Ship Experience / Crew Experience

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Sai
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Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#1 Post by Sai »

Going further on the topic of this thread, and beyond: Ship experience - or levels if you will. Much as per role playing game, where winning a combat earns you experience, and after a certain amount you 'level up' - you become slightly stronger/better than you were previously.

This could apply for ships, or even ship crews as mentioned in the linked thread (When assigning an old crew to a new ship, they should probably lose a percentage of their experience, after all a Titan class ship has different needs than a Lancer, the more different the new assignment is, the more experience should be lost.).

A different approach would be the old MoO2 (?) approach, where you could have fleet leaders. Ships in combat could have a very small percentage of 'raising' a new fleet leader, who'd then benefit a ship or fleet.

This last option would probably make the crew idea a lot easier too.

freereign
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#2 Post by freereign »

I like the ship crew experience idea. And it would be about as hard as the 'Leaders' of MoO2.
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Robbie.Price
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#3 Post by Robbie.Price »

goodmorning all,

I think keeping track of individual crews might prove too unKISS for FO, simply because not all crews are the same size, so you end up with partial crews and mixed experience levels, questions as to what to do when some of the crew dies... and things just go hey-wire. . .

Instead, I would suggest that we go with a variant of an idea from the previous thread, but i don't remember who's it was.

Basically a ship has experience, that experience grows with battles, levels accumulate and so forth. . . But in addition the empire has some form of experience rate/amount as well. (probably accumulating per turn based on the average experience level off all crew across all ships, as well as race pics, special projects, blaw blaw blaw..)

The important part being that ship experience can be traded in for empire experience, and empire experience for ship experience or special projects, perhaps being even Pre-requisite for certain buildings, or upgrading buildings. *one can imagine a planet building 'Empire Tactical Control Center' which provides various bonuses to combat/war, which would be cheep to build, but wouldn't provide much benefit unless upgraded by investing empire battle experience.*

The equivalent is like taking Picard off the enterprise and putting him into the classroom, the Enterprise looses out, but the future ships have better trained troops. . . or better diplomats, or whatever you invest Picard into.

You could even mix the two concepts. By having 'Fleet Leaders' which rather then being initially payed for with money are initialized by paying empire experience. IE the empire had a great person working in the general military machine, then promotes them to fleet leader status.

The fleet leaders would then gain experience with the ship(s) they are assigned to. But would not be re-trade in able for empire experience. (When choosing to promote somebody to a Fleet Leader the user could be provided with a list of 3-4 available people and their abilities(as fleet leader), and current post(randomly generated, if post is in 'the machine' Empire experience cost is higher, if on a ship that ship looses 1-2 levels as well as the empire loosing considerably less empire experience.)


Anyway, Best wishes,

Looking forward to any thoughts you all might have.

freereign
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#4 Post by freereign »

Perfect! And much simpler. This would add another resource to write for the AI *goes off and starts coding in python*
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eleazar
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#5 Post by eleazar »

We are very likely to eventually include some sort of "leaders" in the game, since they are included in the roadmap, in v.0.8.

It's conceivable that ships will have "experience points", since this doesn't have much in the way of micromanagement pitfalls. — though this idea has not yet been included in our preliminary design document for ships.

However i highly doubt we will include transferring/assigning crews, or any disembodied experience, for the same reasons we rejected the ideas of allowing the manual transfer of resources between planets, or of supplies and fuel to ships, or the manual control of a supply fleet, etc...

It doesn't scale well. With a large enough empire it would become a tedious micromanagement chore.

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AudioBottle
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#6 Post by AudioBottle »

Continuing with the ship experience idea, heres my concept (not really, but its the most reasonable route to take for now).
Individual ships should be worth a specific amount of points. In a battle this should be divided evenly among the winning fleet.
For example:
Large ship A is worth 10 points.
Fleet B is made of 5 small ships and wins the battle against ship A.
2 points are awarded to each of the small ships.
This should be a very simple concept to implement and can be taken further with some of the other ideas that have been discussed. Gaining experience could give the option of increasing whatever aspect of the ship that the user would want upon leveling (example: a new level is gained; you get the option of increasing armor, attack, travel distance, etc..)
Some other things to think about could be a chance to salvage materials, weapons, tech, money or other things from the defeated ship(s). This could be increased by the occupation of the ships by a fleet leader or a special type of ship captain or special weapon (as well as increasing experience gained)...
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General_Zaber
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#7 Post by General_Zaber »

I don't know about that one, sounds like micromanagement, a lot of it you maintain a large fleet. From my understanding late game military empires (on larger starmaps of at least 200 stars) would have a collossal navy made of at least a hundred combat ships. The idea of having to pick an upgrade for each ship every time they level up may sound like a good idea but remember; even if it takes a lot of experience to level a ship (or it's crew) up you would still have to do it a lot in long games and that would seriously slow things down.

I personally support the idea Krikkitone suggested on the old thread.
Sai wrote:Going further on the topic of this thread
As for bonuses attained from experience, I envision them as being quite simple. Perhaps the more XP a crew has (later ships will probably start with some taken from the empire's pool) the more accurate it's weapons are, perhaps the shields recharge faster or the ship uses less fuel during warping because the crew can fly it easier. But I think these effects shouldn't be very easy to notice unless you're on a 1:1 basis (ie, enemy has exact same fleet but with rookie crew) perhaps later once a crew has 3 Stars/ Level 25/ veteran status or whatever; then the ship should be capable of taking on a substantially more powerful opposition.
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freereign
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#8 Post by freereign »

Yes, General_Zaber is right. I created a PnP RPG once and every time you leveled you had to make lots of choices about where the points would go. That pretty much destroyed the joy of lvling up. Even if you only have 1 unit, if you have lots of choices then it becomes tedious. How much more when you have lots of units and multiple choices?
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eleazar
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#9 Post by eleazar »

AudioBottle wrote:Continuing with the ship experience idea, heres my concept (not really, but its the most reasonable route to take for now).
Individual ships should be worth a specific amount of points. In a battle this should be divided evenly among the winning fleet.
For example:
Large ship A is worth 10 points.
Fleet B is made of 5 small ships and wins the battle against ship A.
2 points are awarded to each of the small ships.
This should be a very simple concept to implement...
That is a reasonable method, but it doesn't account for non-combat ships like scouts and spies.
AudioBottle wrote:Gaining experience could give the option of increasing whatever aspect of the ship that the user would want upon leveling (example: a new level is gained; you get the option of increasing armor, attack, travel distance, etc..)
We already have a researched-based system planned to increase the powers of ships.

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AudioBottle
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#10 Post by AudioBottle »

General_Zaber wrote:sounds like micromanagement
I agree now that I think about it. There are definitely other possibilities of management that wont be so time consuming. I don't know if I like the crew idea all that much because of, again, the micro management of moving them around just seems like it would take away from the gameplay. A ship has a crew and a captain. Captains should not be so willing to swap ships. The better your captain (more exp.) the better the ship will do in general regardless of crew.

Other types of lvl management i can think of:
- an option you set once (and can change at will) that will automatically put points in the area of your choosing. (attack, defense, travel, balanced)
- Race specific. Heres an odd one. Level upgrades are totally dependant on your race and you have no options to choose. (Attack, defence, balanced, random, other ships give exp to scout ships or spies, materials transport)

I'm open to whatever else you guys can come up with.
eleazar wrote:That is a reasonable method, but it doesn't account for non-combat ships like scouts and spies.
These ships either simply wouldn't gain experience due to their abilities and rely completely on research upgrades or would gain experience by using their abilities (scouts: finding things, spies: espionage). A scout finds a hidden ship and gains 5 exp, or locates an enemy fleet without being detected 10 exp. Personally, I like the first option the most because it makes these ships a little more difficult to operate, as they should be.

The basic idea here is to give rewards for longevity of the individual craft. In an interstellar war there are going to be numerous casualties, and the longer you last, the more war savvy you should become.
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Robbie.Price
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#11 Post by Robbie.Price »

Goodmorning all,

I think i forgot to make it clear that either shifting experience from a ship to the empire, and or from the empire to a ship would be very costly in terms of efficiency.

For example removing a level of a high level ship, would not give you nearly enough empire experience to put that level back. This makes it so that one doesn't have to worry about micromanaging experience on a ship to ship level just make it far too inefficient to be ever a good idea.


But if you have the effect of leveling up be noticeable(or at least the first 1-2 levels, and the later levels) it becomes strategically interesting to ask weather you want to sacrifice a level or two on your primary capital ship, and have the next n ship you make start at their second level of experience.

and then having the experience resource allows you to do things with it. gives the game another degree of freedom from which to build game strategies.


Long story short,

Empire experience could be made another resource used for another subset of special projects, or recruiting of leaders, ect. By making the transfer of experience from ship to empire or from empire to ship or both, inefficient or impossible one doesn't have to worry about micromanagement,
So all you gain is fun, (and some code) [which I would be happy to take some responsibility for writing, as soon as i get my self in gear for actually contributing to the code base].

RE The question as to what effect levels have:

I like AudioBottle's first idea, where you outline for once, or once / ship build type, minimum how it levels up. Which you can then change at a later time, after which levels will contribute in the new way. This prevents a lot of forced micromanagement since most of the time you probably will want to upgrade any given ship type always in the same way.


p.s. Freerein, I can't tell if your being sarcastic, or precisely which idea you were responding to.


best wishes all
Robbie Price

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Krikkitone
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#12 Post by Krikkitone »

Actually to avoid micromanagement I feel that

1. Experience Points should move Automatically between the Empire and the ship (ie 1% automatically leaves the Ship and goes to the Imperial supply)

2. The only point of player choice would be on the Imperial Policy level
when the ship is built (ie If Policy says Best Qualified... then a lot of Imperial Experience is used to build that ship) and as the ship is operating (If you chose high "Training" Policies then experience would tend to leave ships and go to the Imperial Pool Rapidly, so that experience could be put into new ships/sent out to other existing ships. If you choose a 'max mobilization' then Experience stays on the field... in those ships. It still decays but in this case is just lost (ie experienced crew dies)

In this case, the 'Abilities' would be a simple function of the Experience points the ship had at the time.

And the Experience level of your ships would tend towards the same average level (Imperial policies determining how fast Experience was 'distributed' among your fleet)

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AudioBottle
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#13 Post by AudioBottle »

I think the concept of ship experience that I'm thinking of is a lot more basic than the idea of shared ship/empire exp. I dont know why the empire points would even be implemented at all because they just seem like something else to micro manage and i think that the state of the empire altogether is a good reflection of experience to begin with. I think these should be kept separate just on the fact that they should be managed differently. The crew on a ship should be present in transports and only represent ground personel. Again this all goes back to the idea that there is a single captain of a ship and his performance relates directly to the ships, excluding the idea of a crew altogether. Having damage relate to ship performance is a simple task without the presence of crew stats. If the ship is beaten up => it will not perform as well.
If there is a post about the idea of ship/empire exp sharing could someone post a link to it?
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#14 Post by Olemars »

I'm not fond of the "kill monster and gain 50 XP" model and leveling up. It just feels very artificial.

In my opinion, experience should be on a per ship basis and fully handled by the game. The easiest way to do it would be to give each ship a set of attributes or modifiers that improve when that specific attribute is used. For instance, a ship that fires its guns a lot would get gradually improved reloading time and accuracy. A ship that survives a battle, but with heavy damage would get better at damage control and repair. The fleet the ship belongs to could get a small amount of the attribute gain as well, to reflect dissemination of knowledge and experience through crew transfers and battle analysis. If a ship/fleet is stationed at a backwater system too long and not seeing any action, the attributes could start to drop slowly. The options are only limited by imagination.

This should allow for little to no micromanagement, and good transparency and flexibility. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement either.

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Robbie.Price
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Re: Ship Experience / Crew Experience

#15 Post by Robbie.Price »

Goodmorning all,


RE Krikkitone's comment;

I agree for the most part empire experience should accumulate automatically as a % of ship experience.

And that in general the experience level of the empire should gradually regress towards the mean. (or at least have that option if set on empire level)

The direct transferring of experience, or direct spending of experience would only be for special projects or dire circumstances, or to afford special projects(which could be made to require xp) sooner. otherwise general policies would govern behavior. ("all ships leaving spacedoc for the first time should be level 2, min, if empire experience is sufficient". type thing)

RE Audiobottle;

I also like your proposed model as an alternative. It really couldn't be easier, faster, or simpler from a UI point of view. Never do anything special, the ship gets better at what you need it to do most.

I would support this alternative also.

The only problem with it might be defining a way of deciding how much ships should improve for giving situations. Almost all war ships are going to use virtually all their guns each round, so what qualifies as extra gunnage? Also would it be anytime a ship leaves battle with N% damage they gain M% health? Users might try to intentionally bang up their ships a bit more (with the risk of loosing them of course) but this could risk people micromanaging their ships. . .

We could do a mix of course, the game tracks generally how a ship preformed since it's last level, then levels up and undergoes some changes depending on it's performance. Although discreet levels are unpleasantly unrealistic, i'll grant. They certainly make measuring and user comprehension easier. "this is a Level 3 star cruiser, that is a level 70 star cruiser . . . run!"

Just a thought.


best wishes

Robbie

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