Wish list for patch/SEV

[LGM]

I would like to see a supply generating component or supply generating ability that can be modded onto a component that is not tied to the number of stars in a system, but a fixed amount per turn. I would use this to Mod a Version of the Quantum reactor that generates a fixed amount of supply per turn instead of unlimited. The QR wrecks the game in my opinion, when players no longer have to worry about supply. All the weapons with high supply factors, lose that trade off factor (NSP and WMG) with QRs in the game.

I would also like to be able to use Resupply components when ships are in a fleet to replenish the fleet, instead of having to remove ships from the fleet.

I would like to be able to use an Emergency Propulsion component on my slower ships to increase my fleet's speed. For fleets, the button should be available when the slowest rating ships all have the component. Once activated, any ships faster than those would also use their component if they are now the slowest ship. e.g. I have Speed 5 with a +3 EPC and a Speed 6 with a +3 EPC. If activated, my fleet should have Speed 8 for that turn. The Speed 6 ships, use their EPC, but only get a +2 since they are tagging along with slower ships.

Along with this, it would be nice if Fleets would indicate what their speed would be if they used Emergency Propulsion components.

I would like to see Light Carriers have a higher base cost than Light Cruisers. One on One, a Carrier dueling with a Light Cruiser should not win a battle with the same weapon technology. As it is Light Carriers are about twice as good when you figure the value of the Heavy Mount and the way armor tends to go on the FBs before the weapon (usually requires two hits back to back from a Large Mount to take out a 90KT damage resistent Weapon on a Light Carrier where they are using DUCs). Phased Polarian beams can overcome this somewhat, by taking out the 90 KT weapon in one shot.

If this is not already true, and I think that it is not, I would like to see damage randomization weighted by the larger of structure space and the damage size of a component. The chances of hitting a Large Weapon should be greater than the chances of hitting a 10 KT component.

The 10% incremental tohit adjustment should be +10% BC, +20% BS, +30% DN, +40% BS. This would give Cruisers versus Battle Cruisers some trade off to consider. Likewise BS versus DN, but DNs do lose an engine, so they have some trade off already. This might give the Base Ship a bit of an advantage, but see the next item below.

I would like to see Weapon Mount efficiency reduce from 1.33, 1.5, and 1.66 to something like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3: Example, Large mounts take 1.5 times Space, but do 1.65 times the damage instead of 2.0 times. Likewise, Heavy mounts would be 2.0 space/2.4 damage and Heavy mounts 3.0 space, 3.9 times the damage. This change would make smaller weapons more viable.

Make the Relious trait more costly in points: 2000 or 2500. Make the Talisman cost something like 3000 or 6000 organics to make them have some special cost factor. (Takes a lot of priests, sacrifices, or prayer energy to keep them working). Perhaps a Talisman should have a chance of being damaged whenevever another component is damaged (collateral damage). Make the size bitter, would make them restricted to bigger ships, a chance I would not want to see. Their damage rating should be 5 KT. They may be 40 KT of space, but one hit should desecrate their holiness.

Fighter stacks should fire once per fighter, not pooled shots. This would make emissive armor very effective against fighters.

All hits should have a 5% chance of skipping armor. Each armor component taken out, should increase the chance of bypassing armor. Chance to bypass armor should be 5% + (95% * KT Armor Destroyed) / # KT Armor on ship design). This would make larger hulls increasingly vulnerable as their armor is damaged. The KTs above, are space KTs, not damage KTs.

I would like to see ship facings armor thickness in SEIV. 1 m think armor on a Base Ships would be much more costly than 1m of armor on a Frigate, but both would provide equal protection, at least initially. Smaller ship armor should degregate more quickly as they have less surface area than large ships. Armor would be allocated to a particular facing: Front, Flank, and Rear. Do not differentiate Left from Right as by spinning a ship could spread the damage out equally to both sides anyway. Lets assume there is no tumpling motion as that would make engine efficiency very poor as you would have to fire them at set times in the rotation.

Do not implement weapon facing as most would be turreted and spinning the ship would allow you to cover all of space with a turret anyway. Ship shape would really have to be considered if you did something with this anyway: A Cylinder has blind spots straight in front and in back. A cone has no frontal blind splot, but has an enlarged one in the rear. Weapons mounted away from the hull on rods would have smaller blind spots, but would be oddly shaped and would have structural problems.

For tactical combat, use Newton's Physics, instead of Aristole's for tactical combat. Give ships a direction of movement, and engines must be used to alter that direction or the magnitude. You could make tactical combat vector based instead of regulated by squares. Engines are used to alter the movement vector.

Do computer controled tactical in strategic mode combat games in simultaneous and incrementally and allow ships to fire at any point in the increments. This will allow range advantage to actually be exercised.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by orev_saara:
4) An end to weapon platforms? Sorry, WP-lovers.

There is absolutely no reason, either in the real world, or in sci-fi land, why you shouldn't be able to place weapons on the surface of a planet that reach into space. This is especially true when dealing with Groups that have a technology level sufficient to transport materials into orbit in massive, bulk quantities for no noticeable cost.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by orev_saara:
And I'm still thinking that atmospheric resistance should be a factor, but then there's no way to set it to be there for most planets, but not those without atmosphere. And on gas giants, how deep are the weapon platforms really? To say nothing of the grossly inadequate size of gas giants in the first place... Never mind.

There is nothing that says that a colony on a gas giant is on whatever surface it has. THey could just as easily be floating platforms like Cloud city.

[Suicide Junkie]

Many of the things later on in your list can be easily modded.

Try the leaky armor system.
Try requiring armor mounts which base protection per kt on the total hull size.
Fiddle the mounts and racial costs as you suggested.

If this is not already true, and I think that it is not, I would like to see damage randomization weighted by the larger of structure space and the damage size of a component. The chances of hitting a Large Weapon should be greater than the chances of hitting a 10 KT component.

A 50-hitpoint component is at least Five times more likely to be hit than a 10-hitpoint component.
I believe it is slightly more than that, but there is room for doubt.

Armor works the opposite way, with weaker components being destroyed first.

Just mod it!
Then start a PBW game and see how many people agree with your changes

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by LGM:
All the weapons with high supply factors, lose that trade off factor (NSP and WMG) with QRs in the game.

The tradeoff to using WMGs is that their damage/kt/turn ratio is lousy, and their damage/kt alpha strike isn't much better. Increase the damage to around 180-200 and you'd have a weapon that would be more worthwhile using for the massive research cost.

If this is not already true, and I think that it is not, I would like to see damage randomization weighted by the larger of structure space and the damage size of a component. The chances of hitting a Large Weapon should be greater than the chances of hitting a 10 KT component.

The probability that an item will be hit is equal to its structure tonnage divided by the total structure tonnage of the ship, and thus, large components are already more likely to be hit.

Make the Relious trait more costly in points: 2000 or 2500. Make the Talisman cost something like 3000 or 6000 organics to make them have some special cost factor.

For 2500 points I can raise maintenance reduction to 120%, or aggressiveness and defensiveness to 125%/120%. The talisman would hardly be worth it with that kind of cost.

Their damage rating should be 5 KT. They may be 40 KT of space, but one hit should desecrate their holiness.

Giving them a smaller damage resistance would make them less likely to be destroyed until the entire ship was gone.

All hits should have a 5% chance of skipping armor. Each armor component taken out, should increase the chance of bypassing armor. Chance to bypass armor should be 5% + (95% * KT Armor Destroyed) / # KT Armor on ship design). This would make larger hulls increasingly vulnerable as their armor is damaged. The KTs above, are space KTs, not damage KTs.

It would be far better to use mods with leaky armour instead of hard-coding behaviour like this.

Armour and shield facings are a bad idea for a game that easily involves battles between hundreds of ships in the stock game, and thousands in some mods.

Do computer controled tactical in strategic mode combat games in simultaneous and incrementally and allow ships to fire at any point in the increments. This will allow range advantage to actually be exercised.

What do you mean by this Last statement? Strategic combat is already identical to tactical, except that the computer controls both sides. Ships can already fire at any point in their movement.

[Phoenix-D]

"The tradeoff to using WMGs is that their damage/kt/turn ratio is lousy, and their damage/kt alpha strike isn't much better. Increase the damage to around 180-200 and you'd have a weapon that would be more worthwhile using for the massive research cost."

On the other hand, they -do- get a +30% to-hit bonus. Nothing to sneeze at. If they cost the same to research as APBs and were a little smaller, I'd say they were pretty well balanced..but they don't and aren't.

Phoenix-D

[Instar]

re: #2 Orbiting planets
Orbiting planets was discussed to a great degree (I think it was on those old defunct forums at what's that site that no longer exists). The decision came down to that orbiting planets would only confuse players more than necessary. (You could also argue that the camera over the system in the bird's eye view rotated along with the planets... but that assumes that all the planets rotate at the same relative rate...)

[orev_saara]

Wow, I thought this thread was defunct! Regarding the Quantum Reactor issue that was mentioned earlier, I was just thinking of that myself, and I have an idea. Make 'em bigger! If a quantum reactor was, say, 500kT, people wouldn't be able to put them in every ship, just one fleet tender. This way, you'd still get resupplied at the end of every round, but you couldn't just fire those big guns til kingdom come. Another option would be to make the cost staggering, or whatever, so long as it wasn't effective to put the in every ship. I'm currently working on increasing supply usage in general, as I think resupply is a somewhat neglected aspect of the game.

Oh, yeah, on the WP thingy. The WP advocates make the excellent case that if I don't like them I can take them out. Which I have pretty much done. I do think that Geo made a very lucid point about planetary assaults though. It goes to the heart of the issue. I don't want to sit here for five minutes while my armada pounds away at the defenses of a single planet. So I have some ideas, but I need to know a few things. Can troops be landed through planetary shields? If so, this presents a solution within the current game parameters. Kind of Star Wars, actually, planetary assaults would pretty much go like Hoth. I like this, I'll have to try it out. As far as future development goes, I'd like to see some sort of ground defense object that can A: withstand damage from orbit, B: not fire into orbit, except perhaps for point defense, and C: not be dropped from orbit. Some sort of bunkers? I think that would open things up nicely.

PS: I tried putting point defense cannons on troops, but they don't work.

EDIT: Yes! You CAN drop troops onto a planet through shields!!!

[ February 18, 2003, 18:42: Message edited by: orev_saara ]

[Phoenix-D]

"I'd like to see some sort of ground defense object that can A: withstand damage from orbit, B: not fire into orbit, except perhaps for point defense, and C: not be dropped from orbit. Some sort of bunkers? I think that would open things up nicely."

This can also be modded in. Simply remove everything except shields, ECM (?) and armor from weapons platforms.

Phoenix-D

[orev_saara]

Yeah.... that would work, but boy would it be work. I'd have to switch over every single component that can currently be used on weapons platforms... and I'm lazy... maybe next week...