Re: just one battles per turn
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The big problem with charging a movement penalty for defending is that somebody can attack you with 10 separate waves of unarmed escorts, and bleed away all of your attack fleet's movement points. <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I think you mean if somebody plays simultaneus game, I am right? I never tried this, because I prefer traditional gaming (no surprise http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif )

I like the idea of additional costs of MPs per attack (only in classic turn based) very much. Its better than my "1 battle per turn/stack" thing.

If you want to advance the whole concept a little bit more:

The amount of additional MP cost could be moddable and modified by race advantages and/or technological advances.
If the MP amount for attacking an enemy position exceeds the the rest of the MP allowance of the attacking ship/fleet then the attack should be allowed. (using up the rest of the fleets MP)

Eg fleet A has 6 MP and wants to attack 3 adjacent squares with an enemey fleet in each square. Lets say attacking a normal square with an enemy costs 2 MP. The attacking fleet is 2 squares apart from the first enemy square. It uses up 1 MP for the first empty square then 2 MP for the first attack, then 2 MP for the second attack. Now only 1 MP of the 6 is remaining. The attacking fleet can now attack the 3rd square with the 3rd enemy fleet within using up its remaining MP.

In this matter we can even go further. For example some squares could be more costly to attack than others. (Eg squares which content nebulas, planets, asteroid fields etc. due to more complicated pre-battle plans and astronomical calculations etc.)

And even more, attacks of bigger fleets could be more expensive then attacks of small fleets, due to the fact that coordinating big numbers of attacking ships is more time intensive than coordinating small numbers. This would lead to advantages in splitting up big fleets in smaller more flexible ones (interesting thought)
Again with technology this disadvantage could be modified.

Again this is IMO only reasonable for classic turns not for simultaneous turns (which I dont play and therefore cannot evaluate)

klausD

Re: just one battles per turn
 

Klaus, I think what others have pointed out though is if SEIV were a true "classic boardgame" style of game, each turn would not be one tenth of a year like it is now. If it were a classic board game style each turn might be more like one day, or to strictly equate it to current terms on 300th of a year. Then each turn you would calculate whether or not a fleet had enough movement to do anything. If a fleet was moving at a speed that would take 5 days to move one sector on the map (About a speed 6 fleet in current SEIV terms) they would only be allowed to move every five turns. A faster fleet would be allowed to move more frequently. But all moves would still only be only one turn. Unless you had a ship that could move more that 30 spaces in a turn which is not possible under stock SEIV, and actually is not possible in simultaneous SEIV at all because of a bug.

Under such a system if on a particular day you could move the fleet, and you moved into a sector with an enemy fleet you would do combat. You would have your one combat per turn in effect.

Such a systm would be very difficult if not impossible to play via email turns against other people, although it might be workable for hotseat, TCP/IP or solo play.

This is in effect what is happeneing during simultaneous turn games now, but you only get to interface with the game and change orders every 30 "turns".

What we have now is not really multiple combats per turn if it were translated into classic boardgame style. What we actually have is that you are doing multiple turns at a time.

Geoschmo

Re: just one battles per turn
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I think most of the people who talk about the "supply as resource" are looking for a way to have the planetary resupply depots (and, possibly the ship-based quantum reactors) only generate a fixed amount of supplies per turn; in addition, they'd like the ability to transfer supplies in chunks (the manual resupply you mention). IMHO, there is no way to mod those two functions. I haven't tried P&N, so I'm not certain what SJ has done about making supply more like a resource, but I'm almost completely certain he hasn't been able to mod the two functions mentioned above. The closest you can get to generating a fixed amount of supplies per turn is to use the solar collector ability, but that generates supplies based on number of stars in a system, and so can only come close to providing what we want. And, to my knowledge, there is no way to perform manual transfers of fixed amounts of supply (i.e., create a supply ship carrying 8000 supplies, and then transfer 5000 of those supplies to an attack ship, completely filling the attack ship and leaving the supply ship with 3000 supplies to get back home).

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I assume you mean like they had in beta testing? Where you needed to have 50 million people on a planet to operate each facility? There's a discussion about that somewhere on the forum, and it turned out to be pretty annoying. If you could choose which facility to operate each turn, it might be OK, but I don't think there was a way to decide each turn whether you'd run (for instance) a mineral miner facility or a space yard.

What many people do is change the production bonuses for population. Both Proportions and P&N offer production "penalties" on low population planets (something like operating at 10% production rather than 100% production; so a mineral miner on a low population planet only generates 80 minerals per turn instead of 800). And many people have added more bonuses for really high population planets (like ringworlds and sphereworlds). So you can get the effect of "population operating a facility" without the annoyances discovered in beta testing. I can imagine a situation where you have enough population to operate a single facility on a particular planet; that planet has a resupply depot, a space port, a mineral miner facility, and a space yard facility. Now, since you can't choose which one will operate on a given turn, you'd better hope the game engine chose the right facility. I'd be willing to agree that it could add an interesting bit of strategy to the game, but ONLY if you can choose which facility is operated, AND can change that decision each turn. And besides, the game has enough micro-management already; do we really need more?

Re: just one battles per turn
 

Geoschmo,
why do you think that the time frame Aaron gave to SE4 is important? The idea that 1 game turn is a "month" is just an abstract measurement to have some flair. Nobody knows what "1 month" really is. (especially to 10legged aliens) 1 Month could be in our real earth time 4,54 years or just 4,54 days, who knows? Its pure speculation that in 1 month a fleet can achieve this or this. If in reality something like space combat or planetary invasion would exist, nobody knows how long such an action would Last. It could Last decades to conquer a whole planet or to fight out a space battle. With advanced technologies it could Last just several days. But this is also pure speculation. The time Calendar Aaron put in the game is just for fun, it has no meaning for the rules at all.

The move/combat system Aaron uses has been used before several times before. (In the Games Workshop game "Space Hulk" or in the SF-computer game "breach" for example) so I cannot follow your argumentation that in a "real TB-game" the current SE action/move system would have been something different. Above there are classical examples that it is a system which has already been in use several times before.

Director Tsaarx,
Manual supply: I thought already that there is no possibility in SE to mod this feature. (all in all you had to program a seperate pop up window which is used to distribute the supply points) I regret this really. Manual supply would have been a good feature for SE.

Population needed to operate facilities: I meant that every facility should require a certain amount of pop to operate it. For example I have 4 pops on a planet. I build 3 mines, each of them need 2 population to be active. This means that 2 mines are active and one mine-facility is not active.
This is the basic premise. But the definition what active is and what not, should be a further point for discussion. Regarding the special needs of SE I would say that facilities without the needed population could also produce a certain percentage of its job. (lets call it "automatization rate") Eg the third mine without the required pop in the above example is not fully functionally. It could have an auto-rate of 50%, which means that the mine produces 50% of normal (population supported) production rate. This is necessary IMO because in SE you have in the beginning to few pops on the planet. The build up of planet would be too slow if there is no auto-rate which produces at least a certain percentage.
(on the other hand, Aaron could of course handle population in SE5 as a rather linear number - like MOO2 - this would be easier and very clever. I think the non-linear handling of population was also a reason that the beta testers did not like the use of pop operating facilities)

Of course there could be technologies or racial advantages/disadvantages which modifies such automatization rates of a players race.

bye
KlausD