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So Ed, this means that ships will have two speeds, one for travel within a system, and one for between systems? And if so, with both speeds be the product of a single all-purpose engine, or are there separate engines for each type of movement?

As to DW, I've been having an issue with AI automation. Even when I tell the AI to take care of negotiations, gifts, and treaties (Or however that option was termed), I am still forced to deal with every message sent my empire's way. Am I misreading that option, or is there something else I am missing? I've been trying to role-play as my empire's most advanced cruiser, but a foreign message every 10 minutes is really breaking the immersion!

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Yes, unfortunately, the diplomacy is the only part of the automation that isn't fully automated, lol. I really like the feel of the game though and they are majorly responsive to the community, kicking out extra things and bugfixes in patches pretty quick. Reminds me a lot of Stardock actually.

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Yes, ships will have more than one speed attribute:

1. Jump speed - used for interstellar travel. Restricted to jump lanes (think warp points that take time to traverse; ships cannot be intercepted or commanded while jumping).

2. Acceleration - used for in-system travel, and (slow) interstellar travel apart from jump lanes. Movement will be newtonian (no fuel cost to coast, no speed limits, takes time and fuel to slow down).

We haven't quite worked out the combat mechanics yet, but combat will either use the newtonian mechanics from in-system travel, OR it will use a combination of that and a "maneuverability" system. Depends on whether we have tactical combat or not (tactical combat in multiplayer is looking rather unfeasible, but in single player it would be doable, just not a top priority at the moment), as well as how the newtonian mechanics work out in practice!

The way this maneuverability system would work is, combat would be turn-based, and fleets would be stuck on little "plates" - regions of space that they're confined to, with the size determined by their acceleration attribute. Each round of combat, the plates would shift in space based on their current strategic speed, acceleration, and orders from the previous game turn ("pursue other fleet" or "maintain course to Rigel" or whatever). Then the ships in turn could maneuver on the fleet-plates in a non-newtonian fashion (e.g. "move 3 km forward" or whatever); each ship would be confined to its fleet-plate, though, to avoid breaking the strategic movement calculations. Then ships would fire weapons if possible, and you go back to the plate-shifting phase, until the fleets are out of weapons range or all but one side is wiped out.

It would be interesting in this system, actually, if capital ships had little or even zero maneuverability, while fighters could zip around like crazy... would put more emphasis on the fleet formations and strategies, since you couldn't tweak those to any significant degree in combat if the maneuverability was so poor!

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With jump drives and maneuver drives being separate, does this mean we can finally have a distinction between "jump ships" and "system ships"? That's a major point of tactical ship design that we've never had in the SE series. By making the jump drive large and expensive, you can give a decent advantage to the defensive side because system-only ships will be inherently cheaper. And carriers for larger ships than fighters will make a lot of sense.

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Yes, that's the plan :) As a matter of fact, we were discussing docking at yesterday's meeting... seems like we came to the conclusion that without "sectors" in the game, the easiest way to implement repair in a fair manner is to require the ship being repaired to dock at the repair ship, or vice versa!

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Ed, that makes sense. A question though: Would repairing a ship take resources or would it basically be dock + time = done? What I mean is would your repair ship need to construct components with resources and then repair the ship? What type of model is being used for this?

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We were discussing that issue too, and it seems the consensus is, since we're going to use the "build an empty/broken hull, and fill/fix the components" model (like SE3), it would make sense for repairs, like construction, to use resources, since the two are basically identical.

I know SE3 didn't do it QUITE like that - you paid the entire cost for the hull and all associated components up front, rather than just paying for stuff as it gets built, while repairs were free - but this way seems more consistent :)

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Hmm, so is having the resources modeled? What I mean is would the repair ship physically have to pick up the resources and carry them to the damaged ship or site to build a new whatever and build components from resources in-ship?

It would probably be easier to abstract that to just -resources from your Empires total but it is cool to actually model it.

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I don't know, astorax, that sounds a bit like micromanagement hell to me.

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No, that part would be automatic. It would require, however, that there be all available resources needed on the world to begin with.

Meh.

It would probably be easier just to abstract it all, I suppose.