DERILICT SHIPS?

[dogscoff]

What a cool idea for a (multi-human) scenario. It would take a LOT of setting up though...

In a the aftermath of a terribly destructive war, the humbled survivors have been stripped of their former technologies, reduced to feuding, planet-bound medievel societies. After hundreds of years of civil war, each race re-unifies and regains space-flight technology by studying and salvaging relics of their former glories, left on their home planets by their ancestors. (Co-incidentally, they all do this at the same time=-) They set out into the universe in their ricketty craft to regain the glory that once was theirs and to settle some old scores...

The galaxy should show evidence of heavy stellar manip warfare. Each race starts out with knowledge of the galaxy's geography, one homeworld and a few small, scattered colonies. They have ship capture, repair I, a few other important techs, but NO research point generation. Crew insurrction would also have to be disabled.

Scattered around the galaxy are dozens (hundreds?) of crippled ships (belonging to AI races with no planets and AI files modded to do as little as possible). Each player has to race to acquire derelict ships and analyse the tech, in order to reach their old enemies on the far side of the galaxy and resume their old wars.

Of course, you can only repair tech you already have, and you can't build mobile shipyards at the beginning of the game (You might want to disable them altogether), so to start with you have to find ships with primitive engines that you *can* repair, just to get your derelicts to a shipyard. Setting this up would require some thought.

Each player would be spreading their resources thinly in order to acquire the maximum number of ships possible, so some great exchanges would probably take place, where a slow-moving derlict could change hands many times before finally being anlysed (or destroyed)

Some of the derelicts could also have SDDs and boarding defences in place, just to complicate matters further. You'd also get some ships with low-tech components but high- tech hulls, so that a capturing race could repair the ship into a powerful warship, and would have to decide whether it was more valuable as a weapon or a research tool.

Playing PBEM or TCP/IP you'd have to play strategic combat, so you wouldn't be able to look at a ship's components before deciding whether or not to take it. To counter that, the scenario maker could introduce certain clues / patterns to help the player guess what sort of tech might be on a derelict. Maybe ships belonging to a certain shipset tend to have high-tech engines, or ships in a certain part of the galaxy tend to have colonisation techs and deep-frozen population.
Some derelicts might be hidden in storms and nebulae, glittering prizes for the first to acquire and use stellar manip / sensor tech.

If you wanted, you could go the whole way and restrict resource extraction techs, so that scrapping derelict ships becomes an important part of the economy. Actually, this scenario might work well under P&N.

[Mark Walton]

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Originally posted by geoschmo:

It would not be possible to mod this in and have an ai do it randomly. They would build the ships allright, but there is no way to get an ai to destroy itself intentionally.

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On reflection, the race would have to continue to exist, just to pay maintenance on the ship.

To prevent them doing anything other than create the ship, you could create a level 2 of "derelict ship" race tech. This has an "upgrade" to the space yard which cannot produce anything, and level 2 of other facilities which just produce the bare minimum to pay upkeep on the ship. And, maybe, just make loads of red-hot troops and weapon platforms just to make a secondary challenge.

quote:

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Plus, if you are going to use raical techs, you have to be careful. Anything that is racial tech the player cannot repair, and they cannot retrofit it without removing all the racial techs.

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I was thinking about making only the hull a racial tech, and putting a lot of the bonusses on this. Also, give the race a boost in research to get a few extra items at the start of the gmame, also also use the plan to have 2 tech area files (one where all tech is racial and buyable, once game is started switch it for one where ALL tech is researchable)

I'm going to try this! And, perhaps, actually release this on-going mod I'm working on in my "spare time"!

[Suicide Junkie]

A racial tech hull cannot be retrofitted at all...

[Mark Walton]

oh... ah... well in that case I'll repost once I'm back from the drawing board.