Space Food Empires!

[Renegade 13]

Those are some really great looking system pics Kwok!

[Ed Kolis]

What if there's one warp point on one side of the system and one directly across from it? AFAIK, the AI isn't smart enough to avoid obstacles more than 3 sectors in width...

[Captain Kwok]

I think the blackhole is 6x6 sectors wide so it they might be able to navigate around it (note that it is smaller than in normal SE:IV) but I'll give it a test.

[Captain Kwok]

I tested it out and the AI had no problem navigating around the blackhole.

[douglas]

One of the standard black hole abilities, either destructive center or movement towards center, triggers a special AI pathing routine that tries to stick to the edge of the system rather than just avoiding the one sector that actually does damage, even to the extent of wasting movement points sometimes. That routine will usually keep the AI out of the dangerous area of your custom black hole even without the damaging storms, except maybe for the corners, and even for the corners it will almost certainly get the AI's ships close enough to the edge that the standard damaging-storm-avoidance routine will work.

[Captain Kwok]

Yeah I noticed that in my test. It works good as long as the ship avoids being damaged by the outer regions of my blackhole.

[Captain Kwok]

I've been making some SE3-style minis for the next version to help with playability. I'll think they'll do better than the coloured generic sets used in the last version.

Here are a couple of previews:

Banana Star Republic


Broccoli Collective

[Ed Kolis]

Niiice
Are those rendered versions of 3D models, or pixel art?

[Captain Kwok]

There just quick n' dirty pixel art. I figured the coloured generic ships weren't condusive to fun gameplay.

I intend to use them with the mod until I make the actual models that will be used in both versions for SE:IV and SE:V.