What's Next after v0.4.1?

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eleazar
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What's Next after v0.4.1?

#1 Post by eleazar »

Here are some ideas for what to tackle next...

Code:
* [DONE] Base all supply lines on the "supply" meter not "infrastructure". Consider removing the separate ship supply lines (moving dotted lines)

* [IN PROGRESS] Sitrep Organization/Hierarchy. Icons, grouping, etc. Currently you get a wall of text 100 turns in or so, that i mostly stop reading.

* Python-scripted universe generation

* [IN PROGRESS] Sortable and filterable objects list.

* Adding planet happiness and species-empire allegiances. Long complicated discussion, but the actual mechanics involved aren't overly complicated. Would help tie together planets, species, diplomacy, and "influence".

* [New] Jump to 'Pedia function. Right click on a ship, monster, species, building or special icon (for instance), and the Pedia entry for that item pops up. Saves navigating through the 'Pedia when you want one particular article.


Code and/or/maybe Scripting:
* Consider limiting runaway industry growth. By turn 100 or so you you are constantly having to spam ships in your queue or waste production

* New ships part slot type: "Special" or "Large"

* [New] Bombing Planets


Scripting:
* Balance Shield/armor techs with weapon power (weapon numbers are so very higher, shields are mostly a waste). Could be handed off to a non-dev.

* [STARTED]Reballance stealth and detection for current system, and recallibrate numbers to 100 point scale.

(stuff i'll do)
* Calibrating resource Production to a max of 100 per planet

* Species class distinctive (i.e. make robots different from organics)
Last edited by eleazar on Thu Sep 06, 2012 5:22 pm, edited 4 times in total.
Reason: Updated list again

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Saintrl
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#2 Post by Saintrl »

These are some pretty nice ideas, especially the supply line one! I always got confused when I saw the lines and then the dotted lines.

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em3
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#3 Post by em3 »

eleazar wrote:* Consider limiting runaway growth. by turn 100 or so you you are constantly having to spam ships in your queue or waste production
How about doing something like in later Civilization games: you can set a city to generate income/research/culture instead of production.

Here it could be used to boost influence/credits/research etc.

Alternatively one could set a planet to use production surplus to increase troop meter or infrastructure meter, slowly.

Or, any surplus production could be used to boost infrastructure meters in supply range.
https://github.com/mmoderau
[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - Randall Munroe, title text to xkcd #556

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Krikkitone
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#4 Post by Krikkitone »

eleazar wrote:Here are some ideas for what to tackle next...
Code and/or/maybe Scripting:
* Consider limiting runaway growth. by turn 100 or so you you are constantly having to spam ships in your queue or waste production

Possibly making production costs of higher tech ship parts more (so that the amount of damage a weapon does v. the amount of production it costs only goes up very slightly)... or allowing for larger ships earlier would solve the problem.

(techs should probably increase the cost of ship parts faster than they increase production.... because there is also the pop growth+acquisition of new planets to deal with.)

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em3
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#5 Post by em3 »

Krikkitone wrote:Possibly making production costs of higher tech ship parts more (so that the amount of damage a weapon does v. the amount of production it costs only goes up very slightly)... or allowing for larger ships earlier would solve the problem.

(techs should probably increase the cost of ship parts faster than they increase production.... because there is also the pop growth+acquisition of new planets to deal with.)
Good idea, but there must remain some incentive to make one more advanced ship instead of two less advanced.
https://github.com/mmoderau
[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - Randall Munroe, title text to xkcd #556

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eleazar
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#6 Post by eleazar »

Krikkitone wrote:
eleazar wrote:Here are some ideas for what to tackle next...
Code and/or/maybe Scripting:
* Consider limiting runaway growth. by turn 100 or so you you are constantly having to spam ships in your queue or waste production

Possibly making production costs of higher tech ship parts more (so that the amount of damage a weapon does v. the amount of production it costs only goes up very slightly)
Yeah, increasing the cost of more advanced hulls/parts should probably be at least part of the solution

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Krikkitone
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#7 Post by Krikkitone »

em3 wrote:
Krikkitone wrote:Possibly making production costs of higher tech ship parts more (so that the amount of damage a weapon does v. the amount of production it costs only goes up very slightly)... or allowing for larger ships earlier would solve the problem.

(techs should probably increase the cost of ship parts faster than they increase production.... because there is also the pop growth+acquisition of new planets to deal with.)
Good idea, but there must remain some incentive to make one more advanced ship instead of two less advanced.

Well Ideally

TL basic.... Output/pop =1, Ship cost=1, Ship "value" = 1, (Normal pop by this level is 1)

TL advanced... Output/pop=2, Ship cost=3, Ship "value"=4 (normal pop by this level is 2)

So by an advanced tech time...you can pop out 4 cheap ships or 1.333 high tech ships... (which can handle 5.333 cheap ships)



Also, If you are putting in happiness and influence/trade, Runaway growth can be limited by them (happiness penalties to worlds or influence/trade costs that rise depending on the number of worlds you have?)

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eleazar
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#8 Post by eleazar »

Code: Select all

r5102 | geoffthemedio |
-Reworked supply system so there is no distinction between fleet and resource supply range. Both are shown with solid-colour starlanes.
...
Which do you mean: there's no distinction visually, or there is now only one meter?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#9 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:Which do you mean: there's no distinction visually, or there is now only one meter?
Both? There's only one supply range now, and there is only the coloured starlanes indication of this range, not the old moving dots indication.

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eleazar
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#10 Post by eleazar »

Added a new item which i find myself very much wanting, when i playtest, especially to check on species...

* [New] Jump to 'Pedia function. Right click on a ship, monster, species, building or special icon (for instance), and the Pedia entry for that item pops up. Saves navigating through the 'Pedia when you want one particular article.

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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#11 Post by Zireael »

I love the fact that something will be done with industry. And I can't wait for happiness!

Parallax
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#12 Post by Parallax »

Saintrl wrote:These are some pretty nice ideas, especially the supply line one! I always got confused when I saw the lines and then the dotted lines.
So wait whats the difference? Ship lines are dotted and solid lines are between planets?
I guess in that case dotted is refuel range and solid is supply sharing

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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#13 Post by Parallax »

eleazar wrote:
Scripting:
* Balance Shield/armor techs with weapon power (weapon numbers are so very higher, shields are mostly a waste). Could be handed off to a non-dev.

* [STARTED]Reballance stealth and detection for current system, and recallibrate numbers to 100 point scale.
I could possibly work on balancing shields and armor, seems fairly straight forward?

Also Stealth and detection needs to be better elaborated on during game play. It can be very confusing. Quite often I will end up in a position against a human or AI opponent who has a stealth planet that I cannot attack because of my low detection.

That brings to mind another problem and I know people are working on this. without a good way to organize the research technologies its very hard to find what I need to raise my detection value. Also there's some ambiguity between planets sensor range and ship detection and if they work the same way.. Range and strength that is.

Not only does the AI I've faced tend to have highly stealthy planets but it produces hundreds of low value ships that I have to fight through and I cant even calculate how many there are much less their combined values. Sounds like the new runoff industry rules should help mitigate this?

Personally I dont see the appeal of tying things to scales which have a maximum like 1-100 it really limits expansion and creativity. The important part is just building in some absolutes that might trump these values in the direction of the most importance (detection trumps stealth).
Also the two things you're working on are important.

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eleazar
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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#14 Post by eleazar »

Parallax wrote:I could possibly work on balancing shields and armor, seems fairly straight forward?
Make sure to use the latest SVN files as a base. Other than that, have at it, test, and then explain what you've done. If you make it better, i'll commit the changes.

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Re: What's Next after v0.4.1?

#15 Post by davidescott »

With respect to limiting runaway production growth. I think the fact that you have to continually spam ships is indicative of a need to rethink how ships are managed.

Games like this are meant to be about thinking strategically.
  • What solar systems are most important?
  • Where are the key weaknesses in my supply lines?
  • In what direction should I expand my empire?
  • What are my macro priorities (Population vs Production vs Science)?
  • Do I want to have a dense highly developed empire on every solar system, or do I want to have a sparsely developed empire?
For the first 20-40 turns you can do all that by directly controlling units, but as you get past 10-15 developed planets it gets much harder. The fundamental question in my mind is "Why can't I highlight the crucial systems and mark them as such?", "Why can't I highlight a sector of space and automatically settle that space?".

I think long term it would be best to have a fleet management tab where you would select stars and define desired fleet allocations on those stars, and then production would automatically work to fill those targets. Similarly a planets tab which would allow bulk settlement of planets where you could sort by current supply level, planet type, specials would be nice to have. Once you have researched much of the biological and infrastructure technologies planets you initially skipped over because they were hostile are now open to useful settlement, and its a pain to have to build individual colony ships to move them through already inhabited systems to "complete" the settlement of that star.

In the meantime a quick way to bring balance and avoid ship spamming is to have larger colonies automatically divert production for internal purposes. Its rather silly to imagine that a planet with 20 billion people would not have a basic shipyard, would have no defensive fleet, and would fail to settle a habitable planet in the same system. Perhaps as the planets hit various population values they automatically start diverting a percentage of their production to internal purposes. A lot of the decisions with respect to settlement and "defense" of solar systems deep within ones own territory are rather easy, the player just doesn't do them because its a pain to click through 5 dialogs just to get a lighthouse in every system.

If the desire is to not have a ship in every solar system you could instead introduce starbases (think a big slow moving outpost [starlane speed 10, no attack, upgradeable defense, detection/stealth]). Each ship would have to be attached to a starbase, and would refuse to move far from a starbase. Instead of producing individual ships you would instead select which starbase to prioritize, and then within the fleet for that base prioritize the ships stationed at that starbase. When a ship is produced at "Vega" shipyards it automatically travels to the starbase at which point it can be sent out for duty. If a planet was not within the range of a starbase (5 turns) and had a population >5/10 billion it would either become unhappy or start producing its own starbase, to force the player to account for the defense of that portion of the empire. For a mobile attack fleet you could have a flagship, but fleets attached to flagships would not make the locals happy. Expanding the empire then becomes a two stage act:
  • Build a flagship and secure the area from threats with a mobile fleet.
  • Build a starbase and move it to the desired area (once it is constructed the ships will begin construction), while also potentially relocating other starbases to move favorable locations.

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