FreeOrion

I decided to try changing the stealth and detection bonuses to something that somewhat works with the current scaling for stealth and detection. The bonuses for stealth of a particular level precisely counter the previous level of detection, except for the final level of detection, which counters the previous (and also final) level of detection, minus 50 (so that in the late game, it won't be impossible for anyone to see each other).

There are also twelve planet specials, which increase the stealth of unowned planets by levels of stealth equivalent to all four stealth bonuses at regular stealth, great stealth, and ultimate stealth. This is so that when a player comes across a region of space with a bunch of planets that are stealthy, it's not a dead giveaway that the planets are owned by a stealthy empire.

Each of these specials has a monster associated with it that attaches the special to planets. After a certain number of turns (a rough guess at how long it should take for a player to research the various levels of stealth), the monster upgrades to the next level of monster, and all the stealth specials upgrade to the next level of special.

Also updated some techs and buildings to reasonable levels of stealth and detection (Interstellar Lighthouse, etc.)

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There is an OwnerHasTech condition you could use to check if any empires have researched something, if you want to do it based on actual research instead of a timer.

revision 4691
"BigJoe's stealth revamp patch."

I only reviewed it as far as to resolve the conflicts with more recent changes, and to make sure it didn't break any strings.


EDIT:
It is kinda annoying to have three specials with identical names listed in the 'pedia for each of your new stealth thingies.


Why?

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Yeah, I'm redoing that now. Also implementing Geoff's suggestion.


Because there's a need to be especially careful about the maximum stealth bonuses that an object can have, due to the game-breaking effects of an object having higher stealth than the maximum detection that can be achieved. If the bonuses stacked, planets could reach absurd levels of stealth, and if the bonus of the special was given instead of the empire's tech bonus, empires with high-level stealth tech on a planet with a low-level stealth bonus would be handicapped.

It should be possible, and may be desirable, to check which stealth techs a player has, and activate/deactivate particular effects accordingly, such that the player always gets the greater of either his bonus or the special's bonus.

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That commit seems to have changed the encoding of some of the content .txt files from UTF-8 to Western European. This breaks the parsing on my system; encoding needs to always be UTF-8.

Good point.

Wouldn't it make sense, for stealth techs to create the same otherwise naturally occurring stealth special?

I.E. make each of these specials mutually exclusive. If a player settles on a Cloud Cover world, and upgrades the stealth via techs, the volcanic ash special is added, the cloud cover special is removed. Thus no stacking.

Not sure how to work species-based stealth into that though.



Which ones? My computer is telling me all the files i modified today are still UTF-8.


P.S. Running the patch command ate all the returns from the end of the file. I believe i added them all back.

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Revision 4693: Removed needlessly similar stealth specials

Revision 4694: Fixed accidental encoding change in text files from previous commits

Does it work for you now, Geoff?

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Welcome to Committer status!
If you don't have a good app for content file editing, i recommend: Text Wrangler (OsX, Free).
It does diffs easily, and has powerful search/replace functions.


BTW, i have no problem removing some or all of the species stealth-boosting picks, if that makes balancing stealth/detection easier.
Conceptually i have no idea what it means, how it happens -- it's just something i tried to make some of the spy-oriented.

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Thanks. Right now, I'm using Edit Pad Lite 7, which seems pretty robust.


I like the idea of species stealth bonuses, actually, and I don't think it will be a big problem in practice.

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So what do you think it means for a species to be inherently stealthy? This isn't stripes helping something to blend into the jungle, but an innate characteristic that makes ships, orbital structures, and planet-based civilizations harder to detect.

It makes sense in the case of the cell-sized Sention, or perhaps for some energy beings, but i'm having a hard time picturing it for anybody else in a way that's not magical.

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No, but I think I know why. It seems that the files have recently had a byte order mark (BOM) added to them. This is the first three bytes, which I think acts as a marker to indicate the endianess of the file, though that's a bit of a guess. The consequence of this is that the parsers choke of the file if the first three bytes are something it doesn't recognize, and none of the parsers know what a BOM is.

The stringtable reading code already has a section to skip the BOM when present, so I'll try adding that to the content parsing code as well.

It means their biology or some other attribute permits them to produce such structures in such a way that they are more stealthy. For instance, the Laenfa have long leafy bodies. They might choose not to make ships and buildings with solid bulky structures, but build structures that tend to be in more of a framework pattern with each section not much thicker than their bodies, so that someone looking at it from any angle will see mostly just the space behind it, with exception being made only for necessarily bulky parts such as the engine (and not for virtually everything else, for example the large corridors and control areas needed for human ships would be much more compact in a Laenfa ship).Ah, you're right. It seems that my editor was set to add a BOM to the start of Unicode files, so when I converted them to UTF-8, it added it. Since I didn't actually change any of the content of the files, I didn't think there was a need to test it, so it turns out that it broke things for me as well. It looks like you've fixed that in svn, though.

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Essentially that's "compact crew quarters" and "compact housing" on the planet. That would plausibly produce a small bonus to stealth, even in the best case scenario of the Sention.
But most things on a ship and many things on a planet would be at best negligibly effected.
Weapons with the same power would essentially be the same size. Shielding that offered X protection would be the same thickness. Scanners with X range would be the same size. Lots of the ship is not going to scale with the inhabitants.

On planets: scanners, shields, would be essentially the same size. The assumed factories, power plants, etc, and whatever buildings are primarily about something other than housing citizens would be essentially the same size minus the space saved for smaller hallways and access points.
In space (the most obvious stuff) orbital weapons, installations, and space docks (since they are servicing/building ships of essentially the same size) would be the same or nearly the same.

I'm trying not to be overly realistic. But it's one thing to gloss over complexities with a simplified mechanic, and it's another to give special advantages with suspiciously thin explaination.

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Maybe this could be attributed to a stealth-centered mindset of the species?

We could assume, that their designs and engineering practices are biased towards being stealthy - like choosing more stealthy shapes, better masking engine energy signature, using long range communication only when safe or necessary... I don't mean new technologies, just a peculiar focus in their application.

Such approach could give the species a small, average gain in stealth throughtout all their activities.

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If that's the explanation, it makes more sense to me to give them a free stealth tech at the start. Fewer simultaneous bonuses to worry about, but it gives them an entirely plausible lead in stealthiness. If the player focuses on stealth, they can probably keep that lead, as long as they are competetive.

Incidentally, i just discovered is currently possible.

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