What is the deal with starlanes?

[Ranos]

@ solartrix

A later option in the game may be to allow linking as you describe. It may be a possibility. AQ was just clarifying that starlanes will be used in FO. How they will intersect planets, the number, etc is something that may very well change.

[Geoff the Medio]

No... it really doesn't. Real open space is like a big ocean. [...] Where starsystems are has nothing to do with where you want to intercept a ship, or the path from where you are to where the ship will be when you can reach it soonest.

Open space as you describe it is obvously not within the scope of FreeOrion or even any of the Moo's for that matter.

It is how VGA Planets worked, however.

[PowerCrazy]

I voted against starlanes.....
I also wanted sliders....

I've also moved on from worrying about those two items. Now I'll be working on the tech costs/economy etc as soon as this semester is over.

[guiguibaah]

haha - oops, I posted the wrong image - What's funny is nobody seemed to notice. Oh well

[pd]

i did! but i thought it's maybe my overtired mind or my poorly speaken english :)

so where is the right image?

[utilae]

haha - oops, I posted the wrong image - What's funny is nobody seemed to notice. Oh well

I thought you were joking or something. I was trying to see the different colored stars in your picture, think you mean't the green was green stars, etc etc.

[Ranos]

I thought the yellow thing was one empire and the dark blue thing was the other and the monster thing represented a fleet at the chokepoint.

[guiguibaah]

Yes, sorry about that - here's the real picture

Dark yellow stars are home systems, yellow stars are outposts, blue stars / red stars / black areas are systems with no planets.



Bascially it would be neat if there was an option that clustered 'stars with planets and stuff' spaced in between 'stars that don't have any planets' - creating a neutral zone. You could even give the feel of "blank open space" by having "black stars" - systems with no planets, and the star is black to make it feel like just some empty sector.

sorry about the mixup

[Geoff the Medio]

I'm quote partial to the idea of having lots of systems with few or no habitable planets. IMO it should be possible to hide fleets / bases in remote uninhabited systems (ala Star Wars) and I'd like to to have exploration be a rather significant undertaking. Having starlanes connected to open space is a bit iffy though... it sorta makes the concept of a "starlane" a bit fuzzy... it's now just a spacelane? Why not just have every lane end at a star, which may or may not have any planets... funtionally equivalent.

[Daveybaby]

I agree that there could be mileage in a game with lots of stars, but relatively few useful systems. This sort of thing could fairly easily be made an option in the game setup.

It makes the job of coding an AI a bit harder though.

[Raghar]

Re Bastian-Bux

I consider programming AI for "starlanes" as a more difficult.
One of a big problems with simple things is, you need to have them really well balanced, or people with calculators would rip them to pieces. Then, after you balanced them well, they'd become boring. Look for example on Gothic II. You are forced into one of three playing styles. Why? The answer is balancing. In comparisson to dungeon crawl Gothic II is boring game.

I discovered a new NP hard problem when creating my game, but that's it if you don't like a new difficult problems, don't do the game development.

Remember, this is an open source project. Yes, we have some very clever designers and programmers, but no, we won't be able to topple a feat like that. Heck, how many games do you know where the AI is able to deal with open spae tactics? Out of my head I know not even one. And some of the games I play are from real HUGE companies, wasting lotsa money on good AIs.

There are games that didn't use starlanes. MOOI and MOOII, that insane naval game on SNES, Harpoon clasic, Imperia galactica I and II, and so on. (my bad memory...)
And a little question if there are not choke points on a free ocean, then why I fought against a US invasion on Azores in Harpoon clasic?
Of course they could go around them, if they could evade air instalations, but what would happen to theirs supplies?

Big companies?
Yes hiring lazy programmers that are writting alpha - beta and are unable to do any reasearch. If AI programer is not creative he shouldn't do it.

And a little hint. Don't count on easy modification of the source. That code would be writen for star lanes, not to mention that C++ in combination with python (have you added it into the project?) might be nightmare to modify.

[Ranos]

In real life, yes, we know that we have to take this island/planet before going on to the next or there is the possibility of getting attacked from the rear or having your supply lines messed up. The problem is, that programming an AI requires you to set priorities and rate those priorities. The games without the starlanes had the AIs skip planets to directly target one that they considered more important. This resulted in attacks from behind andother things that made the game easier to win.

[Aquitaine]

This is exactly the same discussion that happens every 4-6 months.

Bye.

[emrys]

Anybody feel like writing a little bot or code thingy that just scans a thread and locks it as soon as it counts ten uses of the word starlane?

[Geoff the Medio]

Anybody feel like writing a little bot or code thingy that just scans a thread and locks it as soon as it counts ten uses of the word starlane?

Yes, that would have been very helpful on the thread where we were discussing map generation...