FreeOrion

I think tzlaine suggested to have shipyards visible in combat and I have no problem with this(I like it actually). I would prefer a modular approach - where there is a basic structure that allows to build constructed hulls. Upgrades to allow building other hull sizes and/or different types of hulls could then be attached to this structure. I need to do some sketching to verify if this works, but I'm confident. If it doesn't work, we can just have them as stand-alone structures.

The scope is set to Contains Source rather than Source, which would not work.

[/quote]Also, you can probably do the terraforming building with just two effects groups, half of which set the planet type to target.PlanetType + 1 or target.PlanetType - 1 as appropriate for which side of the EP wheel the current planet type is on.[/quote]You're right; I've modified it in my version.

I used an svn stringtable and edited in my changes in. Any more changes I make will use the most recent stringtable available with my changes edited in, so no stringtable additions should be lost.

That doesn't seem like an ideal way to represent shipyards, IMO. It would be nice if a single shipyard could be displayed, whether this is the "latest" shipyard, or a modular shipyard containing the basic shipyards and its upgrades as pd mentions, and ships under construction within could be displayed and targeted.

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I'm talking about the activation condition.


I don't see a reason to have a single object be shown when there are multiple buildings making up the shipyard. Each part is a separate object, and representing it that way would probably be easier and more consistent between battle and galaxy map displays of the situation.

Source is the least restrictive activation condition. It's existence activates it. Suffice it to say, terraforming works.

If shipyard add-ons are just that - add-ons to a shipyard, it makes sense to treat them that way in combat. Though all the parts are separate objects, their in-game purpose is very similar; I don't think very many players would have difficulty conceptually if shipyards were displayed as a single entity in combat (or if an upgrade replaced the previous shipyard, for that matter - a good example of something similar is the star base -> battlestation -> star fortress sequence in MoO2).

Also, what happens if in combat, the Basic Shipyard is destroyed and none of the add-ons are? Does the planet lose the ability to make only the most basic hull type? Does it lose the ability to make any ships? Does it not lose any abilities? There aren't really any good options there... If the shipyards are represented as a single unit in combat, then it can be guaranteed that either all are destroyed, or only the most advanced add-on is destroyed, which will have the very logical effect of causing the planet to lose all ship making ability, or only the ability to make the most advanced type of hull, respectively. pd has already mentioned that he prefers a modular approach, most likely because that will look better than having multiple shipyards displayed, and I'm inclined to agree. Furthermore, there are many different shipyard add-ons. Having them all orbiting a tiny planet would either require them to be too small to be distinguished reasonably or else they would pretty much dwarf the planet.

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Terraforming works because, as I forgot, conditions will match objects contained by implicitly. Your activation conditions are variants of

which would appear to be false, as I thought, because the activation needs to match the source object, but the building itself isn't a planet. However if it's located on a suitable planet, it will be matched anyway, due to the implicit contained by. (The in-game description of the condition doesn't make this clear.)


Making all the shipyard parts be treated as a single entity in combat requires a special case. That it would be understandable isn't a reason to make such a special case...


All shipyards should likely require the basic shipyard building to build any ships... I don't see a problem with this... Also, having separate objects in battle for each shipyard related building means specific addons can be targetted by attackers.


The various shipyard addon buildings are not themselves shipyards. There is a (or there are a small number of) base shipyard building(s), and then a variety of shipyard-enhancing addon buildings. This is like the factory in an RTS that's needed to build any mech units, and the machine shop, science lab, or robotics bay that lets the main factory build more advanced units.


The scales of things are a bit stretched no matter what we do. If there are dozens of ships orbitting a planet, they'll all have to be placed somewhere. A few orbital buildings won't make this much more difficult.

If that's the case, should more advanced types of shipyard addons not allow less advanced hulls to be constructed, as I have currently done? If there is any redundancy, a player might find that the shipyard addon he destroyed wasn't actually necessary for anything anymore...

Also, why not just have shipyards progress upwards and replace each other, more advanced shipyards allowing the construction of previous hulls? It completely eliminates any issues about redundancy, how to display them in combat, where to display ships under construction, and scaling in combat.

If a sufficiently large number of ships is orbiting a planet, there will have to be some overlap. There should be no overlap of shipyards, because how they are displayed in combat should be planned a little better than that.

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There doesn't have the be a single way this works... It might differ between types of addons or shipyard. More or less redundancy is potentially strategically interesting.


I want it to be possible to destroy a specialized addon without destroying the whole shipyard. It should also be possible to have branching addon dependencies, rather than having only a single shipyard building at a time which must be replaced to upgrade along a single linear path.


It wouldn't eliminate all those issues completely, and I don't think there will be huge problem in any case. Maybe mockups can prove me wrong, though. (See above for reasons to have separate addons buildings / objects.)


Overlap is inevitable at some zoom levels, but I don't think having separate objects on the combat screen for each addon is going to be a major problem to fit in. There shouldn't be dozens of orbital buildings per planet...

Just to clarify, the modular approach I was talking about, should still allow to target the individual modules. The 3d objects can be prepared and then placed accordingly, so the structure appears to be one object. Think of homeworld, were the mothership, carriers or even battleships could have sub systems. As a terran player in Starcraft you could also do something similar to some buildings.

Anyway, I can work with everything you guys decide and having separate structures would probably make my design effort easier.

K, so so clarify:


The Basic Shipyard is required for the construction of all ships.

Specific add-ons allow the construction of ships with specific hulls or parts.

The Basic Shipyard itself and any add-ons are independently targetable in combat, regardless of how they are displayed.

Specific add-ons might not in all cases allow construction of unique hulls or parts that no other add-ons allow.

Add-ons will always require the presence of the Basic Shipyard, but might also require the presence of a previous add-on.


I agree that this allows greater freedom of design than what I had in mind, and will probably lead to a greater variety of interesting options in game. I'll keep this in mind when I go back to the Ships tree.

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Redid the Ships tree and the Learning tree. Suspended Animation has been moved to Growth. Ancient Ruins special gives the first owner with the tech Xenoarchaeological Restoration a free ultra-rare tech or building. A few buildings were removed from the learning tree because I thought their functions were superfluous or unworthy of a building. The Spatial Distortion Generator I made doesn't quite work, because I can't seem to specify WithinStarlaneJumps 1 Target as part of the MoveTo effect. Shipyard upgrades now work the way we discussed and most have been renamed. The Learning tree isn't quite full (you'll probably be able to see the basic pattern I was going for), but when we add espionage and diplomacy there'll be plenty of things with which to fill it up.

Here are the relevant text files:

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Could you get rid of the Quantum Networking theory? I'd like to keep the number of theories smaller when possible... there are already too many techs in most categories, and we'll probably want to add some categories later.

Xenoarchaeology should probably depend on Translinguistics, rather than Psionics, and Force-Field Harmonics on Psionics, not Translinguistics.

Avoid gender-specific pronounds, as in "his will", particularly when the preceeding text works find with "its".

Cognitive submission is probably too powerful, and should instead by implemented as a (ideally unique) building. Or perhaps it's OK, since it is very late game... but a more limited building could be unlocked by something earlier in conjuction with Psionics.

The name should also change... "Psionic Domination" or somesuch. The "victem" wouldn't be submitting, which implies some degree of choice to do so, but rather is being dominated beyond their power to resist.


Conditions were originally written for scope and activation purposes, and having one be a parameter to an effect itself was something I shoehorned conditions into later, with this consequence. I'm not sure how complicated it would be to make conditions be able to reference Target when used a part of an effect description, but it probably won't happen any time soon, unless tzlaine gets inspired or someone particularly skilled at C++ shows up and gets motivated.

I'm not sure whether it's more efficient to use WithinStarlaneJumps 0 than something like
In general, you haven't discussed any gameplay-related plans for how content will be laid out. We need to have a few independent pathes through the tech tree that can be taken, with distinctions between them in terms of broad classes of content or significant gameplay differences, as much as possible.

I'd really prefer to keep the number of theories in Learning the way it is, due to the very specific shape of the Learning tree. As you can see, there are three rows of four theories each. A player who wants to follow the top path needs the Physical Brain theory, and a player who wants to follow the bottom path needs the Algorithmic Elegance theory. A player who wants to follow the middle path needs both. In general, due to the increased expense of the theories and applications of the middle path, and the fact that all applications of the middle path also depend on theories from one of the peripheral paths, usually only players who are focusing on research long-term and going for a technological victory will go down the middle path. This is also why there are a few unique and powerful techs there, such as Gateway to the Void and Xenoarchaological Restoration.

The player who is playing for the tech victory might do it one of two ways - he might be an isolationist, or a diplomat. Presumably an aggressive researcher would either be able to win by being the sole-survivor, or would just lose before he could get Singularity of Transcendence, so that general strategy wouldn't make much sense. An isolationist researcher would still have to think very hard about how to expand his empire - his method of expansion would generally be towards the edge of the galaxy, colonizing as many planets in the same system as possible, and staying within the boundaries of a few strategic choke-points (techs like Gateway to the Void and Spatial Distortion Generator reflect this). Since this player is focused primarily on defense, i.e. surviving long enough to get the tech victory, without thinking about invading other players' space, a tech like Cognitive Submission makes sense, since it's extremely valuable as a defensive mechanism, but barely useful to an aggressive expanding empire, whose main weakness will be not against massed assaults, but strategic strikes and espionage.

A diplomatic researcher would expand quite differently. He would always try to get in a position where he could be in contact with the greatest number of other empires, but still be protected from attack. This would probably be accomplished to a certain extent by putting colonies at "dead ends" where they can detect other empires, but without having direct starlane links to them. There would still have to be a lot of strategic defense at choke-points, and in this context, Gateway to the Void and Spatial Distortion Generator still make a lot of sense. This empire would be able to get to Singularity of Transcendence faster because more contact with other empires means the ability to steal techs with espionage is enhanced, and of course they will have the added ability to trade their Learning techs for high-level techs of other categories, greatly reducing the amount of research they themselves will have to do. In this context, Xenoarchaeological Restoration is particularly useful, because they will be able to trade ultra-rare techs (or whatever strategic resource their ultra-rare building produces) for high level theories as well. As before, the military side of things will be primarily defensive, so Cognitive Submission still makes a lot of sense.

Agreed. It actually was that way until very shortly before I submitted it, but I wanted to see how it would look with all the really bizarre metaphysical-sounding techs all in the middle. Doing it the other way makes more sense on a lot of levels though, so I will change it back.

A similar building might not be as interesting, since either the effect would be localized, which limits its interest greatly, since it's not a total shut-out building like the Gateway to the Void or the Spatial Distortion Generator, or the player would need to build something at a location to get a non-localized effect, which isn't as strategically interesting in a research oriented empire, because if the enemy actually penetrates your empire far enough to destroy it, you've probably practically already lost, so it doesn't really matter that the building was destroyed. Unless there's some kind of location dependent effect or condition, it's not really interesting enough as a building for the type of gameplay that would be expected of a research oriented player, IMO.



As far as the trees that I've already (mostly) done (Learning, Growth and Ships), in general, most players will research growth to some extent, although only those who are going for a bit more of an isolationist espionage game will focus on it. This is because Growth theories will be prerequisites for Organic Hulls theories and/or applications, the hulls of which are very stealthy - the Sentient Hull even gives a bonus to stealth and detection for all accompanying friendly ships. Also, a Growth-focused player will get the techs Xenogenetic Adaptation and Xenological Symbiogenesis, which allow colonization of Poor and Hostile worlds, which makes it much easier to get a large population is a small region of space - ideal for an isolationist. An isolationist researcher for example, would also pick up those to apps on their way to Pure Energy Metabolism, in order to increase the population that they can contain within a closed region of space.

Various Ships apps will be dependent on various theories from other categories, so that all gameplay types will have a rich diversity of Ships apps, but will mainly have access to the ones that support their general strategy. A highly industrialized militarist will have access to things like Asteroid Hulls and Constructed Hulls, the former of which can be devastating if built en masse and hidden in a strategic system with an Asteroid Belt, and both of which can be built quickly with low build time (but high cost in the case of constructed hulls - this complements the large amount of production of which such an empire would be capable).

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts for now. These ideas will be developed further when I finish the other trees, particularly economics - the decision about whether to follow the Market Economy or the Planned Economy should be significant in terms of the overall strategy the player is using.

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Sounds and looks to me like your really thought this through. Good work, I like it a lot.

the tech tree indeed are impressive, but i have some questions:

why Symbiotic Cohabitation do nothing for now?

and one more. maybe i'm just got influenced by early played games, but i estimate that more sophisticated techs takes more time to research. and in current tree there are techs that cost less to research while stands after techs that cost more. let me show an example to avoid possible misunderstanding. here:
1 and 4 seems quite right while 2 and 3 seems a bit confusing

It's a design decision. The big boxes are (more expensive) theories that unlock new techs, the small boxes are appliances that are cheaper to research and give you some bonus but don't unlock new stuff.