SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Patroklos]

Mentioned before, several times, by me, in this thread, but a topic that is dear to my heart and that I must have in SEV.

Space Yards should be restricted in what they can build by level. You should require a certain level shipyard to build certain level componets/size ships. This way you would have to have large sprawling shipyards to produce the largest most advanced ships. Orbital shipyards should be prohibitively expensive, capital investments that take a long time to build. Planetary shipyards should be resticted to building Frigate size vessels and smaller.

I also like the SEII style of building ships where the ship shows up in the sqare with all its componets destroyed and then has to be "built" a component at a time. This might be how it worked in SEIII, I did a generational skip however. This allows for two things.

1.) You can attack a shipyard and destroy a building vessel.

2.) In emergencies you can launch a vessel prematurely before it is done. Maybe require 50% complete before launch or something like that.

And though I know this is moddable, ships cruiser and up should take a significant amount of time to build increasing proportionally to their size. This would

1.) make the production of smaller ship classes always nessecary and add more depth to ship design/fleet strategy.

2.) make your larger warships scarce, prestegious, and important. In SEIV ship size becomes meaningless since everyone can build the latest size within say 10 turns of each other. Once everone is on par fighting with Dreadnaughts they might as well be Frigates.

What I am really trying to do with this is make ships more important "living" things. If you can only produce three large capital ships every 5 years (because you only have three large shipyards capable of building that scale vessel) those ships become important, trackable units. They will be behemouths among the many smaller vessel you have to maintain, renowned and well know within your empire and your neighbors.

[Me Loonn]

ZOMG ?

Does this thread NEVER die ? rofl

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Nope

Making large warships important assets would also be a boon to roleplaying, as keeping track of them when your empire is huge can get hard (or at least less easy), and there's also a larger probability of the ship getting destroyed in combat. But you can mod it in; simply make the large warship hulls cost a lot of resources and scale SY sizes, costs and rates accordingly. Voila; you have to keep track of your large, important warships, lest some sneaky enemy strike reduces it to slag!

[Suicide Junkie]

Try GritEcon.
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE4/Mods/

In that mod, ship build times go up proportional to size CUBED.
Maintenance costs are flat rate.

So it costs about the same amount of resources to maintain two 200kt scouts as it does to maintain two 800kt battleships.
However, those battleships take 64 times longer to build.

Thusly, big ships are super-awesome, but really hard to acquire. Small ships are nessesary as cannon-fodder in combat to protect your larger ships.

[TurinTurambar]

That seems like a really good balance. Is the Proportions mod similar in that respect?

TT

[Atrocities]

I want to thank the developers of GAL CIV for reading this thread and using many of the ideas out lined in this thread in their recent game GalCiv II. Job well done guys.

[Yimboli]

amen.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

An ability that allows you to board ships with no shields remaining, sabotage a component and/or steal the required technology and get the hell outta there. In short, boarding parties that do not capture the ship but instead either A.) destroy one single component (Boarding Sabotage Attack value must be higher than the comp's hitpoints) or B.) destroy the component and steal the tech needed to build it (BSA value must be higher than 2x the comp's HP).

[dogscoff]

Something I'd like to see in SE5 would be for planets to be allowed facilities and cago when there is not active colony on them - so if you plague a thriving colony into extinction, the buildings left behind by the dead population don't myseteriously vanish.

Also, I think zero-population colonies should become "unowned". The previous owner loses any line-of-sight from that colony, and anyone who can put some population and/or troops down on it can claim it (and any facilities/ cargo on the planet) as theirs.

Maybe this is how se5 works already, I don't know.

[dogscoff]

Here's something else I'd like to see. The great thing about this idea, by the way, is that it's largely cosmetic and so (hopefully) it wold be relatively easy to code in at this late stage.


Now, take a look at this se5 screenshot from malfador.com.
See where it says "surface", "races"...."Abilities"? I'd like to see an additional tab there, called "notes". When you click on this tab the game would search for an external text file named after the planet, in a folder named after the game, which in turn would be kept in a special "notes" folder.

By default, this notes/gamename folder would be empty. The game doesn't generate anything at all to go in there, so it isn't taking up any extra disk space unless the player chooses to create files himself using notepad. Also, the file would only be stored locally, and would be for the exclusive use of this player, so these notes would be completely secure and wouldn't bulk out the savegame files at all. This also means that each player could keep their own notes about each planet- you could annotate your own planets, enemy planets or any other planet as far as you liked, without interfering with or seeing notes made by other players. Of course, players would be free to email notes files to one another and trade them or merge them or whatever, but that's all happening outside of the game mechanics so we don't need to worry about it.

Ok, so you've clicked on the "notes" tab. If no notes file for that planet is found (which is the default, remember), then nothing is displayed. However, if the file is found, what happens next is pretty obvious. The contents of the text file are dumped into the window. Players could keep game information in there ("atmosphere conversion due to complete in 2422.8", "Had 3 CSM weapons platforms when I attacked it on 2416.4") or roleplay information ("this is where the 3rd fleet gloriously brought the Phong Empire to its knees", "This is where the enemy's third fleet notoriously brought our empire to its knees") or absolutely anything else you like ("mum's birthday next week, buy flowers").

The file could be plain text - that would be fine - but some markup would be even nicer: a few select html commands would go a long way and would allow roleplaying players to publish their notes direct to the web if they wanted. H1, H2 tags etc spring to mind, UL, OL and the like. Tables might be overdoing it a little, but IMG tags would be cool. Imagine if you could use href tags to set up your own links and click the game directly from one planet to another- very handy for executing population tranfers etc.

Finally, this system needn't apply only to planets- it could be done for asteroids ("Claimed by Jraenar under treaty of 2413.1"), stars ("going nova on 2406.3"), and ships and fleets too ("commissioned in 2402.2, destroyed three enemy light cruisers in battle of Ceres").

Imagine the possibilities...