SEV- Thread on Obfuscation (MM is involved)2weeks to post

[Roanon]

Excuse me for returning to topic in this hijacked thread

Fog of war is nice, but it should not just increase micromanagement. Forgetting given informations in not fogging, but forcing to micromanage. So, if you get informations about a system it is ok that you do not get the latest info every turn, but you should continue to have access to that latest info known to you. Disadvantage: this would create a lot of additional data per result file. But in times of Gigabyte HDs and DSL this should be tolerable.

There should be far more levels of sensors, revealing planet and/or ship details in increasing detail and ranges. Ownership of a planet and number of population should not be known instantly when you enter a system, but a sufficiently cheap scanner should allow you to get at least the "colonized" info from a large distance. May make the game more realistic, but much to chancey if your colonizers only get the "already colonized" info when about to settle down there. Data like number of colonists, and even number / type of facilities should be revealed only by better, more expensvie scanners, though.

I think ship names are fun. But they should not be given automatically revealing the class and the serial number. Especially when constructing new ships it is really bad that everyone seeing them built instantly knows how many other ships of that type you already have if you do not micromanage and instantly rename every ship. Ship names should be left blank and should be shown to everyone if you choose to name your ship. The classes should become visible when you have scanners to detect a ship's components. Too much micromanagement to manually write down a list of components of every ship encountered, compare them, and keep track of classes internally.

[ May 08, 2004, 12:07: Message edited by: Roanon ]

[Aiken]

Small note: I'd like to see the Proxy Partnership "feature" (viewing the systems\planets\ships of partner of your partner) removed in SEV. It's unrealistic, imho.

[AgentZero]

I kinda like the whole obfuscation thing, but I wouldn't go so far as to apply it to things like planets. I mean, a planet is BIG, and as soon as your ship enters the system they're gonna know where the planets are, and even have a rough idea of the conditions of said planets. So as soon as a ship enters a system we'd get a rough idea of what the conditions of all the planets were like but not if there's anyone living there, unless the colony has reached a certain stage of development. However, even if you know someone owns that planet, you won't know WHO until you wander on over and take a closer look.

But ships, even big ships, compared to the scale of an entire solar system, are TINY so naturally, they'd be a lot harder to find, and until genuinely advanced sensors are available, finding a ship in a solar system would be like... Well, you know.
When you detect a ship in a star system, I think there should be several stages of identification:
1) There's a ship over there somewhere.
2) There's a ship right there and it's about -this- big...
3) And it looks sort of like this (silhouette)
4) Now it looks exactly like this.
5) It's weapons/engines/shields are about this powerful

And that's all we'd ever know until actually making contact with the empire owning that ship. Then, under Diplomacy, one would have the option to 'Share IFF Codes'. Once this is done, any ships in you 'Unknown' list that belong the empire you shared with will be moved to that empires list. Obviously, any new designs will still come up as Unknown unless IFF codes are shared regularily.

More to say but no time to say it..

[dogscoff]

I mean, a planet is BIG, and as soon as your ship enters the system they're gonna know where the planets are, and even have a rough idea of the conditions of said planets. So as soon as a ship enters a system we'd get a rough idea of what the conditions of all the planets were like but not if there's anyone living there, unless the colony has reached a certain stage of development.

I disagree. Look how little we know about planets in our own solar system- I mean until a few years ago we weren't even sure if there was water on the moon. Granted, SE4 tech is way ahead of us, but the very fatc that planets are so BIG makes it difficult to map and survey them quickly, especially from a distance.

The answer, of course, is to give modders as much flexibility as possible, thus allowing modders to satisfy both your and my points of view.

[dogscoff]

Small note: I'd like to see the Proxy Partnership "feature" (viewing the systems\planets\ships of partner of your partner) removed in SEV.

When you say "removed", I assume you mean "A moddable option to allow/disallow it".

I think nothing should ever be removed by hard code- give modders as many toys to play with as possible.

[Droplede]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
I like my old idea of limited range scanners and sensors that can only see a sector around the ship on level one and 5 sectors by level 5.

Planets sensors arrays and or scanners would have a greater range of 5 to start out to 10.

This way a ship passing through a system may or may not see all the ships or planets in that system. They would have to EXPLORE the system.

I'm OK with this idea for sensing ships, but hiding planets is a bit too much. I think it's a good abstraction to be able to see all planets in a system once it's entered. I mean, on Earth, with today's technology, we can see system after system after system across the galaxy and determine if there are planets there or not. I'd buy having planet population size hidden until you're close, but ....

For me, greater fog o' war is good for spaceships, bad for systems. And even then, half the joy is reading the funny (and most often grossly misleading) ship names my buddies come up with. Nothing says fun like finding out the hard way that his scan-blocked "Flower Trader" class transport ship has a star destroyer on board.

[Aiken]

Actually, I meant "removed" But yes, making it optional feature is better.

[mac5732]

I would like to see where your not able to see ship designs of enemy or friendlies unless you have a treaty or until you have made contact with that particular ship. Then the only design shown would be of the ships you've already had contact with.... same with units..


my 2 cents Mac

[dogscoff]

I mean, on Earth, with today's technology, we can see system after system after system across the galaxy and determine if there are planets there or not.

Well... no. We can spot stars easily enough, and with a few months' worth of detailed observations and calculations we have been able to identify some systems that (probably) have large planets in orbit, but it's certainly not as easy as you make it sound, and we certainly can't build up detailed maps of those systems- we can just detect some of the more noticable bodies.

We still only barely know our own solar system. There are probably tons of planet-sized objects out in the Pluto/charon orbit that haven't been identified yet. I mean Pluto itself was only discovered about 50 years ago (IIRC) and until much more recently it was thought that Pluto and Charon were one planet. And again, these discoveries were based on extensive, careful observations & calculations with thousands of years' worth of sky-studying (ie knowledge of the movements of the nearer planets) behind them.

If we discovered a warp point in Earth orbit tomorrow and sent a ship through it and found a sol-like system, it would take us years just to find all the planets, moons and things and work out their orbits, let alone figure out what the surfaces of those bodies were really like. (ie SE4 conditions & value).

Of course I'm quite happy to accept that future tech will be far more advanced and do all this much more quickly, but I would like the option to play a more exploratory game.

It would also allow us to start player & AI empires from lower tech levels (yubyub) and build them up convincingly into star-faring races.

[dogscoff]

I would like to see where your not able to see ship designs of enemy or friendlies unless you have a treaty or until you have made contact with that particular ship.

Surely it's feasible that one empire would buy/trade enemy ship-design data from another. I agreee that this shouldn't happen automatically when you reach a certain treaty level, but that's only because I would like to see a more flexible, adaptable treaty system.