Tale of A Ship Idea That Failed

I thought somebody said in another thread that there is a hardcoded limit of the limit itself to a max of 5000 per player (total 100k + 100k) to keep the savegame file size down ? If 100k x 20 is ok, then go for mines. The problem is that if 5000 is the max then at 250 systems you only have an average of 20 per system, typically 7-10 per warp point. That does not count what you use up in planetary orbit....

[Will]

Hey, SJ, you're a General now!

As for mines... You don't need an obscene number of them everywhere, just at strategic locations. IE, for the problem of the 250 system empire, that means there are a max of 5 systems for enemies to be in (hardcode limit of 255 systems because of char array). That means that you will only really have to have mines a few systems in from those five, and over important planets. Not to mention that if you have all your enemies down to five systems, you could easily send in a "small" fleet for your empire to swat them out of existance

For the mine size... if you have mines early and enemy ships are around LC size, then small mines are ok. If you can't fill up a sector with large mines, but can with small, use small. If your enemies have enough minesweepers to clear a full sector, screw the mines, build fighters for warp defense (depending on weapon strength, Groups of 10-25 put into a fleet work nicely). Satellites can work too, but they'd be in one big group, and can only fire at one ship at a time, and can't move (which sucks if you end up at the opposite end of the warp and can't get some point-blank shots in).

Will - in my realy big game with 20 empires those suckers will be in EVERY system by turn 50 from 10 good starting planets each. They already claim all but a few systems at turn 30. If lucky I MIGHT control 35-45 myself, but even that cuts me down to 100 per system. So at 5000 I will really not have much use for mines or fighters on wp by mid game. It is true that a stack of sats can only target one ship per combat round. But that ship will be DEAD MEAT and any others that remain in range will be too. So IF they cooperate then sats on the warp point can take down a fleet of 30 dreadnoughts. Attrition may be 50% or more, but that fleet is GONE and replacing the sats should require only about 100 yard turns while replacing 30 Dn is 200+ yard turns. Economically sats make sense in mid to late game. I have not used sats for a long time because I always jumped from early game 39 colonies at turn 120 to end game all conquered turn 150. But this map6 I am playing with 7000 planets is going to be a whole nother ballgame.

[Jubala]

Ehm, Satellite Groups can fire at more than one ship at a time. Each single satellite can only fire at one ship (unless it has a Multiplex Tracking I suppose, but why bother?) but a group of 50 satellites can fire on 50 ships during one turn. So a large group of Satellites can be quite nasty to a fleet of ships.

What I'm wondering is what happens when a group of sats have sats with different type weapons. Say I have one design with Shield Depleters and another With Wave Motion Guns. I want the Shield Depleters to fire first and switch target as soon as the shields are down and then I want the Wave Motion Guns to pummel the ships with no shields to death. In tactical that's not a problem, just MM hell. But how the hell do I accomplish that in Strategic?

[capnq]

quote:

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What I'm wondering is what happens when a group of sats have sats with different type weapons.

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I'm not certain of this, but I think a satellite group fires in the order the sats appear in the display when you click on it. So when you're placing the sats, you want to launch some of the shield depleting sats before any of the other designs. Once some depleters are in place, all the sats of the same design will cluster in the first display box.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[This message has been edited by capnq (edited 05 June 2001).]

[Oggy ben Doggy]

you can also click on the wpn to deselect it, fire the shield depleters, then reclick the group (which IIRC reslects all the wpns) It's kind of a pain.

[Q]

quote:

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:

No matter what limit you set, once you can build enough minesweepers capable of removing all mines from any location there isn't much point in using mines at all.

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Thats why I set the limit to 100,000

Does that limit of 100000 work?? I thought the limit of 5000 was hardcoded.

[Suicide Junkie]

I just threw a stack of zeros on to the end of the limits in settings.txt, and I haven't run up against a limit yet.
I'm getting close to 5000 mines in space in one game, with over 1000 on each of my "backyard" wormholes, and hundreds scattered throughout my 2 colonized systems.
If I hit a limit I'll be sure to report it

[jc173]

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Originally posted by Magnum357:
I'm sorry, but I think I have to disagree with you. I think how it is now is more realistic and provides better game balance. First, It think it is more realistic because in my opinion, a clocked ship with minewarefare equipment (whatever that might be) would probably require active Emissions of energy (or whatever scanners and sensors use) to detect mines in space so the Mine component can destroy the mine. If you activated your ships specialized scanner equipment while clocked, enemy ships would be able to detect you at long distance and would make the clock useless. Secondly, if ships with cloaks were able to use mines effectily, it would give cloaked ships more advantages then uncloaked. Why build uncloaked minewarefare ships. To unbalancing in my opinion.

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I don't share your opinion on this one Magnum. I think the problem here is that it would be unbalancing if a human player could cloak and sweep, but the AI does not know to uncloak, sweep, and recloak. Regarding the technical issues I see no reason why the sensor suite for detecting mines should be active rather than passive. For that matter a narrow beam active sensor like a LIDAR would be pretty hard to detect via ESM at range. I just see this as a way to make up for a handicap in the AI's operational procedures.