Most bang-for-the-buck hard code changes

[dmm]

OK, we have wish lists a mile long for hard code changes. My question is: What ONE hard code change do you think would give the most-bang-for-the-buck, and WHY? (MBFTB = the greatest improvement to the game for a given amount of effort.) Since some people won't be able to stop at ONE, I will allow THREE effort categories: trivial (a few hours of programming), small (a few days), and medium (a few weeks).

[Realistically, it's probably not fair to ask for a large (few months of programming) effort for your pet idea. The returns would have to be huge, and that's SEV.]

My nominations:

Trivial: Add a third combat option, which would allow you to manually enter the result of the combat. Players could then use ANY program of their choice to play out combat. This gets around a lot of gripes that people have with the game's combat, many of which are conflicting or difficult to implement. Don't like SEIV's combat? Use Panzer-Blitz or another Shrapnel game. Or D&D or Pong or strip poker, for all that Aaron will care -- it'll be totally your choice.

Small: Save/Load game to/from ASCII. Would allow 3rd parties to make game editors for use by scenario authors. It staggers the imagination.

Medium: Not sure yet.

[Suicide Junkie]

Be sure to add an option to disable those ascii save/load and manual combat for PBW & stuff to prevent cheating.

Trivial:
-Add new ability: Explodes when destroyed.
Component will do an additional X pts of damage when destroyed.
Useful for Ramming warheads & StarTrek-esqe Reactor Cores
You could also make Temporal "Damage Delay Armor", which will absorb 1000 damage, but then release it all back into your ship when you crack it .


Major (SEV):
-Weapon damage as an ability
Then you can have multiple damage types per component, and make polaron beams do 50 pts shield skipping, 50 pts normal, and cool stuff like that .
You get Trekish partial shield skipping, you can have WMG beams push a ship away from you, even a SuperMissile launcher with a small warhead effect, so you take damage when firing it!

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 22 August 2001).]

[Matryx]

ok. here we go.
Off the top of my head :=
trivial : colony sizes from SE3
small-medium : ability to pick starting tech levels (as in SE3)
large-huge : fully 3d interactive tactical combat with options to save battle as movie file for use in a mini-TV series

[Deathstalker]

Med change: the ability to RETREAT from combat, ship will leave tactical/strat combat after a 1 combat turn delay, and then go back upon the route it just came from with any remaining movement points....

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"And what the hell would you know about sanity?" demanded Beatrice. "There are depressed lemmings on the edge of cliffs who've got a better grasp on reality than you have. And more common sense."--Simon R. Green 'Deathstalker Rebellion'.

"We are all...the sum of our scars"....(paraphrased) Matt. R. Stover-'Blade of Tyshalle'.

[Taqwus]

Red dwarf:
A way to queue up a 'Destroy Building' command, that takes zero time but waits until it's top o' the queue. For 'upgrading' buildings that aren't true upgrades, such as Mineral III -> Monolith III.

G-class star:
Better list handling/filtering -- namely, bookmarks and that sort of thing. Again, sanity reasons.

Supergiant:
Text I/O -- exporting known information (colony status, ships, et al) in some nicely parseable file(s), and allowing the importing of orders in text form (e.g. "fleet NNN move to system NNN, coords NNN,NNN". Scripter's paradise.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Atrocities]

Larger than 255 galaxy.

[This message has been edited by Atrocities (edited 24 August 2001).]