Base Training

[Phoenix-D]

With the latest patch, you can no longer fleet with bases- to fix the resupply issue.

OK, but I think another can of worms just opened. Defensive bases are now taking AT LEAST a 20% penalty to both attack and defense. You can no longer fleet them, so they can't get the fleet defensive bonus! And if you're using them for WP defense, you can't ship train them unless you're pyhic. -40. Owww..

Now, how do we fix that? Aside from letting bases fleet..

Phoenix-D

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
With the latest patch, you can no longer fleet with bases- to fix the resupply issue.

OK, but I think another can of worms just opened. Defensive bases are now taking AT LEAST a 20% penalty to both attack and defense. You can no longer fleet them, so they can't get the fleet defensive bonus! And if you're using them for WP defense, you can't ship train them unless you're pyhic. -40. Owww..

Now, how do we fix that? Aside from letting bases fleet..

Phoenix-D

1) No fleet bonus - I dunno how to fix this. Except to rationalize that the base isn't in fleet formation, so it should't acquire fleet experience. How does the base acquire any defence bonus -- "Now we don't have thrusters, so when the APB comes our way, everyone run to Sector G at once and we'll tilt the base out of the way"

2) No ship training at warp points - well, if the crew is undergoing intensive combat readyness training, maybe we can mimic that with a base only training component. Wasn't Elowan working on that? Or maybe some base only component - battle simulator holodeck or some such technobabble - that gives the base a bonus.

[ September 23, 2002, 23:14: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Sinapus]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
With the latest patch, you can no longer fleet with bases- to fix the resupply issue.

OK, but I think another can of worms just opened. Defensive bases are now taking AT LEAST a 20% penalty to both attack and defense. You can no longer fleet them, so they can't get the fleet defensive bonus! And if you're using them for WP defense, you can't ship train them unless you're pyhic. -40. Owww..

Now, how do we fix that? Aside from letting bases fleet..

Phoenix-D

Well... there is a flag in settings.txt that lets you fleet bases, but that isn't what you're looking for.

[Mylon]

Originally posted by Arkcon:
1) No fleet bonus - I dunno how to fix this. Except to rationalize that the base isn't in fleet formation, so it should't acquire fleet experience. How does the base acquire any defence bonus -- "Now we don't have thrusters, so when the APB comes our way, everyone run to Sector G at once and we'll tilt the base out of the way"

Hehe... That's good. But if you want to give bases that extra 20% to hit and 20% to be missed, why not just adjust the base bonuses on the base design itself?

[spoon]

Maybe they shouldn't have defensive bonuses anyway -- they just sit still in space like a big target, right? And don't their mounts give bonuses to hit already?

-Spoon

[Baron Grazic]

It seems that this Gives Psychic an extra bonus, so perhaps change it so that Bases don't get any experiance at all.

[Baron Munchausen]

The simplest solution would be to remove the 'system wide training' abilities as Psychic only bonuses. That is, make all training facilities system wide. Would that be considered a hit for the value of the Psychic trait?

A better sceheme for SE V would be to change the way experience works. I emailed MM with a new system a while ago but I dunno if he's working on SE V yet.

The current system is a bit crude. When you need to build larger ships you cannot carry over your experienced crews to the new ships, for example. Someone suggested in another thread that we should be able to 'transfer' crews to new ships when we scrap old ones. Keeping track of 'crews' is a bit difficult since a 'crew' is actually a composite of hundreds or possibly thousands of people/creatures. And the number of crew required for each given size/class of ship is going to be different, not to mention differences caused by changes of the equipment in use. An 'experienced' crew of a missile ship is not going to be nearly so competent if you transfer them to a carrier. How do you track the 'type' of training that the crew has? And anyway, the AI cannot use the current system effectively. How would it handle a more complex system?

I think that what is required is some sort of 'pool' of crew experience based on the number of ships in you have in service and how long they are in service. A sort of 'accumulated hours of operation' measurement, averaged over the number of ships you have. As this pool grows larger relative to fleet size, the default experience of your ships can increase because you can assume a better general level of training in your 'armed forces'. But ships getting destroyed in combat means dead crew, so you should also suffer losses from your pool due to losses of ships in combat. Ship and fleet training facilities will still have a use, but they should just add to the global 'experience pool' so that it will increase even if ships are not earning experience in actual combat, or recover faster from losses. This would be much more usable by the AI than the current system because you wouldn't have to park your ships in a special location for a certain amount of time.

Ships should still gain experience individually for success in combat, but then their new experience would be 'average in' to the general pool. Most individual ships would just rely on the empire-wide 'average' experience/training level. This would tend to 'even out' the differences between ships and make most of your fleet have a similar level of effectiveness. I suppose some people will not like this feature of the system. But isn't that how it works in real life? Do navies in our world generally have radically different levels of crew competence among their ships? Don't crew members actually get shuffled among ships quite a bit? You shouldn't take Star Trek for an accurate portrayal of military service. It's actually quite rare for one officer to stay with one ship for 5 years or more. If you still want to have 'elite' units than maybe you should be able to give some of your ships a special designation as 'elite' and pay extra maintenance costs for their extra training so they can be above the fleet average.

Yes, this would eliminate the usefullness of the 'reassign crew' intel project. But this type of system would be so much more realistic. It would effectively make trained crews a 'resource' that you would have to develop and manage, and could lose in a disastrous war. Managing the 'man power' (creature power?) of your armed forces in this way would be simpler (no parking ships over training facilities and checking to see when they're 'ready') than the current system, and yet more fun.

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
The simplest solution would be to remove the 'system wide training' abilities as Psychic only bonuses. That is, make all training facilities system wide. Would that be considered a hit for the value of the Psychic trait?

Boo... The psycic training facility was what made psycic cool. (The allegence subverter is what makes it easy) It was so great when I captured a planet that had them -- I didn't even know they had that facility. And once it was mine--

Ensign: "Message from the emperor, Captain Neo, we are to report to system Quertarsis"

Neo: "Get under way"

Helm "Exiting warp point now, sir"

Enire Crew: Woah

Admiral M: "How do you feel, Neo?"

Neo: "I know Kung-Fu"

Modeling the crew's experience in the way you described would make the game richer, but a whole lot more micromanagement might not be what people want -- re: a recent thread on fatigue and shore leave.

Edit: Well it's not really micromanagement -- but a scout lost in a black hole system, or a minesweeper that's one sweeper short affecting your top of the line battleship I dunno these things are out of your control kinda.

[ September 24, 2002, 03:58: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Rollo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
The simplest solution would be to remove the 'system wide training' abilities as Psychic only bonuses. That is, make all training facilities system wide. Would that be considered a hit for the value of the Psychic trait?

That is exactly what I have done in the Devnull Mod. Mostly to give all AI the ability to train their fleets like humans can. To balance this out against the psychic advantage 'normal' training facilities will only raise the experience by +1% per turn, while psychics can still train at +3%.

Rollo

[Dragon of the void]

Why not just keep the system as it is, with a simple addition ?

The way things are shown in Star Trek etc are the way we like things most. Not an anonymus piece of military hardware with exchangeable crew, but "a lucky few, a band of brothers", fighting far from home for their race. And if you want reality: If you keep your ships on duty (as I do in SE4), you will really not get much opportunity to exchange crew. ("Captain, a new and competent ensign has warped in from the homeworld. I just wished they could transfer energy and supplies just as easy, for THAT we have to go back to starbase ...")

Why not allow the upgrade to another size of ships instead, and keep your crew ?

Yes, a missile boat has some other jobs when compared to a transport. But it also has some very similar jobs, like piloting a spacecraft, or bringing a crosshair in the right position.
Just make it so that you loose 10% of the experience (you had 30%, now you have 27%) when you upgrade. The real difference between ships is in engineering imho, and that would even apply if you upgrade a missile ship to another missile ship design (if it is not different, why have another design ?).

If you upgrade to another size of ship, just have another modifier: you go up one size, you loose 33% of the experience (lot of "green" crew to fill the gaps), so you had 30%, and now you have 20%. You go down one size, you win (because you can pick the best) 33% experience: you had 30%, now you have 40%. (For all who try to abuse this, by switching back and forth, you loose experience that way.)

I think that would make an easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to program sollution.

Oppinions anybody ?