Stealthy Supply

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

Moderator: Oberlus

Message
Author
LGM-Doyle
Programmer
Posts: 219
Joined: Mon Feb 29, 2016 8:37 pm

Re: Stealthy Supply

#31 Post by LGM-Doyle »

Dilvish, your UI suggestion sounds good. I'll try to implement it.

Regarding your concerns, yes you understood correctly my proposal. Your point is a good point, however I'd like to clarify why I think it isn't that bad. And then I'll suggest two modifications to the mechanics to make it more interactive, which I think is the real issue.

First the clarification.

In order for stealthy empire A to remain stealthy and block empire B's supply, empire A needs to race both stealth and supply range. For empire B to counter it only needs to improve detection or supply range. Empire B is never worse off supply wise than if they were beside an empire that was prioritizing supply. Empire A's strategy is fragile.

I think that the issue is with stealth in general. The intent of stealth is to limit your interaction with other empires. Because detection strength is a global value the results are all or nothing. There is not enough push and pull at the local level of the stealth mechanics.

Here are two suggestions to increase the interactivity of stealthy supply mechanic.
  • Change the blockade mechanic so that a blockading fleet can block enemy supply if it can detect the supply and it can always protect friendly supply. That way posting fleets protects your supply, but still can't block undetectable supply. You send your fleet and protect your supply, or get ambushed by the stealthy fleet that was blocking your supply.
  • Allow colonies to have stances, aggressive and passive the same as fleets. A colony set to aggressive can i) block supply and ii) initiate combat with fleets/monsters in its system. When it attacks or blocks supply it is revealed in the same way that a fleets is revealed and can be attacked/bombarded/invaded. A colony set to passive can i) not block supply and ii) won't initiate combat in system.

    This change is more intrusive than the first change.

    Its benefits are removing the use of Comsats to initiate combat, makes the stealthy supply mechanic interactive.
Thanks for the feedback.

Ophiuchus
Programmer
Posts: 3433
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 10:01 am
Location: Wall IV

Re: Stealthy Supply

#32 Post by Ophiuchus »

LGM-Doyle wrote:Ophiuchus, I may be misunderstanding your point, but I think there can still be more than two sides with overlapping supply. For example, if more than two empires are at peace but not allied.
Id only allow for overlapping in the stealth case.
For peace status, I would also have supply be subject to the supply pressure (so one winner takes all).
My interpretation would be some kind of economic struggle between friendly empires.

If your supply pressure is so dominant, it might force your neighbors into an alliance or a war because you basically strangle your neighbors supply. If AI would be able to handle this, I think that would be great actually, as it rings very true :)
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

User avatar
Dilvish
AI Lead and Programmer Emeritus
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:25 pm

Re: Stealthy Supply

#33 Post by Dilvish »

LGM-Doyle wrote:Empire B is never worse off supply wise than if they were beside an empire that was prioritizing supply.
This seems contingent on you implementing one of your extra ideas, "That way posting fleets protects your supply, but still can't block undetectable supply."

This idea about being able to control the aggression stance of a colony seems reasonable; I kind of think that with respect to combat (but not supply) it's been discussed in the past and you might want to check for those conversations, but I also think you have presented a more thorough proposal than has been discussed in the past.

I am wary of how this might impact the AI, though, and am not even feeling confident I have taken enough time (and have enough time currently) to reliably assess how it would impact the AI. Once Geoff gets us set up with a mechanism to select rules for a game, then this stealthy supply seems like a good candidate to be enable-able in that fashion (but defaulting to the current rules, and I realize that supporting this as an optional rule would notably complicate some code and Pedia articles). I would very much like to be able to focus on some more central combat issues for the AI for a fair while more before trying to tackle something like this (but I can also understand how something like this could be very appealing to some folks, especially for multiplayer games).
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

User avatar
labgnome
Juggernaut
Posts: 833
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2015 5:57 pm

Re: Stealthy Supply

#34 Post by labgnome »

Dilvish wrote:This idea about being able to control the aggression stance of a colony seems reasonable; I kind of think that with respect to combat (but not supply) it's been discussed in the past and you might want to check for those conversations, but I also think you have presented a more thorough proposal than has been discussed in the past.
A quick and dirty solution might be to have the defense focus be able to disrupt foreign trade or act as a blockade.
All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.

Post Reply