Fuel

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Geoff the Medio
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#16 Post by Geoff the Medio »

ewh02b wrote:no, it wouldn't be that bad--since the jump is instantaneous, the 'turn' is the recharge. It wouldn't take 2 turns to move 30 parsecs, it would take 2 turns to move 60 parsecs.
So essentially you move every turn and there is no fuel at all? How is this different from just having no fuel and letting ships go as far as they want at a fixed speed?

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#17 Post by ewh02b »

Yeah, I thought about that after my post. There are two things affecting movement rate, however:

1. Star Type: Some stars emit more radiation, allowing for faster charging--perhaps even two jumps in a turn--this would probably require sub-turns or something, however.

2. Quick Charge: The chance to move twice as far.

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Re: To throw yet another Sci-fi universe into the fray...

#18 Post by marhawkman »

ewh02b wrote:Why not have a system like Battletech/Mechwarrior? I think that with a few modifications, it could closely resemble the current system.
While we aren't currently planning on using the "jump" idea. The rest of the ship design stuff is planned to be similar to that.
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skdiw
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#19 Post by skdiw »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
skdiw wrote:to reduce micro, I think there should be one fuel capacity across the board upgradable by tech.
How would you define "fuel capacity"? Is it some abstract unit (litres, milligrams, tons) or a distance they can travel or a number of turns they can go? How would the latter two mesh with using fuel for things other than just travel on the map? If the former (some abstract unit), do all ships use the same amount of fuel per turn or per distance travelled, or does fuel use depend on engine technology or ship size or something else?
i think fuel should be defined by distance and engine just determines your speed. fuel would just determine the max distance that you can travel at max speed without penalty.

the former idea gets too complicated. if ships have varied engines with different fuel consumptions, and varied with ships sizes... that all gets very complicated, which i rather avoid.
I strongly dislike any system that "magically" upgrades the properties of ships that are away from a shipyard or other upgrade centre. It doesn't obviously reduce micro anyway, assuming we require ships to return to a starbase to upgrade other parts anyway. And even if they don't have to return to base to upgrade, there's still the fleet merging and fuel supply redistribution issues mentioned above.
refitting ships is fine by me.
any way to implement you idea is maybe a seperation between impulse drive and warp dive in research (star trek.) you can always use impluse drive to move, but if you have power for warp drive, you move faster. the impulse drive can double as subspace tactical movement speed.
Given your desire to keep ship design simple, why separate these? It's simpler for design and UI representation and player understanding to have just a signle engine component... Though if we're going to separate fuelled and unfuelled movement, it might be justified.
it was to justify fuel and unfuel movement. in terms of gameplay, impluse can also determine tactical speed, which is different from warp speed. just an idea, not necessarily saying it's a good one.

i thought of another way of limiting range. each colony have a range that they can power the ships. ships inside the range move at full speed/or some sort of bonus (helps defense part of strategic rps) and then reduced speeds or another hard limit that no ships can move beyond.
This is a more complicated version of the MOO system I disparaged in the first post.
funny, cuz i find fuel a much more complicated version of range. if fuel limits range travel, i thought a soft range limit would solve your problem.
ships that moves very slow is the same as immobility. look at moo3 off-road travelling vs. starlanes.
Not quite... with slow movement, you can get somewhere eventually, just not as quickly as you like.
obviously you didn't play moo3. by the time you reach somewhere eventually, you have the tech to overrun the previous ship design and reach your destination faster. seldom do you have any reason to go offroad. there are so many strategic problems doing so.
The case you might want to send a ship to refuel a fleet explicitly (ie. requiring micormangement to do)


that's another micro scenario that i'm afraid off: long train of refuel supply ships to extend range and micro on each step.


I also thought about using RoN's supply wagon to the problem, which why i brought up supply/fuel/power... and other ideas together and try to solve a bunch of problems with some simple idea. the supply wagon can be implemented in FO like max speed whenever you have supply wagon in your fleet.

another thing about limiting range. because of our starlane design, there is already an inherent limits on range, assuming that ships can't sneak by defended borders. in the early game, ships are limited by slow speed. if that's the case, it's redundant to add limited range concepts. if there is a need, i like attrition or a more simple range idea, rather than dealing problems with fuel when you merge and split fleets.
:mrgreen:

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#20 Post by marhawkman »

skdiw wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:
skdiw wrote:to reduce micro, I think there should be one fuel capacity across the board upgradable by tech.
How would you define "fuel capacity"? Is it some abstract unit (litres, milligrams, tons) or a distance they can travel or a number of turns they can go? How would the latter two mesh with using fuel for things other than just travel on the map? If the former (some abstract unit), do all ships use the same amount of fuel per turn or per distance travelled, or does fuel use depend on engine technology or ship size or something else?
i think fuel should be defined by distance and engine just determines your speed. fuel would just determine the max distance that you can travel at max speed without penalty.

the former idea gets too complicated. if ships have varied engines with different fuel consumptions, and varied with ships sizes... that all gets very complicated, which i rather avoid.
Well the way Stars! handled it was very complicated. VERY. but it worked beautifully. Massive ships burned fuel like crazy. Small light ships could(sometimes) go for centuries without refueling.
skdiw wrote:
I strongly dislike any system that "magically" upgrades the properties of ships that are away from a shipyard or other upgrade centre. It doesn't obviously reduce micro anyway, assuming we require ships to return to a starbase to upgrade other parts anyway. And even if they don't have to return to base to upgrade, there's still the fleet merging and fuel supply redistribution issues mentioned above.
refitting ships is fine by me.
Refitting is good. The issue was with having ships get upgraded while out in deep space. Without any sort of effort at all.(BotF did this) IMO you should at least have to send them back to one of your planets with a shipyard to get refitted. I'd make it take a turn or less since it'd be a relatively minor change. Refitting in SE3 was actually done by having the ship stop at somewhere with SY tech(possibly itself). Hmmm... The reminds me are we gonna implement Maker ships? IE portable SYs?
skdiw wrote:
any way to implement you idea is maybe a seperation between impulse drive and warp dive in research (star trek.) you can always use impluse drive to move, but if you have power for warp drive, you move faster. the impulse drive can double as subspace tactical movement speed.
Given your desire to keep ship design simple, why separate these? It's simpler for design and UI representation and player understanding to have just a signle engine component... Though if we're going to separate fuelled and unfuelled movement, it might be justified.
it was to justify fuel and unfuel movement. in terms of gameplay, impluse can also determine tactical speed, which is different from warp speed. just an idea, not necessarily saying it's a good one.
BTW how detailed is our combat engine gonna be?
skdiw wrote:
i thought of another way of limiting range. each colony have a range that they can power the ships. ships inside the range move at full speed/or some sort of bonus (helps defense part of strategic rps) and then reduced speeds or another hard limit that no ships can move beyond.
This is a more complicated version of the MOO system I disparaged in the first post.
funny, cuz i find fuel a much more complicated version of range. if fuel limits range travel, i thought a soft range limit would solve your problem.
I really find the range idea to be unrealistic. How are you gonna fly a ship around for decades or centuries without refueling it? If you are refueling it, how? Wouldn't the fuel supply ship need to be much faster than it? Why not just use the supply ship for scouting? Then there's the rationale of it being that the ship can simply return to base when it needs to be refueled. If it can do that, how does it do it quickly enough to continue the mission you gave it?
skdiw wrote:
The case you might want to send a ship to refuel a fleet explicitly (ie. requiring micormangement to do)
that's another micro scenario that i'm afraid off: long train of refuel supply ships to extend range and micro on each step.

I also thought about using RoN's supply wagon to the problem, which why i brought up supply/fuel/power... and other ideas together and try to solve a bunch of problems with some simple idea. the supply wagon can be implemented in FO like max speed whenever you have supply wagon in your fleet.

another thing about limiting range. because of our starlane design, there is already an inherent limits on range, assuming that ships can't sneak by defended borders. in the early game, ships are limited by slow speed. if that's the case, it's redundant to add limited range concepts. if there is a need, i like attrition or a more simple range idea, rather than dealing problems with fuel when you merge and split fleets.
Well SE3 solved it as a matter of turns before you need to return to base. If you exceeded that your speed got cut in half your cloaking crapped out and your maker ships would lose the ability to build stuff. If you want a simple approach we could do it that way. SE3's fluff text expressed it as being a function of the amount of supplies your ship could take with it.(food, spare parts, fuel etc...) I really don't see an issue with splitting and merging fleets. It's not really that complicated.
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#21 Post by tzlaine »

Geoff, how is this notion of fuel different from the previously discussed notion of supply? We had discussed the notion that if you're in supply, you fight at full force and move at full speed, and if you're out of supply, you fight and move at something less. I bring this up because having fuel and other types of supply be separately accounted for seems like to much detail to me. I would prefer in supply/out of supply to be the one value we care about, rather than enough fuel/too little fuel being an additional factor.

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#22 Post by skdiw »

i agree with tz. since you brought it up, now i guess it's a good time to decide. let's decide if we want another element into combat. and if so, as i mentioned before, we should consider integrating all the ideas like fuel, power, supply... together so we don't have a million things, and worst, independent things to worry about.
I really find the range idea to be unrealistic. How are you gonna fly a ship around for decades or centuries without refueling it? If you are refueling it, how? Wouldn't the fuel supply ship need to be much faster than it? Why not just use the supply ship for scouting? Then there's the rationale of it being that the ship can simply return to base when it needs to be refueled. If it can do that, how does it do it quickly enough to continue the mission you gave it?
first of all, remember that gameplay is considered ahead of realism. you must remember why we may want to implement range and for what reasons. we don't have to introduce things merely for realism's sake.

even for realism, can you estimate the range of your car? of course your can. fuel can translate into distance very easily, so i don't know why you think range is unrealistic. you can always throw in a little sci-fi, like a power antenna that generates from supply ships or planets that fuels your ships, but the power has a certain range.

i don't like the idea of players have to keep track of fuel when there are tens of fleets on the map and also merging the fleets together or splitting it.

what were the reason why we bother with range? i find that range accomplished the gameplay needs. the only disagreement that people have, imo, is just taste, but that has little bearing on the gameplay. if hard-range is too hard to digest, try a soft-range limit. i don't see how fuel is better than a soft-range limit.
:mrgreen:

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#23 Post by marhawkman »

skdiw wrote:i agree with tz. since you brought it up, now i guess it's a good time to decide. let's decide if we want another element into combat. and if so, as i mentioned before, we should consider integrating all the ideas like fuel, power, supply... together so we don't have a million things, and worst, independent things to worry about.
hmm... I'd make insufficient power a result of lack of supply. Thus giving you not enough power to fire all of your weapons in combat, and stuff like that.
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#24 Post by utilae »

skdiw wrote: i agree with tz. since you brought it up, now i guess it's a good time to decide. let's decide if we want another element into combat. and if so, as i mentioned before, we should consider integrating all the ideas like fuel, power, supply... together so we don't have a million things, and worst, independent things to worry about.
Let's make ships have fuel. Fuel is not necesarily a liquid, it might be power, ie a powerplant. It's a source of ___ that makes things on the ship work, such as the engines, weapons, etc. Fuel can be resupplied from space stations and by other means. Fuel can even regenerate, ie fuel scoop or solar screens.

We could make it so that movement of a ship, weapon fire or shield use uses fuel. But we really only want engines to use up fuel, so we need justifications for this.

But yes, we could intergrate all these things into one.

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Idea for fuel / supply

#25 Post by guiguibaah »

What could be interesting...

- If, as an attacker, you lost your supply ships to a savvy defender, you are restricted in what you can do...

1) You no longer have the fuel, supplies, weapons etc.. To maintain a planet-wide bombing campaign, so you have to abandon that idea..

2) You cannot support a massive ground-force invasion, so you cannot engage in a ground war.

This could make for some interesting gameplay. Granted, without a supply ship, you can still destroy space stations, defences, stargates, block trade, and even act as defense for a local colony you want to set up.

This could lead some players to build smaller, faster moving ships that don't necessarily "Destroy" a system but make it weaker.

And because they don't have a supply ship with them, they would need to head back to friendly territory or slowly take damage each turn they are in enemy space.


Or, even more cunning. You see a massive enemy fleet heading to one of your major planets. You KNOW you don't have enough ships ready to repel the force... So you send a small amount of ships off to intercept the enemy fleet. Your fleet suffers a pyrrhic victory - they are completely destroyed, but you managed to destroy all of the enemy's supply ships.

The result, is that now the enemy fleet has arrived to your big juicy system, but can't take it over until they get another supply ship in. The battle then becomes tense - if you can hold off any reinforcements, they will be forced to withdrawl. But fail and even one supply ship runs through your 'blockade', and it's all over for that juicy system :)

This could prevent the "I got a huge fleet, I'll just walk around the galaxy bombing every enemy planet I see" syndrome that was prevalent in Moo2 int he mid-late game.


- - -

Granted, in the late, late game, you would have ships that could generate their own supplies, so the issue of supply ships no longer becomes an issue.
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#26 Post by utilae »

While it's a good idea, in your example what if there were too many supply ships? Odds are the supply ships would be in the back and that your ships would not even get close enough to take them out.

If perhaps a certain proportion of supply ships is needed to sustain your fleet size (number of crew in fleet/weapons needed), then loosing even a few could mean that the fleet would be less effective. Plus this would be an easier mission for your strike ships to carry out.

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mechanics of supply

#27 Post by tbullock »

So from what I have read here, the mechanics could be something like this:

If a fleet is within range of a star base (where range would be more or less equivalent to the moo2 sense of range except directed along the shortest starlane route to a starbase) it is supplied.

If enemy fleets are blocking all starlane paths to any in 'range' starbase then the fleet is unsupplied.

A fleet would be in Range if it were within a certain distance to the nearest starbase. Range would be a function of fuel cell technology just as in moo2, (just an integer number parsecs along any particular set of starlanes)

Supply can simply be a multiplier that changes weapon range/damage, initial shield strength and combat speed by some amount (say 50%)

Out of range fleets should be able to travel back to a system that is in range if it is only one system away but should otherwise be immobile (on the intersteller level)

I think that this is simple enough to not overwhelm a player just trying to conquer the universe in later stages of the game.

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#28 Post by marhawkman »

I don't really like the idea of needing to ALWAYS have the supply ships with you when going into enemy territory. but I do like the idea of have some sort of generic fuel/supply system. Lets see...
1: Supply ships are used to EXTEND range but can't keep your warships supplied indefinately.
2: a fleet of warships could be sent on an attack raid out of your space but without supply ships it'd be forced to return relatively quickly.
3: this idea's probably gonna sound a bit iffy, but the idea that new colonies could single handedly support a ginormous fleet bothers me. I'd make it so you must build supply depots on your planets to refuel your ships.
4: fuel usage depends on what you do. IE moving to a system you don't own might take X amount of fuel, but sitting there and hiding for 1 or 2 turns shouldn't take as much fuel. Some but not much. As an example, driving 20 miles takes several gallons of gas(or diesel maybe), but parking your car somewhere for the same amount of time doesn't.
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#29 Post by ewh02b »

marhawkman wrote:I don't really like the idea of needing to ALWAYS have the supply ships with you when going into enemy territory. but I do like the idea of have some sort of generic fuel/supply system. Lets see...
1: Supply ships are used to EXTEND range but can't keep your warships supplied indefinately.
2: a fleet of warships could be sent on an attack raid out of your space but without supply ships it'd be forced to return relatively quickly.
Sounds good to me. Supplies have to come from somewhere.

We could also keep track of expendables such as missiles. A fleet could still keep going, but run out of missiles. To prevent people from building only laser ships, we'd have to make missiles significantly more effective.
3: this idea's probably gonna sound a bit iffy, but the idea that new colonies could single handedly support a ginormous fleet bothers me. I'd make it so you must build supply depots on your planets to refuel your ships.
Either a supply depot, or a star base. Either one could produce missiles and fuel. We could make supply depots better at resupply or something, to prevent star bases from being the only building actually used.
4: fuel usage depends on what you do. IE moving to a system you don't own might take X amount of fuel, but sitting there and hiding for 1 or 2 turns shouldn't take as much fuel. Some but not much. As an example, driving 20 miles takes several gallons of gas(or diesel maybe), but parking your car somewhere for the same amount of time doesn't.
That sounds good, but what about food? Are the ships going to have hydroponic environments to grow their own, or will food stocks be a concern as well?

We could use food as a "hard" limit, and fuel be a soft limit.

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#30 Post by tbullock »

ewh02b wrote:Sounds good to me. Supplies have to come from somewhere.
While this may be true in real life, I see no reason to over complicate the situation. Often, very simple mechanics improve the experience much more so than conversely complicated systems.

If the concept of supply is even necessary (and I don't necessarily think it adds a darn thing), it should be absolutely basic and simple. Remember that the audience for most games are children who would probably care less one way or the other.

MOO(1&2) were great games because in part the rules were very simple and straightforward. You could pick up how to play most of the game in only a few minutes.

I like to think of it in terms of value added. Is a particular feature going to make the game more fun? or will it just be a feature for the sake of having the feature.

Last time I checked, going to the grocery store to buy food supplies was pain in the bum, not a gleeful fun moment of wonderfulness.

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Education will not

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