Bombardments & Invasions

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OllyG
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#16 Post by OllyG »

qsswin wrote:I really didn't need to conquer those planets. Some of them were not good EPs (I guess even cautious sometimes does that), and I had sufficient PP to win the rest of the game easily. So I felt that bombardment would be a good alternative to conquering every single last damn planet that belongs to another empire.
Something needs to be done to speed up the game in some areas. Possibly the problem is that the game is unfinished - when diplomatic options are available mopping up every last planet won't be necessary.
qsswin wrote:Of course, as mentioned before, there is another use for bombardment: destroying the usefulness of a planet. I feel like automatic bombardment should maybe do a bit more damage, perhaps lowering other meters on a planet.
Automatic bombardment isn't always desirable. Something should be added to the current two options for fleet behaviour (attack or hide). If there was an option to attack fleets and an extra more aggressive option to attack fleets and bombard it would be better. Choosing to bombard each individual planet will become extremely tedious. It's already bad enough invading or colonising as much as is currently necessary to win.

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eleazar
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#17 Post by eleazar »

OllyG wrote:Choosing to bombard each individual planet will become extremely tedious. It's already bad enough invading or colonising as much as is currently necessary to win.
Sounds like you are playing with too many planets per galaxy. These things are generally simpler than in other 4X games.

But i agree-- the game should be eventually balanced so you don't need to conquer every single planet to win, or colonize every possible planet to have a shot at winning.

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#18 Post by Bigjoe5 »

eleazar wrote:
OllyG wrote:Choosing to bombard each individual planet will become extremely tedious. It's already bad enough invading or colonising as much as is currently necessary to win.
Sounds like you are playing with too many planets per galaxy. These things are generally simpler than in other 4X games.

But i agree-- the game should be eventually balanced so you don't need to conquer every single planet to win, or colonize every possible planet to have a shot at winning.
Perhaps some method of scaling up bombardments and invasions as the game progresses (as was discussed for colonization in this thread) would help matters.
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Ashbery76
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#19 Post by Ashbery76 »

Is glassing planets going to give your race diplomatic penalties.When full diplomacy is included of course.

StGW44
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#20 Post by StGW44 »

Hi to all and it is a pleasure reading through all those different ideas and threads...
This one here really got my attention...
I have been very fond of the bombard-idea!
For programming issues I was thinking, I would implement the most powerful bomb, I call it the Laser Scatter Bomb (sort of nuclear, emitted polarized light being the bombs shells). Tiny and small Planets get vaporized to Asteroids, larger planets depopulated und all buildings whiped off the planet. For who wants a downsized version, it would be just a matter of deleting a few lines of code.
Introducing such a weapon makes game balancing very importand. So limitations to the device are:
- expensive and timeconsuming to be built
- needs a "core" slot, so only very few ships can actually use the device
- onetime usage, then it requires a "refill" at a dedicated location, to make it not to simple for players to bomb their way through an enemy empire

The bomb actually works already, bombing only dedicated targets with the above mentioned effects...
but I got stuck at the task of "one-Time-usage"...

Getting the planet being bombed into focus is really easy using the "OrderedBombardedBy" command.
Getting the focus to the ship conducting the bombardement, however, I dont know...
Is there a "ShipOrderedToBombard" kind of thing?
Any help would be apreciated and all comments are welcome.
Best regards,
Robert

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Cornflake
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#21 Post by Cornflake »

do "death spores" so anything at present ? I have used them on the same planet 4 turns in a row and seen no results. do i need to have a number of death spore-equipped ships equal to or more than the troop strength of a planet ?

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Dilvish
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#22 Post by Dilvish »

Cornflake wrote:do "death spores" so anything at present ? I have used them on the same planet 4 turns in a row and seen no results.
One new-ish thing about Death Spores is that to use them the ship having them must target the enemy planet and select "Bombard" from the planet panel, akin to the invasion mechanism (but shields should not matter for Bombardment). Constraints that have always been there are that the enemy planet must be visible to you, and that Death Spores only work against Organic species.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

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Cornflake
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#23 Post by Cornflake »

wow. noob error on my part. i bet my target was not organic. didn't even think about that. doh ! (slinks back to home planet iin shame)

shivu

Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#24 Post by shivu »

Dilvish wrote:and that Death Spores only work against Organic species.
Cornflake was not the only one who did not know that.
I propose to make that public by introducing it in the stringtables.

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labgnome
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#25 Post by labgnome »

Dilvish wrote:Death Spores only work against Organic species.
Perhaps we need techs for "death crystals" for lithic species "death nanites" for robotic species "death soot" for phototrophic species and "death fields" for self-sustaining species?
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.

Computergeek01
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#26 Post by Computergeek01 »

Hi Everyone,

First I want to say that I'm a huge fan of this game and I love what you guys are doing with it.

Regarding the bombardment\spore idea, I like it just for the spite factor alone. It also makes deep strike raiding a valid if slightly insidious option (otherwise the external engines are a waste of a perfectly good weapon slot). It doesn't actually address the end game grinding issue though, it just shifts it around a bit. What if, after a capitol world is conquered, the remaining planets just flipped over to native species and the remaining ships either disbanded or became monsters? Fluff-wise it makes sense, gameplay wise it speeds up the endgame, maybe a bit too much though? The biggest drawback that I can think of is that I've caught the AI with it's pants down in a couple of games and I haven't read enough of the code to piece together how easy that would be to mitigate or if it was a conscious design decision.

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MatGB
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#27 Post by MatGB »

Computergeek01 wrote:Hi Everyone,

First I want to say that I'm a huge fan of this game and I love what you guys are doing with it.

Regarding the bombardment\spore idea, I like it just for the spite factor alone. It also makes deep strike raiding a valid if slightly insidious option (otherwise the external engines are a waste of a perfectly good weapon slot).
Yup, and now that troops are heavily dependent on population it can make invasions significantly easier as well, so much so I'm considering building ships with them instead of just using my pet monsters. Porbably need to do some cost/benefit balancing for it sooner rather than later though.
It doesn't actually address the end game grinding issue though, it just shifts it around a bit. What if, after a capitol world is conquered, the remaining planets just flipped over to native species and the remaining ships either disbanded or became monsters? Fluff-wise it makes sense, gameplay wise it speeds up the endgame, maybe a bit too much though? The biggest drawback that I can think of is that I've caught the AI with it's pants down in a couple of games and I haven't read enough of the code to piece together how easy that would be to mitigate or if it was a conscious design decision.
AI decision making is an ongoing project, the AI team have done a lot to improve things of late but it's still, well, a computer algorithm that can't actually think.

I'd like to see more diplomacy options with a surrender/cede worlds system, but that's something that'll need to be worked through as and when the team have time to actually do some real work on the diplomacy system and I've no idea what the timescale is on developing that.
Mat Bowles

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spikethehobbit
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Re: Bombardments & Invasions

#28 Post by spikethehobbit »

labgnome wrote:
Dilvish wrote:Death Spores only work against Organic species.
Perhaps we need techs for "death crystals" for lithic species "death nanites" for robotic species "death soot" for phototrophic species and "death fields" for self-sustaining species?
I just posted a patch in Other Game Design that addresses this.
All contributions are submitted under GPL or LGPL v2 or later, or under appropriate Creative Commons licence, consistent with project guidlines.

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