Help needed with scripting supply ships

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Vezzra
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#31 Post by Vezzra »

MatGB wrote:Of course, it's fairly apparent that both nascent and adaptive are a little overpowered anyway, so gating them to give a max of the planet population or 2/5 might work and then remove this propblem as well (could gate adaptive to be twice population if we wanted).
That defeats the whole idea of flat boni IMO. And considering the emerging consensus regarding the calculation of the future influence costs of colonies we are going to need more and more powerful (in late game) of these.
(I haven't contributed much to this discussion, but I'm very much with Geoff on the micromanagement concerns here: if it's an advantage to send a supply ship with an outpost then it's a disadvantage to not do so, which is close to the definition of micromanagement: I can see the appeal for some players to want this sort of feature, different people want to play the game in different ways, but I'm not sold this is a balanced non-micro addition)
As long as you make transferring PP that way sufficiently expensive, that problem can be mitigated I guess. Then you only would use that method if you desperately need to supply a disconnected part of your empire with PP, or if you want to stage a very sophisticated (and costly) incursion into enemy territory. But it wouldn't pay for the everyday colonization use.

Colony ships just need to be cheaper than outpost ship + supply ship, that's all.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#32 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I'd be more inclined to add a ship part that lets a ship transfer up to some amount of PP per turn from one supply group to another, which does not consume the ship, or which can generate PP indefinitely (though which will be a bit tricky to balance). These should be less micromanagement-prone than a one-shot injection of PP from a ship which would then be destroyed or require refilling at a different location...

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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#33 Post by Ophiuchus »

Geoff the Medio wrote:I'd be more inclined to add a ship part that lets a ship transfer up to some amount of PP per turn from one supply group to another, which does not consume the ship, or which can generate PP indefinitely (though which will be a bit tricky to balance). These should be less micromanagement-prone than a one-shot injection of PP from a ship which would then be destroyed or require refilling at a different location...
* I definitly agree that refilling an empty supply ship (send it back to origin, refill, send it back to target) would add a lot of micromanagement. I made the ships one-time use because I wanted to prevent that.

* The supply group transfer could be emulated with supply ships, though i agree the interface is klunky
** need to have an auto-unload beacon at the target system in the target supply group
** need to somewhere build supply ships
** set the supply ship production to be recurring
** set the supply ship production to rally the ship to the target system

Maybe the following blueprint for supply-group-transfer would work:
* 'Entangled Nonlocality Teleporter'
* When produced, two ships are created, a sender and a receiver. If both are in your own empire and not supply connected, they transfer PP from the sending ship's supply group to the receiving ship's supply group.
* You can set one of those Focus: 5 PP transfer, 50 PP transfer, 500 PP transfer, which would transfer PP up to minimum of 5/50/500 and the PP available in sending supply group .
* Fluff: By using quantum entanglement, a gateway for energy manipulation can be created. Together with uncertainty correction, this can be used to reconstruct a transformed object at the receiving site. Correction is less than perfect and can only be used for objects with a low complexity (aka PP). Experiments to transfer more complex forms like ship parts or life-forms yield only distorted, unusable objects.


* Pondering the idea of the supply-group-transfer ships in difference to supply ships
** they are less realistic (I know this is is not a design goal), but they are maybe less intuitive
** they can't be stopped by military ships in the way between the source and the target after the connection is established (but maybe that is less micro management and the gain in drama is not high)
** supply ships can be used to store PP for later use

Supply ships and Supply-group-transfer ships both do not address the issue of how many PP should be transferred to production per round in a great way. As much as necessary, but no more? This probably impossible to script.
Would it be possible and beneficial to program something like PP use-on-demand? If yes, such a feature could also be nicely combined with automatically storing excess PP.
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em3
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#34 Post by em3 »

Ophiuchus wrote:Maybe the following blueprint for supply-group-transfer would work:
* 'Entangled Nonlocality Teleporter'
* When produced, two ships are created, a sender and a receiver. If both are in your own empire and not supply connected, they transfer PP from the sending ship's supply group to the receiving ship's supply group.
Alternatively, stargates could be used to connect distinct supply groups with a ship-based "mini stargate" that could not be used to transfer military ships, but would be good enough for freighters (thus connecting the local supply group to the stargate-based supply network).
https://github.com/mmoderau
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#35 Post by defaultuser »

Geoff the Medio wrote:I'd be more inclined to add a ship part that lets a ship transfer up to some amount of PP per turn from one supply group to another, which does not consume the ship, or which can generate PP indefinitely (though which will be a bit tricky to balance). These should be less micromanagement-prone than a one-shot injection of PP from a ship which would then be destroyed or require refilling at a different location...
Easier, but kind of strains the "reality" of the effort. What kind of supply ship dispenses a set amount of supplies in perpetuity? If you go that direction, why not get rid of the ship and create a new building, like the "Supply Line Tap" that "bores a small sub-space channel that can transport limited supplies from the main lines" or sumpin.

Personally I don't think there's much wrong with having supply ships that have to shuttle back and forth. That's pretty standard in a lot of games. I don't even know how often this mechanism would be used. Usually separated areas aren't that far apart, and if moving ships between them is feasible then figuring out how to "glue" the area to the main lines is the main focus. This would most likely be a temporary measure, and if you have to have a bit of management in the meantime, so be it.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#36 Post by Geoff the Medio »

defaultuser wrote:...why not get rid of the ship and create a new building, like the "Supply Line Tap" that "bores a small sub-space channel that can transport limited supplies from the main lines" or sumpin.
Presumably one would require some PP to be available to produce such a building, but the point of the building is supposed to be to provide a source of PP. With a ship, you can produce it elsewhere and then move it into position.

I'd also like to have a ship / part for remote use of PP for cases of ships being production locations, while far from a source of PP.
Personally I don't think there's much wrong with having supply ships that have to shuttle back and forth. That's pretty standard in a lot of games.
FreeOrion isn't a lot of games... Avoiding micromanagement is a major concern in the design of such gameplay features.

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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#37 Post by defaultuser »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Personally I don't think there's much wrong with having supply ships that have to shuttle back and forth. That's pretty standard in a lot of games.
FreeOrion isn't a lot of games... Avoiding micromanagement is a major concern in the design of such gameplay features.
Except when the developers decide it would be better to add micromanagement for balance reasons. So we end up with drydocks that can't repair yet because the inhabitants aren't "happy enough" even though they seem content to build ships. And partial repairs so you have to keep checking the status of the fleets at repair stations, and split off the ones that are done.

Avoiding excessive management is a fine goal, but it shouldn't be the only thing. Maintaining some verisimilitude is a decent thing as well.

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The Silent One
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#38 Post by The Silent One »

defaultuser wrote:Personally I don't think there's much wrong with having supply ships that have to shuttle back and forth.
No, this would definitely be the kind of micromanagement we want to avoid. It's not kiss, and I don't see why a feature like that would be necessary at all.
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#39 Post by defaultuser »

I really don't think it's a huge deal any way you go, as this is such an edge-case feature that most players would never use it. When I get disconnected areas, I work to research Construction tech and (if necessary) set some outposts to link them up. If this needs its own research path, I would not bother as I don't like dead-end tech.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#40 Post by Geoff the Medio »

There are potential use cases with different strategies or different gameplay settings, such as having stealthed production fleets behind / in other empires' territory, and sparsely filled galaxy maps where getting supply connections between or to remote planets / systems is problematic.

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Vezzra
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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#41 Post by Vezzra »

Splitted the discussion about the alternative approach, the global stockpile, to a new thread in the Other Game Design forum.

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Re: Help needed with scripting supply ships

#42 Post by Ophiuchus »

Also note that discussion about the supply ship concept should be in the following thread
http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopi ... =6&t=10308
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