship in sufficient amounts; for example, a Corvette (a real-life torpedo boat) might require to be half filled with torpedos/seekers, and so on. You could also do this with certain Design Types; i.e. (what does i.e. mean, actually?) Torpedo Corvettes might (see above), Graviton Dreadnoughts need things like graviton hellbores/tractor-/repulser beams/etc.

Design Types that can only be used with certain ship/vehicle types/sizes. A Meta-Colony-Ship can't be the size of an Escort (150 kT), but need to be larger than 800 kT. Population Evacuation Transports need to be 500 kT or larger, etc.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

More kinds of "generic ship sizes" or "warship hulls" as they're often called that don't have warship-like names (who has ever heard of a battleship designed to carry population) but more civilian-like names, like "Small Courier Ship", "Large Courier Ship", "Generation Ship" and such.

Generation Ships! Perhaps even the possibility to BE a Generation Ship instead of an Empire when you start. You have a massive ship as your "Homeworld" and you can conduct research/intel/construction/storage/etc. there. You still have the Empire control over your dominion, and you can settle on planets, but you can also become an "Empire-for-hire" conducting missions for others, like hunting down a group of pirates, transporting such-and-such amount of such-and-such goods/resources/population/whatever to planet(s) there-and-there.

Building your own Generation Ships as an Empire, designed truly to Last for forever, and setting them out on a voyage across the stars. This can be handy if you have immense maps (think 5000x5000 ly) and you want to settle another part of the Galaxy. You would lose control and the Generation Ship will act like a single-ship Empire. When it settles an appropriate planet (you can set it for different options, like "first habitable", "first colonizable", "highest value in resource [...]", "best conditions", "largest", or a combination of these) it will become a new small Empire and when you make contact with it again it might join you, or might choose to become a protectorate of you, or the gap might be too great, the colonists are not from your race any more, and they will remain independent or even declare war on you.

Bigger maps. I mean, OK, fully colonizing an area between 500x500 and 1000x1000 ly is OK, but I would also like to have the ability to play on maps over 5000x5000 ly (remember our own galaxy is 100000x100000 ly) or larger, where you might not encounter aliens until you've played for 650 years, and where alien life might be everywhere or there might be only three races, or even one. Would add to the realism: "We are not alone...", remember? Maybe we are. You never know until you've encountered the "Little Green Men" (or ravenous, 60-ft hairy feline carnivorous monsters). They can be only 10 ly away, but could also be on the opposite corner of the Galaxy.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

The option to have more micro-management (in the options screen or yes/no questions in a Data file). I'm a big fan of micro-management, so I'd like to have the ability to micro-manage down to the very component molecules of my ships/bases/planets/etc.

[AMF]

Wow. I think you're, like, the ONLY person I've ever heard say that...


StrategiaInUltima said:
I'm a big fan of micro-management....

[Gandalf Parker]

Personally Im a fan of micro-management also. Not sure how low but I would be happy with a game which is 90% managing my empire and 10% conflict. I tend to do that by soloing playing on maps as large as I can possibly get them. Usually larger than any game designer thought made sense for their game. I like exploring, discovering, developing, preparing.

Which is also why I do alot of thinking on ways to get maps even bigger without hurting game play.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yeah, that's exactly what I like, too. I often play strategy games more for economic/exploration/construction/infrastructure/etc. than for combat. The most fun I had with the ancient strategy game "M.A.X. Mechanized Assault &amp; Exploration" was a hot-seat vs myself, where one player built a small, tightly defended fortress, while the other expanded indefinitely creating a huge base with dozens of Habitats and Research Centers. It's still running.

And I also like Europa Universalis II for its micro-management, with leaders, religion, diplomats that can insult or praise another nation, claiming another nation's throne, the extensive treaty system (would be nice for SEV too, with the victor getting to demand stuff from the vanquished), attrition for armies/navies, rebellions, random/scripted events that reflect actual historical situations, etc.

Oh, and certain scripted events would also be welcome for SEV.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ooh, ooh, ooh, great idea (I think):

Moving systems!

Our own Galaxy rotates slowly. If this would be incorporated into SEV, that would be REALLY nice. You would then have to monitor the movements of stars, and warp points could tear apart due to gravimetric shear or something if the rotation is too big. Also, it would be nice to have some sort of "anomaly" (massive black hole, dimensional rift, space/time continuum distortion, etc.) at the center of the Galaxy. This is what astronomers think might be true; something at our galaxy's center that keeps us together.

Also, if you would be able to play in an entire Galaxy instead of just a sector, it could be nice if there were perhaps more - say, a map with two small galaxies moving slowly towards/away from each other. I've seen artists' impressions (based on actual scientific data) of two galaxies colliding, moving through each other. This would be difficult to incorporate, I know, but would offer a massive bonus to variety in gameplay; if two galaxies cross, systems might be annihilated or might hang on to another galaxy, warp points are destroyed or redirected, planets/stars/anomalies/etc. exchange between the galaxies, and so on. You might suddenly have half your Empire marooned in another galaxy.

Perhaps you should look into the possibilities of communications; i.e. comms signals take time to travel, and so if a scout ship is far away it might be a while before it responds to new orders. And, in the beginning of the game you might need "courier ships" to ferry comms Messages between Empires, making it possible for a third party to intercept your Messages. Also, how come all races speak a common language right from the start? You could need to research some sort of Advanced Linguistics Programme to enable linguistics to decipher alien Languages so you understand their Messages. Later on, you might be able to research some sort of "Universal Translator" or something. Here, Psychic races have an advantage; they can read the mind of an alien and determine what it is it's saying.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Combined research/intel projects. This would be especially handy with intel. This way, you can combine intel projects to run them at a lower cost at a single target.

I.e.:

You start a project. After 0.5 years, the target planet's food is poisoned. The next month or two, spies incite rebellious movements to lower the population's happiness. Then, after another few months, you place Puppet Political Parties to make the planet like you better. If that doesn't work, your spies incite rebels to take over the planet and turn it over to you. Then, you redirect the crews of ships and bases in orbit automatically, and then capture them.

You can do this in SEIV, but this requires frequent visits to the Intel screen. I know I said I'm a big fan of micromanagement, and I still am, but I don't want to have to select the same planet from a list of possibly hundreds of worlds. Also, intel acts don't really influence one another; they're separate entities, not an ongoing project. For example, in the above mentioned situation, the poisoning of the planet's food will reduce happiness somewhat and make the citizens somewhat less loyal. This in turn makes inciting rebels easier, since more people will want to help, and this in turn improves the success chance of the entire mission.

This is something you don't have in SEIV.

Btw, how can you be "promoted"? (I.e. from Private to Sergeant etc. all the way up to National Security Advisor.)

[larrybush]

I too like the micromanagement aspect of this genre of game. I also like the combat part too, as I started my gaming intrest in military wargames in the 70's. The problem with combat (usually) is the AI can never keep up with a human player as the game progresses. Technology tends to overwhelm strategy and tactics. Both of which diminish the tension in the game, I find I enjoy games best when there is a high level of uncertainty or tension present. Try playing SEIV with a very limited technology tree for offensive/defensive weapons, sometimes this can lead to some very tense moments!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yes, you're right. Once you've got better tech (and implement it on all your ships/bases/etc.) you've got the upper hand. Then, it's simply a matter of driving them out of the galaxy.

Also, I would like to see more pics for components/facilites and the like. Also, more open slots for beams/torps; if you make a mod with a ****load of weapons, it would only be realistic if you've got a ****load of displayed beams and torps to go with them. As it is, you can't make much more than six new beams and four new torps. What if you've used all beams and torps, including open slots, but still need more displays?

And I also agree with (whoever it was, can't remember) who said that MM should get rid of the Components.bmp/Facilities.bmp file and simply shrink the image. This way, modding images is easier.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Look, I'm sorry if I overreact sometimes (my first post was just over SIX PAGES long), but I get like that sometimes. I've got so many ideas...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Different Government Types!

Like, not just the "Empire Type" box you fill in at the start, but starting government type - and you should be able to research more types later on. However, this musn't affect the "Empire Type" of your race/conglomerate/whatever. (though having a despotistic tyranny and calling yourself the "Enlightened Democracy" isn't really fair to your people)

Also, you need to be able to change the "Empire Type" and "Emperor Title" during gameplay. Perhaps even the "Emperor Name" to reflect political changes (such as elections, assasinations, rebellions, etc.).

Examples of government types:

Start:
Tyranny
Feudal State
Monarchy
Democracy
Republic

Later:
Multi-Racial Conglomerate
Interspecies Federation
Imperial Parliamentary Democracy
Transcendent Civilization

and the like. There should be more, but this is just an example.

Each government type affects you in a different way; for example, Tyrannies produce more resources and construct things faster, however it will be harder to keep your populations happy. Democracies will make for happy populations, however production/construction rates will drop slightly. An Imperial Parliamentary Democracy will have pretty happy people and a strong fleet, but diplomacy will be harder to conduct. Transcendent Civilizations have ENORMOUS bonuses to research and intel, will be extremely happy no matter what, but their weapons will only be about 20% as strong as normal.

There should also be tensions between different governments, i.e. Democracies will attack a Tyranny more often that they do a Republic. Races should also have preferences for certain types of government, for example the Terrans want a Republic, the Toltayans cling to their Feudal system, and the Imperial Dynasty (a custom race) will like Monarchies or Imperial government systems better.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I still cling on to my idea of resource freighters and independent organizations. That way, if a system is being heavily used (think like homeworld system, interstellar trade hub, large-scale fleet yards, etc.) you see lots of small ships flying around. This can also be an indicator if a system is being used heavily commercially as you first enter it. These ships should not only be freighters and organization's ships, but also randomly generated things (like interplanetary cruises, interstellar passenger ferries, luxury yachts, and so on) that increase in number as more people are in the system. This also makes it easier to spot a trade center.

Also, you should have the option of building a "Ring Station" around a planet. Designs for these have already been made. This would be a ring around a planet, with surface-to-orbit cargo lift tethers, docking bays, habitation quarters, storage spaces and the like. This would have to be very expensive, but when it's finished you should be able to have more population and cargo space (say 10% more) for the planet.

And btw it looks really nifty, to have a ring around a planet with all sorts of small ships (as described above) docking/landing/launching from it.

It might be too much animation, though, and it might cause you to lose the general overview later on in the game (especially in your homeworld system and trade centers) when hundreds of small ships are present.

However, it still should be implemented, I think, so you can have blockades of systems or even sectors. That way, it's more realistic.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I'm sorry if I'm raving on and on.

But, that's me.

[Renegade 13]

No problem man, suggestions are always good! Though I must say, it's going to take a while to read through all your suggestions! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Baron Munchausen]

StrategiaInUltima said:
I'm sorry if I'm raving on and on.

But, that's me.



Yes, you are definitely raving on and on. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

First of all, you'd see that many of these suggestions have already been made (and accepted by MM) if you read the chat logs at spaceempires.net

http://seirc.spaceempires.net/archives.php

Governments, for example, are already in. No word yet on exactly how many types there are and what effects they can have, though.

The debate over actual freighters has been going on for ages. Very few people want them, so you are not likely to win. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif But some people have suggested 'trade routes' that are explicitly marked on the map so you can deliberately blockade them. This sounds like a reasonable compromise, but would still require MM to add some features to the game that might take some time. Given how many things he wants to do this might be relatively low priority.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Another thing I'd very very very much like to see:

Shared Planets.

I know I've stated it before in my first post as "Planetary Surface Use", but this is slightly different:

Have the option (selectable/random) of whether or not you start off on a planet together with another (or more) spacefaring race(s). They could be high-level Primitives (or low-level ones), Neutral Empires or even full-blown Empires of their own! Think like, for example, the Earth: As it is, if SEIV (or V) were to suddenly become a reality, you'd have at least three to four Empires:
-The US (duh.)
-Europe (with the ESA)
-China (they just launched their first space mission, remember?)
-And perhaps Russia.

Maybe even more.

Now, they all start off on the same planet (the Earth) (duh) and so in SEIV there should be a sudden ground conflict between these powers (and other Primitives - think India (relatively highly developed, with nukes), the Middle East, South America, Africa, the Amazone Indians, Micronesians and so on) where one would emerge victorious after a while. Is this realistic? No. The US versus China and India alone (leaving Russia, Europe and all others out) would mean nuclear doom. Instead, it's perfectly feasible that multiple nations continue to exist when interstellar travel is discovered (provided we don't almost wipe ourselves out with nukes first, in which case the world will unite into a happy nation, yeah right) and so in SE you'd have multiple Empires of the same race originating from the same planet.

Why not put this into SEV?

Would also be nice if coupled with a sudden alien invasion - the aliens land on the planet and attack the humans, who will then almost certainly seize the opportunity to settle differences once and for all, so you've got several parties fighting at once:
-The USA, Europe, the Russians and the Australians. (After all, we filthy rich countries (Russia somewhat excluded, but perhaps not in 2400) must stick together to prevent the hungry, poor masses getting their filthy hands on our precious money, no?)
-The aliens.
-India.
-South America.
-and so on.

This would make for a VERY interesting game.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Mines that have the ability to lock themselves on the hull of an enemy ship and explode after a small while. Ever seen the Enterprise episode where a Romulan mine got attached to the hull and pierced Reed's leg? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Crew Amounts; i.e. a ship has a maximum amount of crew of such-and-such. If the amount of crew falls under such-and-such performance will suffer. If a ship with less than minimum crew arrives at a planet or manned space station (mastercomputers don't count, unless you've got redundant crew quarters) the crew will be replenished. If too few crew are available, the ship will be put on Standby - like Mothballing only then you don't need resources to reactivate them, just crew, and going on standby goes automatically and can't be toggled on or off (until you've got enough crew). Crew rotations can be set to Automatic, Manual or None in the game setup screen - None, standard SEIV type, crews have experience but don't do anything else, Automatic, if redundant crew is present they'll board other ships in the sector automatically, Manual you've got crew rotation under your control. Crews can also be used to defend from boarders - now, if you've got a Baseship with a ****load of crew quarters and no marines/boardingdefense, and a boarding ship drops 20 stinking marines, the ship is captured. HELLO?!?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Baron Munchausen said:

StrategiaInUltima said:
I'm sorry if I'm raving on and on.

But, that's me.



Yes, you are definitely raving on and on. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif




http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I'm sorry if I'm cluttering this forum too much, but FINALLY I've got a chance to let my creativity go to the limit... and beyond.

This is an opportunity the likes of which I have never seen before, and I like it very much.

[AgentZero]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Here, Psychic races have an advantage; they can read the mind of an alien and determine what it is it's saying.



Not to get bogged down in semantics, but if you're telepathic, but don't understand Russian, and I'm thinking in Russian, how do you know what I'm thinking?

As for communications delay, I remember playing a game which incorporated this, and to be honest it was a royal pain. One thing I always seem to be saying is that fun is more important than realism. Sure, communications lag is realistic, but what does it add to the game?

I'm not going through &amp; replying to the rest of your suggestions, because I agree with 98% of them. As for your question about the 'promotions' they're based on the number of Posts you have on the forum. 50, 200, 500, 1000, etc...

Oh, &amp; since no one else seems to have said it, welcome to the forum!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

And have some cheese. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Ed Kolis]

NARF'S BACK!!!!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
spamspamspamspamspamspamspamspam http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Atrocities]

MODERATOR MODE

PLEASE KEEP ON TOPIC IN THIS THREAD.

(Tying it up with off topic Posts detracts from the purpose of the thread.)

Thanks.

[Tnarg]

Is there a link or post that details a majority of what is already known to be in SEV for sure, and maybe some ideas that are being toyed with?

[Atrocities]

No not at this time. There was a chat Last month with Aaron on #spaceempires and the log is over at www.spaceempires.net (http://www.spaceempires.net) where Aaron mentioned some things.

I don't know what is in the game, but if SEIV is an indication, then I will bet we will see a lot of the suggestions listed here, and on the yahoo Groups in SE V. The two biggies are ground combat and hero's.

Aaron said that ground combat is something that will most likely be the same as in SEIV, but who knows. You'll have to read the chat. The same thing for Hero's. Albeit, I think my suggestion for Hero's was the best. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Any ways, there is no list as to what will or will not be in SE V that I am aware of. And I would not bother Aaron with one just yet. I am sure as the game gets close to Demo, a list will be published.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

AgentZero, as for your statement about Russian, it's pretty simple (I think):

You detect what the other person is thinking. Even if you're only thinking in abstract text, you will automatically trigger memory "files" with related subjects, which incorporate images. You can extrapolate what the other person is saying through analysis of these images.

Also, Psychic races should be able to generate more intel, as they can scan the minds of their opponents, and they must be able to contact all other empires they don't know but someone else does when you're talking to that person.

You scan his mind for communications channels, and you input them into your diplomatic computer (or whatever the hell you use, slaves, etc.) so you can contact them.

Also, I've had some ideas:

Planetary Cloaking Facilities.
These can be various types of facilitites that hide, for instance, cargo, facilities, orbital objects, entire moons, or even the fact that the planet is colonized.
This could be an easy way to deal with an enemy fleet:
Take one of your most important planets (your homeworld for example) and construct massive space defenses - sats, minefields, starbases, ships, fighters etc - and then cloak them. The enemy might be duped into thinking your homeworld is defenseless. When his fleet attacks, he'll have a surprise waiting for him...
Also, you should be able to activate/deactivate planetary cloaks during combat - hide defenses or weapons platforms, for instance.

Power Generation.
Sort of like supplies for planets. Power can be generated by a Power Plant or something (or you can upgrade the standard power plant always available, and build secondary reactors) that generates a certain amount of Power. Simple facilities, like miners, farms, etc. always work, but things like atmospheric reprocessing plants, planetary shielding, ship/fleet trainers, etc. require power to operate. This makes regulation of these things important; now you can simply colonize a tiny moon in a system and build planetary and systemwide stellar manipulation shielding facilities, but do you have any idea how much power these things consume? How is a tiny moon capable of summoning that much energy?
You might say that tiny moons won't be able to change their atmosphere, because they've only got one slot for facilities and you need power for the reprocessor, but this need not be an issue; each planet has its own small power source that is not a facility so it doesn't take up room. The amount of power generated is dependent on planet size, population present, and upgrade level. You can build additional Reactors (which take up cargo space, similar to weapons platforms) or even whole new Power Plants (which are facilities). You should also be able to construct things like Solar/Nuclear/Fusion/Antimatter/whatever power sats/bases/ships and power relay sats/bases/ships. Non-planetary power sources (think solar satellites, nuclear power plant space stations) also generate power (dependent on things like stars in a system, amount of Radioactives in your storages (which are consumed by nuclear power plants unless you can supply them with uranium or plutonium), amount of Antimatter in your storages, etc.) and transmit it down to the planet. Power relays transmit power between power sources and planets, between planets, or between systems. You don't need a relay for orbital generators.

Comms ranges. You can only directly control a ship within such-and-such range of a planet, such-and-such range if it has a transmitter of level such-and-such, and you can drop relay probes (which can't be attacked, produced or carried, but which simply cost a certain amount of resources) in deep space (like Enterprise did). If a ship gets out of this range, it will try to follow its orders, then return to within your comms range via the shortes/safest route. If you want your ships to perform deep-space exploration missions outside comms range, you need to issue them orders first (i.e. explore for at least 10 turns/5 systems/2 empires/10 habitable planets/etc. or a combination of these) and they will carry out these orders. Also, explorations/discoveries made outside of comms range will not be visible to you after the ship reenters comms range.
This need not necessarily apply to inter-Empire communications, but there should be a toggle in the Setup screen to choose whether you want it to or not.

Thnx AgentZero

[Renegade 13]

Tnarg said:
Is there a link or post that details a majority of what is already known to be in SEV for sure, and maybe some ideas that are being toyed with?



Yes, Captain Kwok has a couple of lists on his site, if you can find it. I can't remember the URL right now.

[AMF]

ALL the suggestions I have seen here and elsewhere are, to some degree or another, cool sounding. BUT, above ALL else I would like to see all these options for a game be 'settings' that you can choose to be "on" or "off" when you set up the game. That way, the "stock" SE5 could approach many of the aspects of mods - making it much more customizable and more appealing to people who don't use mods (for whatever reason).

For example, SE4 currently has settings for "universe size" - why not simply expand that to an entire array of settings. Put them all into a separate "Advance Start-Up options" screen that the average joe won't ever go to, but that if someone wanted to set up a game with all sorts of options they could...

Thanks,

Alarik

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

You're completely right.

And I now I've said it about two times before, but I still think it should be implemented in SEV:

Bigger Galaxies.

I think it's best of you have a dialog box (like was proposed for maximum amount of ships/units a while ago) where you can input length&amp;width of the galaxy. There should be no maximum, but I know that's practically impossible, but I still think you would have to have the option to create IMMENSE galaxies (IMHO something in the order of 500000x500000 ly or bigger) and to have a maximum limit of something about the size of the Great Wall (large group of galactic clusters, near our own cluster - galactic clusters consist of many galaxies (ours is called the Virgo cluster), and the Great Wall consists of a VERY large amount of clusters, in an approximate wall shape. so its at least several billion (or trillion) lightyears wide. I'd like to have the option to play in maps of that size... won't have made contact with aliens after 5000 years of real time lol http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif (no, but seriously, with modern-day computers, a feasible maximum would be about 10 million x 10 million ly or something, excellent for multiplayer games, you can have games going on for years)) (this would also open up options like i stated before, of multiple galaxies to play in) (but you would have to have an unbelievable amount of maximum systems, like millions or billions of systems, which would make gameplay not only VERY complicated (no objections to this, btw) but also VERY large-scale if you do it right. think your galactic empire shouldn't be limited to a puny 255 systems? Simple, conquer 255 thousand systems! Then take 255 MILLION systems! lol This would create a real "Massive Galactic Empire/Republic/whatever feeling, would appreciate it very much Aaron http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif)

Sorry if the above is an unreadable mess. Just print it out and take a weekend to decipher it. If it takes longer and you get fired/dumped because you didn't show up for work/your girlfriend/wife for a week, don't blame me, I'm simply putting my thoughts into text directly, without barriers in between http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[AMF]

I think "larger quadrants" are one of those things that is going to be in. But, I doubt that they will be THAT big...

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I totally agree that quadrants should be bigger...

But...I was just about to also write that it seems to me that it would be very unusual for someone to want to play in a game with 250 Million systems...*however* I just realized that the coolest use for such a thing would be to provide a "real-time" background universe for role playing. For example, if I was still GMing space opera RPGs, I would use my empire in a certain game as the backdrop for it. If one wanted to run a "realistic" Traveller (or whatever) RPG game, one could set up an SE5 game in the largest possible universe and run a turn in it every time "RPG-time" advanced...that way, you could use SE5 to provide your RPGing with a living, breathing background universe...that would be nifty as heck.

Hmmm...the possibilities are pretty vast, especially once you factor in modd'ing...

I might ust get backinto RPGing if ultra-large SE5 universe come about...

-Alarik

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yeah, I know it's going to be a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong game if you have millions of systems to explore/colonize/conquer, but it would, IMO, add to the fun.

As I said, there should be a dialog box for the length/width of the galaxy with a maximum allowable value of something in the order of 10 million... I know it's gonna be 1 million grid squares, but it would be fun. Also, add a dialog box to set the "average gridsquares-per-system" where you could specify the average number of empty grid squares for each system with a minimum of about 5-10 so you could play on a tiny map crammed with systems so a warp point opener level 1 (100 ly, ie 10 gridsquares, ie standard, not modded) could be used to reach dozens of systems without moving. The maximum should be about 100 or something, so you can play on a gigantic map with only a few dozen/hundred systems, making warp point opening less easy, and you need to plan out wp rooutes to get to a system just beyond your reach... would be interesting for trader-games!

(Trader-games are something I dream about sometimes... games where the main part is not necessarily "colonize, research and conquer" but "trade for prosperity". There could also be a small amount of small Empires that were the only ones allowed to go to war with each other, as mercenary-style empires, and such empires could be hired by any party to attack any other party (perhaps even the large trading-empires) for money. This could be fun for the small mercenary-empires, playing two empires against each other by drawing higher and higher bids from them, or driving bids up yourself by stating another empire made you a better offer. That'd be nice to play, with lots of diplomacy involved - and backstabbing. For instance, you covet the systems occupied by one of your Partnership friends, and so because you still want to keep the treaty you hire a mercenary empire to attack the other covertly so you can colonize his former planets. I have even made the "Star Credits Price Table" for these types of games; i.e. "I attacked that planet for you, you owe me 1000 SC" "I can give you 20k organics, 10k rads, and 25 medium fighters" "You bastard! That's only 700 SC! I want my payments! Now!" etc. Exchange rates are fixed - boarding ships, racial-specific ships, etc. to hire/buy, 1k of resources is 2 SC, small troop is 1 SC, medium 3, large 5, etc. This makes trading objects (units, ships, planets) much more interesting than trading resources, since it's much more efficient to trade a ship than to trade 10x its cost which amounts to the same amount of SC.)

[Fyron]

Tnarg said:
Is there a link or post that details a majority of what is already known to be in SEV for sure, and maybe some ideas that are being toyed with?

You can read the chat logs of the IRC chat sessions with Aaron Hall on:

http://seirc.spaceempires.net/archives.php

[Fyron]

StrategiaInUltima said:
AgentZero, as for your statement about Russian, it's pretty simple (I think):

You detect what the other person is thinking. Even if you're only thinking in abstract text, you will automatically trigger memory "files" with related subjects, which incorporate images. You can extrapolate what the other person is saying through analysis of these images.

The problem is that if you are thinking in a different language, you have different thought processes... Combine this with entirely different brain chemistry of an alien... Images only go so far, and do not convey abstract thought very well, only basic concepts.

[vanbeke]

While I am in favor of a HUGE game, there would appear to be some real issues with the computer required to manage all of that information - either you need massive amounts of memory, or you need a totally different structure of the game mechanism to store everything back to disc when it moves on to something else. Would tend to slow the entire experience to a crawl.

The aspect that I would like to see would be to extend the tech trees so that in a large game, you haven't researched everything there is to research before you are half way through the game (I know - it has been mentioned before).

[Fyron]

vanbeke said:
The aspect that I would like to see would be to extend the tech trees so that in a large game, you haven't researched everything there is to research before you are half way through the game (I know - it has been mentioned before).

SE5 will support virtually infinite tech trees. Adding more levels to a component will just be a matter of increasing the maximum level, since each family will be defined by a single entry filled with formulae to determine the attributes of each level of component (like in Starfury, only not extremely simplistic).

[larrybush]

Here's a quick one

Allow for more than 100 letters in the SectType text file. This allows for better descriptions of the planets and stars.

[AgentZero]

StrategiaInUltima said:
AgentZero, as for your statement about Russian, it's pretty simple (I think):

You detect what the other person is thinking. Even if you're only thinking in abstract text, you will automatically trigger memory "files" with related subjects, which incorporate images. You can extrapolate what the other person is saying through analysis of these images.




Aye, that would work reasonably well when dealing with two humans who speak different Languages, but wouldn't do you a lot of good with an alien. Assume you're telepathic/psychic, and I'm an alien. Through the use of a 'Your Pile, My Pile' system, you propose a trade with me, then scan my mind to find out what I am thinking. The unintelligible giberish you recieve activates a memory 'file' that brings up an image of a large, hairy, six-legged carnivore attempting to mate with a tree.

Question is, what do I think of the deal?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yeah, you're both right (Fyron and AgentZero), but I think you should still see the basic type of message - if it's war, you would always see some sort of combat activity (ship-to-ship combat, predators eating prey, and so on). And I don't mean "trigger memory files" in YOUR memore, but in that of the alien. Even though their brain chemistry might work on a miniature plasma ball. You should still be able to get a general outline of what the message is about.

[AgentZero]

That's what I'm saying. If a telepath proposes a deal to an alien and the image they recieve back is that of a large carnivore attempting to mate with a tree, even if they know the carnivore is something called a Hergart and the variety of tree is a Smengart Tree, they still won't be any closer to knowing what the alien actually thinks of the deal. And if they don't even know what a Hergart or Smengart Tree is, they'll stand no chance at all.
It's only when actuall communications between the two races becomes possible that they would discover that "Your Hergart is humping my Smengart Tree!" is an expression used when presented with a deal that seems too good to be true.

On another line of thought, I'd like to see a bit of work done on the 'Demands' system. At the moment, if I have ships in another empire's space, and they demand I remove them, I can accept their demand, but do nothing. Odd thing about this is that since I continually accept their demand to move the same ship, my relations with them end up getting better.
I think if you (or especially the AI) accepts a demand to move ships, the ship should be automatically given orders to leave the system. If you countermand those orders to make it stay, your relations with said empire would worsen. Also, if you're contantly being sent demands to remove your ships, it should worsen your relations with other empires, since they'll start worrying about their space being invaded by your nosey little scoutships next.

[larrybush]

I just read the Last transcript with Aaron Hall and it answered some of my wants in SEV (thanks Aaron). He said he was chatting with his left hand and coding the map editor with his right! Since your working on that here's a suggestion that would truly help us solo players (like me)

1) Allow for me to create a map with just the stars (their name, location and associated image files). Allow me to push a tool button to randomly flesh out the solar systems within. Then I can use my real star maps without knowing every detail in them. The use of formulas would be nice too! Like if its a binary system then use "binary1" thru "binary3" in creating the solar systems. This way we could tell the game or map editor the kinds of solar systems that would be expected with the varying star types.

and this one's kinda hard to explain...

2)Since it appears to me that the warp point movement style is hard coded maybe it would be possible to "fake" other styles of FTL drives... If the map editor uses squares or hexes just allow a feature or mod that would connect all the edges of all the squares/hexes with invisible warp points and lines together as a grid, so that it appears to be movement from square to square or hex to hex. With the addition of a component ability type that allows warp point movement, you could create warp engines, hyper drives and only these ships could move through visible or invisible warp points. With these features you could simulate the Star Trek, Bab 5 and Star wars FTL types by using variations of the expanded warp point styles..

[Elowan]

... have standard Windows dialogs in the Save Game choice? It would be nice if you could choose a name from the file list and append something to it rather than have to retype everything just to implement an incremental save game. Now if you choose a name from the list it overwrites that file. If you choose New Save Game - you get to type in everything. Woo Hoo! I'm not impressed!

[Baron Munchausen]

larrybush said:
I just read the Last transcript with Aaron Hall and it answered some of my wants in SEV (thanks Aaron). He said he was chatting with his left hand and coding the map editor with his right! Since your working on that here's a suggestion that would truly help us solo players (like me)

1) Allow for me to create a map with just the stars (their name, location and associated image files). Allow me to push a tool button to randomly flesh out the solar systems within. Then I can use my real star maps without knowing every detail in them. The use of formulas would be nice too! Like if its a binary system then use "binary1" thru "binary3" in creating the solar systems. This way we could tell the game or map editor the kinds of solar systems that would be expected with the varying star types.

and this one's kinda hard to explain...

2)Since it appears to me that the warp point movement style is hard coded maybe it would be possible to "fake" other styles of FTL drives... If the map editor uses squares or hexes just allow a feature or mod that would connect all the edges of all the squares/hexes with invisible warp points and lines together as a grid, so that it appears to be movement from square to square or hex to hex. With the addition of a component ability type that allows warp point movement, you could create warp engines, hyper drives and only these ships could move through visible or invisible warp points. With these features you could simulate the Star Trek, Bab 5 and Star wars FTL types by using variations of the expanded warp point styles..



1) We requested something like this in the SE 4 map editor. For some reason he never got around to it. It seems simple enough to be able to 'randomly' generate one system at a time, especially if you choose one of the templates from the quadrant file.

2) While it would be very nice to have some other alternative intersteller movement system -- 'warp drive' in a flat universe, hyperspace, or even sleeper ships at sublight speed -- some simple variations of warp points are so easy that I cannot see why he doesn't add them. First, as you already noted, let us setup a 'required component' for warping. Then you can have 'system ships' without warp capability and 'star ships' with warp capability but less space for other equipment. And then from the other side, let us setup 'artificial' warp points, 'warp gates', which we totally control. Then we can have treaties allowing use of each others' warp gates for trade or military transit. Both of these simple variations would add tremendously to the game and aren't much work compared to totally new and different methods of movement.

[larrybush]

I think Baron, maybe the math is pretty large, I sat down one day and blacked out the graphics to the warp point so it blended in to the starmap.bmp. Then I started making warp points on each 11 edge (44 per solar system total), then I made the reciprical warp points on all the other adjacent squares. All of a sudden I realized this was 140,624 warp points in a 68 by 47 square grid. I'm not sure how long this would take me but I hav'nt worked on that map since! Maybe the program can't hanlde that many numbers? I don't know but it would sure be nice.....

[Suicide Junkie]

larrybush said:
I think Baron, maybe the math is pretty large, I sat down one day and blacked out the graphics to the warp point so it blended in to the starmap.bmp. Then I started making warp points on each 11 edge (44 per solar system total), then I made the reciprical warp points on all the other adjacent squares. All of a sudden I realized this was 140,624 warp points in a 68 by 47 square grid. I'm not sure how long this would take me but I hav'nt worked on that map since! Maybe the program can't hanlde that many numbers? I don't know but it would sure be nice.....

You can go with just 12 evenly spaced around the edge of the system, and it will work just as well.

On a small map it takes about 12 hours to do.
See: SJ's FTL map

[larrybush]

Suicide Junkie, I have downloaded and used your map actually, but my thread is to get Aaron to think about incorporating some of these ideas into SEV (not that my ideas are the Last word in gaming, just that it would help out my style of play &amp; maybe others too).

[TCGiant]

I registered just for this, so I figured I might as well make use of it before my eyes turn square and I have to go back into hibernative naptosis for a few more hours:

* Weapons that strike in a cone-like manner, so they could hit more than one target at a time and have the fortunate side effect of looking pretty cool while doing it
* Dyson spheres. Not sphereworld, sphere SECTORS.
* An AI that would rather do smart stuff like not freak out the moment you enter a sector they're in or declare war on first contact. Also, AI that played deceptively would be nice.
* Swarm-like missiles as opposed to(or in addition to!) the huge missiles in SE4. Again with the coolness, but from a strategic standpoint, the more projectiles coming at an enemy, the more trouble they'll have avoiding them. It'd simulate more realistic combat, at the very least.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but most of my ideas aren't really briliantly unique or anything.

Oh! I almost forgot: Miniaturization. It would make sense that as you learn more about technologies, then older ones should get easier and easier to make or improve on, which was kind of factored in automatically in Master of Orion 2, but never in SEIV. Ever play Spaceward Ho!? You could research miniaturization technology, which reduced the amount of metal(non-renewable resources) it took to make a ship, but increased the cost in cash(which was renewable) as a result. It'd be neat to be able to shrink down one's technology(as I was actually thinking about for a mod!), at the cost of it becoming more difficult to repair as a result of its' compressed nature, which would be reflected by a higher maintenance cost or lower damage resistance.



Also, would it kill ya for some higher resolution modes? Those of us running at 1600x1200 have to look at all that ugly negative space outside the 1024x768 playing field right now, and it drives me nuts. :/

[AgentZero]

In terms of Heroes, or more specifically, Planetary Governors, how about a Popular Support rating? Each Governor would have a Charisma stat. Governors with low charisma would give higher bonuses to production etc. but would not be terribly popular leading to lower population happiness, greater vulnerability to subversive acts, and at the extreme (Tyrant) end of the scale, rioting, civil war, and rebellion. Governors with high Charisma, on the other hand, would not give as large production bonuses, but would be well liked by the population, and thus increase happiness.

The Emperor (you) would also have a Popular Support rating which would be affected by how your population felt about their standard of life (abundance of goods represented by large resource stockpiles), their saftey (ships/troops), the economy (number of new/developing colonies), and even things like ethics (if you declare war against an empire that is liked by your citizens, they won't be happy).

Things would get interesting if a Governor's Popular Support on a given planet/system rose above yours, meaning the people of that world/system were more loyal to the Governor than the Emperor. Then you might be faced with the prospect of that governor deciding to break off and form his own empire. You could remove the Governor from office, which would of course cause widespread discontent. Or, you could just as easily have him assassinated and blame a 'popular' empire you'd like to invade. Then your people would be quite happy when you sent the Fleet out to teach those meddling aliens a lesson or two.

[WrathPhoenix]

I thought I heard combat is going to be realtime, but im going to place this anyways.

If combat is still divided by tactical/strategic, then let there be more of an impressive show on the board for strategic then a bunch of dots. Let us see some replays of the battle too!

If turn based will still be an option, allow tactical multiplayer as an OPTION in turn based multiplayer games, and even PBEM. Some of us realize it would take forever but still miss that aspect of the game in the multiplayer modes, all of them, http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Saving during combat would be another great option! (And probably the big requirement... if you could save during turn based combat now, The above option would be completely availible!

[Suicide Junkie]

Saving during combat makes for cheating...

You could just save and reload until you roll big hits and big dodges...

[WrathPhoenix]

It also makes for annoyance. In PBEM It doesnt matter much anyways since you cant reload with the other there. Cheating prevention fine sure, but it also is a huge problem since its the one thing keeping those of us who do like that aspect of the game from true potential http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Im not flaming or arguing, just saying there are better methods of cheat prevention.

[douglas]

In simultaneous movement, ships with seek after orders should anticipate their target's movement when they're moving on the same day. It's completely absurd how much easier it is to evade a pursuing fleet in SEIV if you happen to be moving at exactly the same speed. It's also ridiculous that two fleets can both be trying to engage each other in combat, and end up repeatedly passing each other and exchanging position through the whole turn without starting combat even once. In the case of a loop of seek after orders with all ships moving at once and no ship's course being independent of the target's movement, one force could be picked randomly to not anticipate the target.

It would also be nice if seek after orders could be issued targeting your own ships. This would be useful for sending reinforcements to a fleet, especially if the fleet being reinforced is seeking after an enemy, making it impossible to anticipate where the reinforcements should go without risking them fighting the enemy force before joining the main fleet.

A "wait" order would be nice to have. Sometimes I want a fleet to wait for reinforcements to arrive and then proceed to attack in the same turn. As it is, the only way to accomplish this is to have the fleet waste some of its movement going back and forth. If the meeting point happens to be a warp point on a hostile border, this has a chance of making you lose the warp point defender's advantage if the enemy attacks that turn.

If a ship is seeking after another ship, and the target ship goes through a warp point to a system you don't have an observer in, the seeking ship should head to the warp point and go through it rather than just stopping.

There should be some way of setting guidelines for whether a fleet should go out of its way to avoid an unexpected enemy presence in its path. If a 100 DN fleet is chasing another fleet and a lone LC gets in the way, the huge fleet should destroy the brave, foolish light cruiser rather than falling behind in the chase to go around.

Conditional orders should be possible (e.g. "destroy that new battleship, but only if it leaves the protection of the minefield").

Orders should be editable without reentering the entire sequence.

[Patroklos]

I still cling on to my idea of resource freighters and independent organizations. That way, if a system is being heavily used (think like homeworld system, interstellar trade hub, large-scale fleet yards, etc.) you see lots of small ships flying around. This can also be an indicator if a system is being used heavily commercially as you first enter it. These ships should not only be freighters and organization's ships, but also randomly generated things (like interplanetary cruises, interstellar passenger ferries, luxury yachts, and so on) that increase in number as more people are in the system. This also makes it easier to spot a trade center.



I think this is a good idea, the economic activity of a planet would be represented by animated gifs played over a plante that shows tiny ships flying around and larger space stations orbiting. Of course they would look like little dots jetting too and fro on the main map, but a little telling eye candy.

I don't like controling independant freighters, but a fun and game important economic model would be great. I often wish I could be a trader empire or really anything other than a military juggernaught. Trade routes could be established like in CTP, and I think resources should be like Civ3. We could keep the gerneric minerals, organics, and radioactives and have them traded like normal, but have rare resources that are required for unique or tech heavy items and have THOSE traded like in Civ3. So no matter what you can always build generic spacecraft, but to get the good stuff you need to secure/fight for specific planets/locations.

Population should eat organics http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Fyron]

Patroklos said:
I don't like controling independant freighters, but a fun and game important economic model would be great. I often wish I could be a trader empire or really anything other than a military juggernaught. Trade routes could be established like in CTP, and I think resources should be like Civ3. We could keep the gerneric minerals, organics, and radioactives and have them traded like normal, but have rare resources that are required for unique or tech heavy items and have THOSE traded like in Civ3. So no matter what you can always build generic spacecraft, but to get the good stuff you need to secure/fight for specific planets/locations.

/me casts vote against Civ 3 style resources. All they do is make you restart the game way too many times due to the game cheating and giving you really bad starts compared to the AIs (especially your neighbors)... Miss out on a critical resource and you are screwed. Horsemen and phalanx don't fair well against pikemen and knights... _If_ some sort of resources are going to be in the game, lack of them should provide a bit of a penalty or offset one, rather than just make huge eras of items unavailable.

[Suicide Junkie]

Patroklos said:
I don't like controling independant freighters, but a fun and game important economic model would be great. I often wish I could be a trader empire or really anything other than a military juggernaught.
...
Population should eat organics http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


Starfury's Soylent Red needs to be passed on too http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I reccommend playing my Pirates &amp; Nomads mod.
Play as a Pirate, and you'll have a great time with your handful of ships as you seed the AI shipping lanes with engine-damaging mines, ambush small military ships, loot and pilliage small colonies, and generally be a greedy nuisance with your storm-hidden pirate bases.

[Patroklos]

me casts vote against Civ 3 style resources. All they do is make you restart the game way too many times due to the game cheating and giving you really bad starts compared to the AIs (especially your neighbors)... Miss out on a critical resource and you are screwed. Horsemen and phalanx don't fair well against pikemen and knights... _If_ some sort of resources are going to be in the game, lack of them should provide a bit of a penalty or offset one, rather than just make huge eras of items unavailable.



Considering the curresnt state and proboble future state of SE AI, anything that makes the game more dificult is better. And of course not having resources is the point, that means you would have to negotiate for them or take them. One of the things I don't like about the current SE is there is no difference from planet to planet to any great degree. All locations are the same. I think it would be great if I was the only dilitium source in the galaxy and build a trade empire around it. Would also be great if I had to form a galaxy wide coalition to break up a cartel as well.

In its current form there is only one aspect of the game, build a military. and usually like the RTS games most of us hate numbers care the day too. I wand more depth.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yeah, but something like "bonus resources" like in Civ3 would be nice. I.e. your planets are basically all the same, though some have bonus resources like Dilithium, Tritanium, Neutronium and stuff, which add certain bonuses to things being done there. For example Dilithium bonus resource might make for an intrinsic "resupply depot" capacity for the planet, removing the need to build one, or might make engines of ships built in that sector/system/empire cost less. (The cost decrease would be biggest in the same sector, for example 50%, in the system 20%, and the rest of your empire 10%.) Tritanium decreases mineral cost for your starships or makes armor more efficient or allows for more damage resistance of components. Neutronium provides a large bonus to armor strength of armor components. Ships/units built with these bonuses will retain them for ever, however if you lose the source (by military action/random event/over exploitation in a limited resource game) you lose the bonus.

Also, population happiness should be looked into. It should be clarified to a greater degree why populations are unhappy. Now, you can simply station troops on planets to increase happiness/decrease revolt risk. But not all people would like military police. This should be implemented in the game; i.e. troops make for higher productivity if it falls low due to unhappiness, but decrease the unhappiness even further, increasing the revolt risk. You could also alleviate taxes/production speed (i.e. strain)/ship luxury goods there/etc. to improve happiness but at the cost of certain things (i.e. alleviating taxes would mean a happier planet but less income, reducing production speed would mean more happiness but less productivity in resource generators/spaceyards, etc.).

[Atrocities]

Please include a real time clock in SE V UI so players can keep track of the time.

[Atrocities]

PROPOSE BAN ON ALL CIV 3 RELATED SUGGESTIONS.

To keep the point direct, Civ 3 was not a good game.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Civ3 was a good game! pity maps with altered names of anything didn't work though.

[Irulan]

the greatest fun of this game (SEIV) is in my opinion the easy way to edit it and make custom changes and great mods, that way if the game get's boring ya can turn it into an completely different game.. since it is impossible to add all the wishes we stated ya have to give us the ability to do it ourselves in SEV!!

[boran_blok]

I havent read through the previous 128 pages, so excuse me if this has already been mentioned.

I'd like the option to receive a warning when a planet is not producing anything.

This could be handled with a checkbox, and when the queue is empty it should display an item in the news (a la stars!) you could uncheck it if you dont want to receive nagging about that planet anymore, and wether the checkbox starts checked or unchecked could be in the empire options.

This would be especially handy for the bigger empires, now unproductive planets can easily slip trough before you notice em.

Edit: to clarify, the checkbox would be per queue, per planet.

Also, it would be nice if the queue behaved more like the research and intelligence screens of SEIV with the ability to reorder things without loosing all the work done on it. (if you're at 0.2 years left on a spaceyard, but you have to build some weapon platforms you loose the 0.3 year you have already worked on that spaceyard, this is quite annoying)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

More Resources or the ability to mod them in.

[Timstone]

Strategia:
You should have read all the pages untill you post yourself... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Atrocities]

There is a lot of info in those pages and all of it has been suggested at least twice before so don't worry about repeating it. It just makes it that much more important IMHO. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Timstone]

#10001 and going strong! Hehe... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

read ALL the pages?!? Man, it's fricking midweek! That would take at least a whole weekend! (I know it's been poested b4, but I still want to emphasize it.)

Btw, you should also have resource "classes" or the ability to mod them in. I.e. "primary", "secondary" and "bonus" resources. Perhaps more, such as "Natural Luxury Goods" or "Food" or etc. etc. etc.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

It's been stated by Aaron(Not sure if I spelled it right) that there will only be three resources, although you can change names.

Please note, however, that I havn't slept since yesterday morning.

[Baron Munchausen]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
It's been stated by Aaron(Not sure if I spelled it right) that there will only be three resources, although you can change names.

Please note, however, that I havn't slept since yesterday morning.



I'd swear that he said in one of the chats that there were FIVE configurable resources. The default game will use the same three as SE IV, but modders will be able to tinker with the system much more broadly than they could with SE IV.

[Timstone]

Yup, there are three resources and two more open places. These places can be use to make your own resources. So there is room for 5 types of resources.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Why just five? Why not 255? Or would that be too much memory space? Or maybe a lower number? 127? 63? 31? Even 15 would IMHO add a GREAT deal more to the game.

[boran_blok]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Why just five? Why not 255? Or would that be too much memory space? Or maybe a lower number? 127? 63? 31? Even 15 would IMHO add a GREAT deal more to the game.



I think it's mainly the UI that dictated the amount, and some practicality.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ok. I agree. But what if you could have an extra screen (economics or resource screen) like the four screens you have now? (Would also solve some of the negative space someone with 1600x1200 was complaining about some time earlier) and there you could see your resources/economics.

Think this: Spreadsheet Display Look. A table with in it all your resources. You should also be able to discover resources thru research or exploration/colonization/trade.

And your Economics Screen could be a sort of mix between the Colony, Queue, Empire Status screens - showing your incomes, colonies producing such-and-such resource, and queues using such-and-such resource.

You should also have immaterial resources like Happiness and things like that. Or certain resources that need to be processed from others and cannot be obtained any other way (i.e. "Biocrystals", mix of min and org, or "Solarsteel", mix of min and rad, "Bioactives", mix of org and rad, etc.) or others that require raw material resource tyes - that aren't useful for anything else. So you can start mining Quadan Ore as soon as you discover it, but you wouldn't have anything to do with it until you research Quadan Ore Processing and can use them to create Quaila Steel.

This would add a whole economics/management dimension to the game; "should I build resource or raw material storages on that planet? What has priority in this border colony: a spaceyard or a mine to exploit the rich Quadan Ore veins there?" Would IMHO mean SO much for the game. Like said b4, Economic Superpowers can then arise. They might not have such an impressive navy, but if they control 80% of the Galaxy's Hypersteel reserves, which is absolutely necessary for warp point travel capable ships, you wouldn't attack them anytime soon; lest they give it all to your most bitter enemy. Would also make diplomatic focused games more fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif (and interesting)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

and also diplomacy needs to be made somewhat deeper (you can backstab treaties so it's broken but the other empire doesn't know that, you could use the tradescreen system for treaty construction (and save those treaty types as well! share them with the world!) (and I know it's been mentioned b4), embassy facilities, racial population tensions, population exchanges (i.e. you're good at mining, your ally's psychic, you trade 1000M pop to get each other's benefits), and so on). Now, diplomacy isn't really that deep (or clear) and the AI's diplomacy is weird. They either declare war on you the moment they see you, or you build up a Partnership treaty by treaty one per two turns and they grow murderous when you have the Partnership. The AIs that are at war with you will grow to love you. This needs IMO to be corrected.

[Timstone]

My goodness 15 resources?! You're mad, you know!
You're supposed to run an entire empire, not a company. This creates too much micromanagement. I sympathise with Aaron, he gave the modding community 2 extra resource possibilities. That should be enough for 90% of the community. The remaining 10%... tough luck.

I can imagine something like:
"I want to build this All-Consuming-Ship-Devouring weapon on my precious Eater-Of-Worlds-Ship, unfortunately I can't build it because I haven't found enough solarsteel and biocrystals. Oh damn, I also lack some trifflefluffy and gummiberenbessensap."

Okay, I made a bit of a joke of this, but it reflects the comming doom of 15 different resources. I stick with three or four different resources, more than enough for me. I'm one of the 90%... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Edit:
Rectified a small error in gummiberenbessensap.

[Greybeard]

I don't know if this has been mentioned before.

It would be very helpful if the planet list would show the status of the planet (colonization status) from the last time we had "seen" it. This would be either from us entering the system or through partnership viewing.

Currently, planets that are not visible during the active turn revert to "uncolonized".

This makes it more difficult to decide where to send colonizers. I have occasionally sent colonizers to planets that are already colonized becuase of the status on the list.

[AMF]

Timstone said:
My goodness 15 resources?! You're mad, you know!
You're supposed to run an entire empire, not a company. This creates too much micromanagement. I sympathise with Aaron, he gave the modding community 2 extra resource possibilities. That should be enough for 90% of the community. The remaining 10%... tough luck.




Yeah, and, I would even say that instead of having two "extra resource options" just have the same three as right now, and two "rare resources" that are much, uh, rarer. So that, hey, wehn you finally get that star destroyer tech you need more than just a load of metal and rads to make it, you also have to make sure you have a gram of superneutronrarium...

Actually, let me revise that: I posted a while back that I think "manpower" should be a fourth fundamental resource. I still think that. But, I do think there should be at least one "rare" resource that plays critical, but uncommon roles in things and would be in much less supply.

Gives players one more reason to fight over certain planets (we need the dilithium mines of ceta alpha six darnnit!)

[Ed Kolis]

While we're on the topic of resources, how about resource converters that only convert specific types of resources - for instance, Refineries that convert Minerals to Radioactives?

edit: and also converters with specific capacities, so for instance one refinery might convert at a rate of 25,000 minerals per turn at an efficiency of 50%, so you'd need multiple refineries for large-scale conversion projects? (Accessible through a global interface, of course - no sense having to dig through all your planets to find the ones with the converters! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif) And how about resource converters that can also handle research and intel points? Or are those what the other 2 resource slots are used for in the stock game?

edit 2: and also maybe if your resource converters and spaceports are blockaded you can't use them? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Three standards, OK. But fifteen isn't so bad? You can also mod them to be not actually resources in their own right, but rather a sort of complementary resource. I.e. 1 unit of Hyperplutonium equals 100 Rads, 1 Biocrystal 50 Min and 50 Org etc.

[Atrocities]

I think the best option for resources would be to simply have the base three with the option to add more as the player chooses.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yes, but not with a low max limit like 5. Now, you could add "money" and "biocrystals"... and then you can't add anything else. There should be a high max limit. If I want to make a trader mod where trading is of the utmost importance to survival, I want to be able to add sixty resources.

[vanbeke]

I really like the concept of additional resource types, but I would also like to see something added to that

Consider: A specific technology could be required in order to recognize and use biocrystals. Before you have the tech to need it, you don't even know that it is there. Then you develop the need and now can find it on your planets. Then you also have to build the facilities to mine / refine / farm or whatever the term is. But the monolith might still do that also.

[Fyron]

You can't really have that many resources without the data files becoming extremely ugly...

[larrybush]

Does the community know if there will be an ability to create scenarios? I've read alittle about it and I know I've mentioned it before, but I'm curious; if lets say we want to create a Battlestar Galactica or Star Vikings game; will we be able to create a game with one side or both sides not posessing a home world or any colonies? Or one side with just minor colonies only. The point being the ragtag fleet with the Battlestar G looking for resources while running away from the Deathstars, or the Space Vikings raiding the colony worlds, things of that nature which are not possible in SEIV. Scripting would help too, Like setting the DeathStars to "seek and destroy" or the Space Viking to "raid"...Somthing like that anyway...Be nice to specify reinforcments too! Tell me what you think!!
Thanks

[DarkHorse]

I'd like to see different sizes/classes of shipyard, where only the largest could build/accomodate the largest hull sizes. Maybe require more than one facility slot on a planet, and/or larger starbase size to house the larger shipyards.

[AgentZero]

I suggested something like this earlier. Basically, planetary yards could only build up to a Frigate, then you needed a base to build up to a Light Cruiser. Cruiser-Battleship would require a base with 2 SY comps, and Dreadnought-Baseship would need a base with 4 SY comps.

[DarkHorse]

In that case, I second the motion. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Suicide Junkie]

DarkHorse said:
I'd like to see different sizes/classes of shipyard, where only the largest could build/accomodate the largest hull sizes. Maybe require more than one facility slot on a planet, and/or larger starbase size to house the larger shipyards.


Facilities will be arbitrary sizes, so there won't be facility slots as such.
All it needs is the maximum constructed ship size limits...

[Atrocities]

I had an idea for adding something to combat both space and ground.

In war troops are injured. During any combat in space or on the ground people are hurt so why not have an injury system in the game.

You drop 100 troops on the ground to take Planet X and in the process 20% are killed and 40% are injured. Those troops in order to be effective again, would need medical care. IE either a medical facility on the planet, or a hosipital ship in orbit.

The same thing could be said about crews onbaord ships. After a battle they need medical attention. A ship with a medical component would provide it.

Having medical events, expanding upon the plague one, would also be a great addition to the game.

Whenever a planet has a natural disaster or is attacked, people are injured and the production and happiness of planet faulters. Having a medical facility, or hospital ship in orbit would alievate this over time.

Troops would have a health value and ships would have a crew health value. Whenever that value falls below a set point, their effectiveness becomes an issue. For ships they could loose movement, or suffor a decrease in battle effiency. Resource use could sky rocket, or the simply simply cannot participate in battle with the same going for Troops.

The thing is, troops would more than likely have to be rethought. For example we fleet ships, so you would have to bargade or unit troops. I leave the system up to those who know more about it that kind of thing. If a unit has more than 50% wounded, then it is combat ineffective. For fleets is would be 80% of the ships in the fleet.

[Kana]

Atrocities said:
I had an idea for adding something to combat both space and ground.

In war troops are injured. During any combat in space or on the ground people are hurt so why not have an injury system in the game.



Nice idea...will defintely add some more micro-managment. But it would force the use of other resources, and make for different components, and some good role playing type elements...

Kana

[narf poit chez BOOM]

As long as I don't have to do anything because of it's inclusion, sure.

[Aris_Sung]

I think that 3-4 resources should be enough. I mean when you start adding different elements into the game as resources, we'll eventually end up adding the entire periodic table. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
Although 1 resource I would like to see is some facility that actually makes ship crews(for those not using Master Computers). I think it would be cool to have to build academies where it turns out a standard amount of graduates or it's based on population size. That way you would have to make a balance between the number of ships you build and how many people are actually part of the navy.
So everytime a new ship is built, the amount of crew needed for the ship would be deducted from the 'pool' of crew. And if you build too fast, and you don't have enough crewmen, then you're ships aren't going anywhere, which I think would happen in real life. (Imagine asking a ship to depart without its captain, only 1 engineer, 1 chef, and only a couple of red shirts http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif. That just wouldn't happen...would it?)

[Aris_Sung]

I like Atrocities idea about having troops and ship crews having crew health and being injured. That way the need for a medical ship wouldn't just be when a plague or two happens to break out somewhere. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
As for making unit groupings for troops, this is my idea that I got from another game:
For infantry: Unit Component Units Total Strength
Squad - 7 troops
Platoon 4 Squads 28 "
Company 3 Platoons 84 "
Battalion 4 Companies 336 "
Regiment 4 Battalions 1344 "
if you want to go further than,
Brigade 3 Regiments
Divisoin 2 Brigades

For armour: Lance - 4 tanks
Company 3 Lances 12 "
Battalion 3 Companies 36 "
Regiment 3 Battalions 108 "

Also, I think that fighters should be allowed in ground combat. So if there are any fighters on the ground for the defending side or any fighters 1 grid around the planet for the attacking side, those should be allowed in on ground combat.

[Aris_Sung]

It seems to me that I'm writing a bit much. I'll stop after this and come back later.
(Note: If any of the following has already been suggested, I'm sorry that I don't have enoug htime to read all 131 pages of posts. So please just reply and tell me that it has already been discussed and if you know, please also add what the general consensus was on the idea.)

I have a couple of ideas that could be intriguing and add a small dimension to the game. (I just don't know how feasible it may be.)
1. What if ships' shields had some sort frequency code, say a 4-digit number or code. So then you could branch this idea into having a technology in the form of a 'weapon' that wouldn't really do much damage, but a successful hit would scan some of the code or all, depending on how sophisticated the 'weapon' is. Something like what the Borg uses.
Also, this could also be added into the Intel field, where a mission could be to steal the code of an enemy ship, and when you confront the enemy, you would be able to penetrate their shields like a Phased Polaron Cannon.
Another technology, would be a device that could randomly change your code. So even if the enemy got part of your code in combat, it would be useless because your code would have just changed. (I know this sounds like alot from TNG, the Feds against the Borg, but I've always hoped to play a game as a Borg-like race against other races.)

2. What if ships also had a personalized ID code. My idea is that I want to steal other races ships and send them back in to their space to spy on them. Except, that the ship would get blown into pieces once I sent it into their space. So if there could also be another Intel project where you could steal ship ID codes and then steal the ship, you would essentially have a spy ship and the enemy wouldn't be the wiser. (Of course, there may be the problem that the enemy will see us capturing the ship in combat and whatnot, so then I would have to propose somesort of 'Communications Jammer', which would prevent the enemy from seeing combat, if that's even allowed. But I think I'll talk about that in another post or let someone else describe it, if they want to.)

3. Wouldn't it be great if ship/starbase/etc. weapons had different power settings. How many times have you tried to capture a ship and only wanting to take down their shields and maybe weapons but only had Large or Heavy mounted weapons to do the job. Sounds to me like using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel to do a surgery. If each weapon had say a Low/Med/Max/Overload settings then you could choose what level of punch you want. (For the Overload setting, I was thinking that if you wanted extra punch, you run the risk that the weapon may burn out and be useless for the rest of combat.) The different power setting may or may not influence supply. I don't know.

4. Finally, I think that there should be ship acceleration in combat mode, and planetary gravity as well. From what I've heard, the new combat screen will use hexes? If that's so, then when you start off combat, you should start a little slower and build up speed. Also, when you turn, depending on your turn radius, that should affect how many movement is used. So if you turn on the spot after going full speed, you will definately use more movement then if you were turning on the spot from rest or if you took a turn of a couple of hexes. About planetary gravity: if you're out of engines within so many grids of a planet, you should fall towards the planet and crash unless saved. Also, if you use a repulser beam, you should be able to push ships into the planet. This would prevent people sticking ships all around their planet to defend it with their ship weapons and WPs unless they want to see ships falling from the sky.
(On another note, do you think different ship speeds would work in normal mode, say Flank/Full/Half/Quarter speed to get from one destination to another. And going at slower speeds would mean using more movement for less distance but also saving on fuel and lesser chance of getting damage by storms/etc. then if you were traveling at Flank speed.)

I think I've wrote a bit much, but after not being able to post for a while, ideas just seem to build up and you got to spill them up.
Comment? Ideas?

Thanks for reading,
Aris

[Fyron]

Noone is going to bite your head off if you repeat a suggestion that was already made... It just means that it is a more popular suggestion (marginally, but still http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif).


1. What if ships' shields had some sort frequency code, say a 4-digit number or code.

Damn that Star Trek for perpetuating so much junk science... There would be no such thing as shield frequencies in reality. There is no reason for an energy field to have to shut completely off and back on again so many times per second as Star Trek implies. Certainly, you could design your shields to do this, but it would be monumentally stupid... Read this site for more information: *link* (http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Myths/Myth_Science.html#Phase-coherence)


From what I've heard, the new combat screen will use hexes?

I believe that was the system screen. The combat screen will probably be floating point, as the combat engine will be "real-time."

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

TWO things (and yes I'm bloody persistent):

1. MORE THAN FIVE RESOURCES!!!!! Ok, 3 standard ones would be terriffic, but I want the ability to make a LOT of resources. If I want to make a Trader Game Mod with few weapons, many types of freighters and less (or perhaps more) intel, I watn to be able to make trading actually IMPORTANT... i.e. you have lots of Rads but you need min and orgs. Another player has many Biocrystals (which count as a resource of their own AND as min/org crossover) but little Rads, you could trade a lot of your rads for his biocrystals... Example 2: you need Chronosteel for the repair of the temporal armor on the warship you bought off a Temporal race, but you don't have the appropriate ability... but you DO have Psychic and Crystallurgy. You propose a trade with the empire you've bought the ship from: you get the Chronosteel you need to repair the warship, and they get Psychic Crystals they can trade with another empire to buy a much needed battlecruiser... and so on. Please?

2. You need to have the ability to build Resource Freighters or at least be able to mod them in. Small increments (say 5000 or less) will automatically be transferred, but if you have a Heavy Space Yard that can use 10000 per turn and builds a Super-Hyper-Ultra-BattleMoon of 100MT you will be restricted to half the build time... unless you build a large Freighter and set it on auto-shipments of 100000 a time from the production/storage hub and the Heavy Space Yard.

3. The ability to mod Vehicle Types. I mean, what you've got now is OK, but I want to be able to build ships not just as Ships but, say, for example:
-Generation Ships (massive vessels capable of carrying population etc, like a mobile planet)
-Capital Warships (the largest ships - save for the Generation Ships - you can build, with sizes reaching into the 30MT range and above, capable of fielding entire arsenals capable of blowing up a planet without use of a Tectonic Bomb)
-Civilian Capital Ships (diplomatic vessels, massive freighters, Exodus-class Relocation Transports, etc.)
-Deep Strike Craft (small warships capable of attaining great speeds to strike deep within enemy territory to harass soft targets to draw ships away from the front line, and then to dart back again - the cavalry of the skies)
-Front Line Warships (slow, lumbering behemoths with copious amounts of intrinsic armor, used for fighting in the front lines against other warships)
-Destroyers (fast warships with intrinsic Scanner capabilities - the only ones capable of penetrating the highest cloak levels)
-Warships (your standard run-of-the-mill craft reaching approx. from 300kT to 5MT)
-Small Civilian Craft (hospital ships, freighters, yachts, official craft, small freighters, etc.)
-Carriers (ships from 500 kT to well into the 20MT range, capable of carrying massive amounts of fighters into combat)
-Colony Ships (various types and sizes of vessels used in the expansion of your realm, from simple craft capable only of building a small automated colony (no pop but you can build facilities/units, you just can't use them) to massive ships, similar to Generation Ships, capable of taking a small Empire to a new destination far, far away - especially useful in massive maps)

and for fighters:
-Fighters (the standard fightercraft from 10kT to 125kT, not jump-capable)
-Starfighters (larger fighters, 50kT to 200kT, jump-capable but expensive)
-Shuttles (small, jump-capable craft that can fill diplomatic and exploratory roles)
-Cargo Shuttles (larger shuttles capable of carrying small amounts of cargo, also jump-capable)
-Ferries (larger shuttles, can carry small amounts of population or a diplomatic delegation)
-Landing Shuttles (think SW Lambda-class craft - non-jump-capable shuttles capable of dropping small amounts of troops on a planet

For drones:
-Guided Missiles (similar to the SEIV drones, relatively small, maneuverable things - though they can only use several types of small weaponry, and no large weapons)
-Cruise Missiles (larger drones, faster, less maneuverable, unarmed but capable of carrying larger payloads to a destination)
-Tactical Ballistic Missiles (large, slow, armores behemoths capable of carrying very large payloads to a target - however, you select a target and then you lose control over it, it cannot maneuver)
-Strategic Ballistic Missiles (similar to TBMs, but then even larger and jump-capable - the only jump-capable missiles)

Bases:
-Orbital Bases (normal bases, built orbiting a planet)
-Defense Bases (military defense bases, can be built anywhere)
-Habitat Stations (large stations that hold population - I usually create my own habitat stations with Cargo Bays now, they hold population for me to ferry to newly colonized planets so the initial buildup goes faster)
-Storage Stations (bases that do not require ANYTHING and can only contain various types of cargo bays)
-Colony Stations (massive bases that can carry lots of population and produce resources, like a colony you can construct yourself - handy if you're short on colonizable planets in the neighbourhood)

Weapon Platforms:
-Civilian Defense Battery (small and ineffective but cheap and quick-to-construct installations capable of carrying not much more that three weapons. Good for defense early in the game)
-Missile Silos (installations that can launch "drones" - i.e. guided missiles, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. They require Silo Controls, which you can also design here. How many Silo Controls you need depend on the kind of control components you use - larger, more advanced control stations can control more silos than a low-tech Missile Control Bunkers)
-Fortresses (Large defense installations with surface-to-orbit weaponry and heavy surface warfare weapons - they'll defend the planet from enemy troops. It's a good way of securing your planets from enemy takeovers)
-Defense Installations (similar to current Weapon Platforms)

Mines:
-Normal Mines
-Self-Replicating Mines (when mines are destroyed, a certain number of them are reinstated the next turn - I've posted something about this before. Check a few pages back)

I think you get the idea. I know I'm crazy.

Ok, so it became 3 things... but the first 2 I was persistent in. The third came somewhat on the fly.

[Atrocities]

Micromanagment killed BOTF and Rebellion. Micromanagment made MOO3 one of the most horrible games of all times, aside from it just being one of the most horrible games of all time.

Micromanagment is fine, but excessive micromanagment is bad.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

OK, but I STILL want the option to DETERMINE how much micromanagement I want. If I want massive-scaled Empires with fleets of thousands of Dreadnoughts, colonies in hundreds of systems and populations reaching into the trillions, I won't need much micromanagement. But if I want a more small-scale game I love micromanagement. And what's the micromanagement in the ability to add more unit types?

[Ed Kolis]

Actually, you WILL be able to add your own unit types... and I haven't read over all your suggestions but it looks like most if not all of them could be implemented as custom vehicle types in SE5!
And Aaron has said there *will* most likely be spaceborne populations on worldships and such, presumably something like the Alternate Reality races of Stars! only much more flexible in where they can put their population centers... hidden nebula colony anyone? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Phoenix-D]

Side note: pushing "show all" on this thread is sort of dangerous. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

One thing I don't know if its been mentioned: keep Starfury's mod structure! Picking a mod from a menu when you start a game is much easier than changing path.txt manually every time.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I'd ALREADY gotten that... I'm sorting posts "Newest Post First" so the first page contains the latest posts.

And I still think diplomacy should be overhauled (if that hasn't been done already). Think like EUII. Not just for the "points" system, where the victor gets to demand things (like military access or captured territories) from the loser, but also in DIPLOMATS. Just sending a message yourself is dangerous in intergalactic politics... you let the diplomats handle that. You get a certain number of them per turn, or if you have such-and-such amount of pop, or you can produce them. Would make diplomacy sooo much deeper...

Example:

You (the Atla) have been at war (with the Boota) for years, and you're both ready to call a truce. You were once the most powerful factions in the Galaxy, but a long war has depleted both your resources. You're economically aground, your fleet is smaller than the amount of rocks in a Tiny asteroid field, and you've both lost over half your colonies. But you're still spread out wide. You send a diplomat/an ambassador/a delegation/whatever, assasins for as far as I care - but another faction (the Coa) has been rising to power recently, and their position is in jeopardy if you two (A and B) call a truce and start expanding again. The three other remaining factions (I won't think up alphabetic names for them, just call them D, E and F) are squibbling like infants and thus could be easily overcome by either of you two (A and B). C therefore needs to stop you from making peace or perhaps even an alliance so that he can continue his rise to power in the galaxy. Well, back to the current situation: A is sending a diplomatic envoy to B. C needs to stop it. What C does: He builds/uses several cloak-capable warships with transponder jammers (they hide the faction they belong to, should also be able in SEV, handy but large and expensive) and/or gives them transponder signatures like B's ships. He thus intercepts and captures or destroys your diplomatic envoy - and for all you know it's B trying to keep your diplomats away from his ones to prevent them from making peace against his will. A and B are once again poised for war. This time, in the interbellum (assuming an armistice had been signed a year or so before) they have had the chance to develop some proper technology, and this time it's sure to consume the GALAXY. They both have warp point creators, QRs, cloaking devices, solar destroyers, tectonic bombs and such (OK, in one year this is impossible, unless they traded with D, E and F.) If war breaks out, the only ways to victory would be opening warp points around the borders into other people's territory, forcing the other (with a weak battle fleet) to destroy the sun in that system as soon as a warship enters, taking perhaps half an Empire with it. This way, eventually, the entire Galaxy will be annihilated in a super-war. (I know I'm ranting.) Then what do you do? (assuming you're A) Go paranoid and open warp points around his borders? Open one directly to his home system? Or be wise and not be deterred by one setback, and send another team of diplomats?

It's RANTING ON what I've just been doing, and I know it.

Also, as stated somewhere in the above mess:

Transponders.

Transponders and their corresponding frequencies could be very handy for sneaky backstabbing attacks... I.e. each empire has a certain transponder signal. If one of your ships detects a ship with the signal of empire B, even though it is CLEARLY from empire C, it will show as an empire B ship. Who knows? Perhaps B has captures one of C's ships, or perhaps he's traded for it. If the ship then attacks, you will automatically break off connections with B (like Sharon did with the Palestinians a couple of days ago, even though he cancelled it about three days ago) and perhaps even declare war on them. This way, C (who was in control of the ship all the time) will have triggered a war between you two (or at least bred mistrust). Or you could have ships that HIDE their transponder frequencies - it looks like a C ship, but it could also be B, D, E, or F. What do you do? Let it pass your defenses, perhaps to strike at your Homeworld? Or do you attack it, risking a war with any of five empires?

And, in combination with the jumble above about Diplomats:

You would also need to be able to sign general treaties yourself, using messages with another empire. Say, you could use this method to declare war, sign an armistice, demand/accept unconditional surrender, propose a small trade but not much else. To sign a truce or any other proper treaty, negotiate about the terms for a surrender, propose more complicated trades (i.e. with ships, important techs, lots of resources, units, etc.), you need to send a diplomat. The negotiations would have to last several turns (1 or 2 for an armistice, up to 15 for a Partnership treaty) and you should also be able to place an embassy in the other empire to make things go more smoothly/speed up negotiations/make them like you more/etc.

Also, you should be able to play on after a surrender. (assuming it wasn't total and unconditional) You could buy or rent a ship/ships from someone to start your Empire all over again. Say, the enemy occupies almost everything and demands your surrender. You stand no chance. If you don't accept, you'll be destroyed. You buy one single colony ship full of population somewhere waaay outside your home system from one of your allies. You surrender your home system... but keep your colony ship. You can then start anew.
Also, if someone demands your surrender, you should be able to give it to him... or at least for as far as he knows. You could also just give him several outlying worlds with one full of pop and all ships in there and perhaps also some outside of what he knows, but you should still be able to retain that which he does not know you have. What you can't see you can't claim.

[Atrocities]

I want oxygen nitrogen nebulas and nebulas that I can mine for resources. I want hidden planets in nebulas and nebulas that increase or provide a positive bonus to the ship and crews, planets, or bases within them.

I want money to be worth something so can build ship hulls and sell them to others for cash. I want those hulls, once bought, to be able to have weapons or other components added to them.

I want to build a basic ship, sell that, and the customer customize it to their own specs with their own weapons.

I want to be able to build captured designs. IE if I capture a Phong ship, or they surrender to me, I want to be able to build "phong" ships in addition to my own. This would be a great tool for espinoge and such.

I want a comodity system where we can mine or aquire rare resources and be able to sell or use those resources to make new and exciting technologies. For example mine heavy metal from a black hole and make support struts for Artifical Warp Point Colliders. Mine gold and or platinum to build super conductors and or really advanced electronics.

I want a 3d map star map system with the ability to go off the grid with a fleet of ships and send them through the emptiness of space between systems without the use of warp points. (Very slow, but with hyperlight engines make the process speed up.)

I want ancient events to be added to the events like ancient mine fields that encompus an entire system. Anciet battle moons that act like death stars when found and used. Ancient travel systems that allow players to move cargo from one planet to another instantly. (Think Stargates)

I want both a light and dark universe where a player could move between the two equally sized galaxies via a modified warp point or other phenominon.

I want multi facited galatic maps with 255 system quadrants, 4 quadrants to a galaxy with up to 4 galaxies per game. (One big huge map borken up by levels that a player can move between)

I want the ability to use planets based weapons to protect near by warp points. Think long rang particle cannons or something like them.

I want the ability to claim a planet simply by landing a marker on it. "I claim this work in the name of Atrocities Empire." Then send a colony ship when I have one available.

I want my Commander / Hero system - simular to the way I describe it and not the way other have diluted it.

I have many many more wants, but not enough bandwidth to post them.

[RudyHuxtable]

I want more cowbell.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

UNLIMITED size maps...

Interstellar warp-point-less travel. I.e. you build a massive dreadnought, but oh! you forgot the size of the warp point in your system. Fortunately, you know a system nearby with a warp point big enough, and fortunately your dreadnought is equipped with MASSIVE engines. You send it on an interstellar sojourn to the system. It would take a little while, but it would work. Would also be nice for Generation Ships :-)

You CAN'T see how many systems there are or where they are at the start of the game. I.e. line-of-sight galaxy exploration. Would add to the realism factor, and IMO would not deduce from playability too much.

More ship pictures. DEFINITELY more ship pictures. Perhaps even REDUNDANT ship pics. Would be handy for modders :-) you want a massive starship-of-the-line? Fine, you just use one of the redundant pics to prevent confusion with smaller unworthy craft like Dreadnoughts!

[Alneyan]

Phoenix-D said:
Side note: pushing "show all" on this thread is sort of dangerous. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif



I must confess I am quite disappointed, it barely took a few minutes to display all the posts, and some 150 mb of ram. Truly, I had expected something more impressive. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Atrocities]

More ship pictures. DEFINITELY more ship pictures. Perhaps even REDUNDANT ship pics. Would be handy for modders :-) you want a massive starship-of-the-line? Fine, you just use one of the redundant pics to prevent confusion with smaller unworthy craft like Dreadnoughts!



You will be able to add in as many ships as you want just like in SE IV. The only catch will be they will need to be 3d files in X format with a polygon count of less than 1500. (Est)

Right now, for SE IV, there is the Neo Standard pack that adds in a ton of image for the stock races and there are many sets, most of mine for example, that are neo-standard.

Neo standard sets have about 20 + more ships and images per ship set that various mods call for. Images such as Baseships, Heavy Dreadnoughts, Heavy Destroyer, War Station, Fighter Huge, etc.

[Fyron]

StrategiaInUltima said:
You CAN'T see how many systems there are or where they are at the start of the game. I.e. line-of-sight galaxy exploration. Would add to the realism factor, and IMO would not deduce from playability too much.

Were it not for telescopes, I would agree. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif 16th century astronomers and mathematicians were able to make a decent map of the space surrounding Sol. Perhaps some limited range around your systems for the system locations you can see, based on technology level? Of course, this all depends on how large the map is supposed to be... Some sort of control over the distance each square on the galaxy map represents would be great. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I know you've created a lot of shipsets, AT, and I know about neostandard, but I mean EVEN MORE ship pics. Oh, and (I know it's been mentioned b4) MORE entries for the pic in VehicleSze.txt. Now, it's pretty limited. NOT good. Limitations are BAD.

And I meant exactly such types of exploration, Fyron. Telescopes, deep-space probes, unmanned explorers, old probes you regain contact with (think Voyager and Pioneer projects)... Also, if you explore far, I still think systems should be able to be hidden. I.e. you've got a massive Terran Empire spanning half the Galaxy, and you've explored all you can (with no stellar manip), and you think you've explored it all, with no more systems - then, suddenly, an alien power opens a warp point to your systems.

[Ed Kolis]

StrategiaInUltima said:
You CAN'T see how many systems there are or where they are at the start of the game. I.e. line-of-sight galaxy exploration. Would add to the realism factor, and IMO would not deduce from playability too much.




SE2 had that; you could only see your own home system and any other systems you have explored on the galaxy map. That idea was scrapped in SE3 for *realism* purposes, as it was assumed that any decent spacefaring civilization would have telescopes of some sort to at least see the stars with http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
Now hidden *non-star* systems, that would be interesting... maybe a flag on each system type whether it's visible or not http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Hidden non-star systems, hidden star systems, systems hidden because of nebulas all around them... you could think up any number of reasons. Also, the galaxy map should not necessarily work with the principle "systems need to be connected with warp points". You should have a galaxy map in itself, with the warp points being additions. This way you can open warp points into "empty" sectors to find anything. Lone stars, rogue planets, nebulas, black holes, anomalies, even full planetary systems - perhaps even with an Empire in them.

Also, the SEV change to 3D has me worried. Settlers IV was a FANTASTIC game, Settlers: Heritage of Kings (demo) is OK as a game in its own right, but as a Settlers game... ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

its simply so much cheaper to create great looking art in 3d than it is 2d. look how many 2d pics are just pics of 3d objects.

i think Imperator Fyron was talking about how much better Realtime was for balance- that's so very true. Actually- I'm curious, is it the realtime combat change or the 3d change that bothers people? I can't see how the 3d change for systems maps is going to be bad.

[douglas]

I think both bother a lot of people, but not because they're bad features. What people are worried about is that implementing realtime and 3D might take away from time spent on improving gameplay. I, personally, don't expect this to be an issue, as I expect Aaron will take however much time he needs to do a good job.

[Suicide Junkie]

The maps are still 2D.
IIRC, they'll be hex based instead of square as well.

Think of having the screen zoom smoothly in from a system-view to a colony and stats view when you click a planet for example.


its simply so much cheaper to create great looking art in 3d than it is 2d. look how many 2d pics are just pics of 3d objects.


Not in processor time...
The 2D pics that you see here rendered from 3D models can have a zillion polygons, and take an hour to render once without causing any problems in SE4.
You have to use really low poly, and thus blocky, and relatively ugly models in order to render 30 FPS of a combat involving hundreds to thousands of ships.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

its cheaper in $$ terms. much cheaper, for what you get. The requirements are of course higher. One curious example of this is the original MechCommander; the graphics were done with 3d models that were used to generate many many frames of 2d animation. This kept the requirements low and the game fast and had really quite excellent graphical quality.

you'd be surprised what can be done with relatively low poly models and low quality textures; the game "Dawn of War" can scale pretty far down and still look good, for example.

One bonus of this game is also that it won't have to be rendered at 30 FPS; that's an arbitrary requirement. A game like this could be perfectly servicable at 10 or 15 FPS; only the truely dedicated are likely to start combats that drag it down to 3 or 4 FPS.

Furthermore, there is always the recourse of computer-calculated combat, which is what will presumably used for multiplayer (and probably for truely large battles) regardless.

[Atrocities]

Man there must be over 5,000 great ideas in this thread. Two years ago I tried to mine it and make one post and I could only get about a fourth of the way before I gave up on it.

I would challenge any one here to make a comprehensive organized list of suggestions and put them in word format for downloading. The challenge is on the table boys, any takers?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I'm not gonna try it. I've got other things to do this month, you know!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Halo Ring World/Dyson Sphere SYSTEMS.

Think: you have a star, and perhaps a number of planets, but the edges of the system are not just normal edges - YOU'RE IN A MASSIVE HALO RING WORLD/DYSON SPHERE!!!!! Would have to be a special type of system... You can colonize it, and another can too at the same time, without you making direct contact. (if you're on opposite sides of the system) It should be able to hold TRILLIONS of people, with perhaps a limit of one per galaxy/sector. You still need to be able to build ringworlds and sphereworlds, and they will still be very big, but not the biggest you can get - just the biggest you can create yourself. Would certainly be nice if coupled with "ancient relics" of a "lost pan-galactic empire with technology beyond our comparison". It's been proposed before. Ancient derelict ships, massive super-weapons prowling the galaxy, ancient colonies that get reactivated when examined, cryo-chambers containing the sleeping bodies of those ancient beings...

Campaigns/map goals. Say, if the above is true, your goal could be to get at least five trillion people on the Dyson Sphere, and oter colonies must be under 1 billion. Or, your goal would be to revive the ancient beings from hibernation - a (constantly) ongoing project that you need to divert resources to manually. Think: "To revive the ancients, you will need: 100 million research points, 10 million intel points, 10 million minerals, 50 million organics, 100 million radioactives, 500 billion Star Credits, and at least 50 generic alien artifacts and the following specific artifacts: Alien Cryo-Chamber Blueprints, Alien FTL Starship, Alien DNA Bank, Alien Cryo-Research Data Storage Dump and any number of Alien Cryo-Chambers with a total of at least 100 aliens in hibernative state." Or: "To assure the safety of the Galaxy and the state of peace between your allies, you must destroy or conquer the [%RaceName1] and have at least the [%RaceName2] and three other allies left alive." Or: "The Galaxy is getting unstable. The Galactic core anomalies are in a state of quantum-chroniton flux, and the Galaxy will be destroyed in three hundred years. You need to either stabilize the anomalies or find a way to escape destruction by opening a warp point to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. To stabilize the core anomalies, you will need to research "Quantum-Chroniton Stabilizers". To open a warp point to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, you will need to research "Interdimensional Warp Points"." Where the two techs are WORLDS apart from each other, and you will not be able to research them both since they start off with different base techs from the very beginning.

Or series of maps (and thus games) that together form a campaign. I.e.:

-First Scenario: Early Exploration. Goal: a total population of 500 billion. Briefing:
We stand at the brink of a galactic adventure. We are ready to traverse the warp points at the edge of our system and explore the galaxy. However, our home planet has massive overpopulation, and we need to bring many people to new colonies. However, since population growth is so slow, we will need to GROW our population before we can start exploring the galaxy in earnest.

However, deep space probes have discovered two large, well-established other races in our vicinity, who appear to be at war with each other. You must be wary of sudden and unexpected attacks. We do not know if their attitudes towards us are hostile or not.

-Second Scenario: The First Wars. Goal: eliminate the [%RaceName1] and [%RaceName2] presences in this area. Briefing:
We are now well established. Our population is growing steadily. We are poised to make great breakthroughs in many fields of science. However, two large colony ships have recently arrived in this vicinity. Their early expansion is alarming. They have already eliminated one of the races in this sector, and are now firmly established in their former territory. The two races appear to be allies, so little chance of them wiping each other out. Also, the other race in this vicinity will not respond to reason and says it can take care of the new threat itself, without our help.

Regardless of whether or not the other race here will choose to ally with us in the coming conflict, we need to eliminate the two newcomers if we are to push further into the Galaxy. It would, however, be easier if the other race here would ally with us.

And so on.

Would be really fun.

[MightyPenguin]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Halo Ring World



Ahhh! Head pain. Tell me you're not labouring under the delusion that Bungie came up with those things. They existed a wee while before Halo, trust me. Go pick up a Banks novel some time (and they probably existed prior to him as well).

Not trying to come down on you or anything, but that irritates me. It irritates me enough to make me delurk. That much.

Um. Time for something positive, methinks.

- Formula based tech levels. Good, so long as they don't result in ridiculous power inflation
- Real-Time battles. Oh yes. Oh yes oh yes oh yes. But slow real time. A spaceship that weighs a million tons or so is going to steer like a cow. Plus, players need time to strategise, even in real-time.
- Better yet, no seams between the battle and system screens. Have everything in real time. Let ships move in and out of the battle zone. Reinforcements, retreats; moving lines of battle. Delaying tactics while a fleet gathers around home world.
- No redundancies. Or, at least tone the problem down a little. Yes, new tech is going to make your smaller ships obselete. But, turning a ship of the line in its prime into a jumped up shuttle craft with a turn of the ship construction tech is a bit irritating. Not to mention urrealistic. Smaller ships should be good for some things.
- Like speed. Implement newtonian physics; if a big mother of a carrier wants to outrun a tiddly gunboat it better have a hell of a lot of engines. And link chance to hit to transversal velocity; if they're faster they can dodge better.
- And cheaper. Obviously the power : cost ratio should improve with each generation, but it should be cheaper and faster to build smaller ships- enough to make a difference.
- Sublight interstellar travel; yes, please
- Ground combat. Ever play superpower 2? [censored] game, but interesting world view. It was a globe that you could rotate as you wish. If you balanced things right, you could have people managing a ground war and a space battle at the same time. And if you could make it fun at the same time, that would be grand.

And I'm done. I don't think I've justified half of that, though...

[Suicide Junkie]

MightyPenguin said:
- Formula based tech levels. Good, so long as they don't result in ridiculous power inflation


It will only inflate your modding power by ridiculous amounts http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
If you want damage to go up proportional to the square of the tech level, sure. If you want diminishing returns on a sine wave curve, go for it.

As for the rest, much of that is moddable into SE4.
QNP is a somewhat popular feature. (You either love it or hate it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) Keeps small ships relatively useful, automatically scales fuel use to ship size, and lets you customize your speed/weapon/shield percentages to whatever balance is called for by the strategic situation.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I am NOT thinking that Bungie made up the fricking idea of Halo... I just like the name. And, in actuality, such a ringworld WOULD probably be called a "Halo" regardless of Bungie. And it also adds a bit of variety. See: "Dyson Spheres are massively upscaled Sphereworlds." "Halo Ring Worlds are massively upscaled Ringworlds." And: "Ringworlds are massively upscaled Ringworlds." What the CRAP am I talking about in my last sentence?!? I'm not a follower of the Haloist religion
(that's what I call people addicted to Halo) nor do I worship Bungie. I've never even PLAYED Halo!

I've also used these names (Halo Ring World, Dyson Sphere) in the Capship Mod, simply because I like them better than the standard names.

And IF you have (the option to select) real-time combat/gameplay, why not implement FULLY Newtonian propulsion? That big Super Star Destroyer is slow when it starts up, but give it enough time and it will accelerate to a greater speed than a Hunter Assault Craft (NOT stolen from Metroid, the Hunter is the fastest ship in Capship) at start. However, it will not slow down that fast - and maneuverability will also decrease. For straight-line journies, you could be accelerating up to halfway, and decelerating for the rest of the way. That's realistic. (In "The Cassini Division" a ship flying from Earth (orbit) to Jupiter needed to accelerate half the journey, and decelerate the other half.) Would also allow massive carrier motherships and super-battleships to outrun small hunter-killer craft if they simply keep accelerating. Also, you could use this method for sublight interstellar travel. Say, the Galaxy's warp points are approximately crescent-shaped, and your enemy's home system is just three squares away from yours in the galaxy map, but you'll need dozens of warp jumps to get there, and his borders are well defended. Now, let's also assume that stellar manipulation is out of the question. You could simply build five super-battleships and have them moving to the enemy home system from the rear. Surprise attack. Probably'll knock him down for years.

In accordance with the above, let's not make the galaxy system-based - let's just make it one big system map, with sectors. You would still have warp points, but short-range interstellar distances could be traversed with sublight ships. Would IMO be fun.

[Fyron]

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but... All indications from Malfador have been that interstellar travel in SE5 will still be dependent upon the classic SE warp points. No other form of interstellar travel will likely be available... :-|

Isn't "halo ring world" redundant? You are saying ring twice. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I think Halo or The Halo is a good name for a ring world, but not a good interchangeable term.

Also, just some thoughts.. did anyone else think the Halo ring world was reallyreally small? It would have to be spinning ridiculously fast to keep from having to use gravity generators of some kind, wouldn't it? To say nothing of maintaining an artificial sun! (I've only played the original Halo; when it came out on PC. *shrug*)

Also, I wouldn't expect an empire building game using newtonian propulsion any time soon; strategy and tactics are far too dependent on it and extremely tough for an AI to handle...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Well then, maybe newtonian propulsion for SEVIIIhttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Halo Ring World... well, I just like the name. "Halo" or "Halo World" is... well, less... how do I explain it? I dunno. I just like the term "Halo Ring World" better.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Oh and btw maybe Malfador could incorporate interstellar travel (probably sublight (sleeper) ships, perhaps FTL travel like hyperspeed, warp drive, hyperspace and so on - hyperspace would also be cool, if used as in SW: with a whole new Universe where ships travel through and could collide with "shadows" of real world objects, perhaps even fights in hyperspace would be possible - where hyperspace would get severely diturbed in that area. Or perhaps ships could suddenly drop out of hyperspace somwhere entirely NOT where they're supposed to be. And so on.) in SEVI or SEVII. Perhaps SEVIII.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Well, I was just thinking, maybe something could be set up where using a warp point drops a ship out of the game for x turns; that would probably help pseudo-ftl a bit.

[MightyPenguin]

StrategiaInUltima said:
I am NOT thinking that Bungie made up the fricking idea of Halo... I just like the name. And, in actuality, such a ringworld WOULD probably be called a "Halo" regardless of Bungie. And it also adds a bit of variety. See: "Dyson Spheres are massively upscaled Sphereworlds." "Halo Ring Worlds are massively upscaled Ringworlds." And: "Ringworlds are massively upscaled Ringworlds." What the CRAP am I talking about in my last sentence?!? I'm not a follower of the Haloist religion
(that's what I call people addicted to Halo) nor do I worship Bungie. I've never even PLAYED Halo!



Sorry. My brother is a Halo fanatic, whereas I'm left wondering exactly how much more bland you could make a setting if you tried. So I jump at the first sign of Bungisms. Bungisms? Bungeisms?

Um. Weren't Dyson Spheres built around black holes? Nevermind.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The original Dyson Sphere requires a sun; the theory is that if you put enough orbital habitats around it you cant see it anymore.

It just sounded cool so it got slapped on all similar concepts http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20010702.html

Dyson spheres.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Feedback Loops. Say, for example, shields. If an enemy weapon hits a feedback loop shield, there is a chance that a successfil feedback loop will occur and a certain amount of damage will be done to the weapon that hit the shields. Say:
-Feedback Loop Shield I: 10% chance to deliver 10pts of damage to the weapon that hit the shields.
-Feedback Look Shield II: 20% chance to inflict 15pts of damage.
-Feedback Loop Shield III: 30% chance to inflict 25pts of damage.
Somewhere along the line (probably lvl III or IV) the tree will split, into shields that deliver more damage (Type Is) and shields that will have a greater chance of damaging (Type IIs). This will continue until:
-Type I Feedback Loop Shield [%RomanNumeral]: 60% chance to inflict 100pts of damage.
-Type II Feedback Loop Shield [%RomanNumeral]: 100% chance to inflict 60pts of damage.
And perhaps it would not stop at shields. Perhaps also armor, certain weapons, or certain power cores. But ONLY if it was THAT component that got hit.

Hypothetical situation: I have a ship with no intrinsic offense modifiers and a Combat Sensors III. It is fighting a ship with 100% defense minus. That would give me 165% to hit chance. But the game only shows 99%! I want my 66% extra to hit chance! How? Well, critical hits! Percentages above 100 (or 99) would count as a percent chance to inflict a critical hit. These could be, for example:
-Double damage to the shields.
-Piercing armor.
-Taking out a certain component outright.
-1.5 times the damage.
-Blowing up all the engines in one shot, inflicting collateral damage too.
And so on. I would CERTAINLY appreciate it if at least you would have the ability to mod these into SEV. And you could perhaps even be able to mod your own critical hits, similar to Weapon Damage Types. You could create a critical hit type (with low chance to occur) that would only take out the bridge or master computer. You could create a critical hit that simply pierces the ship right through, destroying 4 armor, 2 outer hull and 1 inner hull component. Think:
[|][|] 2 armor pierced by the weapon.
[oo] 1 outer hull comp pierced.
[xx] 1 inner hull comp pierced.
[oo] 1 outer hull comp pierced.
[|][|] 2 armor pierced.
Or a critical hit type that would automatically destroy a certain amount of tonnage (think blasting a warp nacelle loose from an ST ship, or destroying one of the "claws" on a Xi'Chung ship), or one that would cause a lot of damage to a certain type of component (think aiming for the engine block, or for the lateral fighter bays). The possibilities are HUGE, and would be fun - a small craft could turn the tables on a massive Dreadnought by taking out its bridge and auxiliary control in one lucky hit, effectively crippling it, giving it the ability to stay at long range and pound the Dreadnought from a safe distance.

[Aris_Sung]

MightyPenguin, I like you idea about ground combat. What could also be cool is that by clicking and selecting on a colony, it could unfold into a map where you can play out ground combat.
Also an idea for ground combat, is that depending on the characteristics of a world, it can affect where facilities can be built, how the world looks like(eg. world is 70% water and 30% land, so there must be parts of the world that are not connected, so you may need dropships to transport from one continent to another; also if the world is forested, there will be trees that can hinder troop movement depending on density, or icy world which makes it slippery for movment; you get the idea).
So please let there be a great ground combat. It would add a lot to the game.

[Aris_Sung]

I've always thought that plagues never happened often enough and they weren't very complex. Simply 'outbreak on planet x', send medical ship to planet 'plague cured', the end. Plagues go down for the count wwwaaayyy to easy.

Here's an idea: 2 different types of pathogens, say plagues and viruses, just to add some diversity. Next they all have different levels, so level 20 plague/virus is much deadlier than level 5 plague/virus. There'll be a 'death'(can't think of the right word at the moment) factor which indicate what number or what % of population dies. Also, an evolution factor, depending on the level, the plague/virus mutates at different rates. So at level 1, mutation factor could be every 5.0 years (very easy to kill), but if left untreated after 5 years, it would mutate into level 2 and its 'death' factor and mutation factor also change to make it slightly more deadly. Of course, the game wouldn't start off given you a level 20 plague with a 'death' factor of 0.15 and mutation factor of 0.5 years.
In turn, this means that medical technology would also have to change. Different types of facilities to find cures at different rates(this could be stackable to get bonus antibiotic/antiviral shots.) So there can be an element of urgency where you have to discover a cure for a certain level plague/virus before it mutates or the vaccine you discover is useless and you have to keep on studying to catch up. That's why it will be good to stack the abilities of the facilites.

You see, reading a Biology textbook has more uses than just for academic knowledge. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Weapons that can only target certain ship sizes. In Capship, I've created several anti-capship weapons - meant as fire-support against capital warships, but there's no reason why you wouldn't simply use them on an Attack Scout to destroy it in one shot.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

note : smallest capship (capital warship) in Capship is 4500kT. Attack Scouts are 200kT

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Plagues and viruses? Plagues, viruses, bacteria, environmental medical conditions (i.e. frostbite and such), chemical waste accidents, spaceborne diseases, etc. etc. etc.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Btw, one question: it's been said that the max poly limit for ships is 1500. But is it possible to create a ship with more polys and have the game load it, at the cost of tactical combat FPS?

[Nodachi]

That usually holds true for other games so I'd say it's a definite maybe. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ok, thnx http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I've never made any shipsets and don't plan to make any soon, not only because of my massive lack of design software (the program that approaches it the best on my PC is Paint) but simply because I do not have enough inspiration (yet). Just wondering. In another thread, someone (I think it was AT) said he'd been working on a ship (Battlecruiser of some race or other, I think) and that the poly count was waaay off. Another person said he'd been working on a Terran battlecruiser and it had 150,000 polys and still it wasn't finished. I just hope that these huge (in poly count) ships will still be able to be used by SEV.

So AT, you could start making Star Trek shipsets in earnest! (Not that the ones in existance now aren't relevant, I just mean that you can make full-3D ST ships... can't wait to see a Jraenar dreadnought face off against an Excelsior or Sovereign class starship and see them flying around each other, admiring them from EVERY angle... (the admiring mainly goes for the Excelsior or Sovereign, but what the heck.))

[Kana]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Btw, one question: it's been said that the max poly limit for ships is 1500. But is it possible to create a ship with more polys and have the game load it, at the cost of tactical combat FPS?



So is the number low by comparison of other games...like for example SFC 1, 2, 2:OP?

Kana

[Nodachi]

Here's some examples:
UT 2003 - 3000
HL2 - 7500
ST: Armada 2 - 1000

As you can see, the more modern games push more polies. So the answer is yes, the limit is a little low.