New ideias / concepts / problems in / for SE4 GOLD after 1.78

[Crazy_Dog]

New ideias / concepts / problems in / for SE4 GOLD after 1.78

This is a sum of ideas i get around the forums...

In the creation of galaxy:
random size and type

New tech:
Stabilize planet core
Restore Star nucleus
Expand Warp (remove problems that damage ships)
Universal colony

In the tactical combat
if you start with fighters outside carriers they are reported, otherwise not ->fix

In the Empire options, add the directives for ministers:

minimum nº troops p/planet (ships don't remove above that number, and the minister try to build up to it)
type of ship priority to build (attack / colony / etc)
mines in all waypoints
satellites in all waypoints
create defense stations

In the Ship designs menu add:

Info about the maintenance of the design
Ship / unit can be build by minister
Maximun number in service of this design (the minister don't build more)

In the ships/units menu add:

Ships of class xxx

upgrade to class yyy
mothball
unmothball
scrap

All Ships AI controled (on/off)

If units, units of class xxx scrap

In the planets menu add:
change all planets type xxx to type yyy

Change the Ship Construction minister :

Generic Ship
Colony Ship
Units

If you have the flag 'Automatically use Individual Ministers for newly built vehicles',
it must include the ships captured or that join you (race surrender)

If a race surrender to you and have techs that you can't (cristal) you can't research it but
can build the itens that they have discovered (if surrender to you, they give you the blueprints)
Also, the blueprints of units/ships they have designed must be acessible

Add the system's Minister

Manage the creation of system's wide facilities (like urban pacification center)
If exist duplications of SWF in a system, remove redundant.
If a planet in the system is rioting / angry, call / build troops or UPC.

The troops minister must have the capability to send troops to rioting planets

If i send order to 10 ships to retrofit on a planet and in that turn only can retrofit 3 the others forget the order.

The retrofit rotine, must take in consideration that exist ships with cargo and add the
capability of removing it temporary (if exist avaiable space in the sector)

Add the capability of the Ships that can close warp points to only do it to
warps with possibility to damage ships (else is too dangerous to asign a minister).

If you put a fighter bay in a ship (you can put it in all), it only have use if the ship is
of design type carrier, otherwise the ministers igore it.

If i put a cargo bay in a carrier (to add more fighters), the minister start to load generic
cargo. Is possible to stop this ?

Is possible to add 'netmouse' support ?

In some games, the minister insist in building small / older models of weapons platforms (even obsolet ones).

The destrutction of ion stroms is still not reported in the log.

Sometimes, the ministers add itens ti queues of shipyards under human control (example: i use some space stations with huge cargo capability to build units in a loop, not minister controled of course, and sometimes appear ships/etc added to the queue.

If the Intelligence make a ship turn to us, in the log they report it but the go button take us to the place it appenned and not to the ship itself.
I think need to be fixed.
I think racial anger modifiers would be great - something that would allow you to represent long standing hatred between races!!
Would also be nice if you could set anger modifiers for use of certain weapons or actions - so you can set an AI to react negatively to a race that uses a planet killer.

Number of race specific modifiers : 2
Race specific modifier race 1 : Terran
Race specific modifier amount 1 : 20
Race specific modifier race 2 : Phong
Race specific modifier amount 2 : -20

The race with this politic file would react very hostile to the Terrans but be very friendly against the Phongs. You could specify as many races as you want. This would prevent the alliance of "mortal enemies" like Eee and Drushoka that we see now. It would also allow you to reduce conflicts between AI's in a solo human player game without making them all declare war on you when you select the "team player mode".

It would be nice if we could get the AI to build defensive capabilities on a newly colonized planet before building facilities just as we human players do. If the newly colonized planet is breathable/huge, it can be 30+ turns before defenses go up, making it an easy target to capture/destroy.

Allow Troops to have a chance stop intelligence against a planet. Chance should never go to zero, more troops should be a diminishing return.

Allow Security Stations and Boarding Parties to inhibit intelligence operations against a ship. I think that to use intelligence against a ship, you have to have some way to establish a contact against that ship when it is visiting a planet. (Hard to infilitrate a ship when it stays away from a port).

It would be nice in the tactical combat mode if the satellites were evenly distributed around the four corners of the warp point or planet "picture"... rather like the traditional symbol for a castle .. a square with a tower at each of the four corners. In this way you would have 360 degree coverage, instead of the 120 or so you get now.
This would help the AI & occasionally the human player.
One of the things I would like to see, (I don't know how everyone else feels) in regards to jammers.
If a ship has a jammer and you clik on it you are not allowed to see what it has, ok, However,

In tactical combat, you can still clik on any enemy ship and see its contents whether they have a jammer or not.
I would like to see, if a ship has a jammer, even in tactical combat, nothing is revealed until the jammer unit is destroyed at which point, everything would be open to view.

AI must have a history of relations and evolve based in that, because is stupid to offer a treaty one turn and declare war next.
if a ship have a destination and not enough supplies to go, select the nearest supply depot, refuel and stay on course

[dogscoff]

Good ideas in there, including some I haven't seen before. I think a lot of the ones you list should be low priorities, but any improvement is an improvement=-)

BTW, universal colony components are already possible they're just not in the standard game. Play Devnullmod, that has unicolonies.

I'd like to add to the list:

-Route-finding code will automatically divert ships to pass through a friendly resupply depot if that can be done at no extra movement cost. This will help both AI and humans.
(Flags in Empire options to turn this on/off for own/allied depots?)

-Intel Project success probability modified by:
--Presence of own/ friendly race on target planet.
--Anger level of target planet. (collaborators.)
--Presence of target race in own empire. (brainwashed agents=-)
--Experience level of target ship.
--Any other relevent factors I've forgotten.
Percentage modifiers moddable in one of the text files.

-Ground combat modified by terrain: Rock planet race at a disadvantage on an ice planet, for example. Percentage modifier moddable in one of the text files.

-"Modify ground combat" ability for facilities, and maybe even for (friendly) ships.

-Allow retrofit, scrap, mothball and analyse to be added to order queues (ie move to planet, mothball.)

-Bring back the Halt command from SE3. Effectively a command that says "Don't move for remainder of turn" and can be added to order queues. (Two of them in a row should mean halting for 2 turns.)

-contextual rather than immediate calculation of "nearest", so that repair/ resupply at nearest can be meaningfully added to order queues.

-ability to re-arrange and remove items from order queues like you can with build queues.

I have many other suggestions, but these are the ones I think could be implemented comparitively easily. Small changes, but I'm going for a high "bang for buck."

EDIT: typos, crapnesses. Need sleep...

[ August 16, 2002, 13:21: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Atrocities]

First and foremost, this is simply the best game I have ever played in the 4x market.

All that I would really like too see, is improved Political AI, and the addition of wheel mouse support.

The ability to set the exact number of Neutrals and AI empires would also be very nice, as well as setting each races starting Tech levels.

Past that the game rocks.

[dogscoff]

Hell yeah - I agree with your praise of the game Atrocities (although I wouldn't limit it to "in the 4X market"), but I'm just greedy and I want more, more, MORE features and improvements.

I can't know for sure but I think Aaron must enjoy creating / evolving this game as much as we love playing it - after all you don't get dedication like this from anything but passion.

If this is the case, I assume (I hope) that he welcomes suggestions like this for what they are, (Ideas to help the game acheive its full potential) rather than criticisms of what the game is lacking (which is certainly not my intention.)

EDIT: Does any of that make sense? I didn't get much sleep Last night...

[ August 16, 2002, 13:18: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Crazy_Dog]

Yes it is the BEST game i play for as long i remember.
But because MM is so great in supporting / expanding it, guys like me are allways asking for more, trying to see if the ideas that whe have to improve (?) it can be implemented.

Is not criticism, is one of the best apraises that i know

[oleg]

Originally posted by Atrocities:
First and foremost, this is simply the best game I have ever played in the 4x market.

All that I would really like too see, is improved Political AI, and the addition of wheel mouse support.

The ability to set the exact number of Neutrals and AI empires would also be very nice, as well as setting each races starting Tech levels.

Past that the game rocks.

You can easily set exact number of random races : edit settings.txt and put the same number (say 10) to Min. and Max numbers of players for, for example, "medium number of races". Then start the game and you will always get 10 random races when you select "medium number"

[dogscoff]

What would be nice would be the option to put randomly selected races before you in the player list (ie make yourself player 15 rather than player 1).
Or has the "low player number advantage" been really really fixed in 1.78?

Oops... it appears to have been re-fixed in 1.58 - pardon me.

[ August 16, 2002, 14:09: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[ckotchey]

FYI, since this thread has been started, About a week ago, here's a list of minor updates I sent to MM as suggested improvements. Most of them are more GUI-oriented, rather than game-play. Comments?
-------------
List Ordering:  There are many of them, but it's annoying to me how many lists (e.g. Ship Type, Colony Type, Research & Intelligence categories (within their main Category), etc.), that are presented in non-alphabetical order, making it hard to find the desired choice - they should be sorted before presentation, where appropriate.
 
(Bug?) Combat Replay Sound:  I noticed that during Combat Replay, when missiles hit their target, there is no explosion animation, and similarly, no explosion sound effects.  These sounds were definitely there during the tactical presentation.

Combat, Ship Identification: During combats (both Tactical, and Combat Replay), there is no indication as to which ship belongs to whom! Normally, this isn't much of a problem, but I've captured several enemy ships in different ways, and during combat, my ships look just like his, and I can't tell whose is whose unless I wait for all the animations to stop and I have to put a mouse over all the ships to see whose it is! There should be a colored box or asterisk or something drawn on or around ships to indicate the player color.

Combat, Component Damage: I love during Tactical combat (even when I select "Auto", or "Resolve Combat") seeing the ship's components, damage bar graphs, at whatnot. Why are they not also shown during the Combat Replay? Seems that doing that would be no different than when they are shown during automatic combat resolution in tactical. Please add this if you can! For me, being a new player, it's helpful to find out HOW exactly each ship got damaged the way it did, even as a learning tool.

Ship Repair at Ally Planet: This would be great. Perhaps since you can gain ship supplies at Ally bases at a Military Alliance, you could also get your ships Repaired at Ally planets - at either the MA, or even at the Partnership level (considering this a "higher level of cooperation" than simply refuelling) (with Ally planets giving priority to their own ships' repairs over any ally player ships).

Repair Priorities: To reorder the repair priorities, you must remove ALL items from the list, then re-add them one at a time. There should be buttons to reorder them, as with other queues, etc. (i.e. move to top, move to bottom, item up, etc.). Perhaps the ability to save these preferences as default for future games?

Tactical Combat, Ships to Move: I'm new to the game, and am still trying to get through Tactical combats, but I'm having trouble knowing which ships still have movement points left to use. Perhaps some sort of indicator on the ships' icons can show if more movement points are left (or not), rather than having to click on each and every ship. Similarly, to show if there are still weapons to be fired. This is a nit, probably, since there are the arrow buttons at the top of the screen to cycle through the ships that can shoot and/or move.

Variable Speed Replay: Seems that battles can be viewed in either "slow" or "fast" mode. Personally, I'd like something in-between. Maybe this could be some sort of slider setting, with maybe 5 settings between slow and fast?

Saving Empire Options: When I set these, they are the way I want them. when I start a new game, I have to set them all over again. There should be a way to save the current list of options as my "default" options, so that when I start a new game, they're set the way I want them. Same goes with the Global game options (i.e. save game every x turns, etc.)

Destroyed Facilities: My homeworld was just attacked, and it was not immediately obvious that my Space Yard Facility had been destroyed, along with the 4% of the population. Perhaps a list of destroyed facilities, etc., could also be displayed in the Log entry listing the combat? Similary, I once got a message about a comet or something destroying 2 facilities - but it did not tell me WHAT facilities got hit.

Galaxy Map: With the galaxy map window open, I can add "Notes" to a system, that are displayed when I mouse-over one of the systems. This should also work when I mouse-over the galaxy map that is part of the main screen! There is even a little blank space below the map that is just enough room!

Ship Icons: Wow, a lot of these ship icons are DARK! Brighten them up a little!

Component Browse in Tech Tree: When viewing the Tech Tree (if allowed to in the game) under "Tech Levels", I'd like to be able to right-click on a listed component to see the information on that component, so I know what it is I'm working towards in detail.

---------
And here are two earlier ideas I submitted, for the sake of listing them all here in one place.

Simple GUI addition: On the main screen, at the top, where your current stock of Minerals, Organics, and Radioactives is displayed, Add a small dash, up-arrow, or down-arrow after the "material icon", to display whether current supplies are steady (dash), increasing i.e. surplus, or decreasing i.e. running a deficit). could even get fancy and do some kind of double-arrow if supplies are increasing or decreasing rapidly, or if levels are critical.

Ship Designs I Already Know: I know the design of a particular enemy ship. Thus, I can view it in the ship designer windows. However, when I see one of these ships in actual space and click on it, it does not allow me to click on the "Comps" tab to see the components - when I cant remember what sort of weaponry it has. I notice, however, that if I get a long-range scanner within range, I can again see the design from the main screen by clicking "comps". See also previous discussion.

[ August 16, 2002, 14:49: Message edited by: ckotchey ]

[Atrocities]

An addition to sorting that I would like to see.

Sorting my Planet Type. Rock, Ice, Gas. This would make it a lot easier when send out colony ships.

[Atrocities]

You can easily set exact number of random races : edit settings.txt and put the same number (say 10) to Min. and Max numbers of players for, for example, "medium number of races". Then start the game and you will always get 10 random races when you select "medium number"

Both Fyron and I played around with this yestarday Oleg, but neither of us could get it to work. Could you be a tad bit more specific? Perhaps post what you have if you have it working.

Thanks