SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Captain Kwok]

It needs to be somewhat low because you still want to have hundreds of ships in combat right?

[Suicide Junkie]

And don't forget those 3600+ ship battles!
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Number=328876

[Nodachi]

Hey, I don't mind the limit being low. I was just pointing out that, yes, by comparison with games coming out today the limit is low. HL2 is really high-end but it doesn't have to have as many objects on screen as a 4x game.

[RudyHuxtable]

I'm sorry if my post is redundant, but I just can't see checking 134 pages of posts to find out:

I'm interested in seeing CAP (Combat Air Patrol) in SEV.

I've been playing a lot of War in the Pacific (www.matrixgames.com, trust me guys it's a masterpiece), and the idea that my fighters or pursuit craft would move to intercept without my having to take direct action would be great. Not reactionary CAP, but proactive, moving to intercept as ships pass within a few hexes of a planet where the complement is stationed. With the option of not sending them based on enemy fleet size. Kinda like opportunity fire, I suppose.

I know very little in the way of SEV details at this point. Is there a good place to find out "rumors" and confirmed features?

[Phoenix-D]

StrategiaInUltima said:
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.



This can be simulated with to-hit chances..big weapons have -, small +, small ships + to defense, big - to defense.

And on the plague upgrades: I don't think that's a good idea. Better to have something more like a level (indicating the death rate) and a complexity (indicating how hard it is to cure).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

OK... but I don't just want to-hit modifiers, I want IMPOSSIBILITIES. A Heavy Anti-Capital Ship Disruptor Cannon might have -500 to hit against, say, an Attack Scout, but the game would STILL use a 1% to hit chance... which means that one day you'll hit an attack scout and spread its molecules out over the entire Galaxy. And if you forget to deselect the Cannon when firing at the Attack Scout, the shot'd be wasted... bad thing with perhaps a 10 turn reload rate... and an enemy Assault Dreadnought moving in... And I also want anti-support (i.e. small) ship weapons - like light lasers, swarm missiles and stuff. I want them to be able to target ONLY ships under the size of Battle Destroyer.

(Note: In the above text, I'm talking Capship Mod ship sizes)

[Siegebreaker]

I would like a huge file with weapon and facility graphics, no matter if not use in the stock game, to use in mods.

[David E. Gervais]

Because someone asked,.. The minimum version of DirectX that is/will be required to play SE5 is 7.0

There, now you have proof that I have posted in this thread. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

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

[AgentZero]

StrategiaInUltima said:
OK... but I don't just want to-hit modifiers, I want IMPOSSIBILITIES. A Heavy Anti-Capital Ship Disruptor Cannon might have -500 to hit against, say, an Attack Scout, but the game would STILL use a 1% to hit chance... which means that one day you'll hit an attack scout and spread its molecules out over the entire Galaxy. And if you forget to deselect the Cannon when firing at the Attack Scout, the shot'd be wasted... bad thing with perhaps a 10 turn reload rate... and an enemy Assault Dreadnought moving in... And I also want anti-support (i.e. small) ship weapons - like light lasers, swarm missiles and stuff. I want them to be able to target ONLY ships under the size of Battle Destroyer.

(Note: In the above text, I'm talking Capship Mod ship sizes)



I don't see why it would be 'impossible' for a weapon to fire at ship just because it's really small. Sure, it might not be smart if you'll probably miss and could kill the thing ten times over with a single hit, but that shouldn't stop one from trying. And one should be able to fire light weapons at big ships, they just won't hurt it very much. The only restriction would be I think only PDC weapons should be able to hit missiles and fighters. Real Life example: An anti-ship missile launched at an aircraft carry stands absolutely no chance of being shot down by the guns mounted on destroyers or frigates, because the weapon system simply can't react fast enough, which is why most (American) carriers mount the Phalanx missile defence system which is a set of very small, extremely fast firing guns designed specifically to take out missiles.

Speaking of missiles:
A few suggestions to make them useful: Significantly longer range. At the moment one can close from maximum missile range to energy weapon range in 1-2 turns. I'd like to see this extended to around 6 even if the fleets are heading right for each other.
More speed. Missiles should be fast enough that even the best PDC should only have enough time to get off a shot or two at the missile before it hits.
More armor/reduced PDC damage. At the moment, a 20kT PDC can take down a 50kT missile with one hit, ergo a ship equipped with sufficient PDC would be virtually indestructable to a missile-laden ship of similar size. A missile should take 2-3 hits to destroy. At 2 hits to destroy, if combined with the speed idea, means a ship would require 2 PDCs to ensure a missile gets knocked down. This would bring things to a bit more even 40kT of PDC to counter 50kT of missile.
Chance-to-miss. At the moment PDCs are pretty much guaranteed-hit weapons. Creating a small chance to miss would create a situation where a heavy missile barage would stand a good chance of at least a few getting through the heaviest PDC screen.
More missile types. High speed missiles with small payloads, slower missiles with huge damage potential, MIRVs (the concept, anyway, since 're-entry' doesn't apply in space), big heavily armored ECM missiles designed to do minimal damage but increase the chances of the others getting through, uber-missiles -high speed, massive payload- designed to knock out the biggest ship-of-the-wall, etc.
I think the incorporation of these ideas would make missiles not only useful, but almost necessary armament on any decent sized-ship.

[AngeldelaMuerte]

Hey you're not the same Agent Zero who used to run around blowin stuff up on the old Galaxy of Fire BBS are you? Just askin cause it seems the two of you share a similar fixation on missiles.

For my own suggestion I'd like to see SEV have a goal or maybe several different goals that players would work towards. SEIVs victory conditions were just a bit vague. Get X number of points to win and that. Things like diplomatic victory where you have to make alliances with all the other alien races and also convince them all to make peace with each other. Or economic victory where your economic score exceeds a certain amount and also is a percentage above your closest rival. Sub-goals would be great too. Sort of like side-quests in roleplaying games where an event would happen and depending on how you reacted to it you could gain bonuses or rare technology. I think this would give players a much greater sense of purpose than with SEIV.

[Aris_Sung]

Hey Phoenix-D,
I posted something along the lines of what you were talking about the plagues. Each level of plagues has a particular death rate, and as you go higher in levels, the harder it is to cure. However, I also added the idea that plagues could mutate so a plague could increase in levels, so that if you don't deal with plagues soon, you can get even more deadlier plagues later.

[Aris_Sung]

In addition to what I added before, how about plagues that can be research that can kill only a specific species. To do this, each species can have a genetic code that is kept secret and parts of it can be stolen at a time as an intellligence mission. That way you can make plagues that are deadly to other races but which you are resistant to. So you could plague bomb or intel mission release plague on a planet of aliens, when they're dead you can claim it and not have to 'cure' the planet.

[Kana]

Would like to see the return of weapons fire on plasma missiles decreasing it's damage. Like it was in SE3...So you either kill or not kill the missile, or if a plasma missile, your damage just decreases its available payload damage...

Some kind of flag/option on the hit points/resistance and/or damage of the missile type.

Also would like to see the possibility of having the option to set specific combat modifers (+/-) on certain ranges or range brackets or a set percentage to hit at a certain range or range bracket, instead of just a straight forward linear regression. For example:

Currently: SE4 uses -10% for each square of range to target, range 4 = -30% (range 1 is 100%).

Would like to see this: Lets say I want a PDC to have a harder chance to hit a missile the 'closer' it is to the target. Range 1 = 33% to hit, Range 2 = 50% chance to hit, Range 3 = 67% chance to hit.

Kana

[Kana]

AgentZero said:
More missile types. High speed missiles with small payloads, slower missiles with huge damage potential, MIRVs (the concept, anyway, since 're-entry' doesn't apply in space), big heavily armored ECM missiles designed to do minimal damage but increase the chances of the others getting through



Sounds alot like someone has played SFB... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Atrocities]

I wish that everyone will buy two copies of the game and that we can buy it in stores around the world, except China for they copy cat everything and then sell boot leg copies back to the world market thus undermining our efforts to fund SE VI. Those Bastards!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Like you're saying about the PDC/missile thing (AgentZero): fast missiles can't be targeted by slow-moving guns. That's what I'm talking 'bout: small, fast ships can't be tracked by big, slow cannons. Perhaps ship size shouldn't be a modifier for this, perhaps just speed.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Area-of-effect weapons and events. If a COMCA explodes next to an Attack Scout, the AS would be gone... in real life. In SFC ship explosions can cause damage. Why not in SEV? And as for area-of-effect explosions, think shrapnel missiles, flak cannons, anti-fast-missile defenses, pulse/torpedo spreads, space-based nukes etc.

[AgentZero]

AngeldelaMuerte said:
Hey you're not the same Agent Zero who used to run around blowin stuff up on the old Galaxy of Fire BBS are you? Just askin cause it seems the two of you share a similar fixation on missiles.




Angel! How the devil are you?! I am indeed more or less the same Agent Zero although there's about 60kgs less of me now than there was back in those days. Hey, BTW sorry bout blowing up your homeworld. It was an accident, honest. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

StrategiaInUltima, I conceed that a fast, highly manoeverable ship would be exceedingly difficult to hit, but to use the modern example, there's no reason a frigate couldn't hit an incomming anti-ship missile with it's main guns, it's just extremely unlikely.
I do however really like the idea of area of effect weapons, but when it was suggested during the SE4 beta we were told that the AI had too many problems with them. Here's hoping Aaron's AI skills have progressed since then.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Perhaps no stock area-of-effect weapons, but just the ability to mod them in - and the AOE pattern, too. A pulse repeater sweep would not cause damage in a square pattern, more like a staggered line. And AOE could be used on weapons with low to-hit chances to compensate for the low TH chance. Perhaps, in the center of a square (circle) AOE weapons burst, damage was 100%. Second row of squares (hexes) out, 50%. Then 25%. Then 5%. Then no damage. Or direct hit: 100% damage, second row 25% damage.

Or perhaps weapons with cone-shaped damage arcs - think Expanding Wave Cannons which fire a concentrated wave of energy which expands cone-like, with damage diminishing as the wave travels. Or a torpedo spread, with multiple torpedoes moving in straight lines, but which together have an approximate cone-shaped arc. (Tried to make a jpeg example image, but it wouldn't paste here.)

Also think that battles should be SFC-like, with an Empire Earth perspective and zoom capability.

Also, I stick to my idea: Boarding Marines that you can design like troops. Just like the idea of designing facilities for yourself, which I also still stand by, you could design boarding components; for example:

-Small Marine Detachment, 10kT
-Medium Marine Detachment, 15kT
-Large Marine Detachment, 20kT
-Marine Force, 25kT
-Marine Army, 30kT
and you can design them with:
-Body Armor, 1kT, 3kT resistance.
-Powered Armor Suits, 3kT, 15kT resistance.
-Personal Shield Generators, 10kT, 25 shielding.
-Pistols, 1kT, damage: 1 1
-Rifles, 1kT, damage: 2 2 2
-Assault Rifles, 1kT, damage: 3 3 3
-Pulse Rifles, 2kT, damage: 4 4 4 4
-Pulse Machineguns, 3kT, damage: 5 5 5
-Grenades, 2kT, damage: 0 7 7 (they won't throw right in front of them)
-Demo Packs I-IV, 4kT, can destroy 10-20-30-40kT of comps.
-Bomb Belts, 10kT, will kill the marine (i.e. destroy the marine component) when used, damage: 15, can destroy 20kT comps.
-RPG, 6kT, damage: 0 0 10 10 10
-Shotgun, 3kT, damage: 10 7 3
-Pulse Shotgun, damage: 15 9 6 2
et cetera. Boarding combat similar to ground combat. Boarding can take several (game) turns. Boarding Troops can be reinforced and pulled out like troops. Boarding Combat can damage internal components OR crew/defenders, some weapons can attack only comps (Demo Packs and such), some both (Bomb Belts). You can mount auto-defense turrets in your ships next to security personnel, infantry troops can help in boarding combat, you can create weapons lockers to arm your crew. You can train your crew/boarders in several disciplines (Martial Arts, especially handy for crew or marines with just demo packs, unarmed hand-to-hand, Marksmanship, increases damage of weapons as they aim better, Sniping Skills, extends ranged weapon range as they will now take the chance of firing while the enemy is farther away, which they otherwise wouldn't for risk of damaging vital components or blowing a hole in the hull, atc.) to make them more effective in combat. Space Marines should also be able to fight ground combats.

Sorry if the above is unreadable. I'll try to put it in a handy .txt file if you ask http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Fyron]

Kana said:
Also would like to see the possibility of having the option to set specific combat modifers (+/-) on certain ranges or range brackets or a set percentage to hit at a certain range or range bracket, instead of just a straight forward linear regression. For example:

Currently: SE4 uses -10% for each square of range to target, range 4 = -30% (range 1 is 100%).

Would like to see this: Lets say I want a PDC to have a harder chance to hit a missile the 'closer' it is to the target. Range 1 = 33% to hit, Range 2 = 50% chance to hit, Range 3 = 67% chance to hit.

Kana

From the sample data file that Aaron posted a long time ago for one of the IRC chats, it seemed like it would be possible to specify the range penalties for each individual weapon exactly as you can specify the damage penalties now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Sample data file? Where? Do you have a link?

[douglas]

Retrofit costs should include a special discount for upgrading a component to a newer version of the same thing. The discount should be greater for smaller upgrades.

[Slick]

douglas said:
Retrofit costs should include a special discount for upgrading a component to a newer version of the same thing. The discount should be greater for smaller upgrades.



Great idea. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

...I don't really get it.

[MightyPenguin]

StrategiaInUltima said:
...I don't really get it.



If when you are retrofitting a ship, one of the components being added is an upgraded version of a component fitted on the pre-retrofit ship that has been removed, the cost for adding that component is reduced.

I.e. Retrofitting S1 to S2

S1 has; 1 organic armour mk II
S2 has; 1 organic armour mk III

Cost of replacing org arm II with III is 40% of what it would be if org arm II wasn't present in S1 and III was coming in straight.

And, the larger the tech gap between components, the smaller the discount.

I.e.

org arm I > III 40% cost reduction
org arm II > III 60% cost reduction

I think that's what he's getting at

[Slick]

He's referring to another thread. Currently, in settings.txt the following 2 lines exist:

Retrofit Cost Percent For Comps := 120
Retrofit Cost Percent For Comp Removal := 30

The first one makes you pay 120% to add a new component. This one is ok since you should pay a premium to add a component after the ship is built.
The second one makes you pay 30% of the cost of an old component to remove it. This one has some issues.

This means that if there are, say, 5 levels of a type of component, and each higher level costs more than the last as is typical, then it is actually cheaper to upgrade from level 1 to level 5 than to upgrade from level 4 to level 5. This is because of the second line above (i.e. you are paying 30% of something more expensive).

I think it's a little backwards. I would expect more time/effort/cost (real life work and money) to upgrade something that is VERY obsolete than to upgrade something that is SOMEWHAT obsolete.

Given that these are the only 2 moddable lines (not counting cost of the components) that affect this aspect of retrofitting and that the other retrofit mechanics are hard-coded, this can't be adequately addressed in SEIV unless there is another patch to the exe. But it can be brought up here for SEV.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ah... thankyou.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Plug-In Ground Combat?

I've read bandied about on the SEV chats that it was considered virtually cutting out ground combat in SEV, because it was hard to maintain consistent quality with the empire management and the tactical combat as it was and the ground combat 'minigame' seemed subpar in SEIV.

Perhaps it could be set up so that ground combat could be vague now (using something simple, like crossing MoO3s unit categories with a simple equivalence system), but a more advanced minigame could be plugged in later, say in a gold edition.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Make GC more like SC. I want to be able to add long-range Artillery as ground combat fire-support units! Tried this in Capship, but just heard it couldn't be done.
And not only artillery, something like this (taken from Capship plans):
Infantry: 5 5
Assault Marines: 15
Heavy Infantry: 15 10
Cyborg Troopers: 10 10 10
Robotic Assault Troops: 20
Infantry Officer: 10
Mech Infantry: 20 10
Light Armor: 30
Armor: 40
Heavy Armor: 60
Artillery: 0 0 20 20 20
Missile Artillery: 0 50 30 10
etc.

[Yith_Saulkar]

1- Return the ability to select starting tech points as in SE3 instead of the blanket High, Medium, Low settings. There was alot of strategy in that alone in SE3 that is now lost.

2-Balance the Tech trees. All techs at max tech level should be able to compete with each other.

3-Please for the love of man do not go overboard with micro-management. I read alot of "cool" ideas but implementation of many of them would just make the game too ponderous.

4-Do not make this game "Star Trek". There are plenty of other ST games out there and I'm sure there will be plenty more. Give people Mod options for this kind of stuff.

Just my 2 cents.

[Suicide Junkie]

TheDeadlyShoe said:
Plug-In Ground Combat?


The ability to export the details to a text file, and allow the host to simulate the battle any way they choose, and then plug the numbers back in would be pretty cool.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

The OPTION for extra micormanagement... I still WANT to be able to mod the game to be able tocreate marines... or perhaps to add the option to have a sort of Infantry unit that can be used in boarding a ship.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Suicide Junkie: Yeah, exactly that sort of thing. I think it would necessitate seperating out ground combat from space combat; invasion in the space combat phase would simply be a dropping-troops sort of thing. Ground combat would be a turn-end thing. The game could export a list of unit IDs / what they have, and it could accept import lists of what units were destroyed. You could certainly go into more depth than that if you introduced regions or somesuch like MoO3, but that doesnt seem likely.

[Suicide Junkie]

And once exported, you could set up the combat as a scenario in any other game... even a D&D style roleplaying thing.


You could even say "Screw you, AI, my 10 militia make a brave last stand against your 1000 tanks and and destroy all of them, with one militiaman miracously clinging to life among the wreckage of your broken offensive."


SJ rolls a natural 20 to save against a thousand tanks!

[TheDeadlyShoe]

You could even say "Screw you, AI, my 10 militia make a brave last stand against your 1000 tanks and and destroy all of them, with one militiaman miracously clinging to life among the wreckage of your broken offensive."

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Would make for cheating, like saving mid-combat... you enter far higher values for yourself and much lower for the other player

[TheDeadlyShoe]

If the host is cheating, you're screwed regardless http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Aerosol]

How about officers? Maybe a facility that would be one or two units per empire that would be like a service academy that would be upgradable to produce leaders that give bonuses and drawbacks in combat. Wouldnt need to generate a whole lot because it could be limited to ship captains only. That way you could assign leaders to ships according to where you know they are going and what capabilities they will need (so you could assign inexperienced low-rated guys to explorer ships or something like that and give big capital ships to your highest rated guys etc.) Maybe the same idea for marines and fighter squadrons..

[Fyron]

I have a suggestion for how stellar manipulation could work for creating system types. Rather than have hard coded types (nebula creation, black hole creation, etc.), just have all such components use a single ability. This ability would reference an entry in SystemTypes.txt. Now, your SM devices would just create a pre-defined system. Black hole generators would create a "Black Hole" system, nebula creators would create a "Nebula" system entry, etc. This would also allow for all sorts of cool things, like creating ringworlds that are the whole system and have lots of colonizable "planet" parts, or genisis devices that create a system complete with stars and planets, or anything else a modder would desire.

The ability could even be set up to create one of a specific class of systems at random. This would allow the creation of random nebulas that have differing abilities, all from the same component. Much like storm creation devices now, but more complex and powerful.

Or even better, SystemTypes.txt could be set up to have random variables. Instead of all Storm X systems being the same, the Storm X entry would have a random range for its values. Cloaking level could be 2, 3 or 4, all from the same system entry, without having to explicitly create 3 different entries, which leads to messiness in the QuadrantTypes.txt file, as you have to have extremely long lists to get more varied quadrants...

[Aris_Sung]

Here's a suggestion: A sensor technology that is capable of detecting from types of planets to ship movements (depending on what model and so forth). It would be heavy so, it would take up most of the space on a satellite or some of the space on a ship.

For races that are not telepathic, there can be a facility called 'observatory' which can detect ships within so many sectors and is basically a sensor for planets.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

What I want? Partial maintenance. You do NOT have a fixed value for maint like you have now, you could select/slide the maint cost as a total or per resource for your entire starfleet, a single fleet, or a single ship even. Also, ships without maint shouldn't just explode. They should degrade. Comps without maint should first deteiorate in effectiveness (i.e. a Mineral Robo-Miner III would harvest less and less of itself) then get damaged, and ultimately be destroyed. Also, if you've got, say, an Assault Dreadnought with organic armor and mixed normal/organic weapons, and you're in a bit of a bind since your Org production is nearing rock bottom and your reserves will soon expire, you simply decrease the org maint cost for the ship. Sure, armor and some weapons will degrade and eventually will be destroyed, but you would spare a helluva lot of orgs that could be used to build colonizers to set out and colonize org-rich planets.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Mineral Robo-Miner III would harvest less and less of itself



AhhhHHHHhHHHH! They're harvesting the ship out from under us!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

?

I meant that the base amount of minerals harvested would grow to be less and less.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Dudes... this thread is dying out.

Partial damage for Units, like with ships. Right now, in Capship, you can field 250kT Armies in ground combat, yet they will not take partial damage. That is at least somewhat unrealistic. Especially when you consider that an Army can consist of, say, an Artillery unit, two or three Heavy Armor units, several Mech Infantry units and a hell of a lot of infantry.

Roman Numerals for ship sizes.
What I mean by this is: You can upgrade ship hulls. Look in the attachment for details.

Ships that can land on planets. Would also add usefulness to sneaky ground attacks; say, a damaged Dreadnought lies motionless on the ground of a planet to be repaired while resting safely under a very strong shield. You (the DN's enemy) then ship a cloaked transport there with lots of troops. While it is still cloaked, you land it to avoid detection right up to the moment your troops exit the ship. Your troops step out of the transport, and start to make their way to the DN to destroy it before it can take off.
Taking off should also cost movement, supplies and perhaps cause damage (think torque: a small Scout of 100kT would have pretty little trouble rising from a planet as it is compact, but a 25MT COMCA would suffer terribly from torque effects. Also, non-reusable colony ships (i.e. CLs that you lose when you colonize, like the SEIV CLs - to avoid this you need to have Drop Pods, larger, more expensive comps that can carry less people and are destroyed after use, but saves you the trouble of building a whole new ship) could suffer from those effects as they descend. Imagine, you could lose you colony module and thus your population from the torque!

[Bobhouse]

A clock. A little digital display up in the top right corner to tell me the time. Like in moo3(the only good part of the game). I like to know what wee our of the night i've played in too.

[iaen]

I read in the chat transcripts that ship design is going to be like in starfury, dragging components onto a template. It would give some interesting options if you could have large components taking up several spaces. Huge cargobays, hangars with extra bonusses, maybe some of the stellar manipulation components too.

A problem would be the fact that the components on a ship aren't neccesarily aligned in a square grid. (The way the standard starfury ships are.) In starfury you can easily make a ship with a honeycomb style component layout.

[AMF]

I would like to see:

Real "civil wars" - perhaps triggered by events, big time/long term intel actions, serious battle losses, or loss of the homeworld. It would be interesting to have more than just one planet rebel - I'd like to see groups of planets, or even half your empire, rebel and form an entirely new empire.

In the same vein, I would like to see the ability to gracefully add a player to a game - especially in the case of a civil war. Even if only a single planet rebels, it'd be nice to be able to add a player to that planet to give it a fighting change, add RP flavor, etc...It woudl also be neat to be able to add a player to take over an AI empire - so if someone wanted to join an in-progress game, then they could.

Thanks,
Alarik
(credit where credit is due: these were mentioned by a fellow player, and I suggested they post them, but they never did so I am going to post them becuase I think they are excellent ideas myself)

[Hiruu]

I would like to see some news on the game! I'm going thru a SERIOUS withdrawal for a great next gen 4X game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif

[Renegade 13]

I totally agree! Latest news was that the beta was coming in early April, with applications in March...

[Puke]

alarikf said:

In the same vein, I would like to see the ability to gracefully add a player to a game - especially in the case of a civil war. Even if only a single planet rebels



you can already do this in SE4. the game admin can check which races are controlled by AI and which by humans, after the game starts. if a planet revolts through happyness factors, PPP, or events, a new empire is created and you can assign this to player control.

The only limitation is the PBW server, which does not let you add players after the game starts. this is a limitation of PBW and not of SE4.

[Kana]

[/quote]From the sample data file that Aaron posted a long time ago for one of the IRC chats, it seemed like it would be possible to specify the range penalties for each individual weapon exactly as you can specify the damage penalties now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[/quote]

I also wonder if we would be able to set specific +/- modifers for weapons versus specific types of targets (ie: Ships, Fighters, etc...)

Kana

[Phoenix-D]

Puke, there's also the problem of SE4 not allowing more than 20 races per game. Once you have 20- even if some get killed off- no more new ones can appear.

[vanbeke]

I would like to see some intelligence in the combat system so that my ships/units will stop firing a specialty weapon (shield, engine, weapon) at a ship when that ship no longer has any relavent components (that are functional). Unless I go in and micro-manage the combat (uncheck all but 1 - okay fire that one; check the next one, etc), the ship will proceed to fire everything it has at a target until it is destroyed. Not just when the available weapon would have no affect.

This is especially frustrating for the single use or long recharge weapons.

[Ed Kolis]

In combat, if one side can't see the other (due to storms, cloaking devices, or other means of cloaking), they shouldn't be able to fire at them, or at least should have a significant to-hit penalty, even for seekers.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

On the same vein as Alarikf: the ability to start a (sp or mp) game where you start as a rebel society, i.e. you need to conquer your homeworld first and then need to struggle to survive until you can establish yourself as one of the major contenders for power in the quadrant.(/galaxy.)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Also, the ability to start as a "nomad" or "organization" of some sort, with no planets (or even colony bases), just a small fleet of ships with a slightly higher tech level than stated in the setup. Also, when you choose this, your starting tech levels need to be higher as well, to reflect the fact that you do not have the industrial backing of a planet full of population.

And you should also be able to specify the ships you start with to a certain extent - you should be able to choose existing setuos, like with existing empire templates, or you could design your own starting setup. Perhaps with some sort of "credits" system, like the race points, that you can spend on certain ships and extra starting techs.

You should also be able to save such an empire as it gains experience - with these experience points being the number of extra credits that you get when choosing them as a starting race. I.e. if you setup a game with starting credits set to, say, 2000, a saved empire with 1500 experience will get 3500 credits.

Btw, what does "race experience" do? What's the bonus of a Young race over an Infantile race?

[Alneyan]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Btw, what does "race experience" do? What's the bonus of a Young race over an Infantile race?



It doesn't give any bonus, but it looks so much better. If they did give a bonus, it would be very easy to cheat and get to the highest levels, making the whole thing useless. Racial points are normally hard to come accross: you need 400,000,000 to get to the highest level, and even after a monster game few Empires are above the million mark.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ok, so then, say, 1 credit per 100 or 1000 experience points. Or perhaps you could "buy" credits ingame from a sort of "trader organization" that has nothing on the map, or by creating a trade with a player stating you want credits in return for what you give. It will not be subtracted from the credits amount of the other player, and it will be a fixed amount. (I created a file once, the "Star Credits Price Tables", to make fair trading possible and easier - SCs were abstract values given to certain attributes, such as unit type, ship size, special ship type, development level of a planet etc. Never looked into it for over a year or so though.)

Also, small (very small) bonuses for experience. Like, when you hit the 1k mark, you can select either +1% to-hit, +1% production of any resource including research and intel, +1% SY rate and such. It should work like the racial setup screen, but with other types to select. It could also add racial setup points, for immediate use.



Moddable atmospheres.

The ability to set weapon firing speeds to multiple times per second, to imitate a machinegun effect. I would REALLY appreciate that.

Some sort of "muzzle flash" option, so that when you fire, for instance, a Gatling Cannon, you see the muzzle flash as you fire, or when you fire your "14-Inch Guns" you see a big fiery cloud emitting from the muzzle and you could see a shell cartridge (or whatever... You know, that thing the bullet was in before it was fired. What are those things called? I forgot.) flying away into space.

See your weapons on your ships, and customize the look of your ships ingame! Say, with the Phong, you could modifiy the Battlecruiser to have a flatter top, then place some big 14-inch guns on top that actually work...

I say again: BETTER GROUND COMBAT!!!!!

[Renegade 13]

Something I'd really like is this: You know when you get the message (during non-simultaneous movement games) when all the ships are buzzing around after the AI's have taken their turns that the colonization of a planet has failed due to another colony already being there?? Well, it'd be great if we could have a message in the message log saying that this happened, and the "goto" button points to the sector where that happened. It'd be nice since when I have an empire spanning 40 systems, I can't always remember the name of the system where the colonization failed, and can result in spending a while looking around for the colony ship that is just sitting around doing nothing.

[Ed Kolis]

If all your forces in a combat are destroyed, but the combat continues, you shouldn't be able to see the rest of the combat. (Say a 3-way combat http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Moddable vehicle types. PLEASE.

[Fyron]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Moddable vehicle types. PLEASE.

This is already a probable feature. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I know, just wanted to underline it again. I REALLY want this. I believe that it would be an integral, absolutely essential part of a future SE:V Capship Mod, as I want to separate capships and smaller support craft.

[Atrocities]

I know that I have suggested this before, but I want to again.

I had a similar idea, but the opposite. A race that is strictly a pacifist in nature and their weapons, via racial trait, are all non-lethal. They target engines, weapons, shields, uses boarding to capture ships, and lands troops to capture planets.

I suggested this for a race trait in SEV and I think it’s going to be one. J (Fingers crossed.)

Image playing as a Pacifist race where your race is limited to non-lethal weapons. Of course they would have a huge boost in the diplomacy area, and have specialized Intel gather and Counter Intel abilities. Their ships would have better shielding and be faster over all with superior maneuverability.

Try playing a game where your best weapon takes out both the engines and weapons of your opponent’s ships. You board those ships and find that your racial trait won’t allow you to use their weapons. LOL. But you gain the ship and can re-arm it with non-lethal weapons. Cool.

[Atrocities]

Some more things that I think would be nice to have.

In the Fleet window, the option to sort ships by speed, damage, cargo, orders, etc.

Would make it a lot easer to optimize fleets.

I would like to see the option to turn on or off a mines ability to be swept.

What I mean is in the component file have a line that reads:
Can Be Swept := YES or NO

This way we can have some mines that cannot be swept.

I would like to see the option to SURRENDER during combat. IE your fleet is toast and you just want to get out of the combat so you can move one with playing. Sure you loose your ships, but at least you won't have to wait several minutes for them to be destroyed.

[Suicide Junkie]

Improved boarding combat...

Basically, make it like planet capture, with hitpoints/damage on each side, and CS/ECM modifiers. Potential for multiple-combat-turn action.

Boarding Strategies.
- Capture vs destroy checkbox. As boarding progresses, the troops have the option to limit collateral damage in an attempt to take the ship intact, or to randomly destroy components as they go.
- System priority: Capture/Engines/Shields/Weapons. The % of security stations which must be destroyed in order to disable/capture each system can be specified in a settings.txt. EG: 50% capture, 5% shields, 10% Engines, 10% Weapons.
In order to disable shields (and regenerators to allow reinforcement boarders) and then capture the ship, you'd need to defeat 55% of the defenses. If you forego the shields, and just head straight for the command center, you'd only need to defeat 50%.
- Defenses would be damaged and destroyed as combat progresses, allowing multiple waves of boarders to eventually take the ship while facing weaker resistance each time.
- Some troops (infantry, perhaps tiny armor units) with an ability allowing them to participate in the boarding defense. Perhaps limited to one troop at a time in the corridors.

- Self Destruct would be set to activate with your strategy... "Self Destruct when defenses are below X%" Enough troops attacking at once could potentially overwhelm you in one turn before you can activate the destruct device.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

It's great to see some of the "old guard", experienced players/modders, still have ideas. I fully concur with SJ, and posted something similar before, but I also want to have the ability to mod in the designing process for boarding parties / security stations. So you could design your own boarding marine forces. If you wanted intact capture, you could just use pulse rifles - not too strong but very accurate, and would thus only damage enemy defenders. If you wanted to destroy them, give your marines demo packs and bazooka rocket launchers.

Also, the ability to board a ship, take out a certain system/comp/set of comps and then retreat. I.e. you lock on to the enemy ship and send your marines to the engines, once they have destroyed the engineering section (engines/repairbay/SY/sat bays) they return.

And, the ability to land boarding marines on planets and use them as additional landing forces.

And, the option to have something like a "shield interrupter" which will lower enemy shields for a small amount of time, so that a boarding ship can dock with a dreadnought with a massive shield battery.

Coupled with that, the ability to mod in something like "to launch fighters during combat you need to lower shields to let them pass", requiring you to lower your defensive shielding while your fighters launch, making you vulnerable to enemy fire and boarders.



"Power allocation" during combat - i.e. you have a certain amount of "power" which you can increase by building more engines and generators, which determines how many power units you can consume during a second. The standard power amount should be pretty high, so that you will have enough power to run everything up to a Light Cruiser at full capacity constantly, while large Dreadnoughts need many power cores to supply additional power. NOTE: Power is not the same as Supplies. Example:
Your ship generates 200 units of power.
You have 20 APBs on your ship, needing 10 units of power each to function constantly and at full capacity. Low power to these weapons would mean less damage/range/accuracy, no power would mean that they won't work.
You have shields requiring 50 units of power to remain fully active.
Your engines need 50 units of power to operate at maximum capacity.
So, if you want your shields and your engines at full capacity at all times, you need to fight with only half your weapons. If, on the other hand, you need much firepower in a short time, you can use all weapons at the same time, but you cannot move and you have no shields. Also, any CS/ECM present on your ship needs power, where higher-level doesn't mean better accuracy/defence, but more power can be allocated to it, allowing for a higher maximum threshold for the CS/ECM.
Think something like SFC-type power. (I've only played SFC 1, I don;t know if 2 or 3 operate different power systems.)

[Atrocities]

I would also suggest having double the Majority Weapon Family Pick's as well as double the Secondary Weapon Family Pick's.

Needed for ship design.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Related to fleet organization, it would be nice to be able to designate a design's formation priority, and to structure formations by priority.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

If your fleets are huge (100 small / 50 large ships or more), make it take up more space - i.e. if an enemy ship moves into an adjacent square initiate combat anyhow.

I like the "combat air patrol" idea, perhaps something similar for ships, so that an orbital defense fleet moves to intercept an attack fleet passing by. Would make for strategic options - create several cheap but big and menacing looking ships with no comps except B/LS/CQ/MC, engines, QR and scannerjammer - oh, and maybe armor/shields. Use a small group of those to lure a dangerous defence fleet away from a strategic planet so that another, real attack fleet can attack the planet.

When engaging in combat in turn-based mode, make large combat movements cost actual strategic movement. As it is, combat costs 1 movement, but if you move right across the map three times, you've used three movement. Am I right? Well then, why would it still cost you 1 strategic movement?

Combat that lasts for multiple turns. Not like it is now, where you have to click "Attack" again every turn, but actual combat taking place at the beginning/end of every turn. If you're playing in strategic realtime mode (will that be available or only tactical realtime? Note: with strategic I mean non-combat system gameplay and tactical is combat.) that would mean that the battle would go on continuously.



Idea for SEVI (or SEVII or SEVIII):
Scale-less realtime strategic/tactical gameplay. I.e. you don't have combat screens, you conduct combat right in the actual system view, in full realtime. Like in Netrek.
(note: only played that game for 45 mins or so total.)

[Atrocities]

I doubt with the new 3d engine that we will see fleets larger than 40 ships or so.

[Aris_Sung]

Use a small group of those to lure a dangerous defence fleet away from a strategic planet so that another, real attack fleet can attack the planet.




On this point that StrategiaInUltima made about trying to lure away the defence fleet, I'd like to add this idea. Repulser beams should be modified to be able to push bit by bit a ship into a planet's atmosphere which leads to its subsequent crash. (IMHO, this would be realistic. Objects not entering the atmosphere with the right approach vector do burn up.) Thus, this will discourage empires from surrounding their planets so that the offence fleet doesn't have to go up against the defence fleet plus planet-based weapons. This would make it more challenging for the defender to defend his holdings as he will have to come up with new defenses to protect the immediate circumference around his planets, while his fleet is further out in space duking it out with the attacker.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Or perhaps the possibility of smaller ships (<400kT) to land on planets even, while larger ships need to stay in orbit. Really huge ships (>10MT or so) can't even enter orbit for fear of plummeting in the gravity well.

Also, warp points should have some sort of gravitational attraction or event horizon, so they suck objects closer in. This would make mining WPs harder as you'd have to re-lay the entire minefield when it's been sucked in and destroyed wy the WP. Also, really huge ships passing by through the same sector should get slowed down or even sucked in by the gravitational pull. You're about to use your DCOMCA on an enemy attack fleet when you suddenly locate it in another system...

[Phoenix-D]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Or perhaps the possibility of smaller ships (<400kT) to land on planets even, while larger ships need to stay in orbit. Really huge ships (>10MT or so) can't even enter orbit for fear of plummeting in the gravity well.




The Moon would disagree with you there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.

On a game aspect I don't like this idea simply because of the additional, IMO unneeded, micromanagement.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

At least the ability to mod it in.

Or you could program in "gravitational pull" of objects, that is measured in kT. That way, when your ship/base gets too close to a stellar object, it cannot escape its gravity anymore, and plummets to its death. This pull would also affect moons, and they would have a high kT rating (say, 500TT (TeraTons)).

edit: And btw, why is a simple ship bridge 10,000,000 kilograms in weight? Why is a fighter cockpit one million kilograms? Why are fighters the weight of a fair asteroid?

[Phoenix-D]

Because it simplifies the record keeping. That, and if you'll notice you don't have to build in most support equipment/ammo/consumables/etc. That's taken care of in the base tonnage.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

So, to keep the comps in realistic proportions, each ship carries the approximate harvest of the entire planet for fifteen unusually good years in a row? Man, you could feed a crew of ten million for decades on that supply of food... provided it doesn't go off http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Phoenix-D]

StrategiaInUltima said:
So, to keep the comps in realistic proportions, each ship carries the approximate harvest of the entire planet for fifteen unusually good years in a row? Man, you could feed a crew of ten million for decades on that supply of food... provided it doesn't go off http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif



You think that scale issue is funny, go see Starfury. The units really don't matter, and it'd be hard to find a scale that "works" for everything.

[MightyPenguin]

Aris_Sung said:Repulser beams should be modified to be able to push bit by bit a ship into a planet's atmosphere which leads to its subsequent crash. (IMHO, this would be realistic. Objects not entering the atmosphere with the right approach vector do burn up.)



Or not, since by the time you got a beam strong enough to overcome the engines (you think a ship isn't going to notice that it is falling into low orbit?)it'd be far more efficient just to blow a hole in it.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Unless high-powered repulsers are all you've got on your ship as you spot a nice soft target of opportunity like a damaged COMCA just waiting to be pushed into a planet lying somewhere nearby... or repulsers could be cheaper than normal weapons.

And even if it would be more efficient to blow a hole into the ship if you're facing a Heavy War Cruiser, I don't think you'd stand up to a COMCA. My COMCAs usually sport one or two hundred top-lev shield generators and regens... and I think that it'd be far more efficient to push a ship like that into a planet than to try and blow a hole through tens of thousands of shield points with regenerators backing them up, and several hundred units of armor, all the while while the ship is pounding away at you with battery upon battery upon battery of heavy weapons... don't you think?

[Suicide Junkie]

Atrocities said:
I doubt with the new 3d engine that we will see fleets larger than 40 ships or so.

SF handles thousands of ships, just with a poor framerate http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

And there is nothing stopping players from sending their entire 100-turn buildup of ships at each other in once combat http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Phoenix-D]

Psuedo turn based combat! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Actually the biggest problem would be pathfinding issues. so here's another item for the wishlist:

Either have ships pass over each other or please, PLEASE improve the pathing AI. Way too much ship death in SF because of collisions, especially at higher game speeds.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

And PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT FLEET MOVEMENT IN TACTICAL COMBAT!!!!! It is EXTREMELY irritating to rotate your fleet slightly and have a ship move between two squares endlessly just because some other ship which moves later occupies the square in which it should be. I am SO fed up with that...

[douglas]

Please make sure things like this can't happen in SEV:

In a recent invasion plan, I wanted to split my fleet into two, partway through the turn, but follow the same path of conquering for most of the turn. So, I split my one fleet into two, but I only had one minesweeper and had to pick which fleet got the minesweeper and which waited for the backup after they started going separately. Both fleets moved at exactly the same speed, all ships and the minesweeper arrived exactly simultaneously at the first planet in line, but the minefield damaged the fleet that didn't have a minesweeper instead of getting swept by the minesweeper that arrived at exactly the same time, following exactly the same path, just in a different fleet. Minesweeping and mines exploding should be checked only after ALL movement in a day, not in between movements that are supposed to be simultaneous.

Also, it would be nice to be able to order ships to join or leave fleets partway through their movement. There should also be a setting to leave damaged ships behind instead of letting the 1% of the fleet that's damaged hold up the other 99% that has very important things left to do that should be done immediately.

[MightyPenguin]

StrategiaInUltima said:And even if it would be more efficient to blow a hole into the ship if you're facing a Heavy War Cruiser, I don't think you'd stand up to a COMCA. My COMCAs usually sport one or two hundred top-lev shield generators and regens... and I think that it'd be far more efficient to push a ship like that into a planet than to try and blow a hole through tens of thousands of shield points with regenerators backing them up, and several hundred units of armor, all the while while the ship is pounding away at you with battery upon battery upon battery of heavy weapons... don't you think?



Considering the size of your ships, a beam strong enough to have an appreciable effect would already be a fearsome cannon.

Plus, I think a ship like that would be smart enough to move out of the way. Plus you're assuming that the repulser would have more range than your main weapons. If that main weapon is a beam or kinetic then there is no reason for this; they would both have a range as long as you could accurately aim it.

And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types.

[Puke]

Phoenix-D said:
The Moon would disagree with you there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.



or faster. I wonder how fast the moon would have to be going to orbit a couple feet above the surface. and how much thrust it would have to have behind it to overcome atmospheric drag.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

In my example, I assumed that:
-the COMCA is damaged, and has no engines, and less weapons than normal. As I said, soft target (where "soft" for a COMCA is your average Heavy Battlecruiser).
-the COMCA uses weapons with a mount that increases damage but decreases range.
-your ship - for some reason - was just passing by.
-your ship - for some reason - has been fitted with only a heavy repulser as a weapon. It is unarmed besides that.
-that repulser actually outranges the COMCAs remaining weapons, which should be easy, as their ranges are already reduced by a mount.
-it is still SE, be it IV or V. In SEIV even if you give a repulser a power of 5000000 it does nor do damage to my knowledge. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Fyron]

MightyPenguin said:
And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types.

The game just has to wait to process minefields until after all ships have moved in the day. It isn't that difficult to accomplish. Build up a list of all of the objects that just entered the sector and wait until all movement for the day is finished. Then, treat everything in that list as if the vehicles were all in the same "fleet" for the purposes of sweeping.

[Baron Munchausen]

Puke said:

Phoenix-D said:
The Moon would disagree with you there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.



or faster. I wonder how fast the moon would have to be going to orbit a couple feet above the surface. and how much thrust it would have to have behind it to overcome atmospheric drag.



The Moon simply could not orbit only a few feet above the surface of the earth. It's not a problem with the atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere is only about a hundred miles thick while the Moon is a couple thousand miles across. It's the simply fact of gravitational stress. There is a practical limit on how close a large satellite can be to its host without being torn apart -- broken down into smaller satellites that can handle the stress, essentially. This is called the 'Roche limit' after the scientist who calculated it.

http://www.answers.com/topic/roche-limit

[Phoenix-D]

"And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types."

That's still easy enough to fix. Check for mine attacks at the end of the day and not when a square is moved into.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ship animations during combat. Like, when you have an actual gun turret mounted on your ship, that it rotates before it fires. Also, firing arcs. Most definitely firing arcs. Or at least the ability to mod them in - that stock weapons would have 360-degree firing arcs. With SH's Neo-Icaran set, it would be REALLY fantastic to actually see it maneuver broadside, swivel its guns and then fire. Also, as I said before, muzzle flash and/or shell casings.

Graphical view of ground combat.

[AgentZero]

StrategiaInUltima said:
Ship animations during combat. Like, when you have an actual gun turret mounted on your ship, that it rotates before it fires. Also, firing arcs. Most definitely firing arcs. Or at least the ability to mod them in - that stock weapons would have 360-degree firing arcs. With SH's Neo-Icaran set, it would be REALLY fantastic to actually see it maneuver broadside, swivel its guns and then fire. Also, as I said before, muzzle flash and/or shell casings.

Graphical view of ground combat.



I'm OK with firing arcs, but turret animations, muzzle flash & shell casings would do nothing except look pretty. And considering SE5 only has one man coding it, I'd rather he spent his time making the core game better, rather than on glitzy frills. Personally if the AI, intel & diplomacy was significantly improved, I wouldn't mind fighting my SE5 battles using ASCII characters.

[Baron Munchausen]

Since combat will be based on Starfury, firing arcs are already in the game. I agree that this is an improvement. One of the annoying factors in ship design for SE IV was that you could cram completely unrealistic amounts of weapons into a ship simply because you wanted to. There was no rational limit related to ship size -- like power supply or mounting points! Now at least we have a limit on mounting points. Maybe power supply, too? I'm not sure all of the tactical features of Starfury will be included in the strategic level game. Tracking power levels in hundreds or thousands of ships might get very complicated.

[GreyCloud]

Hi, my first post on this site http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif so hello all!

The main feature I would like to see would be a more advanced and easier to use Order setting interface, being able to repeat orders with ease - this seemed to be a bit hit n miss in SEIV http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif I agree with previous posts a large resource system would be great http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif also far harder AI built in http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

the spell check feature on this forum is great http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

GreyCloud

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Welcome to the forum!

Building off you, I suggest a selectable repeat - you select what to repeat.

Also, planets can't launch infinite units.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Hello

[Delron]

I don't know they have been mentioned before, but the ideas just came to me today:


1) Overpopulation: It hit me that it seems rather silly to just have planets stop producing population just due to them being at the planets "Maximum" capacity. So heres my idea, instead of stopping when it reaches maximum population a colony will continue to reproduce over what it should be able to hold. As the situation grows worse production rates across the board will drop and happiness will go down as will reproduction rate.

2)Auto-Migration: This would go along with overpopulation to prevent excessive amounts of micromanagement. You could specify areas you encourage your citizens to move to, from other areas. They would of course use vessels to small to be accounted for in-game, other than as some kind of small cost associated with the orders. Heck maybe it could even be a tech tree that ups peoples abilities to move around without you building a giant transportation ship.

[Renegade 13]

I'd love to be able to selectively upgrade facilities across the board. However, currently you can only upgrade all facilities unless you do it manually....and I don't have to tell you that's a massive pain in the rear. So my suggestion is to have the universal upgrade be the same as it is now, except that you select the facility types that you want upgraded, and exclude the rest. Hope that makes sense http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Welcom Delron and GreyCloud!

[Atrocities]

Guys,

I really don't know but I would speculate that Aaron may not be reading this thread any more. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif It lacks organization and is riddled with repeated ideas and off topic discussion.

I mean 140 pages of posts with no sense of organization would scare off even the most die hard SE IV fan let alone the game programer.

Again this is just my opinion and I am often wrong.

[Slick]

I'd like to see a list of what ships I lost when they are destroyed by a minefield. Currently in SEIV the log message does not tell you what ship(s) you lost.

[Gandalf Parker]

The developers in the Dom2 forum found it very helpful when a player consolidated a list of all suggestions into very short fairly-unbiased sentences. Possibly with pointers back to the "full discussion" whether a post on the wishlist or a seperate thread. That way they could scan for anything they had missed.

To do it legibly the person would either have to understand html enough to make a link that shows as one word but jumps to the long URL. Or use something like TinyURL.com go convert the long link into a short one

[Atrocities]

I am going to send this suggestion to Aaron for SE V, but I wanted to run it by you guys first.

Have a "One per Empire" Requirement ability so that when modders build a special facility they can set it up as a ONE TIME only facility.

An extra File system for adding such things as Nomadic races, or space monsters that the game can then be set up to use X amount of in a game much like the Neutrals are set up now.

Addressable Tech.
Basically you add one Racial trait, say Neutral Tech to the racial trait file.

This Neutral tech will then use the file Neutral Tech in the Tech Area folder. It will have a special ability that will tie into the General Settings for each race with a specific number that will then give that race access under Neutral Tech to any number of sub techs or components that share that races unique ID number.

For example:
Neutral 1 - has a unique ID of 1
Neutral 2 - has a unique ID of 2

In the Racial trait both races are set up to use the Neutral Race Racial Trait which gives access to the Neutral Race Technology.

Under Neutral Race Technology each races Unique ID number will give that race access to any component, facility, other that also has the Unique ID number.

So Neutral 1 will have access to any Component or facility that shares its unique ID number.

Neutral 2 will have access to any component or facility that shares its unique ID number.

But both share the same racial trait and TechArea tech that separates them out by their Unique ID numbers.

[Kranodor]

I am a great fan of SE4 gold and I read some of the ideas given here, but so far, I would have only one wish:

Auto-Proceeding in simulanteous/multiple machines gameplay.

SE4G was not the 4x game of our choice on LAN parties because of one reason: We like to play from the beginning (1 planet, low tech etc...) and this makes the first turns rather short. And with manual proceeding it simply took too long to be fun.

So a routine which automatically proceeds the turn when all player order files have been received - and on the other hand the player machines automatically start playing the next turn when the turn was proceeded - would greatly speed up gameplay. This surely should be optional (Checkbox?).

I don't know if this was mentioned already (didn't take the time to read all 140+ pages) but that would be my ultimate wish for SE5.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Welcome to the forum!

If you're not doing much for a couple of turns, you can always do what I do: keep your cursor at the place the "Yes" button will be in the "End Turn" window, then press F12 and LMB rapidly, thus ending your turn really fast.

[Kranodor]

Oh, I don't have any problems with that in singular play.
Click. Click. No problem.

Problem is multiplayer on LAN (local area network), so ingame with "multiple machines" and "simulanteous turns".
On LAN (parties, sessions, whatever you'd like to call'em) turn based games aren't very popular because in most of them, most of the players can't do anything but watch most of the time. And you don't transport your PC to some other guy's home just to watch your screen. Only exception: Simultaneous turns. And those are (except for Deadlock-series, maybe) only executed correctly in 4x-games.

Problem: If you e.g. play Reach for the stars or Master of Orion 2 or 3, you have instant proceeding of game turns. Means: When all players pressed "end turn", the turn is automatically proceeded and the next turn begins within the next two seconds after the last player pressed "end turn".
If you play SE4 (gold), which is, in matters of depth, possibilities and realization superior to the three other games mentioned, you have all players end their turn and then the host has to proceed and all players have to press "play turn" before the next turn actually begins.

During later play, when a turn takes several minutes to play, this isn't something to worry about. It is still an annoying gesture, but not anymore as time consuming compared to the actual turn. But during the beginning, with short turns, it plays not very much different from "traditional" turn based, with one player after the other.

That's why I'd wish for an auto-proceed option. It's not the problem that I have to end my turn, and that I may have to confirm turn-ending. The problem is that endless time in between the turns when playing on multiple machines simultaneously in a local area network.
Because, in LAN, when all players have ended their turns, there is nothing more left to do but "proceed" and "begin next turn on all machines".

[Suicide Junkie]

Kranodor said:
...Problem is multiplayer on LAN (local area network), so ingame with "multiple machines" and "simulanteous turns".
...
That's why I'd wish for an auto-proceed option. It's not the problem that I have to end my turn, and that I may have to confirm turn-ending. The problem is that endless time in between the turns when playing on multiple machines simultaneously in a local area network.
Because, in LAN, when all players have ended their turns, there is nothing more left to do but "proceed" and "begin next turn on all machines".


http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE4/Tools/
Try my SE4 Autohost.

It will monitor the savegame folder for the PLR files, and automatically process the turn for you.

Plus, it can blink the keyboard lights to tell you which players has finished their turns if you want.

On a LAN, everybody can use it (only one player should have it set to process the turn though) and they can all see the blinkenlights.
When a the lights start turning on, you know to hurry up and finish because everybody else is done http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[narf poit chez BOOM]

A check for resupply routine for the colonize order.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Zoom, rotation and over-the-shoulder camera modes for tactical combat. Perhaps you could even make the over-the-shoulder mode a little like SFC, but perhaps that's too much work for now. Anyways, I'm posting this idea for SEVI then.

[Slick]

When a game is over (i.e. victory conditions met) I'd like the option to view the game from the point of view of any/all of the other empires like some other games have. (Empire Deluxe, for example) This way you can see the world from the enemy perspective, see their development, etc. This is a great learning tool to see what the other guys were doing when the game is over.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Make the amount of units a planet can launch moddable.

Make it possible for (small) ships to enter orbital yards for repairs/retrofitting/whatever. The comp should be huge, but it should be far more effective than an open yard, and moreover it will hide the ship from prying enemy eyes. If you build lots of yards and load them full of warships, an enemy might attack your planet thinking he can eliminate the bases easily so he can glass the planet/land troops, but once he sees he's up against a massive defense force..... ooh, I'd love to see the look on his face........................

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Let modders specify certain comps needed on ships. Say, a ship needs B/LS/CQ, but the description says it also needs a Gravitonic Nullifier to prevent all the stars in the galaxy from orbiting the ship, or because the Nullifier is needed for WP travel. In SEIV this would be practically impossible, but plz could you make this a feature for SEV?

[NullAshton]

Scriptable components, facilities, hull sizes, and all that good stuff.

[AMF]

It would be nice if your homeworld was displayed in the center of the quadrant map, and you explored out from that. And I would like warp points that automatically 'wraparound'

As it is now, if my HW starts in the corner of the map, I know that I am in the corner, and can gear my exploration aroudn that. It's much more realistic, and fun, to send explorers out not knowing where "the edge of the galaxy' is.

And I would really like a "zoom" on the quadrant map. When one starts making a lot of warplines, it gets real crowded real quick, and hard to tell which system is connected to which...

Alarik

[Tom_Holsinger]

I just learned of SE5 and am checking in. I participated in the run-up to SE4 and had a blast with the game. Some of you may remember me from that, and Master of Orion where I was more involved. I have quite a few ideas for expanding the political and intelligence sides of the game, mostly with fairly easy spreadsheet stuff, but getting here late means most probably can't surface until SE5 Gold. But we might be able to squeeze some in.

My highest priority is to have player-definable racial animosities a la Master of Orion I and MOO3, both as a major, major, boost to role-playing, and as a vehicle for:

The Space Empires V Backstory Contest.

Backstories right now mean nothing in SE5 game play - one empire is the same as any other for diplomacy. But when some races hate each other's guts, err, innards, and others just love to sqooze each others' tentacles or whatever, that can make games much, much more interesting. Check out this MOO3 forum thread for examples - http://www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=331031
(Making Diplomacy Make Sense: Fish Friends, Lizard Lickers, and Humanoid Haters)

That sort of thing could make good backstories an effective part of the SE5 - working within the backstory could the difference between winning and losing.

And I expect fans would love an opportunity to write backstories based on a new game feature of racial animosities. Malfador could have a contest for the best 3-4 backstories - those would become part of the game CD. The contest winners would design pre-set races and the racial animosity table to go with their backstories for players to import into new game setups, with randomly designed maps, etc.

It would also be nice eto have Space Empires V governments mean something besides a name - have governments modify racial/imperial attributes a bit, again player-configurable. And let those become part of the backstories too.

Tom Holsinger

[Emperor's Child]

The one thing I still find artificial after all this time is the one ship per tile rule of the tactical combat. This gives the game a very 2d feel. It would be nice to allow ships to pass over each other at the least, or even stack, should they opt to. This would give the game more of a 3d feel in the 2d environment of tactical combat.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main problem with allowing ships to stack, is that you'd always keep all your ships in the same square to optimize your firepower.

Combats are more interesting when your ships have to pair off to some degree against the enemies.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

As far as I know, you could stack ships in SEIII. I played the demo several years back, and in the simulator my ship(s) and the enemy ship(s) always ended up in the same square.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah, but at least in SE3 you couldn't choose new targets in the middle of the shooting phase... You had to spread your fire, or waste the whole turn destroying one ship with massive overkill.

[Emperor's Child]

I think my main issue is not stacking, which I can understand from a game balance perspective, but not allowing ships to pass over others. It just does not make sense at all that you can build an impassable wall of ships abreast in space, the AI handles this poorly, people do the HUH? It would be less artificial if they were allowed to move OVER other ships, but not land on them.

Now, on the topic of stacking... This would be a much more complex code alteration and would significantly alter game play. However, if stacking were allowed, ships would be able to mass fire much more efficiently than they can today (which presumes that opposing forces choose not to stack themselves). But how does that kill the game's flavor? Formations in space are formed for...why? Because you can't stack? A better (more realistic) answer would be that ships in close formation are easy targets... like shooting fish in a barrel.

I would propose that if your were to allow stacking, you should also stipulate the following rules for ships in a stack:

1. Every ship above the first in a stack gives a -5% defensive modifier to ALL ships in the stack to reflect the “fish in a barrel” quality of maneuvering together. So, if you have 20 ships in a stack you would have a –100% defensive modifier, etc…

2. 25% of damage from hits to one ship in the stack will “spill over” to EVERY other ship in the stack, representing the other ships getting caught in the crossfire, getting hit by pieces of the first ship, etc.

This would give some rather compelling effects to the rest of the ships in a stack and would give lots of good reason why they normally don’t want to do it.

[Kana]

I see both sides of the stacking issue...I would at the very least like the option for going to range 0 on an enemy...besides with weapon arcs being a part of SEV, flankin is going to be an important tactical consideration...so stacking or not...maybe a bad tactical choice in terms of maximizing firepower...

Kana

[AngleWyrm]

* Have a filter button for fleeted ships, so that they don't appear on the ship list.

* Filter button for ships with orders, or have the 'sort on orders' column click put all ships without orders ON TOP of the list.

* Have a quick GO-TO from the construction queues. Many times I've wanted to see which planet or ship in a system, and had to bail out to go look.

* Have ships carry and consume their upkeep resources instead of using 'supplies' and spaceports to put all resources into a galactic pool.

[Jake Monroe]

oh my god, this thread has so many posts in it. It's kinda scary.

OMG, my avatar still links to that old webspace. *scrambles to change it*

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Seekers that have a long range, but need to be fired at lower ranges. I.e. a Heavy Anti-Ship Missile needs to be fired at a range of 8 or less, but it can track ships to a range of, say, 20.

[Fyron]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Seekers that have a long range, but need to be fired at lower ranges. I.e. a Heavy Anti-Ship Missile needs to be fired at a range of 8 or less, but it can track ships to a range of, say, 20.

You can do this in SE4. Add a mount for seeker weapons that adds -12 range. Set the family requirements to the weapon families of the seeker you wish to have this behavior on. Set the range of that seeker to 20. Set its size to 100 times normal. The mount will make the size 1%. This will force the use of the mount on this component. Now, the weapon will only be able to fire up to range 8, due to the mount. However, the seeker will still travel up to 20 squares, due to the weapon stats. Seeker range is affected bizarrely by mounts... Damage is not affected at all.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Aah, thank you very much Fyron.

New races that are created during a game. I'm not talking rebels, I'm talking planets with intelligent population who have finally made the jump to space in the year 2405.6 or so.

Also, random "elder" ships floating around, going somewhere or patrolling sections of the Galaxy. These ships would be massive, and players cannot play as these Elders.

The above two combined could result in ancient colony sleeper ships in the Galaxy, that would travel towards a planet and colonize it, thereby creating a new race during gameplay. This race might start with no tech, they might start with some tech or a lot of tech. Or they could have special unique techs that cannot be researched by the player. Something like Elder Technologies of various kinds, or other tech unique to the new race.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, 'Elder Races' would be a very nice feature to have either as playable races or as 'wandering monsters' in the galaxy.

I think that a good population AI might make 'Elder Races' doable as playable races. You'd give the Elder Race population a very low growth rate and a very high resistance to the sorts of adventures that younger races normally tolerate. Invasion and conquest, for example. Since an Elder Race starts with a presumed very high level of technology and culture they are all highly individualistic and not willing to 'sacrifice' themselves for some petty war. Normally, if you attack a race that hasn't attacked you, your population would shut you down. They are all 'artists' or 'scientists' or 'scholars' after all and not interested in being shipped off to fight a war. So, you couldn't rush out and attack anyone and everyone and you couldn't necessarily colonize a lot of planets beyond the first few turns because of the very slow growth of your population. They'd probably not want to even have trade treaties with the younger races because they wouldn't have anything of interest technology wise, and their culture would seem seedy or outright vulgar and barbaric to the advanced Elders. On the other hand, you would have lots of technology goodies to work with from the very first turn and you could possibly use those to manipulate or bribe younger races to do your dirty work for you. Kinda like the Babylon 5 universe. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

And don't forget, the Elders use little or no technology you can research as a normal player. They can research techs other players can only aqcuire via ruins, and they can utilize a host of other unique devices.

Their ship sizes should also be unique, with even small scouts reaching sizes of young races' medium warships - think LC size for the first ship the Elders can build, comparable to Escorts. Also, Elders should have a LOT more ship sizes, so that their biggest ships (could be generation ships, giant battleships or whatever) reach unimaginable sizes. Weapons for the Elders should be very strong and highly effective, think the WMG with double/triple damage, 1.5 times the range, 20kT and ROF of 1. Sound attractive?

Also, Elders should have unique mounts to reflect their millenia of weapons/component research, so they can have such hugely useful mounts like doubling range, tripling damage, doubling kT, tripling resistance but increasing costs by x5.

Elders could also have multiple colonies at the game start, and you could specify those in the map editor. You could thus create a scenario with a massive Ancient Empire in decline, and hordes of younger races standing posed to take over power. The Elders would have little chance if there were large alliances, but if the younger races were crippled by infighting, the Elders could actually win as they destroy/subdue one race at a time.

[Atrocities]

The ability to make any component a required component for any hull size.

The ability to specify the individual tech cost for each component level as an over-ride.

Stock system names list should be 300 or more names.

[boran_blok]

Another idea just popped into my mind:
Customizable numbering schemes.
Preferrably on Empire level.

This will be quite complicated so maybe assign different levels of control, here is how I see the options:
Numbering:
-- Per shiptype
----- Enable/disable revision indications
----- Codes
--------- Prototype
--------- Veteran ship
--------- ...

or:
-- empire wide
----- Enable/disable revision... etc.

Also an option of what numeral system to use (roman, etc) would be nice.

I realise this is a very peculiar thing, but I'd like the option to set empire wide numbering with prefix ncc-# if you see where I'm getting at.

now the numbering is always 0001 etc...
You could prefer to use other methods etc.

Anyways, just suggesting.

[Slick]

pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease please

Add a button and a hotkey to:

"Go to the sector of the next log entry and display what happened there"

This would speed up turns immensely because we wouldn't have to keep bouncing back to the log like a ping-pong ball a hundred #%&*@$king times a turn.

Please excuse my language.

[Emperor's Child]

I've noticed that the AI seems not to ever send their ships to the yards to modernize their designs, so you tend to fight lots of older ship models unless they have suffered significant losses earlier in the game. I'd like to see a tweak to get the AI to be a little more agressive on their modernization of older ship designs. -COTE

[Suicide Junkie]

For the combat replay and simulator:
A handy, floating window which lists the ships (and perhaps units) in combat.

<Name> : <Launched units left> : <Shield %> / <Armor %> / <Hull %> : <status icons>
Status icons would include:
- no movement
- no weapons
- no supplies

This would make it much easier to see how things are going without having to click each ship, so you could have both a fast relay/simulation AND ship details.

Currently, the simulator's tactical mode takes too long, but the strategic mode has way too few details.

[boran_blok]

Another one: Make it possible to set a ships maximum speed, say you have one engine using 10 supply/move (simplified example) and you can move 6 spaces/turn, but now if you have a supply generation device giving 40 supply/turn you would run out of supplies eventually, it would be handy to be able to cap speed at 4 and thus be able to cruise indefinetly.

Also The option to at least mod in solar-independent supply generation would be nice (ramscoops and bussard collectors are technically seen (where they technically possible) not influenced by the amount of solar radiation, but rely on the ever present space dust)

[zircher]

Hmmm, along that line of thought. A Star Trek planet eater device would be nice. Say something that strip mines asteroids for supplies/fuel.
--
TAZ

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Indeed, strip-mining together with the two types of resource extraction in SEIV would be mucho welcome.

Currently, you have two processes to generate resources:
-Normal mining/whatever, which does not generate too much resources but keeps value constant.
-Remote mining, which slowly decreases value (and can only be used on uninhabited planets) but generates more resources IIRC.
To have Strip Mining added as a third:
-Strip Mining, can be done with facilities or remotely, generates masses of resources at unthinkable speeds but very rapidly decreases value AND conditions, and not only in the tpye of resource you get. A Mineral Strip Miner would also decrease org/rad value.

[Suicide Junkie]

You can do that.
Simply give a facility large resource production, and then add a negative value improvement ability.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Yes, but an ORBITAL strip miner will be hard. Remote Resource Generation only deducts 1% per turn per comp IIRC, to simulate actual strip mining you would not only have to have a very large production but also a VERY large value degeneration.

And Strip Mining will affect the very planet, so I'd want my Strip Miner facility to have an effect that turns the planet into a small patch of asteroids with no value whatsoever after Value has hit rock bottom, or perhaps even sooner; you could only strip mine for such-and-such amount of turns before the planet is reduced to rubble.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

(Sorry about not editing, but for some strange reason every time I edit a post I turn up at the last page of the thread - and that means a LOT of navigating to get back here)

The ability to specify racial animosities and likings for races when modding/at startup. For example, you might create a race with an abundant backstory that involves their near annihilation at the hands of the Amon'krie and their rescue by support from the Xiati, but if the AI controlling this race strikes a Partnership treaty with the Amon'krie and declares total all-out war on the Xiati, this does not reflect your intentions..... So you need to specify that they really hate the Amon'Krie and love the Xiati.

Galactic Councils.
Councils would be formed by one or more players within an alliance or even in a war, Council Chairbeings would be elected every now and then, and you can join and leave Councils freely according to their rules. Council Chairbeings could posess the power to mediate in a war between two Councillors (i.e. members) or even to start a joint war on a non-Councillor's race. This to simulate the UN/Galactic Senate/Republic or whatever. Councils could be saved separately and utilized many times, like saving a race. Also, Councils would greatly add to the Roleplaying factor of the game. It would be perfectly suited to simulate, say, the following situation:

A galactic empire/republic/whatever is in decline. Its many races have started to act more independently. The old Council still retains all its members, but the Council World is essentially powerless. All the Council Head can do is use diplomatic channels, intrigue, blackmailing etc. to achieve his goals.
The Council World system would have no WP access and a System Shield would be in place on the planet to prevent races from attacking and destroying the powerless Council world. The races are each fully independent, but the Council can still achieve goals like the UN. If two or more races have been at war for decades, the Council can be used as a channel to negotiate a treaty between the races, if an uneasy one. No race can withdraw from the council and the Chairbeing does not change.

Essentially, the Council would be a combination of a large alliance of sorts, a massive center for excessive use of intel and a large diplomatic arena.
Council Chairbeings would be the most powerful and influential leaders in the galaxy, as they can utilize the widest variety of means to achieve their goals - they have the largest diplomatic power, they know a lot about the member races and so can use blackmail (think along the lines of "I know you're massing your fleets there-and-there to attack this ally with whom you have a Trade treaty. You would be in big trouble if that ally knew of your plans. If you do this-and-this for me, I will not reveal your plans to your ally."), and they can also utilize deep-level high-effect intel, they can gather information much easier, their sabotage would be more powerful and they could possibly even use a project that would give them total control over the other empire.

I know, I'm ranting. It's just that I love this idea personally - and that's not just because I thought it up.

[Timstone]

You know I don't think that Galactic Council stuff will work. The game has a bit too high pace for that kind of depth. This kind of councils would only work in real life. I don't think it would be possible to succesfully merge the complex political system and preserve the game as an empire building game.
I also think this would resemble MOO too much. I never liked having an unmbrella organisation around.

[Fyron]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Yes, but an ORBITAL strip miner will be hard. Remote Resource Generation only deducts 1% per turn per comp IIRC...

It is 1% per resource type mined, regardless of how many mining components are present on the ship/base (or set of 3 satellites, one for each resource).

If you want strip mining, you can play a limited resources game. All mining slowly strips planets and asteroids of their value.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Slowly strips planets, yes..... but "real" strip mining would be a very fast, highly productive mining exploit that would earn you a helluva lot of resources in a few turns, but would reduce planet quality extremely fast and perhaps eventually reduce it to asteroids after a few turns.

[El_Phil]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Slowly strips planets, yes..... but "real" strip mining would be a very fast, highly productive mining exploit that would earn you a helluva lot of resources in a few turns, but would reduce planet quality extremely fast and perhaps eventually reduce it to asteroids after a few turns.



Nope real strip mines have lives measured in decades as they're so bloody expensive to setup you don't bother unless there is so much resources it's ridiculous. Taking German lignite mining for instance, if you've just chucked several hundred million at bucket wheel excavator then you need to mine a lot of coal just to break even. And your mine is going to need seveal of those BWEs. And you're going to have to relocate several villages and even small towns during the mine's life.

So for 'real' strip mines you'd want high production but at a massive price and a negative for planet value and probably population happiness as well (Lets be honest kicking people out of their houses and then levelling their entire town is going to annoy them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)

Ohh here's an idea. Types of mining facility: Normal mines with good production and no penalties, unsafe corner cutters with better production but happiness bonuses, strip miners with value and condition penalties but even better production and b***ard miners with huge production but every penalty.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Notice I put "real" between quotation marks. I didn't mean actual daylight strip mining, I meant sciencefiction massive-scale strip mining that can literally strip a planet's outer crust away completely in under a year or so.

I like your idea about the different types of miners, mind if I use it?

[El_Phil]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
I like your idea about the different types of miners, mind if I use it?



Sure go ahead, I was going to chuck it in my mod, but then I realised I was just looking for an excuse not to start the game story. I had promised myself that I would start it when I had finished my mod, the problem that it was an open-ended mod...

You might want to consider for Organics say: normal farms, hi-chemical use farms for -ve value and -ve conditions but + output, organic farms lower production but +ve for conditions and happiness and slash and burn agriculture for massive output but all penalties and fast -ve value.

Radioactives: Normal, 3 Mile Island type big -ve for hapiness but no other penalties and increased production, Rossing type for -ve conditions and value and of course Chernoybl for all -ves except up production. In fact could the Chernobyl type have a negative luck modifier as well? If so then massive price, massive production for rads but taking a risk.

That's some of the ideas I had knocking around for production side, instead of just making all facilities the same give each a different flavour.

[boran_blok]

Now this might be asking for a lot, but would it be possible to bumpmap planets ? or moons, or actually make a lighting model (use DX8+ etc) I have no idea how difficult this would be and it's imho not a priority, but sometimes small things can make big differences in looks (defenetly bumpmaps and a realistic lighting model)

[Q]

Now that new screen shots are out and the beta testers are chosen I would like to add some more wishes:

1.) Maximal clearness of the maps, especially system and galaxy. The screen shots are very nice, but I am not sure if in a crouded system or very large galaxy you might be a little bit lost.
2.) Not too much micromanagement.
3.) A request to the beta testers: please test all abilities to avoid the situation in SE IV, where even in the final version some abilities are not functional (see known bug list).

[zircher]

> 3.) A request to the beta testers: please test all
> abilities to avoid the situation in SE IV, where
> even in the final version some abilities are not
> functional (see known bug list).

I'll do my level best to kick the tires and try as many things as I can. Honestly, I think my work with DoGA CGA and other 3D modelling technologies may have influenced my section. I'll definately be trying out new ship models and looking for flaws/limitations in that arena. I suspect that other people were chosen for similar talents.
--
TAZ

[Baal]

There was some mention of "pre-space faring" races on planets. Take it a couple steps further.
-Be able to colonize the planet or invade it and use the indigenous population (nothing new)
-Be able to attack an enemy empire and "bomb them back to the stone age". Take out all their facilities, weapon platforms, sources of technology thus turning them into a "pre-spacefaring" race. They would retain the population.
-Accomplish this by making normal weapons not hurt populations except for a little collateral damage. This forces planetary bombardment research.
-Allow for "pre-space faring" races assent to space faring empires. So, you can bomb them back to the stone age but they can again research space flight and turn into a new empire (not related to the original).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

As for making normal weapons powerless against population, this is very simple. (but it will mean that normal weaps would be powerful against cargo, and that you get true WMDs that can take out 50 large WPs in a single shot).

Simple go to Settings.txt, and change the line that says "Amount of damage required to kill one population" or something like that into a very high number - say, 1000 - then go to Components.txt and increase orbital bomb damages in a similar way. You could/should then also change some entries in TechAreas.txt to make orbital bombs more expensive to research and require more tech requirements. Also, you could add multiple types of bombs, ranging from small cluster bombs of 10kT which will enable you to create Escorts in swarms as orbital annoyments, right up to the 1k WMD that kan depopulate a Small Breathable world in a single shot but is prohibitively expensive.

[boran_blok]

The right click menu, please make a very good right click menu, make it gui consistent, right clicking on a planet anywhere should give the same meny anywhere, the left click should execute the default action for the list you're viewing (construction queue for instance in the construction queues list) but the right click should offer the same options everywhere imho. because now it's impossible to go directly to a planet from the construction queue window, whereas the planets are shown, I'd like to be able to do that.

A todo list, it would be nice if you would be able to make a todo list for yourself with reminders, like "send colony ship to planet X as soon as I have the appropriate tech" which could have a reminder enabled that triggers as soon as you have the appropriate tech, the key is that the planet would be triggerable (you click on it and you go to it, you right click on it and you get it's menu) and so would be the requirement.

Besides that, now comes my biggest request:
Now this might be definetly stretching it. But it's something i'd soooooo like to have: Macros, scripting & plugins

Since space empires is heavily micro management based these could greatly reduce micro management overload (players with over 300 planets to manage in a game probably know what I mean)

The plugin thing is the ability to take someone else's script and make it a menu item somewhere (be it right click, be it on a submenu somewhere else)

This idea has to be further refined in my head, but I have one example of what I'd like to be able to script.

Situation: You found a freshly colonizable planet, it has a ruin, but you have also spotted an enemy scout, so you're going to make a run for it.

My idea is that you make a plugin script which adds a menu item to the planet with the ruin "grab ruin"

The script would be something akin to:
Send closest colony ship to this planet to colonize, send new colony ship to planet which was to be colonized by that ship, if no colony ship available, display message in todo list


Now I know all these ideas are quite big and grand (to code, because I have a vague idea how i'd code em)

But please considder them for SE 6 (we should start making an SE 6 request thread somewhere http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif)

Since micromanegement is a part of SE i'd like to be able to manage the micromanagement http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Thanks for even reading this post.

Boran.

[Trantor]

<font color="black"> </font> What I would like to see even as a patch to SEIV is a little clock to tell me what time it is, so when I need to go to work the next day I don't end up staying up until 3 in the morning. Could make it a little tool bar ditial clock. Help cure the "just one more turn" syndrum.
:-) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Well, judging by the screens, it seems that the two extra "moddable" resources were Research and Intel. Bugger http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[Phoenix-D]

Its possible that you can turn resources on or off. Which would mean that they aren't being shown..or they could be used in the ground screen (workforce?)

[TurinTurambar]

Trantor said:
<font color="black"> </font> What I would like to see even as a patch to SEIV is a little clock to tell me what time it is, so when I need to go to work the next day I don't end up staying up until 3 in the morning. Could make it a little tool bar ditial clock. Help cure the "just one more turn" syndrum.
:-) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif



Lmao!
Turin

[El_Phil]

A clock wouldn't do any good unless it had a big audio-visual alarm. I mean the clock isn't helpfull for running your empire so why would you look at it? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

The ability to run it in windowed mode as opposed to the current "Minimized/Fullscreen" options.

Moddable diplomacy, custom treaties and the like.

The possibility of "Councils" or "Senates" or something which acts as an advisory board for the player, and can be used as target for intel.....

[Alienboy]

This may have already been covered somewhere along the way, but I think it would be nice to have more abilities using the Ships/Units, Construction queues and Colonies command buttons.
eg, you can "multi add" units and ships in the Construction queue command button. I think it would be cool to be able to perform other muilti tasks such as putting multiple queues on and off hold. That sort of thing. ???

*Being able to upgrade/scrap/analyze/mothball groups of vessels by going into "Ships/Units", then multi adding the vessels you need to upgrade etc, and from there being able to access the "Scrap/Analyze/Mothball" command from within "Ships/Units"

[AgentZero]

Given that the beta test is already underway, it might be a bit late to implement this suggestion, but here goes anyway:
I'd like to see a 'Points' system set up for diplomacy. This would be completely invisible to the player, but would have huge effects on diplomacy.
There would be two seperate points systems, one when you're at peace with another empire, and one where you're at war.
Each race would have their own individual Point Thresholds.
When you're at peace with another empire, before you have any treaty, you gain points basically just by giving gifts and accepting demands of the other empire, and a small number of points each turn for just staying out of their way. You lose points by making demands, attacking them, hanging around in their space, etc. Once you rack up enough points, the empire will be willing sign a treaty with you. Once you have a treaty, you earn say, two points per turn of the treaty. You can then also get points by being at war with your allies enemies, and lose points by warring with their friends.
As the number of points you have with a given empire goes up, they will sign higher and higher level treaties with you.
This would eliminate a few of the problems from SE4, namely, empires declaring war on you for no reason (if you're staying out of their space, the number of points keeps going up so it's more likely they'll offer a treaty), and also eliminate the practice of AI empires offering the next treaty up every single turn, until you get to Partnership 4 turns after you've met them.
Also, once you have a treaty with an empire, as long as you don't go zooming through their space, or blowing up their allies (or both!), your relations with that empire will keep getting better. Anyone who's played Civ or Alpha Centauri will appreciate this, since it's infuriating in those games that you pretty much have to give presents to your trading partners every single turn to keep them from hating you.

Moving on, once you're at war with an empire, they would have a defined threshold that must be met before they'll agree to peace. You gain points by destroying ships (1pt), capturing planets (10pts), and capturing systems(bonus 20pts). You lose points by letting the enemy destroy your ships, or capture your planets &amp; systems. Once the point threshold has been achieved, the empire will agree to peace with you. Then the system switches over to the Peace Point system, albeit at a fairly low starting point number so it will be a while before your former enemy signs a Trade Agreement with you. A second threshold would be in place if you refuse peace and continue to attack, and once that one is met, the enemy will surrender.

All of these points would be more or less invisible to the player, aside from maybe a little tag under their name that tells you how good your relations are, and maybe a little arrow showing whether they've gotten better or worse since the last turn.

You would have a default starting number of points with every empire, but depending on their set up, they would react differently. ie: Your starting points are 500.
The Praetorians are set up to go as far as a Trade Alliance if points are 500 or greater, so when you meet them and propose a NA treaty, it is accepted.
The Xiati, however are set to declare war if your points with them drop below 600, so upon meeting them, they declare war.
There would be other things that could raise or lower you starting points, such as racial achievements, or research in certain fields. Also, every 10 points you earn with an ally gives you 1 extra starting point when meeting a new empire, since you reputation will procede you, as it were.

Maybe there's another way of doing it, but I think this is the simplest, most easily moddable way of getting decent diplomacy.

Using points, even Trade could be made to make more sense. Eg: 100kT of resources is worth 1 point, a ship is worth 5-50 points depending on size, a planet is worth 500 points, and technologies would be given point values based on their level. ie: level 1 tech is worth 2 points while level 10 tech is worth 20.
Then, when you propose a trade with another empire, it just looks at -We Get: 10000pts -We Give: 10100pts. and then accept, decline or counter offer, based on what sort of Trade Threshold they have. (ie: A race with a trade threshold of 500 would accept this deal, while one with a TT of 50 would not).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

As for the trade points, I tried to start something similar a while ago; I called it "Star Credits" (crappy name I know) and it also used "points" allocated to certain things. For example, a newly colonized planet with under 5 facilities and under 50M pop would cost, say, 5000 SC IIRC, while a developed world with over 10 facilities and over 100M pop would cost something more like 25000 SC. For ships, something similar; SCs based on the hull size, but also whether or not it had a colony module, whether or not it had Racial Tech comps, Stellar Manipulation, etc. I also implemented "patrols": i.e. you order one or more of your ships to patrol/guard an area for a certain number of turns, and you get paid based on the size and number of the ships and the amount of turns you patrolled/guarded the area.

But what you're saying is much better.

[Emperor's Child]

I've always thought that you shouldn't be able to kill ALL of the population by bombarding it from space. You would have to practically blast every square centimeter of the planet, and then find all of the populace hidden in mines, basements, etc. I have always thought that planetary damage should never be allowed to kill the last 1-2 million to represent this little point... you need boots on the ground to do that messy work.

Another Alternative is that you could consider a planet "killed" from orbaital bombardment as destroyed from the empire perspective, but then allow 1-2 M of the original race as automatically being added to whoever colonized the planet next (rather than needing to kill them). Basically this could be one way to implement the "bombed back to the stone age" approach. You could also use this same approach for automatically getting "bonus" population upon establishing a colony for Native, pre-warp cultures which could be seeded to planets similar to ruins (basically ruins that give you population rather than tech).


Another interesting thing I'd like to see is options for burning off a planet's atmosphere. Could be used by attackers as another type of planet trashing raid style of attack against stronger / parity opponents, or could be used by defenders in a scorched earth move.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Or, what you could also do, make the first few M pop easier to kill, but as you depopulate the planet you'll need to do more and more damage to kill the same amount of population. The amount of damage you need to do is calculated using some sort of formula involving the size of the planet, the size of the original population, the size of the maximum population, one or two random or semi-random factors and perhaps a few other variables.

[123456789]

- experience lets you buy more Racial Points

- much stronger AI

- change the threshold of individual empires for declaring Mega Evil (empire A declares Mega Evil when empire C is at 200% of A's score, empire B declares Mega Evil when empire C is at 500% of their score.)

- Civilian ships. They would be autonomous, although you could order them around if you needed to. For example, the ships that handle the "trade" of resources between empires.

- "colonize" button for empty planets, which automagically orders the nearest appropriate colony ship to load up population and go colonize the planet.

- some kind of solution for the problem of colonizing planets that are too small to hold all the population in cargo on the colony ship.

- Remote mine inhabited planets.

[Atrocities]

123456789 said:
- experience lets you buy more Racial Points



Good idea, but not at all praticle.



- much stronger AI


You have my vote on this one.



- change the threshold of individual empires for declaring Mega Evil (empire A declares Mega Evil when empire C is at 200% of A's score, empire B declares Mega Evil when empire C is at 500% of their score.)



You can do this in the settings yourself. You can even disallow it entirely.



- Civilian ships. They would be autonomous, although you could order them around if you needed to. For example, the ships that handle the "trade" of resources between empires.



There is really no trade in the game. You can set up transport ships and have the Transport minister control them currently.



- "colonize" button for empty planets, which automagically orders the nearest appropriate colony ship to load up population and go colonize the planet.



You have that. But I think what your saying is to be able to click on the planet itself and say COLONIZE this world and have the nearest ship come. The game has this, but you have to locate the planet in the list then click colonize.



- some kind of solution for the problem of colonizing planets that are too small to hold all the population in cargo on the colony ship.




There is, its call atmospheric converters.



- Remote mine inhabited planets.


I can see why you might want this ability, have a planet full of research facilities and no room for min/rad/org mining facilities. It would be best if they were far less efficent then the facilities themselves.

[Renegade 13]

Welcome to the forums 123456789 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Atrocities said:

123456789 said:
[quote]

- some kind of solution for the problem of colonizing planets that are too small to hold all the population in cargo on the colony ship.




There is, its call atmospheric converters.




AT, that is after you colonize the planet. What he means (and what I would certainly like too) is that, say, the automatic Colonize order load takes 500M people off your homeworld of 1000M people, and then you colonize a moon..... and it can only hold 100. The remaining 400 (i.e. 40% of your entire population!) is simply gone. This is extremely irritating if you forget this. I fully concur with 123456789 on this one.

And welcome to the forums!

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

For SEVI -

Damage modifiers against Armor and other components. Double Damage To Armor for Acid Launchers for example.

Multiple damage types - Quarter Damage To Shields, Double Damage To Armor for example.

Larger/smaller modifier damage types. Ten Times Damage To Shields, Tenth Damage To Shields.

There was more but I forgot.

[Emperor's Child]

Thought of a few things that would be nice in the new game:

"Stacking" component mods: It would be nice to be able to split out different effects in component mods. Miniaturization, armor, size, fire rate, etc, are all modeled in several different mods as individual selections, but in each case a component can only have one component enhancement. If you want to model variants that blend two different technologies, under the current system you must create a specific component enhancement that does this. An example from Deathstalker's Mount Mod (DMM) would be combining the miniaturization modification with shield improvements (ie: hard or multiphasic). It would be less complex to allow several component enhancements to be in effect simultaneously.

Edit to correct DMM author.

[Captain Kwok]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Damage types blah blah...


Aaron has already said that you can create your own damage types in SE:V. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[douglas]

Moddable stacking rules. For each ability that could conceivably be stackable, allow the specification of stacking groups. Wherever stacking groups are defined, possibly in their own file, allow independent specification for each ability value if an ability has multiple values. Both highest-only and lowest-only should be options, as well as infinite stacking. Also, limits should be possible for both the number of distinct source that can stack and the minimum/maximum total value after stacking. Stacking groups should also have a list of other stacking groups that they stack with. Stacking groups may or may not be specific to particular abilities. Which stacking group to use would be specified along with all the other ability information in components.txt, facility.txt, etc., and would be separately specifiable for each ability the item uses.

[douglas]

Allow specifying an official policy for first contact other than shoot on sight. Battles shouldn't have to occur just because the combatants haven't had time to establish a treaty yet.

[TurinTurambar]

douglas said:
Allow specifying an official policy for first contact other than shoot on sight. Battles shouldn't have to occur just because the combatants haven't had time to establish a treaty yet.



Now THAT'S the best, most basic one I've heard in a long time. That makes a whole lot of sense. Maybe it could be tied to your Race-Type as a default but selectable for those who care to do something about it?

/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gifTurin/threads/images/Graemlins/icon42.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Scenarios &amp; Campaigns.

Scenario &amp; Campaign Editors.

[HP Delron]

I have read some interest in having "heros". This is somewhat simliar to that. Not sure if anyone has suggested this but...

"Personalities"

These would be important people that are noted to be on a planet/ship.They would provide bonuses/penalties to the planets/ships they are on.And them moving or them dying could have an effect on as much as the whole empire.
Here are some examples:

"Emperor": Reprsents the ruler of the empire. Generated on the home planet at the start of the game. Gives a massive bonus to the planet he is one something in the order of +50% to all things that can be increased. And a sizable bonus to he entire system +15%. However should the system he is in have any enemy presence in it, the whole empire takes a huge happiness hit. Should the planet he is on come under attack another huge happiness hit. Now of course the emporer would flee in that case the planet he is on is going to be overwhelmed and would appear randomly on another planet under your control (just to stop the whole emperor dying and somehow you are still playing the game problem).

"Mining Overseer (random name here)"
"Science Director (random name here)"
"Intelligence Head Coordinator (random name here"
and so in that manner

They would be created by different training facilties. They would provide bonuses to whatever area they are experts in. The training faclities would only be able to be used on planets with a large population to choose from. And it could take quite a few years just to find one someon exceptional enough to be qualifed to be one of these personalities.

The "Heros" of ships would too be personalties that could be moved around. They could provide combat bonuses to ships, training bounuses to planets etc. They'd have names like "Big Adimral Man (random name here)".

There are also lots of other ways a system like this could be used, from hostage taking to ruler changes etc..

[heimheim]

Because I am so lazy that I have no patience to read all 146 pages. So maybe there will be repeat wishes already included before me.

What about remove the warp point system? I think it strange with a galaxy filled with warp points. Instead, Warp engine components wll be needed to make a jump. Warp engine should has warp speed, so a jump also spend times depending on the distance and the engine. Ships could also move to the ajacent grid without a warp engine. So the galaxy map should be contineous.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Don't worry. Nobodies gonna re-read this unless their bonkers.

...By which I firmly conclude that I am *Entirely* sane.

[Ed Kolis]

For my latest suggestion, see this SE.net thread:
http://www.spaceempires.net/home/modules.php?name=Forums&amp;file=viewtopic&amp;p=4298#4298

edit: wow, is this thread really almost two and a half years old??? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

I posted the exact same thing here in this thread when these screenshots were still new.

Great minds think alike http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[thorfrog]

Rise of the Robots!

How about as you increase your computer science level you run the risk of having the AI revolt. A type of civil war condition. I'm thinking Cylon/Terminator kind of thing. It could be the kind of change that temporarly changes your empire bonuses for a time until the revolt is put down. Or it could be a full all out civil war until one side wins control.

[El_Phil]

Or just have one of your planets revolt to form a new empire?

Better maybe to link it into facilities, so a system robotoid factory increases the chances of such an event. After all you may research high level AI/Computers but never build them. On the other hand if you have vast armies of robots doing your manual labour they might rebel. Same, but far lower chance, for using master computers on ships.

But it would have to be an option, only a catastrophic level event say.

[JAFisher44]

Well, I dont know if it has already been suggested, and there is no way that I am going to read 146 pages to find out, but I think it would be cool if your planets orbited the sun. The planets could move each turn. This would be considerably easier now that the game will have a hex map for systems http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Something which I personally would like; to be able to determine the duration of Shields and BigExplosion animations. I know it's just eye candy, but perhaps for SEVI?

[Q]

Cost of facility upgrades should be based on the difference between the cost of the old and the new facility, not just the cost of the new facilty.

[Suicide Junkie]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Something which I personally would like; to be able to determine the duration of Shields and BigExplosion animations. I know it's just eye candy, but perhaps for SEVI?


In SE4, it lasts as long as the weapon animation does, which is quite sensible.

In Starfury, the shield animation was an arbitrary length, and you just needed to specify what the sequence of sprites should be. It repeated the whole cycle if nessesary (due to a long-cycle beam hitting, say)

[Colonel]

I dont know how exactly this would work but have weapons which attack specific types of weapons cutting threw armour and shields. So race A has weapons which target energy based weapons, you would be forced to use projectile weapons. I hate in the end of the game where Im stuck with have only a specfic group of weapons because all others are too weak.

[Suicide Junkie]

Colonel;
You need some mods!

http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE4/Mods/
Check out Pirates &amp; Nomads, or my new Carrier Battles mod (no AI for CBmod, but there is a "newbie" game open on PBW)
Devnull is also quite popular.

Or, if you don't want to have it be too different, you can pick up the SE3 mod I made (For SE4 gold). Something was lost in the translation from stock SE3 to SE4, and this puts it back. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

In general, most mods do a significant amount of weapon balancing.

---

PS:
For those who still think a realtime combat can't be controllable, check out the demo of the predecessor to the new Wierd Worlds game.
http://www.digital-eel.com/sais/files.htm

Space bar is the hotkey to toggle the pause.
It only has "play" and "fast forward", no slo-mo, and the weapons are quite different, but you should get the general idea.

[Colonel]

SJ, have most of the major mods, granted I need to update most of them due to new versions made in my absencse but even with mods I still end up chooseing one specific type of weapons never needed any other, nothing forces me to choose weaker or other weapons. I simply want something that forces you to have fleets each with different weapons to battle differnt enemies.

[Ed Kolis]

Hmm... that makes me think of Dominions, because in Dominions, you definitely need different types of units (or at least strategies) to defeat the different nations. For instance, to defeat Abysia, you will need a lot of fire resistance spells and items just to counteract their deadly radiant heat. In SE5, last I'd heard, we'll be able to make up our own damage types and resistance types, so you could for instance give the Eee different components than everyone else (to reflect the fact that they're energy beings) which are particularly vulnerable to shield depleters. Actually, this is already being done in a somewhat different way in SE4 by Fyron in the Adamant Mod; the Eee, being an energy race, will get components with half the normal hitpoints, but extra phased shield generation, so they literally will be vulnerable to shield depleters! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[Raapys]

One thing I would really like to see in SEV is some sort of 'galactic council', like in MoO3, but better and with more options. I think it really adds alot to the game to be able to vote on different sorts of rules, have all the council members isolate someone diplomaticly, go to war against someone, etc. Makes you feel less alone and the universe more alive.

[Ed Kolis]

One of the announced features is a new alliance system in which (if I understand it correctly) you can even have multiple rival galactic councils, much like NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
Of course, it's hard to say if that feature will actually be present when the game's released - if you followed SE4's development, you might have noticed that drones were planned to be in from the start http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Suicide Junkie]

Colonel said:
SJ, have most of the major mods, granted I need to update most of them due to new versions made in my absencse but even with mods I still end up chooseing one specific type of weapons never needed any other, nothing forces me to choose weaker or other weapons. I simply want something that forces you to have fleets each with different weapons to battle differnt enemies.


Well, its not so much for fighting different empires...
But in CBmod, a mixed fleet does far better in combat than a monolithic one against most/all enemies.

Any one race might be particularily vulnerable to a type of weapon due to their research path or culture, but you still need to mix in other weapons in order to maximize your effectiveness.

[Raapys]

Ed Kolis said:
One of the announced features is a new alliance system in which (if I understand it correctly) you can even have multiple rival galactic councils, much like NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif
Of course, it's hard to say if that feature will actually be present when the game's released - if you followed SE4's development, you might have noticed that drones were planned to be in from the start http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif



Still, that sounds terrific! I love the game already &lt;3

[Slick]

I hope it works well with game mechanics. It sounds like it might be difficult to implement:

- empires A, B &amp; C join an alliance
- empire A proposes to attack empire D
- empire B agrees, but empire C disagrees and offers a counter-proposal
- empire A &amp; B agree
- alliance moves fleets toward empire D
- meanwhile empire E has declared war on the alliance
- *sigh, politics... here we go again...*

each of these would take at least 1 turn during a multiplayer game (unless communication (via email or equivalent) outside the game is allowed)

[Kana]

Option to have user/modder assigned 'generic buttons' for the activation of stellar components, and any other component that needs manual activation. That way when modding components for SEV, we will have the option to flag a button to a specific component and effect...

Kana

[Q]

If the game setup of SE V is as complex as in SE IV (as I hope), a save option before you start the game would be very helpful.
Game setups take sometimes more than half an hour for me and then I start the game and realize that I forgot someting important: back to the beginning http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif
If you could save the setup it would be a matter of seconds to fix the problem instead of going through the entire process all over again. That would allow of course to save your favorite setups too.

[Renegade 13]

Hey Q, have you looked in the bottom right corner of this screenshot? http://www.malfador.com/SE5scr017.htm

[Ed Kolis]

Bottom right you mean? And I could have sworn I posted a link to one of those screenshots already... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Emperor's Child]

Another interesting thing I'd like to try in the game is some type of planet-to-planet wormhole / gate technology to move troops / cargo between planets.

There are a lot of sci fi themes that use this, but it is impossible to model in this game. It would be nice to have some way to accomplish this at least in the mods.

[Wolfman77]

Renegade 13 said:
Hey Q, have you looked in the bottom left corner of this screenshot? http://www.malfador.com/SE5scr017.htm



I see a button that says "starting Positions" as well. I wonder if we can change starting positions manualy before starting the game or if it just shows us where they are.

It would also be nice if we could add or remove warp lines right from the quadrant setup screen. It would be easier than saving the map and loading it in the map editor.

[Renegade 13]

Ed Kolis said:
Bottom right you mean? And I could have sworn I posted a link to one of those screenshots already... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif


Oops, yeah bottom right was what I meant. Thanks for pointing that out http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Q said:
If the game setup of SE V is as complex as in SE IV (as I hope), a save option before you start the game would be very helpful.
Game setups take sometimes more than half an hour for me and then I start the game and realize that I forgot someting important: back to the beginning http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif
If you could save the setup it would be a matter of seconds to fix the problem instead of going through the entire process all over again. That would allow of course to save your favorite setups too.


I've sometimes had to re-start several times.

[Q]

Renegade 13 said:
Hey Q, have you looked in the bottom right corner of this screenshot? http://www.malfador.com/SE5scr017.htm



That's great!

[LordFulgrymm]

Not sure if this one has been suggested, and its probably a bit late anyway, but here goes - debris fields forming after battles, that can be mined using robo-miners like asteroid fields.

It could be useful for finite resource games. Think about it; there's just been a few dozen dreadnoughts blown away in a sector. Thats potentially several thousand kT of resources, so why not let some of that be reclaimed? have the value of the field based upon a percentage of the total value of the destroyed ships.

OK, it may not immediately be worth it, but I have found that many battles take place in the same locations (same heavily contested planets or warp points) so the debris could potentially accumulate after each battle.

I guess this can bring in other ideas such as procuring technology from debris/derelicts etc...maybe a % chance to find an intact component in a debris field if you use the right type of equipment, say a salvage tug equipped with a space yard and some sort of scanner, but perhaps thats complicating things a bit.

Talking of derelicts: one thing thats always slightly annoyed me is if you can't afford the maintenance costs anymore, you lose a random ship or ships (crew scuttles the ship); firstly, why not set a priority system for which ships should be abandoned, and also set whether the ships are scuttled and destroyed, or should simply be abandoned but left intact in a stable orbit somewhere, for later retrieval and repair. Abandoned ships have no allegience, and all components would be inactive; all thats required is a boarding party to come back and reclaim the ship.

Of course, simply leaving the ship somewhere runs the risk that an enemy could easily capture it! I just think it would be nice to have the option; do you just blow it up and build another, or risk leaving it and try to reclaim it later? Could produce some interesting situations, racing to claim that hi-tech dreadnought that someone foolishly left floating in space...

[Kana]

LordFulgrymm said:
Not sure if this one has been suggested, and its probably a bit late anyway, but here goes - debris fields forming after battles, that can be mined using robo-miners like asteroid fields.

It could be useful for finite resource games. Think about it; there's just been a few dozen dreadnoughts blown away in a sector. Thats potentially several thousand kT of resources, so why not let some of that be reclaimed? have the value of the field based upon a percentage of the total value of the destroyed ships.

OK, it may not immediately be worth it, but I have found that many battles take place in the same locations (same heavily contested planets or warp points) so the debris could potentially accumulate after each battle.

I guess this can bring in other ideas such as procuring technology from debris/derelicts etc...maybe a % chance to find an intact component in a debris field if you use the right type of equipment, say a salvage tug equipped with a space yard and some sort of scanner, but perhaps thats complicating things a bit.

Talking of derelicts: one thing thats always slightly annoyed me is if you can't afford the maintenance costs anymore, you lose a random ship or ships (crew scuttles the ship); firstly, why not set a priority system for which ships should be abandoned, and also set whether the ships are scuttled and destroyed, or should simply be abandoned but left intact in a stable orbit somewhere, for later retrieval and repair. Abandoned ships have no allegience, and all components would be inactive; all thats required is a boarding party to come back and reclaim the ship.




Interesting idea...sort of like a reverse engineering ship capture thing...as for the abandon/scuttle issue due to resources...instead of destroying the entire ship, maybe some form of stepped effectivness system should be initiated. Like when you dont' have a bridge, LS, CQ, and your are restricted to 1 move, no attacks, that sort of thing, or maybe even damage random systems for each turn with out supplies/maintence...

Kana

[LordFulgrymm]

Kana said:

LordFulgrymm said:
Not sure if this one has been suggested, and its probably a bit late anyway, but here goes - debris fields forming after battles, that can be mined using robo-miners like asteroid fields.

Talking of derelicts: one thing thats always slightly annoyed me is if you can't afford the maintenance costs anymore, you lose a random ship or ships (crew scuttles the ship); firstly, why not set a priority system for which ships should be abandoned, and also set whether the ships are scuttled and destroyed, or should simply be abandoned but left intact in a stable orbit somewhere, for later retrieval and repair. Abandoned ships have no allegience, and all components would be inactive; all thats required is a boarding party to come back and reclaim the ship.




Interesting idea...sort of like a reverse engineering ship capture thing...as for the abandon/scuttle issue due to resources...instead of destroying the entire ship, maybe some form of stepped effectivness system should be initiated. Like when you dont' have a bridge, LS, CQ, and your are restricted to 1 move, no attacks, that sort of thing, or maybe even damage random systems for each turn with out supplies/maintence...

Kana



I certainly like the damaging idea better than the current system; maybe a combination of the above ideas, especially if crew becomes a resource - damage the ship until the crew (or you) decide to abandon the ship due to lack of life support, giving the choice to scuttle or leave the hulk for later reclaimation. Makes even more sense if crew is a resource because then you've gotta decide - save an experienced crew, or limp on in the hope you can reach a repair facility before the crew dies.

[Colonel]

I think if a colony ship runs out of supplies the population on it should die off because of lack of food

[cshank2]

How about being able to put different races as crew onboard a ship to gain specific advantages? Like say, a Terran ship would be good with weaponry or so, while an Eee crewed ship (although still under terran control) would have better shielding, or maybe mixed crews and give a nerfed version of the racial specials to the ship?

Also, maybe add infantry in stock games? Give them a better to-hit ratio due to their ability to get into smaller areas?

Oooo, since we have crews in the game, maybe an escape pod component? Say Ship A's crew has 13% Experience, their ship gets slagged, the crew escapes (or most of them do) and their pod acts like a fighter craft and can slowly shuffle back to a planet, whereon they act like cargo to be loaded on a ship built from that planet (Or possibly be moved to another one). Then when Ship B is built, the crew would have about 9% Experience (To simulate the loss of some crewmembers during combat/trip).

And I have a question, has it been stated whether or not the different races will have different facility models? (Thought that's a lot of strain on modellers and texture artists.)

Another suggestion on ships, basically is component placement has some strategic value, say Ship A has it's bridge in the middle deck, on top, bottom and around it are armor components, whereas Ship B has the bridge on the Top Decks and right at the front of the ship with no armor around it. Ship B fires at Ship A, Ship A's components in front of their port armor become destroyed along with the armor, leaving the bridge intact. (I always thought it was silly that armor HAD to be on the outside of ships. Seems more like a job for shields.). Ship A fires on Ship B, scoring a direct hit on their Starboard components and their bridge since it was unarmoured.


Those probably didn't make sense so please forgive me.



Oh, One last thing. Would it be possible for us mac users to get a version? (Right now I have my old dell set up just to play SE4) I'm sure it wouldn't hurt sales seeing as how Mac users are limited to Civilisation 3 and Moo3 in the way of 4x games. (Edit: I can't believe I spelt Sales as Sails...)

[LordFulgrymm]

cshank2 said:
How about being able to put different races as crew onboard a ship to gain specific advantages? Like say, a Terran ship would be good with weaponry or so, while an Eee crewed ship (although still under terran control) would have better shielding, or maybe mixed crews and give a nerfed version of the racial specials to the ship?



Interesting idea...might make things a bit comlpicated though...


cshank2 said:
Also, maybe add infantry in stock games? Give them a better to-hit ratio due to their ability to get into smaller areas?



Would be nice to have infantry and other types of units in ground combat; it certainly needs a major overhaul...there has been some lengthy and interesting discussions on ground combat earlier in the thread


cshank2 said:
Oooo, since we have crews in the game, maybe an escape pod component? Say Ship A's crew has 13% Experience, their ship gets slagged, the crew escapes (or most of them do) and their pod acts like a fighter craft and can slowly shuffle back to a planet, whereon they act like cargo to be loaded on a ship built from that planet (Or possibly be moved to another one). Then when Ship B is built, the crew would have about 9% Experience (To simulate the loss of some crewmembers during combat/trip).



Escape pod component...yeah, gets my vote. Not too sure about having to fly a craft back to a planet tho...might be better just to have an escaped crew automatically go back into some kind of crew pool.


cshank2 said:
And I have a question, has it been stated whether or not the different races will have different facility models? (Thought that's a lot of strain on modellers and texture artists.)



different race-&gt; different facility models...this would be good...could have a system where we have the generic pictures/models in one area, then under each race folder, a file which points to race-specific models/pictures which overrides the generic files...


cshank2 said:
Another suggestion on ships, basically is component placement has some strategic value, say Ship A has it's bridge in the middle deck, on top, bottom and around it are armor components, whereas Ship B has the bridge on the Top Decks and right at the front of the ship with no armor around it. Ship B fires at Ship A, Ship A's components in front of their port armor become destroyed along with the armor, leaving the bridge intact. (I always thought it was silly that armor HAD to be on the outside of ships. Seems more like a job for shields.). Ship A fires on Ship B, scoring a direct hit on their Starboard components and their bridge since it was unarmoured.



Again interesting idea...although I'm not sure if it would really be worthwhile; why would anyone put armour on the ship and not put all other components behind it? unless of course you introduce components that cannot be behind armour...

[cshank2]

LordFulgrymm said:
Again interesting idea...although I'm not sure if it would really be worthwhile; why would anyone put armour on the ship and not put all other components behind it? unless of course you introduce components that cannot be behind armour...



Basically for a couple of reasons, one, weapons can't fire behind armor (Unless, it was like a blast-door or something, but I'm talking massive plates.). Second, Sometimes you may want to armor certain components on a ship if you're pressed for space, IE Life Support, CQ and Bridge to keep the ship running. Or, of course, engines. On Cargo Transports you armor up the cargo bays.

[henk brouwer]

I was wondering if mines in seV will work the same way as they do in SEIV, since I kind of dislike the SEIV system. The problem is that it is kind of an all or nothing situation. When you have researched mines and your enemy hasn't you're kind of invincible. It's very cheap, and very easy to lay a minefield, and your enemy has no chance to get through untill he has researched mines and has built enough minesweepers to sweep one hundred mines (or more if the game settings are changed). After that point mines are completely useless, and you might as well not bother to build them.

A solution would be to make mines work differently:
The main defence against mines should not be minesweeping but mine avoidance. A player that wants to defend it's ships against mines could research a "mine detection" technology. when discovered a ship-component would become available that gives ships a 70% (or some other percentage) chance to escape from a minefield unharmed.

When a fleet consisting of ships equiped with these components would enter a minefield, each ship would have a 30% change to be hit by the mines, which would most probably mean the ship would be completely dead. 70 percent of the fleet would survive, which would make the mines less of an all or nothing weapon. This would also mean we could abandon the silly limit of a hundred mines per sector which we have in SEIV.

Ofcourse research in mines would lead to components which makes mines more effective, and gives them a to hit bonus, this would lead to a research arms race between mine avoidance on one side, and more effective mines on the other side. Also designing mines would be a bit more interesting, you would have to choose wether you put in that extra warhead for maximum damage, or that new sensor that gives your mines a larger chance to hit.

Ofcourse normal minesweepers would also be available, but they should probably be less reliable, and more suited for sweeping minefields around planets or warp points that have already been taken from the enemy.

What do you think?

[cshank2]

I wouldn't go that far, but maybe something like, weaponry without special mounts (Normal DUC's, AP beams, etc) can sweep some mines.

[Ed Kolis]

A couple more wishes for me:
1. Make it work on WINE!!!! I don't wanna go back to windows! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif
2. Little nitpick: could you rename "weapons platforms", since a) they share an abbreviation with "warp points", confusing everyone, and b) they can be used for more than weapons (armor, combat sensors, ???)
3. Add an option to require ships to travel to the proper lagrange point or whatever to open a warp point (in other words, if you want to open a warp point to a system to the right on the map, you have to travel to the right side of the system to do it).

[cshank2]

Along with Ed's suggestion with WINE, I will reiterate once again, make it work on Mac OS X! (pretty please? I'll give you my first born.)

[El_Phil]

Hmm, but is that a good trade? I'd want the option to have your second or third born if the look better value. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Kana]

Ed Kolis said:
2. Little nitpick: could you rename "weapons platforms", since a) they share an abbreviation with "warp points", confusing everyone, and b) they can be used for more than weapons (armor, combat sensors, ???)




I vote for the great name of 'Ground Bases'
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Kana

[Colonel]

Kana said:

Ed Kolis said:
2. Little nitpick: could you rename "weapons platforms", since a) they share an abbreviation with "warp points", confusing everyone, and b) they can be used for more than weapons (armor, combat sensors, ???)




I vote for the great name of 'Ground Bases'
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

Kana



Why not just call them Defense Platforms

anyways, this is especially needed in Infantry or crews are included in the core game, Troops, ships, anything that would require a person to operate can be effected by Biological\Chemical Weapons.

Just as an example, Base A gets attacked with a missle carrying the Plague level 3, owner of Base A doesnt have a cure so the crew dies off but the base is still infected allowing for Race B to come threw and take or destory easily Base A, in addition if race A had changed the crew out, all crews or ships troops etc that come in contact with crew from Base A will be infected aswell. So hitting one base could potential destroy the entire race if the person was careless.

Of cource something like this would take at least a year or so, so the chance to save everyone by researching the right tech would be available.

[Ed Kolis]

I've probably mentioned this several times before, but what about randomized tech trees? Each tech could have in addition to a base level of each of its prerequisites a maximum positive variance (which determines how much the prerequisite level can vary) and a probability of occurrence. So if Phased Polaron Beams required level 5 physics with a 2-level variance and a 80% probability then they could appear anywhere from level 3 to level 7 of physics, or they could simply not appear one out of five times. Additionally, you could have a game option which sets whether each race gets their own uniquely randomized tech tree (balanced of course in some fashion so one race doesn't get all the fancy techs early and another never gets anything http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) or if all races in the game get the same tech tree. Imagine what that could do to tech trading, assuming (unlike MOO3 which implemented a similar system) that each race does not know without using intel what another race's tech tree looks like! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

[Kana]

Colonel said:
Why not just call them Defense Platforms




To me 'platforms' just sound like something in space...or the air...And Ground Bases could be used for other things, not just offense and defense...

As for the Random Tech...a nice interesting idea...I don't really thing that tech research should be directly linear...sometimes you get a brainstorm or luck, and you get something early, or get bogged down with problems and setbacks...and get research later...

Kana

[LordFulgrymm]

Random Tech is probably a good thing...anyway, just a few more random thoughts which may (or may not!) be nice to see included in the game:

(1)
Paying "research maintenence" i.e. a percentage of research points need to be expended just to keep your current level of technology (representing training/teaching); otherwise you will start losing tech levels (might be more appropriate to rename research to knowledge or something in this case)...that way you can bomb someone back to the stoneage. Also means you still need some research even when you reach the end of the tech tree.

(2)
Have a "facility prerequisite" on components (or even other facilities), so you can have factory facilities that "build" components (at least in abstact terms) - for example, you want to build that quantum engine do you? well, have you got a quantum engine factory in your empire? No factory, no engines. Could extend it so more advanced weapons/components need more infrastucture present, so lets say, basic DUC doesn't need a factory, APB 1 needs a single level 1 weapons factory, APB 2 needs a single level 2 weapons factory, PPB 3 needs 2 level 3 weapons factories, WMG needs 5 factories at level 10, etc (these are just arbitrary numbers BTW). Extending it to facilities, could have something like "uber research centre" which requires the existence of, say, 10 basic research centres before it can be built...

entries in the components text files would look something like this:
Types of Facilities Req := 1
Number of Facility Req 1 :=5
Facility Name Req 1 := Weapons Factory
Facility Tech Level Req 1 := 10
Facility Location Req 1 := Empire ; can be Sector,System or Empire

so this tells us we need 5 Weapons Factories at level 10, located anywhere in the empire, for us to be able to build this component

(3)
This is an alternative to (2)...could have it so the presence of the appropriate factory in the empire simply gives a small discount when building that component; having no relevant factory just means it costs more to build (hand built prototypes or whatever..no mass production). Could have it so the bonus kicks in only if the required level and number of factories are present in the empire.

Could use the same format as the previous example, just add the following lines:
Facility Effect Req 1 := Bonus ;can be Enable or Bonus
Facility Bonus Req 1: 50

enable tells us if the component is "enabled" by the facility (i.e. can't be built without its existence), otherwise bonus tells us the percentage reduction in cost when building that component

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Great ideas..... however, if it's not implemented already, there's little chance that it'll ever be in the first release, seeing as to the fact that it's already in such an advanced stage. Really good suggestions, though.

[Spacenoob]

Tach =)

okay some idea from me about sensors:

how about to make sensor have like 3 diffrent ranges.

1. long to very long range: You see there is something, just a ping )
2. short to long rang: You see the strengh from then ping (ships, typ) but cant see more
3. short range: You see detailed informations from ship, race , etc.

with tec-tree you can research diffrent sensors like very long range senors but they are bad at close range, or good short range sensors with very close long range...

dont know if someone has this idea earlyer in this threat (too much for me to read =) )

[Seik]

Hi,

without reading the whole thread just my two cents:

1. Improved Mini-Map
for a better strategical overview I would like to see
- the systems colored (red = enemy units present, yellow = neutral units, etc.)
- "picture" (remember) the systems from last visit (planets, units, etc.)

2. Make planetary weapons useful
In SE4 planetary weapons were rarely used ...
- increase the needed damage to kill population by 10x
- increase (only) planetary weapons damage by 10x


Best regards
Seik

[Arkcon]

Stellar muanipulation is SE4 sometimes causes other distant obects to disappear without explanation. One hopes this bug gets squashed firmly in SE5.

[Q]

Speaking of stellar manipulation: one component I always wanted already in SE IV is the "genesis generator".
I first destroys every object in the system with the exception of warp points but then recreates a random standard solar system.
And make the "only one sun per system" restriction for star creation moddable. I like to have multiple sphereworlds in a system!

[Colonel]

Q said:
Speaking of stellar manipulation: one component I always wanted already in SE IV is the "genesis generator".
I first destroys every object in the system with the exception of warp points but then recreates a random standard solar system.
And make the "only one sun per system" restriction for star creation moddable. I like to have multiple sphereworlds in a system!



This gives me an idea, why not have some that cost unbelieveable amounts of material which can create a whole new system. So you bring a ship with the component on it to a system it creates a new warp point and a whole new system on the other end. of cource it would be a random system so it might wind up being a nebula, or black hole, but it could also create a perfect 9 or 10 planet system.

[AMF]

Zoomable strategic and local maps...they get real crowded...and my eyes will eventually go...and when I'm 80 I still want to be able to play...so maps that are zoomable will help me do that...

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

[henk brouwer]

Q said:
Speaking of stellar manipulation: one component I always wanted already in SE IV is the "genesis generator".
I first destroys every object in the system with the exception of warp points but then recreates a random standard solar system.
And make the "only one sun per system" restriction for star creation moddable. I like to have multiple sphereworlds in a system!



Great idea, I would definitely like to see this. Maybe it should only work in systems without stars though, we already have plenty of weapons of massive (stellar) destruction in the stellar manipulation techtree in SeIV, and somehow this component sounds more like something that should create stuff, not destroy entire civilisations. but it's a very nice idea!

And a suggestion of my own: (not really a new idea)
I saw in the new SEV screenshots that the race portraits have gotten a major upgrade from seIV, They look absolutely stunning compared to the weird "floating-heads-with-huge-eyeballs" aliens of SEIV. The new race pictures definitely help give the races some more character. What I'm hoping is that the speech files for the different races get simillar attention, SEIV shipped with just one speechfile that was used for all the races (mineral planets are the best!). I know from personal experience that writing a good speechfile takes a lot of time, (I did the united flora ages ago) but it really helps in giving the different races more character, you could really start hating the arrogant jraenar, and feel sorry for the friendly but naive EEE. I know this could also be done by the modding community after the game is released, but I think it would be a good selling point for the game if the races in the game are really different from eachother, it makes the universe seem that much more alive and exciting.

[Q]

And make speech have an effect on the mood of AI empires!

In SE IV you can send whatever insulting messages you want to an AI empire without effect. Of course I realize that you cannot really ask for the AI to analyze the message itself, but if you only had some major categories of general messages like

- pleading
- insulting
- threatening
- friendly

and some more and specify for each AI the reaction to it, you might add some more flavour to the game.
I think this was already planned for SE IV with the "message tone" but as far as I know this has no effect at all.

[Q]

According to the screen shots this might already been implemented:

- keep the race culture as it is in SE IV: a modifier that you select at the game setup and will remain. You still can edit the culture.txt file during the game if you want as I do for the AI. I use this instead of the AI bonus.
- the new government type: a modifier that you choose at the game setup, but every player can change it during the game as he wants! If your production is critically low you might change to a government type that gives you here a bonus (but has disadvantages in other fields). Later you might switch to a government type that gives you a better bonus in combat but has lower production bonus.

[Ed Kolis]

I couldn't tell from the video, but do weapons have firing arcs? If not (they were a pain to mod in Starfury), here's a simple way of doing it:

1. The arc WIDTH is determined by a parameter on the weapon's data entry, e.g.
Weapon Firing Arc Width := 90
2. The arc POSITION is calculated by converting the XY position of center of the slot where the weapon is mounted to polar coordinates.

edit: and maybe the arcs could be affected by mounts?
Spinal Mount: set to 0
Turret Mount: set to 360
Heavy Mount: decrease by 25%
Gatling Mount: increase by 45 degrees

[Zaamon]

Ed Kolis. What if you want to place weapons shooting ahead to sides?

[Ed Kolis]

Ahead to sides? As in an arc facing from straight forward to straight east? Then place the weapon in the northeast corner of the ship! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
edit: oh, yeah, now I understand http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif
Well that would really depend on the hull configuration, so maybe it would be better to have the arc direction determined by the slot's data entry in the ship design... problem is, since in SE5 there are no "weapon" specific slots you'd need to define a firing arc for every slot in the hull! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif
Maybe weapons should be limited to outer hull, though... that might narrow it down a bit...

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

You mean firing arcs from 315 degrees to 135 degrees? (right-firing)


Q said:
I like to have multiple sphereworlds in a system!



Then find a binary or trinary star system and build to your heart's content. (or, until you get bored again and go off to pester Picard http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif )

[Kana]

Heck why limit arcs to just weapons...you could have shield, sensor, arcs to name a few...

Kana

[Q]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
You mean firing arcs from 315 degrees to 135 degrees? (right-firing)


Q said:
I like to have multiple sphereworlds in a system!



Then find a binary or trinary star system and build to your heart's content. (or, until you get bored again and go off to pester Picard http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif )



Oh I already built 5 sphereworlds in a system! But I never can get enough! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
Regarding the arcs of weapons: can anybody answer the question (from the video/without violation the NDA) if it matters if you put a weapon in the front/rear or on the side of a ship at all? From the screen shots I had the impression, that this was not the case (in contrast to starfury). Then of course all discussions about arcs would be futile.

[Slick]

I'd like to expand Q's question to include all components. The reason is in Starfury, internal component placement did matter. Once Shields/Armor on a side were gone, components placed near that side were taken out first. This makes component placement a little bit of a game in itself. An identically equipped (but not identically configured) ship in SF could be inferior to another if its internal components were placed adjacent to less shielded sides. (The components in question would be those which go in the general area and are directionless like Bridge, ECM, etc.)

While this idea may/may not have been intended for SF, I kinda like it for SF; makes ship design fun. BUT I personally don't think that should be part of SE:V.

[Ed Kolis]

I think that if there's an opaque storm, then you shouldn't be able to see OUT of it or THROUGH it as well, not just INTO it! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[El_Phil]

Ahh but what if your on the edge of an opaque storm, so you signal gets lost in the general rubbish?

Hence explaining why storms are only opaque to a certain level of scanner/sensor.

[Seik]

Another idea:

Strategies
Sometimes the range for a strategy is not exactly what you want, why not give it a min and max range (ex. MinRange="4" to MaxRange="6") instead?!

[Q]

More display options for the galaxy map like:
- show systems with more than X enemy ships.
- systems with facility Y present.
- systems with colonies of empire Z (you don't see that in SE IV when more than one empire is present in a system).
- systems with new enemy colonies since last turn.

[Atrocities]

#2, systems with facility Y presents is already part of SEIV at the system level. Is that what you mean?

The rest are good suggestions, they are all good suggestions.

[Arkcon]

Consider adding an expensive intelligence project that allows a race to intercept and receive the communication between two races.

That might seem unbalanceing on the face of it-- so you might have the result just be a fragment of the message, 30 % of the text, or every 4 th word or something. Perhaps a delay between interception and display, to allow for encryption time. This would be pointless against the AI, but it would be interesting in human games.

This sort of thing has happened in the historical wars here on Earth, so it might add interesting dimension to SE4 warfare -- giving away fleet movements, attack plans, etc.

[Ed Kolis]

SE4 already has such an intel project, and it's minimally useful as players can communicate outside of the game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[Q]

Atrocities said:
#2, systems with facility Y presents is already part of SEIV at the system level. Is that what you mean?

The rest are good suggestions, they are all good suggestions.



I was talking about the quadrant map: I know the display options for facilities in the system map, but I would like to see on the quadrant map which of my systems have e.g. a system robotoid facility or a system gravitational shield. If possible even a differentiation of systems with completed facilities and facilities under contruction.
You would select the facility you want to show and the quadrant map marks the systems with it as "*" if completed or "x" if under contruction (just an example).
In small quadrants this may not be very important but with 250 systems I missed it more than once in SE IV. And if you can have even more/unlimited number of systems in SE V.....

[Arkcon]

Ed Kolis said:
"SE4 already has such an intel project,"

Really? It gives the content of the message as well? As in, "I will invade Kartogia IX while you attack the other side of the warp point to Urteka"? I never knew that. I've been playing so long without intel, I don't even remember ...

"and it's minimally useful as players can communicate outside of the game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif"

Well, yeah. That does ruin the plan completely. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif But maybe vs the AI, if they can give more complicated mssages, it could come in handy.

[Slick]

SE:V atmosphere converters should show how much longer until atmosphere is converted. Other Planetary Engineering facilities should also show projected results.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

What I would like to see is a "success chance" of colonizing a planet. Colonizing a planet is not just a matter of dispatching a ship and disassembling it; for example, the ship can crash, killing everybody inside, or it might be damaged upon landing, meaning that there is fewer initial populatio etc. Colonizing is risky business.

Also, I would like to see more types of random events that would specifically occur in newly built colonies, such as attacks by natives, accidents happening during construction of prefab homes, etc. Once a colony ship has successfully started a colony, it has not immediately secured its existence, and a lot of things can go wrong when the colony is newly established. Like I said, colonizing is a risky business.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Could remove the strategic element.

[OrionsBane]

Im sure somone has posted ideias like mine before but here they are anyway.

My first "wish" is for an advanced ground combat mode.
i would like weapon arcs
the ability to mount components on the troops like you do on ships.
tactiacal movement and random obstacles.
an "objective building" or Facility which when captured can either end combat or must be destroyed to capture the planet. (mabye a drpoship for the attacker and a base for the defender).
This is further explained in my next wish, but i would like to see facility's

My next "wish" would be that each planet has a "area or space" probably represented by a hexgrid or something.
this would be where cargo, population and facilitys could be built/stored and could be used a template in ground combat.
this would resolve the isue of max facility on domed planets. ex you would have to create a dome for population and the facilitys could only be built adjacent to it.
cargo and population could be stored in empty spaces next to a facility or city/population center and you could create a unique planet each time you colonize. with "cities" or "domed population centers", and facilitys which take up available space represented by hexes:)
i think you could make a spaceyard or major facility take up more space and therefore you (depending on planet size ) could have more then one sy but the space used would cost you some cargo or facilitys in the long run.
also population would be used bya the facilitys creating a supply and demand on domed worlds.
i have lots of idieas on this but i think this covers the basic ideia.

Another "wish" is that (and i know this was posted earlyer)
we have supply routes made up or uncontrolled netural or private ships which can be attacked by enimy empires.
ithink it would be annoying if we saw them move every turn so they should just be visible if your looking for them( mabye an optin to show/ not show trade ships) and i think combat should only occur when you have a ship defending them. i also think having them war is too much trouble for coding and such so they should just go from planet to spaceport and such.

i suppourt the unlimited research idiea and any improvement there like "and or techs" and such.

and finally i would like to thank Aaron for the oporutunity to post my idiea's and personally i think you should take more time in producing this game and make it so good we wont want to modify it much anyway. (im bias because downloading mods for se5 will be a major pain at 56k) and if he dose want to get this game on the market i hope he will consider all the idies he left out when it goes gold.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

@Narf: What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean that in a positive or negative way?

@Orion:

Wish 1 is mostly granted. There are weapon arcs, there is tactical ground combat. I don't know exactly what you mean by "tactical movement and random obstacles", but in case you mean on a planet, like I said there is tactical ground combat, if you mean in space, well, the combat area is the entire system map instead of a single sector, so you can pull reinforcements in from an adjacent fleet I guess. I don't know about any "random obstacles".

Wish 2, well, it seems that there is a hex grid map of a planet's surface on which tactical ground combat is fought, and facilities do take up space there, but I don't know if you can control this. So, wish 2 is granted.

Wish 3 will not be implemented. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[El_Phil]

For the random colonising success it would make strategy, and all connected threads, that much more random. This could be good or bad depending on how you like your games.

For instance a big scrap over an important system could be meaningless if you can't colonise a planet as your ship fails. So you send two, three ships just to ensure it works and then the first works and you have two out of position colonisers with no nearby planets to colonise. So that hits you initial expansion and you rist falling behind.

So it expands the strategic options, but by introducing uncontrolable and unpredictable factors. Some will like it, some will hate the idea.