Ship Character

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

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utilae
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#16 Post by utilae »

Kharagh wrote:I don't like the idea of ships getting experience.
My idea does not involve ships getting experience. You spend points to improve your ships character. Basically you are setting up a style that ships will be in for your race. If you spend points on better engines, then all ships your race builds will have better engines, of course the cost in space and money comes with it. And the better engines would be mandatory, you have to have it on your ships.

Kharagh
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#17 Post by Kharagh »

Making the better engines mandatory doesn't seem like such a good idea to me. After all you distribute your points in the middle of the game, so before the upgrade your race will have had normal engines. Why should they no longer be able to build them if they really want to.
They probably wouldn't want to as the new engines would be much better, but I think they should still be able to do so if they wish.

This whole problem could be avoided, if we (as I proposed in my last post) didn't use the points to improve the engines for the whole race, but improved the handling of engines for the whole race.

The ships would also get their "character", but in a much easier and more logical way.

If we did it as you proposed we would have to fix the improvement to the engine of every single ship, which surely would be a much bigger task, than to just add a (e.g.) 10% bonus to every ship your race uses.

Your race has just learned how to use their normal engines to a greater effect. It would be like picking a perk after getting experience in an rpg game, only the perk is for your whole race instead of a single character.

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#18 Post by Rapunzel »

I don't know about ships, but I rearly like the idea of evolving the race you play to change there abilities.

There coudk be several way's to get point
- a Point every 5 turns
- 20 Point sfor researching genetic engeniering

Thereafter you could take pics like
- infravision (20P)
- Cameleon skin (42P)
- Higten Inteligence (70P)

or whatever.
Dieser Text basiert ausschließlich auf frei erfundener Interpunktion und Orthographie. Jegliche Uebereinstimmungen mit geltenden Regelungen sind rein zufaellig und wurden nicht beabsichtigt.

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Geoff the Medio
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#19 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Rather than a points system, where the only negative to picking a perk is the opportunity cost of not picking something else, all the potential perks could also have significant negative consequences for being chosen as well. Making your race stronger physically would make for better ground troops, but maybe this also makes them consume more food. Making them smarter would make them more susceptible to psychic attacks. Making them more disease resistant makes them more xenophobic. etc.

This could also be combined with a points system as well, obviously...

The idea is to make for hard player choices.

herbert_vaucanson
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#20 Post by herbert_vaucanson »

Rapunzel wrote:I don't know about ships, but I rearly like the idea of evolving the race you play to change there abilities. [...]
Well, I could not resist but shamelessly propone once again my idea on templates - which you can find at about the end of the "Galaxy History: playing different ages" thread.

As for this Diablo-like "ship character", I do not like the idea.

Give me social engineering effects instead , with ripercussions on technology use and research pace. Two silly examples:

say, we are a democratic, pacifist lot? Normal ships, with the eventual, self-castrating "first directives" when we go for the "you can join our sexy federation, too" path. AND it will be long and socially painful to do research on cloacking, anti-bio weapons and modifications, brain implants... AND very difficult to achieve the "machine" template.

Are we the xenofobic, secretive complex? The "psi" template becomes difficult to achieve here, reasearch in general is uncreative except for security and brainwashing... BUT the nastiest anti-bio techs can be researched with no social penalties and immediately implemented in ships.
- Well, what about this: a lot of empty space, colored balls spinning around, the occasional nifty exlosion, and some infestation here and there to give it the "lived in" feel?
- It shouldn't take more than a week... ok, I am in.

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#21 Post by Kharagh »

@Geoff the Medio

Yep, that's about what I had in mind, too.
It will be fun to keep customizing your race and giving it more "character" during the course of the game.

This way even with fixed races, players will be able to adapt their race to their playing style

Dreamer
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Re: Getting great ships

#22 Post by Dreamer »

guiguibaah wrote: ...Then my opponent sends in a mig attacks and fries my GLA light tank, as well as about 6 others next to it in one quick swoop. Didn't even see it coming.
I don`t really like the idea of points, but I like the idea of "gaining knowledge when loosing". You could have 2 different experience stats one for each ship/squadron (since I still advocate for squadron fights instead of complex, single ships):

A: the normal one, for the crew.
B: empireal one (data recovered from the fight or transmitted before destruction, telepathic )

When a ship goes to battle and gain X xperience you add X to A and X/R to B. Then every new ship built starts with B experience instead of 0, representing the acumulated knowledge, tactics, etc of the empire transmitted to new recruits. Global academies would be needed.

In the above example R is a fixed value (say R=50), but can change acording to tech and race. For example a telepatic race can have something as good as R=5, so almost all knowledge is transmitted to new crews. A central-brain race like zerg can instead only increase B but EVERY ship in the galaxy uses B as his primary experience, even old ones.
:D

Dreamer
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Another idea...

#23 Post by Dreamer »

Another idea, about crew getting better working with a particular ship we can have crews being novices/professionals/experts with the current tech. This would only need to store when a certain tech level was discovered instead of putting more info on individual ships.

This way empires who are constantly changing tech would have some penalty. The same bonus could be used to planetary production and other factors now that I think about it. Maybe making refitings and the like innecesarry.

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Re: Another idea...

#24 Post by Kharagh »

Dreamer wrote:Another idea, about crew getting better working with a particular ship we can have crews being novices/professionals/experts with the current tech. This would only need to store when a certain tech level was discovered instead of putting more info on individual ships.

This way empires who are constantly changing tech would have some penalty. The same bonus could be used to planetary production and other factors now that I think about it. Maybe making refitings and the like innecesarry.
I like the idea of crews getting better in using tech if they have had it for a long time. But I don't think this will make refittings unnecessary. It will merely be an alternative to refitting your ships all the time. Players will have to find a balance between the two extremes.

This will add more choices to the game and will also help smaller less advanced empires not to fall back in the race for supremacy and thus make the game more interesting

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#25 Post by Dreamer »

Sorry about that... when I said refiting I meant for factories, not for ships. I was just being carried away by the idea. What I meant is that if you apply a bonus/penalty to how used to a certain tech your race, this can be used not only for ships but for other effects at empire level.

In Moo1 you have to refit your factories when new tech is discovered, so the mentioned bonus can have the same or similar effect (and explanation). This way you get a standard method to handle constant tech changes in several aspects of the game, may them be ship, factories, etc.

The refiting of ships could be automated and gradual too, but that is an entirely different topic.

Kharagh
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#26 Post by Kharagh »

@Dreamer

Got your point, I thought you wanted to leave out refitting for ships entirely.

I think there will be no refitting of factories in freeorion anyway. They will not be build them separately for every planet as in moo2

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utilae
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#27 Post by utilae »

Kharagh wrote: Making the better engines mandatory doesn't seem like such a good idea to me. After all you distribute your points in the middle of the game, so before the upgrade your race will have had normal engines.
In never said when you distribute points. You would do it throughout that game, so start, middle, end, everywhere.
Kharagh wrote: Why should they no longer be able to build them if they really want to.
They probably wouldn't want to as the new engines would be much better, but I think they should still be able to do so if they wish.
This idea of mine does not prevent you of getting and using newer tech. It just adds a bonus to your current tech. Eg if you got engine-A, then you 10% ship character bonus improves engine-A, maybe more travel per turn. If you then got a better engine, then the 10% ship character bonus would now apply to the new engine. Of course if one ship has an old engine and another has a new engine, the 10% bonus would improve each ship based on what engine they have.
Kharagh wrote: This whole problem could be avoided, if we (as I proposed in my last post) didn't use the points to improve the engines for the whole race, but improved the handling of engines for the whole race.
Handling has not been defined in the game, so really improving the engines/improving the engines handling, it just doesn't matter, those were examples. If you put a point into an 'ability' eg faster engines, then that ability is given to all your ships and the ability would have certain effects, such as +10% to engines speed, etc.
Kharagh wrote: If we did it as you proposed we would have to fix the improvement to the engine of every single ship, which surely would be a much bigger task, than to just add a (e.g.) 10% bonus to every ship your race uses.
The two things described in this quote are really the same. Let the programmers deal with these problems. Also the 10% bonus to every ship is what I mean. However the ship has to be built by your race to get the bonus, after all your race has to design the ship for the ship to get the style and ship character that your race creates in their ships.
Geoff the Medio wrote: Rather than a points system, where the only negative to picking a perk is the opportunity cost of not picking something else, all the potential perks could also have significant negative consequences for being chosen as well.
Oppurtunity costs would exist, as they already exist in the diablo 2 system of choosing skills. Eg in diablo 2 you can't put 20 points into everything, only some things, so you have to plan your character, because you'll never get enough experience to put 20 points into every skill. And in freeorion you would never have enough turns to put max points into everything (assuming you get x points every x turns).

This would make for hard player choices by default.
Geoff the Medio wrote: Making your race stronger physically would make for better ground troops, but maybe this also makes them consume more food. Making them smarter would make them more susceptible to psychic attacks. Making them more disease resistant makes them more xenophobic. etc.
I don't like this idea. Plus, this sounds like the technology achievement 'genetic manipulation' in Moo2. Also the genetic thing of improving your race would be seperate to improving your ships as I have suggested, because ship character is a part of ship design and not necesarily based on technology, more like does the race prefer more forepower on their ships or more engines power, etc. Genetic manipulation is linked more with technology, cause you can't manipulate your genetics until you get high up in the tech tree.

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#28 Post by Kharagh »

utilae wrote:The two things described in this quote are really the same. Let the programmers deal with these problems. Also the 10% bonus to every ship is what I mean. However the ship has to be built by your race to get the bonus, after all your race has to design the ship for the ship to get the style and ship character that your race creates in their ships.
Then I misinterpreted your previous postings. :-)
If the 10% bonus effects every ship your race builds, the idea seems to have some merit for me.


However this post has gone in a totally differrent direction than you intended it seems.

Your initial idea, utilae, of applying "styles" to ALL ships built by certain races has nothing whatsoever to do with the my idea of crews getting experience in handling e.g. a certain TYPE of engine.

Both ideas are good and should be implemented into the game in the end.

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#29 Post by Rapunzel »

The ideas seem to have nothing in commond, and target totally different asspects of the game, but have the same effect (the ship getting better)
If you do it on crew level you have to do it seperatly for each ship + a gereral modifier for race.
Dieser Text basiert ausschließlich auf frei erfundener Interpunktion und Orthographie. Jegliche Uebereinstimmungen mit geltenden Regelungen sind rein zufaellig und wurden nicht beabsichtigt.

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