Satellites, [...] now renamed the "cargo" thread

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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herbert_vaucanson
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Satellites, [...] now renamed the "cargo" thread

#1 Post by herbert_vaucanson »

Hi All,

I just bumped into the freeorion project and, well, I love it :D
I am getting more info, but I just wanted to ask what is the status-consensus on some issues I would love to see in the final game:

Color-coded starlanes: owned, travelled, known but untravelled;

satellites - expecially for gas giants, they should be a rarity on rock planets. Say, tiny to medium, rarely one for a medium-to-huge rock, up to four for a gas giant. They should be independently colonisable. The names could be Mirak III a, Mirak III b and so on. Please, let single body names be customisable...

some ideas for the "main areas" of the tech tree:
- artificial intelligence and sentience
- telepathy (from little empathy to psionics...)
- physics (materials, beams, engines)
- biotechnology (manipulation of life, new materials, food used for industry...)
- social engineering (governments, economic sistems, ethics...);

do you think that some technological choices should "caractherise" a star empire? Say, if a race chooses to become machines, new bonuses appear but psionic research dwindle to a crawl, etc.?

the possibility to federate - and so peacefully incorporate - other empires (some social technologies are surely needed, maybe also a multicultural experience as a jointly owned base, or colony, or an embassy);

a bigger, more detailed icons for ships?

star travel: star lane engines, or hyperspace engines, should be really big and power consuming so that only big ships can handle them. However, it should be possible to build carrier ships with hyperspace drives to transport smaller ships without this capability, like colony ships, outposts, smaller warships, etc. Jump gates could be "fixed" versions of such transpost ships, needing two of them to cooperate at both ends of a starlane to allow travel...

playing a game, I found a black hole with a terran planet, and a G-star with 4 terrans and an ocean planet. Is this normal?

what I would like most is that, with technology and development, the need to phisically expand the number of stars controlled is reduced - when you have demographic control, live in space and can dram materials from a gas giant or star, why do you need to colonise other planets, if not for cultural reasons? So we could have "old empires" at the beginning of the game, mostly uninterested in the new sentients coming up; of course, if an empire wants to conquer the galaxy for ideological reasons...

and most importantly: cross-breeding and population mixing of different but alike species, like humanoid, with the final effect of stacking the intrinsic bonuses of both. I am in favour of it (too much space opera, I believe), but only after some radical bioengineering feats.
Last edited by herbert_vaucanson on Wed Mar 09, 2005 1:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Satellites, federations, expansion and old races

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I'd like to preface this by saying that unless done so explicitly, nothing has been specifically rejected from the future design or decided against. So if something hasn't been decided upon, or there's nothing like that (yet) in the game, that doesn't mean there won't ever be. In those cases, a specific thread in brainstorming would be in order (if there isn't one already). However keen in mind that most ideas in brainstorming won't be implemented or decided on until the appropriate stage in the roadmap, which could be months or years away, depending how things go...

The roadmap: http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Roadmap
herbert_vaucanson wrote:Color-coded starlanes: owned, travelled, known but untravelled;
There's currently no conception of "owning" a starlane, but the game does colour a starlane that goes directly between two systems in a particular player is the only one who owns planets. This is just eye candy though. Whether a particular starlane has been travelled is not tracked. I've been musing a about starlane visibility being variable though, which might be indicated with differently starlane appearances (assuming you know about the starlane, how visible it is would be important, as other empires might not know about it if they aren't able to see lanes of that or less visibility).
satellites - expecially for gas giants, they should be a rarity on rock planets. Say, tiny to medium, rarely one for a medium-to-huge rock, up to four for a gas giant. They should be independently colonisable. The names could be Mirak III a, Mirak III b and so on.
There will almost certainly be some conception of "moons" in the game, though whether they will be "indepedently colonisable" is, I believe, undecided.

If they are colonized independently, then moons are functionally separate planets, which raises questions about what the real purpose of having the distinction between "moons of gas giants that are as big as planets" and "normal planets". Depending on how space combat is set up, there might be a difference in where they're placed on the battle map, but other than that's, it's really just a naming issue... If moons aren't treated as functionally separate planets, they'll probly be treated as specials that modify the planet they're attached to, by increasing the planet size or some other bonus(es).

I could be wrong about this, and it could have been decided, but unlike some other issues of this sort, I haven't ever seen someone who was around at the time declare so unambiguously.
Please, let single body names be customisable...
Planets can be renamed, if that's what you mean...
some ideas for the "main areas" of the tech tree:
- artificial intelligence and sentience
- telepathy (from little empathy to psionics...)
- physics (materials, beams, engines)
- biotechnology (manipulation of life, new materials, food used for industry...)
- social engineering (governments, economic sistems, ethics...);
See the tech tree design forum. Some of the tech categories have been decided upon, and others will wait until the appropriate stage in the roadmap.
do you think that some technological choices should "caractherise" a star empire? Say, if a race chooses to become machines, new bonuses appear but psionic research dwindle to a crawl, etc.?
That's "characterize". Some people have suggested that different strategies would depend on what tech category you focus on, suggesting that the trees be mostly independent, but other aspects of the tech model we're using require some degree of interconnection between the categories. The suggestions for individual theory techs and their prerequisites hopefully achieve a balance between these.

As for "chosing" to become machines, this probably won't reflect how things work. I suspect for story purposes, most races will want to be fairly strictly defined. That means that there will be "machine" races, and "humanoid" races, and weird plant or aquatic or energy races, and there will be limited or no ways to change your race during a game. I could be wrong on this though... Or the reality could be somewhere in the middle, with races starting out strictly defined, but being able to change over the course of the game through various means / technology / whatnot.
the possibility to federate - and so peacefully incorporate - other empires (some social technologies are surely needed, maybe also a multicultural experience as a jointly owned base, or colony, or an embassy);
I suspect for clarity and UI reasons, there won't be joint ownership of anything of planet size or smaller. There can be more than one empire owning planets in a particular system, but each planet will likely be owned by a single player. I'm not absolutely certain about this, but I'm pretty sure. There are also only going to be one race per planet for similar reasons, which might be hard to accept, but is arguably the best way to go...

As for embassies or "multicultural experience", this will probably have to wait until somewhat later. Check the roadmap.
a bigger, more detailed icons for ships?
Bigger than what...? In any case, this will probly wait until ships are designed...
star travel: star lane engines, or hyperspace engines, should be really big and power consuming so that only big ships can handle them. However, it should be possible to build carrier ships with hyperspace drives to transport smaller ships without this capability, like colony ships, outposts, smaller warships, etc. Jump gates could be "fixed" versions of such transpost ships, needing two of them to cooperate at both ends of a starlane to allow travel...
This won't be decided until ships are designed, but I suspect that any ship that the player can control independently will be able to move between systems independently. We'll likely have fighters on carriers or somesuch, but these won't be separate "ships" that the player builds, and won't move between systems on their own.
playing a game, I found a black hole with a terran planet, and a G-star with 4 terrans and an ocean planet. Is this normal?
That depends on your definition of "normal". The current algorithms for placing planets could probably use some tweaking, though are effectively "normal" right now, whether or not they act as they should (however you define that). I think there's a spreadsheet / table of values in the game files somewhere that you can alter, but some algorithmic modifications are also necessary. It's on the TODO list, but there are higher priorities.
what I would like most is that, with technology and development, the need to phisically expand the number of stars controlled is reduced - when you have demographic control, live in space and can dram materials from a gas giant or star, why do you need to colonise other planets, if not for cultural reasons? So we could have "old empires" at the beginning of the game, mostly uninterested in the new sentients coming up; of course, if an empire wants to conquer the galaxy for ideological reasons...
It will probably be possible to construct scenarios for any such imaginable situation. Such discussions are probably best on the story forum, or brainstorming for now though.
and most importantly: cross-breeding and population mixing of different but alike species, like humanoid, with the final effect of stacking the intrinsic bonuses of both. I am in favour of it (too much space opera, I believe), but only after some radical bioengineering feats.
As above, there will only be one race per planet. As for changing what that race is / making up new races / hybridization: it's possible and could be fun, but not really a core feature that's essential for a playable game. If a simple but good system can be found to implement it, it has a better chance of happening. I suggest looking for or starting a brainstorming thread.

Edit: I did include a "Xenological Hybridization" theory tech in the Growth category. What the applications under this tech allow you to actually do in game is entirely undecided though. The decision will most likely be based on how practical / important it is for gameplay, how fun it would be and whether it would create significant design or UI problem (eg. too much micro in the late game). Again, whether or not it happens probly depends on the mechanics of how it would be calcualted and how it would be represented in-game, more so than the specific concept of "cross-breeding and population".

Edit2: Keep in mind that there's more to consider when designing a game than just what would be cool conceptually. It's equally or more important to be sure the game is playable and fun than it is to include any nifty ideas that may only sound good in theory, but which are pointless or unworkable in practice.

And don't be too discouraged if your pet feature(s) aren't a high priority... it's better that we get a simple, but working and playable game up and running first, rather than trying to include every possible feature or sci-fi concept in the game in some way, and end up never actually producing a game at all... And we can always add in new features for versions after v1.0.

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Re: Satellites, federations, expansion and old races

#3 Post by kess »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Please, let single body names be customisable...
Planets can be renamed, if that's what you mean...
A little rant from my side...
Thinking multiplayer games, diplomacy.

Scenario
In the System of Gayatri (two medium sized planets). Player A owns Gayatri I (and has renamed it to Last Defence), Player B owns Gayatri II (and has not renamed it). Now Player B is sending Player A an hostile threat.

Version 1
Player B's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Gayatri I, prepare yourselves!"
Player A's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Gayatri I, prepare yourselves!"

Version 2
Player B's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Gayatri I, prepare yourselves!"
Player A's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Last Defence, prepare yourselves!"

Version 3
Player B's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Gayatri I (Last Defence), prepare yourselves!"
Player A's diplomacy screen: "Due to your untimely attack on Gayatri II, we're going to return it in multum on Last Defence (Gayatri I), prepare yourselves!"


Some thoughts, that was. I do wonder, how is the customized naming affecting other players in multiplayer games? It could be interesting to learn of their namings in certain situations (perhaps not always transparent of what it really is a renaming of). That is, a player sends the (game generated) message "Our planet of Arga'zaaam has just built this X, come get it if you can.", well, be the message for real or joke, the planet Arga'zaaam's real name could be Mirabilis IV (but of that the other player would never know)...

Ah! my ranting will stop here.

[edit]
There could though be small problem, for instance, if a Japanese (or English or...) player renamed Mirabilis IV to 夢 (yume 'dream') it might be undisplayable for other players due to font problems...

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#4 Post by noelte »

@kess: Hmm, what's your point? IMO, we should always use the name which the last planet owner had given the planet. As messages are generated dynamicly based on the unique planet id it should be no problem at all!?
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#5 Post by kess »

No point. I was playing with ideas in my head seeing if something could come from it, and I thought that I might as well share those thoughts.

And, no, I don't see any problems either (except that one with the fonts perhaps). If each planet has just one name (renaming replaces the original Star + Numeral), then the idea I played with has no ground in the game. ;)

(Rant again. Though, if each planet has two names associated with its id, then the post above has a ground in the game. I'm not sure though that I would like that to happen, it might give an interesting puzzling aspect to the game, but might take away too much from a simple 'head-on play style'.)

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#6 Post by noelte »

kess wrote: (Rant again. Though, if each planet has two names associated with its id, then the post above has a ground in the game. I'm not sure though that I would like that to happen, it might give an interesting puzzling aspect to the game, but might take away too much from a simple 'head-on play style'.)
No, every planet has always only one name.
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#7 Post by kess »

Ah, sorry! Not meaning to offend or anything like it. I'm just fond of brainstorming. And the thing for me with brainstorming is that anything goes, at least in the first stage.

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Re: Satellites, federations, expansion and old races

#8 Post by herbert_vaucanson »

Geoff the Medio wrote:I'd like to preface this by saying that unless done so explicitly, nothing has been specifically rejected from the future design or decided against. [...]
Cristal clear.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
herbert_vaucanson wrote:Color-coded starlanes: owned, travelled, known but untravelled;
There's currently no conception of "owning" a starlane, but the game does colour a starlane that goes directly between two systems in a particular player is the only one who owns planets. This is just eye candy though.
I had this "Babilon 5"-based idea: you own a starlane if you have hyperspace gates on both sides, so that you can actually have non-warp ships go through them. Otherwise it is just a starlane between two of your systems...
Geoff the Medio wrote: There will almost certainly be some conception of "moons" in the game, though whether they will be "indepedently colonisable" is, I believe, undecided.
I would like them to be independently colonisable, even if, at the end, this means that they behave just as planets. Consider a gas giant: it is not colonisable, but its moons could be...
Geoff the Medio wrote:
Please, let single body names be customisable...
Planets can be renamed, if that's what you mean...
Ohhhh thanks, that's a relief. I could not stand anymore my homeworld being "Sol III" :D
Geoff the Medio wrote:
some ideas for the "main areas" of the tech tree: [...]
See the tech tree design forum. Some of the tech categories have been decided upon, and others will wait until the appropriate stage in the roadmap.
Ok.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
do you think that some technological choices should "caractherise" a star empire? Say, if a race chooses to become machines, new bonuses appear but psionic research dwindle to a crawl, etc.?
That's "characterize".
:P
Geoff the Medio wrote: As for "chosing" to become machines, this probably won't reflect how things work. I suspect for story purposes, most races will want to be fairly strictly defined. That means that there will be "machine" races, and "humanoid" races, and weird plant or aquatic or energy races, and there will be limited or no ways to change your race during a game. I could be wrong on this though... Or the reality could be somewhere in the middle, with races starting out strictly defined, but being able to change over the course of the game through various means / technology / whatnot.
I always found that a machine race should have been bio in the past, so it must be far technologically more advanced than the bios...
I would imagine an universe in which you invariantly start bio (or cristal, which is "bio in silicium"), and where you have the POSSIBILITY, after certain techs are achieved, to go machine OR go mass-telepatic OR go energy... probably the final version is an energy bio-machine with psi capabilities, but the order in which you accept the "sublimations" affect the further speed of research in the other ares. So that there is still diversity in the mid-to-late game.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
the possibility to federate - and so peacefully incorporate - other empires (some social technologies are surely needed, maybe also a multicultural experience as a jointly owned base, or colony, or an embassy);
I suspect for clarity and UI reasons, there won't be joint ownership of anything of planet size or smaller.
Sorry, I did not mean this, probably I was not clear. What I meant is:
can I peacefully incorporate another empire by peaceful means, i.e. creating something which evolves into a "federation" which I control?
Geoff the Medio wrote:
a bigger, more detailed icons for ships?
Bigger than what...?
Bigger that the ones currently used in the o.2 version
Geoff the Medio wrote:
star travel: star lane engines, or hyperspace engines, should be really big and power consuming so that only big ships can handle them. However, it should be possible to build carrier ships with hyperspace drives to transport smaller ships without this capability, like colony ships, outposts, smaller warships, etc. Jump gates could be "fixed" versions of such transpost ships, needing two of them to cooperate at both ends of a starlane to allow travel...
This won't be decided until ships are designed, but I suspect that any ship that the player can control independently will be able to move between systems independently. We'll likely have fighters on carriers or somesuch, but these won't be separate "ships" that the player builds, and won't move between systems on their own.
I understand. My gripes were mostly against the classic way to implement colony ships: who whould build lots of complete starships for one way travels? Better build a transport infrastructure and move some "payload" through it - the same concept of containers...


Edit: I did include a "Xenological Hybridization" theory tech in the Growth category. What the applications under this tech allow you to actually do in game is entirely undecided though. The decision will most likely be based on how practical / important it is for gameplay, how fun it would be and whether it would create significant design or UI problem (eg. too much micro in the late game). Again, whether or not it happens probly depends on the mechanics of how it would be calcualted and how it would be represented in-game, more so than the specific concept of "cross-breeding and population".
[/quote]

My idea was to have an empire with, say, two humanoid races. They will have the same enviromental preferences, so they live on similar worlds. After XenoBioHybrid tech is discovered, a "new humanoid race" appears, being the stack of the positive characteristics of the two (or more) humanoid races in the empire. At random each turn, the population of one, none or some of the owned worlds turn into this new race.
This would fit with the "federation" approach to expansion, creating a "Banks-Culture" like of entity. It would also fit/stack with my other idea of major changes in the race, like become cybernetic, create a psi-link, eventually shift into "pure energy" or whatever...
Geoff the Medio wrote: Edit2: Keep in mind that there's more to consider when designing a game than just what would be cool conceptually. It's equally or more important to be sure the game is playable and fun than it is to include any nifty ideas that may only sound good in theory, but which are pointless or unworkable in practice.

And don't be too discouraged if your pet feature(s) aren't a high priority... it's better that we get a simple, but working and playable game up and running first, rather than trying to include every possible feature or sci-fi concept in the game in some way, and end up never actually producing a game at all... And we can always add in new features for versions after v1.0.
Understood, I am not discouraged at all :D

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Re: Satellites, federations, expansion and old races

#9 Post by Geoff the Medio »

herbert_vaucanson wrote:I had this "Babilon 5"-based idea: you own a starlane if you have hyperspace gates on both sides, so that you can actually have non-warp ships go through them. Otherwise it is just a starlane between two of your systems...
I suspect there will be something like a stargate / jumpgate that players can build that sends ships instantly to some other destination. Whether it will be possible to make ships without regular starlane-traversing engines is entirely undecided. Personally, I don't see much point in it; if we want to have immobile system defences, why not just make regular non-ship immobile system defences?
I always found that a machine race should have been bio in the past, so it must be far technologically more advanced than the bios...
I would imagine an universe in which you invariantly start bio (or cristal, which is "bio in silicium"), and where you have the POSSIBILITY, after certain techs are achieved, to go machine OR go mass-telepatic OR go energy... probably the final version is an energy bio-machine with psi capabilities, but the order in which you accept the "sublimations" affect the further speed of research in the other ares. So that there is still diversity in the mid-to-late game.
Spontaneous formation of mechanical life does seem somewhat less likely than sponteanous formation of organic life, as we currently understand them. However at the time of the game, there could have been previous races and empires that colonized the galaxy and made mechanical servants, after which the original race died off or disappeared, leaving the self-replicating machines to evolve on their own into a mechanical race. And even if there's no "were created by ancient race" backstory, the argument about unlikeliness of spontaneous formation is essentially a realism argument, which is of little or no weight when deciding such things (see realism policy on FAQ in wiki or in post on announcements forum).

Again though, none of this will be decided for a while...

Perhaps the way races that start as "machine" or "telepathic" are defined is by giving them a moderately advanced tech along those lines, which gives them some appropriate benefits that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten for many turns into the game... They'd still be able to research all the biological, energy, machine or psionic type techs they would have otherwise, and if there's some way to alter your race, the in game effects of this would be identical... So that rather than starting as generic biological, a race might start as prespecialized to mechanical, but still able to do the same other specializations as the races that don't start mechanical when they get far enough up the tech tree.

Really, we can tack on whatever fluff story description we want to a variety of game mechanics...

Sorry, I did not mean this, probably I was not clear. What I meant is:
can I peacefully incorporate another empire by peaceful means, i.e. creating something which evolves into a "federation" which I control?
Diplomacy and Governments are quite a ways off. Nothing has been decided about this yet, except apparently that people liked the SMAC model of various different social engineering settings, rather than a single Civ-like government choice.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
a bigger, more detailed icons for ships?
Bigger than what...?
Bigger that the ones currently used in the o.2 version
I'm not sure what icons you're referring to, but it's probably a graphics decision. Post suggestions on that forum... Though depending on what you want exactly, you might want to wait until the v0.4 design (which is about ships / combat) gets underway.
I understand. My gripes were mostly against the classic way to implement colony ships: who whould build lots of complete starships for one way travels? Better build a transport infrastructure and move some "payload" through it - the same concept of containers...
Presumably you take apart your colony ship to build the initial colony infrastructure... But really this is a UI and micromanagement issue. Having to load up cargo on transports and send the transports back to pick up another load after unloading is more micro than it's worth. It's much simpler for the player to build a colony ship and send it out and be done with it, even if it's "unrealistic".
After XenoBioHybrid tech is discovered, a "new humanoid race" appears, being the stack of the positive characteristics of the two (or more) humanoid races in the empire. At random each turn, the population of one, none or some of the owned worlds turn into this new race.
I'm not a fan of the "At random each turn" part, but something like this could probably be done. Your population might not particularly want to be hybridized however...

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#10 Post by noelte »

Whether it will be possible to make ships without regular starlane-traversing engines is entirely undecided.
Hate to contradict you, but i'm pretty sure that we won't have such ships. It is the same problem as with having no starlanes. Fleets could simply drop in and you couldn't do anything against it. No strategic planning at all.
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#11 Post by Geoff the Medio »

noelte wrote:
Whether it will be possible to make ships without regular starlane-traversing engines is entirely undecided.
Hate to contradict you, but i'm pretty sure that we won't have such ships. It is the same problem as with having no starlanes. Fleets could simply drop in and you couldn't do anything against it. No strategic planning at all.
I meant ships that can't move between systems at all (ie. "system ships"), not ships that can move off starlanes.

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#12 Post by noelte »

I see. I think system ships could be in!? I like the idea of system (impuls) and star (warp) drives. As i remember there was a problem of moving those ships from shipyard/system to an different star system. But the same is true to starbases. Right now there is some magic about placing starbases.
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#13 Post by Sandlapper »

How about starlane tug-ships? To pull/push a system ship thru a starlane.

It could be limited to one ship at a time, which would mean a return trip to get the next ship (moving a same size fleet of system ships takes twice as long as a starlane capable fleet(unless you have more than one tug)).

Tugs would have oversized engines, limiting space for weapons and ordnance. We could add a speed handicap as well, if desired.

This would allow you to move system fleets as your empire expands.

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#14 Post by Geoff the Medio »

noelte wrote:I see. I think system ships could be in!? I like the idea of system (impuls) and star (warp) drives.
If so desired, we can separate the warp / interestellar engines from the battle / in-system engines on ships. This in of itself is not a reason to have a whole separate class of ships that can't move between systems.

Then again, I suppose there's no reason to require all ships to have an interstellar drive either... If the player wants to make a ship without such a drive, I don't see any obvious reason to not make it possible. And we wouldn't really need to provide any way to move these ships between systems... So if you want system ships, you can have them, but you can't move them. There could also be some special (not for direct combat) ship parts that can't be used on a ship that has interstellar drives, for some fluff reason, but which does have to be put on a (system) ship, so can be sneak attacked and destroyed.

Then again again, perhaps we'd be better of designing this so that there's not a huge advantage to making ships without interstellar dives... It seems like having to deal with half your ships not being able to move around would be a pain, but you'd be obligated to do so strategically...
As i remember there was a problem of moving those ships from shipyard/system to an different star system. But the same is true to starbases. Right now there is some magic about placing starbases.
What exactly is a starbase and what they can/can't do hasn't really been nailed down... But whatever they are, presumably you wouldn't move starbases around the map (as then it would be a ship). You'd build them and they'd be stuck where they were built... like shipyards or buildings on planets (or ships without interstellar drives, I suppose).

Sandlapper: Tugs set off the "EXCESSIVE MICRO" alarm... They don't significantly improve gameplay compared to a game in which they don't exist, but if you could use them, you'd have to, and doing so is a pain due to micro required and having to represent it in the UI.

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#15 Post by Ablaze »

I do like the idea of having cargo ships which can transport population, goods, and ground combat units around. With truly massive cargo fleets you could even transport ships around. It could be a lot like Dune.

I like the idea, but I'm not sure how feasible it is.

It could also be fun to have all transport be on loan from an intergalactic corporation, like CHOM in Dune. The more you invest the cheaper all space travel would be for you. It could be another good explanation for why starlanes exist; it's like a bus schedule, it only runs along certain routes.

It would be fun if, at the start of a battle, a huge transport vessel warped in, dropped your fleet off, and then warped out to the next system.
Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

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