Things we'd like to see in the next patch

[DavidG]

How about this one:
(perhaps more of an SE V possibility)

The ability to upgrade a ship that contains componets you can't build yourself. Then you could for example buy an organically armoured vessel from your allie and then just put your own weapons engines etc. on it. Could make for an interesting game with lots of trading going on as races trade their unique techs.

[jimbob]

Terran: Brilliant thought about the transfer of skilled crews. Instead of limiting the number of times a crew could be transfered, or on the basis of their skill level, what if you assign a specific # of crew needed per ship mass (this is clumsily represented by the number of crew quarters needed).
Then, if you wish to do a transfer, you would select how many crew members would be transfered between the ships. The new skill level of each ship would then be recalculated.
You could therefore load up a planet sized ship with a veteran crew from a scout, but their skill level would be diluted out by the new recruits who make up the majority of the crew. Likewise you could split up a veteran crew from a huge vessel between many smaller ships and bring up their skill levels considerably.
Some people may even start overcrewing their ships so that as the ship gains experience, it can be slowly bled of officers who can now command new ships.

DavidG: I think this would be best accomplished through plug-N-play components. Just buy and trade the individual components from others. If you capture a ship with interesting plug-N-play components, disassemble for it's components instead of analysing it for the technology.

That's just my 2 peso's.

[ September 06, 2002, 01:06: Message edited by: jimbob ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Keeping track of 'crews' is a bit difficult since a 'crew' is actually a composite of hundreds or possibly thousands of people/creatures. And the number of crew required for each given size/class of ship is going to be different, not to mention differences caused by changes of the equipment in use. An 'experienced' crew of a missile ship is not going to be nearly so competent if you transfer them to a carrier. How do you track the 'type' of training that the crew has? And anyway, the AI cannot use the current system. How will it handle a more complex system?

I think that what is required is some sort of 'pool' of crew experience based on the number of ships in you have in service and how long they are in service. A sort of 'accumulated hours of operation' measurement, averaged over the number of ships you have. As this pool grows larger relative to fleet size, the default experience of your ships can increase because you can assume a better general level of training in your 'armed forces'. But ships getting destroyed in combat means dead crew, so you should also suffer losses from your pool due to combat losses. Ship and fleet training facilities will still have a use, but they should just add to the 'experience pool' and all ships just rely on the global 'average' experience/training level. This would be much more usable by the AI then the current system.

Ships should still gain experience individually for success in combat, but this system would tend to 'even out' the difference between ships and make your fleet have a similar level of effectiveness. I suppose some people will not like this feature of the system. But isn't that how it works in real life? Do navies in our world generally have radically different levels of crew competence among their ships? If you still want to have 'elite' units than maybe you should be able to give some ships a special designation as 'elite' and pay extra maintenance costs for their extra training so they can be above the fleet average. The AI could also deal with this more easily than having to park ships over a given planet until they are trained.

[ September 06, 2002, 02:49: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Zanthis]

I really like the crew xp ideas floating around. I'd like to add that I personally feel crew should be treated as a resource. You just cannot instantly train the crew for 10 baseships every month. Combined with Baron Munchausen's global crew experience system, you could do something like:

You have X crew in your empire. You have Y experience evenly divided among them. Each crew quarter carries 1 (moddable) crew. Whenever a ship dies, your total experience becomes Y/X*(X-n) where n is the number of crew that ship carried. You total crew in the empire obviously becomes X-n.

Training facilities add crew every year. The base experience of these new crew members varies based on the level of the facility. Lower ones add 0 xp crew to your empire, reducing the overall experience. You could also have the ability to draft crew, which requires no facilities but the drafted crew have negative experience and therefor more strongly reduce the overall experience of your fleet.

Further, you could still track individual ship experience. Say the system worked just like now. Only every year, each ship has its experience "harvested" out of it to add to the empire pool. So any given ship's actual combat ability would be determined by Empire Experience per Ship plus the ship's own Experience. Losing ships before their earned xp could be harvested out could obviously be rough.

[capnq]

In Tactical Combat, I'd like to be able to set individual ships on auto, rather than it being all or none the way it is now.

[Baron Munchausen]

I've wanted to have auto-movement and auto-fire as seperate options, like they were in SE III. Still ask once in a while. You never know when MM might actually do something. I asked for the hotkeys to disable or enable all weapons at once for months before he finally did that.

Being able to individually tag ships as AI controlled is an interesting idea. I'll add that to my list.

[Q]

This would be probably for SE V not for a patch but anyway:
1.) The possibility to give a weapon one or several families of component/facilities as target. You could then expand dramatically the special weapons you have now, e.g. a weapon that destroys only allegiance subverters or religious talisman.
2.) For every weapon a line of the shield level they can skip: 0 = no shield skipping; 1 = skips shield level 1 and so on.
3.) Introduce shield levels: you could create a almost never ending race of research for higher shield levels and weapons that can defeat them.