FreeOrion

You can look them up in the Pedia window, which gives a few relevant statistics about them, including their structure (effectively their hit points), though not much about their weapon strengths. You can look up all their weapons separately, though, and they are linked from the monster type pages (in the SVN version at least).

Oh, I didn't know that. But wouldn't it be nice to have an icon right next to the structure icon that sums up all the weapon power?

Well, the ones with the smaller, 3-tentacled icon can't hurt ships.
As a general rule monsters with low structure also have less destructive power.

Currently, there are distinct monsters that protect ancient ruins and gaian worlds.

Fighting blind is not our planned interface. But we don't have anything better yet.



The plan for weapons is to have a rock-paper-scissors type thing, so that Point defense blocks missiles, long-range trumps short-range etc. That kind of stuff can't be meaningfully reduced to a single "weapon power" number.

Though i'm not so sure that's a good thing at this stage of development. You can't see how the various weapons and defenses interact, so it is pretty much a mysterious black-box. It would probably be best if we limited ourselves for now to one type of weapon that could be reported by a "weapon power" statistic.

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Presently, the automatic battle resolution doesn't consider what kind of weapons a ship has.
That would also be an excellent way to condense the tech tree further.

So only the "damage" statistic currently matters on a weapon? Or in the case of Fighters "antishipdamage"?

Should i make all weapons of the same type, or will that not matter?

That would also be an excellent way to condense the tech tree further.[/quote]
There are only 15 weapon-related techs, so there's a small potential for savings.

Currently there are 186 visible techs

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I believe so.
For user understanding, it might be better to have just one type of weapon, as having multiple types implies type matters, which it does not.
I suppose the simplification would come from reducing the number of weapon parts then, if not techs.

wouldn't it be easy to calculate one attack value for a ship, even if it has different weapons.
for example: twice the firing rate per turn simply doubles the damage
and you could also add a factor in case the weapon does not hit the target all the time. just multiply a 0.1 for 10% chance of hitting. In the end the statistics should be fine

I think the problem is with missles, since they take more turns until they do one hit. but again for simplification purposes you could simply divide the damage by the number of turns it takes until the missle hits.

So, this way you should easily get an attack value per turn for a ship. And you could still use it later on for automated battles, when someone does not want to it all manually.

By the way, scanners should improve the propability of hitting a target

Yeah, but why bother if the different weapons make no difference? It just makes things more confusing. We'll bring out different weapon types again when the game is far enough along so that it actually means something.


I added in 10 new weapon techs -- all Short-Range type. I think they are now used everywhere instead of the old weapons, but i haven't commented out the old stuff yet, so it's still available in the tree.

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Geoff: i have the content all switched over and a "damage" meter icon uploaded.

All should be ready for the addition of a weapon power meter.

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Could you clarify / specify in terms of the UI or whatever else is player- or scripter-visible that you want changed? There probably won't be an actual "meter" added, but the technical / code definition of meter is probably not important to what you want...

From what i understand of your description of how combat currently works, a useful weapon power number would be the sum of the "damage" of all the weapon parts that a ship or monster has. Aside from defensive measures (and some random chance?) the bigger that number the greater the chance of winning, right?

Since the weapon parts have the stat, "damage" i think it would be clearest to call this stat, "total damage".

Fleet window:
Since it's an important stat, i'd put it where "structure" is now and bump everything over to the right.

Pedia/Design Screen (the same thing i think)
(See attached) Again i'd put the stat at the top of the list.
The stats covered by the red boxes, have no current function, so i'd hide those bits for now.

How's that?

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There is some truth in what you say. There's not a great advantage in being able to build ships everywhere, but there is advantage in being able to repair ships everywhere.

This could be resolved by allowing gradual repair for any ship within supply range -- with no additional benefit for being in a system with a shipyard. This would not include contested systems -- you have to be behind the battle lines to repair (unless you have special repair parts and/or ships). As a rule it is clean and clear.

I don't really like the implications of certain shipyards being faster than others. That would complicate the production screen, and encourage the player to "shop around" for the fastest shipyard when he builds something.

I would generally like to see shipyards much more expensive then they are now, except for one thing -- the only way to use a new species you've come across is to build a shipyard on that planet. (This is assuming the species is the type that can colonize other planets.) It's kinda dumb to build a huge expensive shipyard at an otherwise un-strategic planet just to get a few colony ships.
Possible solutions:

* Colony ships don't need shipyards.
* Colony ships use a cheaper type of shipyard that can't build anything else.
-- problems with the 2 above: you can add colony parts to any ship.

* or Select the species of a colony ship some other way.

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I added a line of code that should replace %17% with the total weapon strength of a ship design. With a new build, you should be able to edit the enecylopedia entry stringtable entry ENC_SHIP_DESIGN_DESCRIPTION_STR to remove whatever lines you don't want, move around other lines, or add a line at the top like "Total Attack: %17%". Similarly you should be able to remove the lines you don't want from PART_DESC_DIRECT_FIRE_STATS (although be careful about whether it works right to have just one line surrounded by '''). You should also be able to make those changes with the old build, though you'll probably just see a blank instead of the new %17% stat until you get the new build.

The target construction is the same for nearly every colony in my Empire. I think this is a bit boring.
Target construction should be 5 for Tiny planets, up to 25 for Huge. Good Planets should have a +5 bonus. This gives an Empire's starting world (medium, good) target construction of 20. Larger worlds can supply resources further and good worlds also have more ability to send resources further. Then techs could add less than 20, but would still allow some worlds to reach a multiple of 20.
This wouldn't affect the supply range of most empires but will add a little variety (which is the spice of life).

As of r4428 that doesn't seem to work.

Revision 4432 has everything in place for %17% to work.

You're right, it is boring.

The concept of construction, (or as i prefer: infrastructure) is that it represents all the various improvements and constructions that differentiate a frontier planet from a thriving seat of civilization. That concept isn't very well realized right now, but it doesn't have that much to do with planet size.

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