Suggestions for Space Empires V

[Emperor's Child]

I had an idea about a way to give the game some additional kick: Facility location tags.

I was playing a P&N game and had the idea of trying to model a Habanna gas mine-like fuel station – like thing into game play. My idea was that if you could tag a facility to only be built on a certain type of world, you could tag them so they could only be built on gas worlds. I would then make the gas-mine refueling stations places where unlimited supplies would be available and then make some restriction (or outright-prevent) on all others.

Anyhow, I think that while that particular idea won’t work well, the concept of tags for facilities and worlds that identify type of world and atmosphere would have lots of interesting possibilities.

Refueling stations on Gas giants or methane worlds only.
Solar collectors on worlds with no atmosphere that work much more efficiently (and a whole raft of other things that will work better or worse under no atmosphere).
Farms could be made 20 times as expensive on worlds with no atmosphere to reflect domes, etc…

Lots of possibilities for playing around with some interesting concepts.

[ToddT]

Well after being burned by it again. It would be nice that when select ai off, that it does just that. Leaving a seperate option at the bottom of a menu, off the screen , that operates the reverse of that, is just wrong.
i do not play offline and do to the way things have played rarely start a new game very often and, most if not all missed turns where do PBW issues.
Sorry just had a game in turn 35 irrepairable trashed by this feature.my other pet peeve is the fact that the warp screen has everything swithed off by default, hadn't used Stelar manip in a few years, an din't remeber right way how to use it, it got me in hot water During the race for SEV games.

[Kamog]

Oh, another thead of SEV suggestions! Didn't know this existed, in addition to the big sticky one at the top.

Is there still time for Aaron to incorporate suggestions into SEV before the release?

[douglas]

Kamog said:
Oh, another thead of SEV suggestions! Didn't know this existed, in addition to the big sticky one at the top.

This thread was originally in the SEV forum, which got merged into this one a while ago.

Kamog said:
Is there still time for Aaron to incorporate suggestions into SEV before the release?

That all depends on how major the suggestion is and how long you're willing to wait for the release.

[inigma]

Two ideas I'd love to see:

1. real time combat
2. custom hotkeys, and macros

1. I wonder if battle will be in real time. I think that would be very very very very very cool.

You set your ship, task force, and fleet strategy, formations, and primary, secondary, and trinary orders before the battle, hit start when you're ready, and the computer plays out the entire battle in real time. I think the ability to create your own scripts for how your fleets "react" to enemy forces during real time combat would also be one of the coolest inventions in 4x games.

2. Custom hotkey combinations would be awesome in setting up some system of macros for empire management, battle management, and others.

Imagine watching a 200 ship battle in real time, your carriers are preprogrammed to stay with the fleet near pd ships, instead of running away once they've launched their fighters. The fighters form up in preprogrammed flight groups and wings, and your cruisers provide perimeter defense while firing their heavy mounts from long range. Light cruiser task forces move in for close encounters of the third kind, forming the front line of the battle, rotating their positions so as to soak up the most enemy fire, the computer almost seemingly working hard to provide cover for weakened ships.

You can pick a ship to command personally, be it part of a formation, or a leader, or even the fleet flagship, and as the battle changes and your preprogrammed responses appear to be failing, you quickly call up hotkey macros which load entirely new strategies and responses for your fleet to follow, which eventually change the formations within battle as the enemy is flanked, surrounded, and defeated soundly in a shooting retreat as the battle ends.

Now THAT would be the Space Empires of my dreams.

[Ed Kolis]

Well, realtime combat has long been a feature of SE5, and the AI is said to be scriptable - check out some of the screenshots and the preview video (sorry I can't give you an exact URL but I think it's at IGN...)

[Aris_Sung]

In regards to Atrocities idea of Torpedo Launchers, I thought wouldn't it be cool that as you researched better torpedo launchers you could fire more than 1 torpedo/launcher. Therfore, the more advanced you get, you can reduce the number of launchers but maintain the same number of torpedoes fired (compared to a less advanced period) or keep on adding launchers and fire even more torpedoes.

Just my $0.02.

[Aris_Sung]

Oh, one last suggestion before I forget.

If you put mines around your planet, it should decrease the amount of resources that gets exported from that planet.
Think about it. The more you mine a planet for its defense, you're basically cluttering up the space lanes that resource transports need to use to come and go. So with reduced lanes, there would only be so many transports that can come and go at a time.
This idea is just for balance, so that a defender doesn't mine all his planets with no down-side.