FreeOrion

Looking at ship design and space combat counter, I think it is time to discuss some specific weapon details so we can resolve certan stand-offs in those threads. I'd like to present here *ALL* parameters of weapons and its effects, based on general mechanic (it deals damage, simple :D), including th...

Think of one person trying to herd one sheep. The person can do that well. When the person has to herd 50 sheep, especially in a larger paddock, the person needs a few dogs, needs a horse, maybe some more herders. Managing more sheep requires more management skill, money, etc than managing one shee...

I prefer the way we have discussed previously: no limits on ship design (mass, etc.) BUT designing a template is very expensive and done as a research project, meaning you *do* research a hull size/type, but you - the player - decide in each game what kind of hull it is from close to infinite choice...

That is the way I look at refinements but at some point, the ability to refine something should run out. For a while, there should be no new weapon that is like the one that became obsolete. After a while, though, there should be a new weapon that does something similar to the one that became obsol...

We are discussing, so far as I can see, two things: an economy penalty for being big (having many colonies) and a loyality penatly (i.e. increasing rebellion chance) for being far from HW. It is important not to confuse both thing (consider an empire with many colonies but all close to HW, and an em...

I have one of my long posts almost ready to answer most of questions raised here. Short version is: * if new techs are diffrent, but not more powerful, what is the point of researching them at all? Now I agree that weapons are similar, and we should emphasise their diffrences, and try to keep some o...

There is a slight problem what do we actually understand by ship design. I think designing a ship - meaning using UI to pull a components after you have some experience both with UI and game strategy (so you know what you want) should take less then 2 minutes. Honestly, I can't think of any game it ...

What if when you designed your ships you gave each component a priority number. Components with a lower priority will be shutdown in order to allow other higher priority components to keep working when power is very low. This reminds me of component repair priorities as used in SE3 and SE4 (I think...

It looks to me like corruption in Civ games. The idea has some merit, but not much - I hated it in all games I played. It was very primitive and hampered the development of my empires with rather unrealistic assumptions (and made the game less playable). After all, if we make a cap on empire size - ...

For those that have not been following related discussions the problem is: the more complex the game, the more difficult it is to program good, challenging (=fun) AIs. Several things have been postponed (like non-starlanes methods of movement) because they would be very consuming for Ais to use effi...

The best way to deal with criticals is to base them on probabilty (think board games and die rolls). Few solutions: - chance for critical damage should proportionaly increase the more hit points given ship loses (or if we go with cc to given components and hp for those component, the same should app...

Star Wars, Freelancer, Starlancer, Freespace, and Wing Commander all used something like starlanes. I don't think that has any more relevance than your list of Space Operas that don't. Yep. I just wanted to point out that other ways are possible and have been implelented both in space operas and in...

Why would someone choose to underpower a starship? Lets assume the following design: a ship with an oversized energy weapon and an energy absorbing shield. . I think of Babylon 5 Crusade and the Interstellar Aliance Destroyer class ships (Victory and Excalibur). Since they used reverse engeneered V...

Have you ever read "Red Mars" and it's two sequils? I think they do a very good job, but they also don't go very far into the future. Yes, they are good for the short term (100-200 years). For FO we can use them for basis of many fluff terraforming ideas, but it has been long time since I read them...

It will be difficult to implement other types later, unless you had no AI in your MP game at all; then we could probably just switch them off. In all multiplayer games I have played so far (Stars!, SE4) we never use AIs. They are a) always stupider then human player, which makes them an easy pray f...