Non A.I. issues for upcoming patch - Page 3

Sabre21 · #21 January 16th, 2001, 09:33 PM

What I would like to see is the ability to create specific ships, facilities, and components for a specific race. If this can be done already, will someone please enlighten me

Plus I would like the ability to set certain starting techs to individual races. This way, say the Romulans would get cloaking very early while the Hydrans had fighters. (OK..so I'm a bit of a Trek fanatic)Of course this can be done to some degree by re-arranging the research tree in the Race AI files.

I really like Nyx's idea about having Ruins have more than tech...the advanced ship or race idea is great..kinda like civilization.
Maybe add a few bloopers to it too, like a plague or wild savages which kills off the colonists..hehe.

One more item..not overly important, but I would like a confirmation window when saving a game...basically saying "Do you want to save this game..yes or no". More than once I have inadvertently saved over a different saved game by accident...OK so I have 10 thumbs too. Would be nice to have anyways.

Tampa_Gamer · #22 January 17th, 2001, 12:35 AM

Sabre21 - cloaking is a non-issue until the next patch. The AI will not use it even if their ships are equipped. I stealthy ships built into a racial trait I created for my Darlok, but trashed it after I figured out the non-cloaking bug. Basically I created a set of low-level cloaking components that required the racial trait. So I wouldn't screw up the designs, I made 0k tonnage and required it to be on every ship the race made, thus all their ships/bases/sats were "stealthy" as the Romulan would be. So it works, we just need to wait until the next patch to match the Romulans against the Darlok!

jonas · #23 January 17th, 2001, 01:02 AM

You bet! In fact, some of them should be primitives with a tech level of zero: no discoveries, and no idea how to make any either.

It'd also be nice if warp drive was a discovery you had to make -- that way you could give it to neutrals near your rivals and suddenly they're a problem. Though I guess that eliminates the only distinction between neutral and AI-controlled player. Hmm. Maybe eliminate that distinction and instead have a score for expansiveness? Empires with a score of zero wouldn't expand beyond their home system, but could at least send warp ships against their enemies' home planets in retaliation.

quote:
Originally posted by SirDarwin:

Yes seeing more neutral little empires spread through out the galaxy would defenitly be cool, providing a variable in the settings file for the percentage of systems with life would be a nice touch.

Barnacle Bill · #24 January 17th, 2001, 02:07 AM

On the subject of colonization:

I interpret "ice" as being frozen atmosphere, temperatures near absolute zero, etc... Life forms which evolved there would not be able to live in any other environment. There is a book which I think is titled "Camelot 40K" about such life forms.

Similarly, gas giant critters wouldn't be living on any other type.

The notion of anything like us living on either of the above is also an impossibility.

So, I propose the following changes:

You should need domes to live on the same planet type but with different atmosphere from your home world (as you do now). The "conditions" would refer to what it is for folks who can live there without a dome. For anybody who needs a dome, it would act like the conditions were at whatever the lowest rating is (don't remember off the top of my head).

If you convert the atmosphere, the conditions would gradualy get worse, until they reached the lowest rating just before the atmosphere actually changes. It then starts at the lowest rating for the new atmosphere and have to be improved via the appropriate facility.

There should be a special tech required to be able to build domes at all. It would take a special, and specially expensive, colonization module to implace a domed colony. That would only implace the population held by the colonization module itself (so don't bother with cargo storage on a domed colony ship). The population in a domed colony would not grow. You would have to build additional dome space in the planet's production que and transfer in additional people as cargo after the dome space is ready. The maximum population limits would remain as today.

It would take special techs to be able to colonize planets of another type from your race's environment (rock, gas giant or ice). Those techs would require developing the dome tech first, and allow building the special and expensive colonization modules for those planet types.

You would not be able to obtain the special techs for colonizing planets of another type except from another race of your own type. How a gas giant race colonizes gas giants is of no use to a rock race. How an ice race colonizes gas giants is of no use to a rock race, either.

You would either not be able to convert planets between types at all, or it would be very expensive (probably cheaper to build a ring world, if you think about it).

Building a planet from asteriods should be a project akin to ring world construction (only cheaper), not something done by a component. Blowing one up is fine like it is, though (lots easier to blow things up than to build them).

Finally, the number of facilities you could operate on a planet would be determined by population. It should take a nearly full planet to operate that size of planet's full allotment of facilities. The facilities in excess of what could be operated by the current population would be "idle". Idle facilities ones would be labelled as such on the facilities report, and you would be able to reorder the facilities in some list for each individual colony to enable the ones you want.

DirectorTsaarx · #25 January 17th, 2001, 05:18 PM

A thought on being able to 'see' the enemy fleet before deciding on battle: as Barnacle Bill points out, in many circumstances you can already do this by looking at the fleet before you move your ships into that sector. HOWEVER, if your ship/fleet is moving under orders, and happens to run into an enemy fleet, there currently isn't a way to find out what's in that fleet. But there should be.

BTW - on the same topic, I kinda like the idea that you're forced into battle if you transit a warppoint into the middle of someone else's fleet. Fairly realistic; once you've warped through, it's too late to retreat...

JeffG · #26 January 17th, 2001, 07:18 PM

How do you tell if a race is a "neutral" race? I just saw an interesting situation where it seems the Sergetti split into two factions. Deep into a game, after the whole quadrant had been explored, I received a "First Contact" message with, I think, the Aldans. These people looked like the Sergetti and the race profile referred to them as Sergetti, and was the exact same text that the Sergetti had. What's up with this?

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Cheers!
Jeff George

Taqwus · #27 January 17th, 2001, 07:53 PM

quote:
Originally posted by JeffG:
How do you tell if a race is a "neutral" race? I just saw an interesting situation where it seems the Sergetti split into two factions. Deep into a game, after the whole quadrant had been explored, I received a "First Contact" message with, I think, the Aldans. These people looked like the Sergetti and the race profile referred to them as Sergetti, and was the exact same text that the Sergetti had. What's up with this?

They probably got PPP'd; often the planet forms its own faction rather than joining the PPPer (who may then be able to get the new faction to surrender, possibly giving him tech -- whereas the other result yields none).

One tip-off: ISTR that the neutrals at least used to have, if they don't still, completely average characteristics with no advanced traits.

Nyx · #28 January 17th, 2001, 08:09 PM

quote:
Finally, the number of facilities you could operate on a planet would be determined by population. It should take a nearly full planet to operate that size of planet's full allotment of facilities. The facilities in excess of what could be operated by the current population would be "idle". Idle facilities ones would be labelled as such on the facilities report, and you would be able to reorder the facilities in some list for each individual colony to enable the ones you want.

There's actually already a flag for that in one of the data files. I think it would be interesting if there were greatly relaxed limits on the number of facilities built, but population limited the ones in use. Make the flag a facility-based variable, not a game-wide variable, so Cargo facilities take fewer people to man than a shipyard or some others. Then rework the robo miners facilities to provide additional manpower for facilities instead of increased output.

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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Alpha Kodiak · #29 January 18th, 2001, 05:59 PM

I've had this game for a couple of weeks now, and I'm having a bLast with it! A couple of thoughts regarding attacking planets have come up and I wonder how others feel about them.

First, it seems to me that planetary weapons should really be the only type of weapons that could knock out large populations. I can see the ability to knock out industrial capacity and other facilities to some extent with other weapons, but I just used a fleet of about 10 ships using mostly DUCs to wipe out 4 billion sentient beings. I can't see how projectile weapons, unless we are talking REALLY BIG projectiles, could kill large numbers of people from space. Mind you, from a game perspective, I can live with it and still enjoy the game, but it just doesn't seem right from a reallity perspective.

Second, it seems likely that if you do enough damage from space to wipe out 4 billion people, that the conditions of the planet should be affected by the attack. While I'm not an environmental researcher, my guess is that there would be severe atmosheric and geological effects caused by pounding a planet that hard. There should also be a lot of depleted uranium dust floating around, based on my above example.

As far as I can tell, the planet is pretty much in pristine condition and waiting for me to colonize it as soon as my colony ship shows up. Seems like I should at least have to clean up the dead bodies or something.

None of this is to take away from the game, it's just some ideas that came to me while playing it, and I wonder what other people think.

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Ursoids of the galaxy, unite!

Taqwus · #30 January 18th, 2001, 06:09 PM

Hrm. _Domed_ colonies perhaps should still be fairly vulnerable. Even if you assume that this refers to multiple domes (you pretty much have to, for colonies on the scale of SE4's), breaching domes would still be far easier than trying to bombard 500M with acid, DU, missiles or what-not.

(Perhaps a new facility: underground shelter? Provides refuge for some limited pop against plagues and fairly high resistance against orbital bombardment of most kinds. Not sure how to reconcile it with gas giants, 'tho...)

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night