Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

It needs to be somewhat low because you still want to have hundreds of ships in combat right?

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

And don't forget those 3600+ ship battles!
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=328876

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Hey, I don't mind the limit being low. I was just pointing out that, yes, by comparison with games coming out today the limit is low. HL2 is really high-end but it doesn't have to have as many objects on screen as a 4x game.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I'm sorry if my post is redundant, but I just can't see checking 134 pages of posts to find out:

I'm interested in seeing CAP (Combat Air Patrol) in SEV.

I've been playing a lot of War in the Pacific (www.matrixgames.com, trust me guys it's a masterpiece), and the idea that my fighters or pursuit craft would move to intercept without my having to take direct action would be great. Not reactionary CAP, but proactive, moving to intercept as ships pass within a few hexes of a planet where the complement is stationed. With the option of not sending them based on enemy fleet size. Kinda like opportunity fire, I suppose.

I know very little in the way of SEV details at this point. Is there a good place to find out "rumors" and confirmed features?

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

This can be simulated with to-hit chances..big weapons have -, small +, small ships + to defense, big - to defense.

And on the plague upgrades: I don't think that's a good idea. Better to have something more like a level (indicating the death rate) and a complexity (indicating how hard it is to cure).

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

OK... but I don't just want to-hit modifiers, I want IMPOSSIBILITIES. A Heavy Anti-Capital Ship Disruptor Cannon might have -500 to hit against, say, an Attack Scout, but the game would STILL use a 1% to hit chance... which means that one day you'll hit an attack scout and spread its molecules out over the entire Galaxy. And if you forget to deselect the Cannon when firing at the Attack Scout, the shot'd be wasted... bad thing with perhaps a 10 turn reload rate... and an enemy Assault Dreadnought moving in... And I also want anti-support (i.e. small) ship weapons - like light lasers, swarm missiles and stuff. I want them to be able to target ONLY ships under the size of Battle Destroyer.

(Note: In the above text, I'm talking Capship Mod ship sizes)

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I would like a huge file with weapon and facility graphics, no matter if not use in the stock game, to use in mods.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Because someone asked,.. The minimum version of DirectX that is/will be required to play SE5 is 7.0

There, now you have proof that I have posted in this thread. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I don't see why it would be 'impossible' for a weapon to fire at ship just because it's really small. Sure, it might not be smart if you'll probably miss and could kill the thing ten times over with a single hit, but that shouldn't stop one from trying. And one should be able to fire light weapons at big ships, they just won't hurt it very much. The only restriction would be I think only PDC weapons should be able to hit missiles and fighters. Real Life example: An anti-ship missile launched at an aircraft carry stands absolutely no chance of being shot down by the guns mounted on destroyers or frigates, because the weapon system simply can't react fast enough, which is why most (American) carriers mount the Phalanx missile defence system which is a set of very small, extremely fast firing guns designed specifically to take out missiles.

Speaking of missiles:
A few suggestions to make them useful: Significantly longer range. At the moment one can close from maximum missile range to energy weapon range in 1-2 turns. I'd like to see this extended to around 6 even if the fleets are heading right for each other.
More speed. Missiles should be fast enough that even the best PDC should only have enough time to get off a shot or two at the missile before it hits.
More armor/reduced PDC damage. At the moment, a 20kT PDC can take down a 50kT missile with one hit, ergo a ship equipped with sufficient PDC would be virtually indestructable to a missile-laden ship of similar size. A missile should take 2-3 hits to destroy. At 2 hits to destroy, if combined with the speed idea, means a ship would require 2 PDCs to ensure a missile gets knocked down. This would bring things to a bit more even 40kT of PDC to counter 50kT of missile.
Chance-to-miss. At the moment PDCs are pretty much guaranteed-hit weapons. Creating a small chance to miss would create a situation where a heavy missile barage would stand a good chance of at least a few getting through the heaviest PDC screen.
More missile types. High speed missiles with small payloads, slower missiles with huge damage potential, MIRVs (the concept, anyway, since 're-entry' doesn't apply in space), big heavily armored ECM missiles designed to do minimal damage but increase the chances of the others getting through, uber-missiles -high speed, massive payload- designed to knock out the biggest ship-of-the-wall, etc.
I think the incorporation of these ideas would make missiles not only useful, but almost necessary armament on any decent sized-ship.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Hey you're not the same Agent Zero who used to run around blowin stuff up on the old Galaxy of Fire BBS are you? Just askin cause it seems the two of you share a similar fixation on missiles.

For my own suggestion I'd like to see SEV have a goal or maybe several different goals that players would work towards. SEIVs victory conditions were just a bit vague. Get X number of points to win and that. Things like diplomatic victory where you have to make alliances with all the other alien races and also convince them all to make peace with each other. Or economic victory where your economic score exceeds a certain amount and also is a percentage above your closest rival. Sub-goals would be great too. Sort of like side-quests in roleplaying games where an event would happen and depending on how you reacted to it you could gain bonuses or rare technology. I think this would give players a much greater sense of purpose than with SEIV.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Hey Phoenix-D,
I posted something along the lines of what you were talking about the plagues. Each level of plagues has a particular death rate, and as you go higher in levels, the harder it is to cure. However, I also added the idea that plagues could mutate so a plague could increase in levels, so that if you don't deal with plagues soon, you can get even more deadlier plagues later.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

In addition to what I added before, how about plagues that can be research that can kill only a specific species. To do this, each species can have a genetic code that is kept secret and parts of it can be stolen at a time as an intellligence mission. That way you can make plagues that are deadly to other races but which you are resistant to. So you could plague bomb or intel mission release plague on a planet of aliens, when they're dead you can claim it and not have to 'cure' the planet.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Would like to see the return of weapons fire on plasma missiles decreasing it's damage. Like it was in SE3...So you either kill or not kill the missile, or if a plasma missile, your damage just decreases its available payload damage...

Some kind of flag/option on the hit points/resistance and/or damage of the missile type.

Also would like to see the possibility of having the option to set specific combat modifers (+/-) on certain ranges or range brackets or a set percentage to hit at a certain range or range bracket, instead of just a straight forward linear regression. For example:

Currently: SE4 uses -10% for each square of range to target, range 4 = -30% (range 1 is 100%).

Would like to see this: Lets say I want a PDC to have a harder chance to hit a missile the 'closer' it is to the target. Range 1 = 33% to hit, Range 2 = 50% chance to hit, Range 3 = 67% chance to hit.

Kana

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Sounds alot like someone has played SFB... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I wish that everyone will buy two copies of the game and that we can buy it in stores around the world, except China for they copy cat everything and then sell boot leg copies back to the world market thus undermining our efforts to fund SE VI. Those Bastards!

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Like you're saying about the PDC/missile thing (AgentZero): fast missiles can't be targeted by slow-moving guns. That's what I'm talking 'bout: small, fast ships can't be tracked by big, slow cannons. Perhaps ship size shouldn't be a modifier for this, perhaps just speed.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Area-of-effect weapons and events. If a COMCA explodes next to an Attack Scout, the AS would be gone... in real life. In SFC ship explosions can cause damage. Why not in SEV? And as for area-of-effect explosions, think shrapnel missiles, flak cannons, anti-fast-missile defenses, pulse/torpedo spreads, space-based nukes etc.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Angel! How the devil are you?! I am indeed more or less the same Agent Zero although there's about 60kgs less of me now than there was back in those days. Hey, BTW sorry bout blowing up your homeworld. It was an accident, honest. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

StrategiaInUltima, I conceed that a fast, highly manoeverable ship would be exceedingly difficult to hit, but to use the modern example, there's no reason a frigate couldn't hit an incomming anti-ship missile with it's main guns, it's just extremely unlikely.
I do however really like the idea of area of effect weapons, but when it was suggested during the SE4 beta we were told that the AI had too many problems with them. Here's hoping Aaron's AI skills have progressed since then.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Perhaps no stock area-of-effect weapons, but just the ability to mod them in - and the AOE pattern, too. A pulse repeater sweep would not cause damage in a square pattern, more like a staggered line. And AOE could be used on weapons with low to-hit chances to compensate for the low TH chance. Perhaps, in the center of a square (circle) AOE weapons burst, damage was 100%. Second row of squares (hexes) out, 50%. Then 25%. Then 5%. Then no damage. Or direct hit: 100% damage, second row 25% damage.

Or perhaps weapons with cone-shaped damage arcs - think Expanding Wave Cannons which fire a concentrated wave of energy which expands cone-like, with damage diminishing as the wave travels. Or a torpedo spread, with multiple torpedoes moving in straight lines, but which together have an approximate cone-shaped arc. (Tried to make a jpeg example image, but it wouldn't paste here.)

Also think that battles should be SFC-like, with an Empire Earth perspective and zoom capability.

Also, I stick to my idea: Boarding Marines that you can design like troops. Just like the idea of designing facilities for yourself, which I also still stand by, you could design boarding components; for example:

-Small Marine Detachment, 10kT
-Medium Marine Detachment, 15kT
-Large Marine Detachment, 20kT
-Marine Force, 25kT
-Marine Army, 30kT
and you can design them with:
-Body Armor, 1kT, 3kT resistance.
-Powered Armor Suits, 3kT, 15kT resistance.
-Personal Shield Generators, 10kT, 25 shielding.
-Pistols, 1kT, damage: 1 1
-Rifles, 1kT, damage: 2 2 2
-Assault Rifles, 1kT, damage: 3 3 3
-Pulse Rifles, 2kT, damage: 4 4 4 4
-Pulse Machineguns, 3kT, damage: 5 5 5
-Grenades, 2kT, damage: 0 7 7 (they won't throw right in front of them)
-Demo Packs I-IV, 4kT, can destroy 10-20-30-40kT of comps.
-Bomb Belts, 10kT, will kill the marine (i.e. destroy the marine component) when used, damage: 15, can destroy 20kT comps.
-RPG, 6kT, damage: 0 0 10 10 10
-Shotgun, 3kT, damage: 10 7 3
-Pulse Shotgun, damage: 15 9 6 2
et cetera. Boarding combat similar to ground combat. Boarding can take several (game) turns. Boarding Troops can be reinforced and pulled out like troops. Boarding Combat can damage internal components OR crew/defenders, some weapons can attack only comps (Demo Packs and such), some both (Bomb Belts). You can mount auto-defense turrets in your ships next to security personnel, infantry troops can help in boarding combat, you can create weapons lockers to arm your crew. You can train your crew/boarders in several disciplines (Martial Arts, especially handy for crew or marines with just demo packs, unarmed hand-to-hand, Marksmanship, increases damage of weapons as they aim better, Sniping Skills, extends ranged weapon range as they will now take the chance of firing while the enemy is farther away, which they otherwise wouldn't for risk of damaging vital components or blowing a hole in the hull, atc.) to make them more effective in combat. Space Marines should also be able to fight ground combats.

Sorry if the above is unreadable. I'll try to put it in a handy .txt file if you ask http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

From the sample data file that Aaron posted a long time ago for one of the IRC chats, it seemed like it would be possible to specify the range penalties for each individual weapon exactly as you can specify the damage penalties now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Sample data file? Where? Do you have a link?

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Retrofit costs should include a special discount for upgrading a component to a newer version of the same thing. The discount should be greater for smaller upgrades.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Great idea. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

...I don't really get it.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

If when you are retrofitting a ship, one of the components being added is an upgraded version of a component fitted on the pre-retrofit ship that has been removed, the cost for adding that component is reduced.

I.e. Retrofitting S1 to S2

S1 has; 1 organic armour mk II
S2 has; 1 organic armour mk III

Cost of replacing org arm II with III is 40% of what it would be if org arm II wasn't present in S1 and III was coming in straight.

And, the larger the tech gap between components, the smaller the discount.

I.e.

org arm I > III 40% cost reduction
org arm II > III 60% cost reduction

I think that's what he's getting at

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

He's referring to another thread. Currently, in settings.txt the following 2 lines exist:

Retrofit Cost Percent For Comps := 120
Retrofit Cost Percent For Comp Removal := 30

The first one makes you pay 120% to add a new component. This one is ok since you should pay a premium to add a component after the ship is built.
The second one makes you pay 30% of the cost of an old component to remove it. This one has some issues.

This means that if there are, say, 5 levels of a type of component, and each higher level costs more than the last as is typical, then it is actually cheaper to upgrade from level 1 to level 5 than to upgrade from level 4 to level 5. This is because of the second line above (i.e. you are paying 30% of something more expensive).

I think it's a little backwards. I would expect more time/effort/cost (real life work and money) to upgrade something that is VERY obsolete than to upgrade something that is SOMEWHAT obsolete.

Given that these are the only 2 moddable lines (not counting cost of the components) that affect this aspect of retrofitting and that the other retrofit mechanics are hard-coded, this can't be adequately addressed in SEIV unless there is another patch to the exe. But it can be brought up here for SEV.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Ah... thankyou.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Plug-In Ground Combat?

I've read bandied about on the SEV chats that it was considered virtually cutting out ground combat in SEV, because it was hard to maintain consistent quality with the empire management and the tactical combat as it was and the ground combat 'minigame' seemed subpar in SEIV.

Perhaps it could be set up so that ground combat could be vague now (using something simple, like crossing MoO3s unit categories with a simple equivalence system), but a more advanced minigame could be plugged in later, say in a gold edition.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Make GC more like SC. I want to be able to add long-range Artillery as ground combat fire-support units! Tried this in Capship, but just heard it couldn't be done.
And not only artillery, something like this (taken from Capship plans):
Infantry: 5 5
Assault Marines: 15
Heavy Infantry: 15 10
Cyborg Troopers: 10 10 10
Robotic Assault Troops: 20
Infantry Officer: 10
Mech Infantry: 20 10
Light Armor: 30
Armor: 40
Heavy Armor: 60
Artillery: 0 0 20 20 20
Missile Artillery: 0 50 30 10
etc.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

1- Return the ability to select starting tech points as in SE3 instead of the blanket High, Medium, Low settings. There was alot of strategy in that alone in SE3 that is now lost.

2-Balance the Tech trees. All techs at max tech level should be able to compete with each other.

3-Please for the love of man do not go overboard with micro-management. I read alot of "cool" ideas but implementation of many of them would just make the game too ponderous.

4-Do not make this game "Star Trek". There are plenty of other ST games out there and I'm sure there will be plenty more. Give people Mod options for this kind of stuff.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

The ability to export the details to a text file, and allow the host to simulate the battle any way they choose, and then plug the numbers back in would be pretty cool.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

The OPTION for extra micormanagement... I still WANT to be able to mod the game to be able tocreate marines... or perhaps to add the option to have a sort of Infantry unit that can be used in boarding a ship.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Suicide Junkie: Yeah, exactly that sort of thing. I think it would necessitate seperating out ground combat from space combat; invasion in the space combat phase would simply be a dropping-troops sort of thing. Ground combat would be a turn-end thing. The game could export a list of unit IDs / what they have, and it could accept import lists of what units were destroyed. You could certainly go into more depth than that if you introduced regions or somesuch like MoO3, but that doesnt seem likely.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

And once exported, you could set up the combat as a scenario in any other game... even a D&D style roleplaying thing.

SJ rolls a natural 20 to save against a thousand tanks!

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

You could even say "Screw you, AI, my 10 militia make a brave last stand against your 1000 tanks and and destroy all of them, with one militiaman miracously clinging to life among the wreckage of your broken offensive."

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Would make for cheating, like saving mid-combat... you enter far higher values for yourself and much lower for the other player

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

If the host is cheating, you're screwed regardless http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

How about officers? Maybe a facility that would be one or two units per empire that would be like a service academy that would be upgradable to produce leaders that give bonuses and drawbacks in combat. Wouldnt need to generate a whole lot because it could be limited to ship captains only. That way you could assign leaders to ships according to where you know they are going and what capabilities they will need (so you could assign inexperienced low-rated guys to explorer ships or something like that and give big capital ships to your highest rated guys etc.) Maybe the same idea for marines and fighter squadrons..

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I have a suggestion for how stellar manipulation could work for creating system types. Rather than have hard coded types (nebula creation, black hole creation, etc.), just have all such components use a single ability. This ability would reference an entry in SystemTypes.txt. Now, your SM devices would just create a pre-defined system. Black hole generators would create a "Black Hole" system, nebula creators would create a "Nebula" system entry, etc. This would also allow for all sorts of cool things, like creating ringworlds that are the whole system and have lots of colonizable "planet" parts, or genisis devices that create a system complete with stars and planets, or anything else a modder would desire.

The ability could even be set up to create one of a specific class of systems at random. This would allow the creation of random nebulas that have differing abilities, all from the same component. Much like storm creation devices now, but more complex and powerful.

Or even better, SystemTypes.txt could be set up to have random variables. Instead of all Storm X systems being the same, the Storm X entry would have a random range for its values. Cloaking level could be 2, 3 or 4, all from the same system entry, without having to explicitly create 3 different entries, which leads to messiness in the QuadrantTypes.txt file, as you have to have extremely long lists to get more varied quadrants...

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Here's a suggestion: A sensor technology that is capable of detecting from types of planets to ship movements (depending on what model and so forth). It would be heavy so, it would take up most of the space on a satellite or some of the space on a ship.

For races that are not telepathic, there can be a facility called 'observatory' which can detect ships within so many sectors and is basically a sensor for planets.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

What I want? Partial maintenance. You do NOT have a fixed value for maint like you have now, you could select/slide the maint cost as a total or per resource for your entire starfleet, a single fleet, or a single ship even. Also, ships without maint shouldn't just explode. They should degrade. Comps without maint should first deteiorate in effectiveness (i.e. a Mineral Robo-Miner III would harvest less and less of itself) then get damaged, and ultimately be destroyed. Also, if you've got, say, an Assault Dreadnought with organic armor and mixed normal/organic weapons, and you're in a bit of a bind since your Org production is nearing rock bottom and your reserves will soon expire, you simply decrease the org maint cost for the ship. Sure, armor and some weapons will degrade and eventually will be destroyed, but you would spare a helluva lot of orgs that could be used to build colonizers to set out and colonize org-rich planets.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

AhhhHHHHhHHHH! They're harvesting the ship out from under us!

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

?

I meant that the base amount of minerals harvested would grow to be less and less.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

Dudes... this thread is dying out.

Partial damage for Units, like with ships. Right now, in Capship, you can field 250kT Armies in ground combat, yet they will not take partial damage. That is at least somewhat unrealistic. Especially when you consider that an Army can consist of, say, an Artillery unit, two or three Heavy Armor units, several Mech Infantry units and a hell of a lot of infantry.

Roman Numerals for ship sizes.
What I mean by this is: You can upgrade ship hulls. Look in the attachment for details.

Ships that can land on planets. Would also add usefulness to sneaky ground attacks; say, a damaged Dreadnought lies motionless on the ground of a planet to be repaired while resting safely under a very strong shield. You (the DN's enemy) then ship a cloaked transport there with lots of troops. While it is still cloaked, you land it to avoid detection right up to the moment your troops exit the ship. Your troops step out of the transport, and start to make their way to the DN to destroy it before it can take off.
Taking off should also cost movement, supplies and perhaps cause damage (think torque: a small Scout of 100kT would have pretty little trouble rising from a planet as it is compact, but a 25MT COMCA would suffer terribly from torque effects. Also, non-reusable colony ships (i.e. CLs that you lose when you colonize, like the SEIV CLs - to avoid this you need to have Drop Pods, larger, more expensive comps that can carry less people and are destroyed after use, but saves you the trouble of building a whole new ship) could suffer from those effects as they descend. Imagine, you could lose you colony module and thus your population from the torque!

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

A clock. A little digital display up in the top right corner to tell me the time. Like in moo3(the only good part of the game). I like to know what wee our of the night i've played in too.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I read in the chat transcripts that ship design is going to be like in starfury, dragging components onto a template. It would give some interesting options if you could have large components taking up several spaces. Huge cargobays, hangars with extra bonusses, maybe some of the stellar manipulation components too.

A problem would be the fact that the components on a ship aren't neccesarily aligned in a square grid. (The way the standard starfury ships are.) In starfury you can easily make a ship with a honeycomb style component layout.

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I would like to see:

Real "civil wars" - perhaps triggered by events, big time/long term intel actions, serious battle losses, or loss of the homeworld. It would be interesting to have more than just one planet rebel - I'd like to see groups of planets, or even half your empire, rebel and form an entirely new empire.

In the same vein, I would like to see the ability to gracefully add a player to a game - especially in the case of a civil war. Even if only a single planet rebels, it'd be nice to be able to add a player to that planet to give it a fighting change, add RP flavor, etc...It woudl also be neat to be able to add a player to take over an AI empire - so if someone wanted to join an in-progress game, then they could.

Thanks,
Alarik
(credit where credit is due: these were mentioned by a fellow player, and I suggested they post them, but they never did so I am going to post them becuase I think they are excellent ideas myself)

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I would like to see some news on the game! I'm going thru a SERIOUS withdrawal for a great next gen 4X game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

I totally agree! Latest news was that the beta was coming in early April, with applications in March...

Re: SE5, Tell Aaron what\'s on your Wish List
 

you can already do this in SE4. the game admin can check which races are controlled by AI and which by humans, after the game starts. if a planet revolts through happyness factors, PPP, or events, a new empire is created and you can assign this to player control.

The only limitation is the PBW server, which does not let you add players after the game starts. this is a limitation of PBW and not of SE4.