Next Upgrade/patch

[Graeme Dice]

For starters, the current released Version is 1.78, which is a large number of patches away from the demo.

Originally posted by couslee:
1. Enemy units warp past SAT defended wormholes. I had a wormhole defended of the enemy side with some SATs.

The ships would have appeared right on top of the warppoint, and right next to your satellittes. If they couldn't destroy it before they ran away, then yes, they would be able to get into your system, because those satellittes aren't going to chase them around.

2. I wouyld like to see the option to force a ship in combat to break formation and not auto move around when the lead ship is moved.

Go into your strategies menu under empire options. Select the strategy that you want your fleet to use. Select launching, and pick ships to break formation. They will then follow their individual design type strategies instead of the fleet strategy.

4. you get ripped off if you mix engine types. Say I can put 6 engines on a design. The first engine added is a photon type (+2 movement).

That's +2 bonus movement, not +2 movement. Otherwise ships with 6 quantum engines would be running around at speeds of 20+ which is game-breakingly fast.

All the rest of the photon engines added do not give additional movement. That is fine, but if for the 2nd through 6th engine I place Ion3 engines, I lose the extra movement points.

Part of the movement rules is that all engines must be the same type for engine bonus movement to be applied.

6. Allow editing of prototype designs even if some are already in the queues.

This would probably break simultaneous movement games.

7. On the ship "design detail", show the total maintenance cost. It might be a factor in the design (duh, guys).

The maintenance cost can be seen after you click create design, but it would be nice to see it before hand.

10. When your using the empire queue list(f7), have the main screen re-center on the planet that you selected. Similar to the way it works when you click on a planet from the "colonies" screen (f5).

I would definetly not want this. I want my currently selected ship to stay selected through almost anything.

14. Limit the technology list to offer the AI to items they don't have. IE, if they HAVE rock colonization, then don't list that when making your offer. Also, on the want tech list, don't show tech I already have.

For offers, that's far too much intelligence information to give someone for no effort.

It would be acceptable if the supplies from the pool were evenly divided between the ships being removed from the fleet and the number of ships remaining in the fleet.

They are.

19. Allow one engine on space stations. Since it is listed as a ship, why not? Being able to move it one square per turn makes more sence than having to build a construction ship and move that to where you want to build one and then building it there.

Why exactly? There's no reason for a construction yard to require an immobile station, which is what bases are treated as in the game. You could always just add a vehicle with the same stats as a base and the ability to add engines.

Like some little ship could carry enough material to completly build a space station without having to make multiple trips. yeah, right.

Civilian transport is completely automated in this game. A ship does not need to carry resources because they are delivered to it.

22. No construction surplus rollover? It does for reasearch, why not construction.

I'd like an option for this in the settings.txt file. I want to be able to set ships to be built more than one per yard in my mod.

23. have some picture options for your designs. say a choice of 3 or 4 pictures for each ship size.

\races\pictures has every picture available to be changed if you want to.

[Fyron]

3. Have hot keys in combat for "next unit with movement points remaining" and "center window on currently selected unit" (if these are in the game already, I have not found them). I tried the "c" key for center and found the capture ship option (nice) though.

Hit the Spacebar. It works in combat and out of combat too. Hit the Help button (F1) and then look in the Hotkeys tab.

18. it would be nice if the system had the Last visited info displayed. IE, I visit a system but decide to not leave a unit there to monitor traffic. It now will show as explored when selected in the galaxy window. I would like something along the lines of "this information is 15 turns old" or "system Last visited on stardate 2404.9". this could be displayed underneath the system name in the upper left corner. It could also show red if it has been more than ten turns since Last visited, but color coding is not necessary, just a nice addition.

That would be a great feature, but it would require the savegame files to be a lot larger. And I mean a lot. This is bad for MP games for Users on dial-up modems.

21. Why do you lose construction accumulated when re-ordering the build queue? this is dumb. sorry, you have to destroy that partially built mine before you can build a ship on the other side of town. absurd. ESP since you retain research points accumulated when re-ordering the tech choices. It's bad enough that excess construction don't roll over to the next project in line. But having both is too much construction penalty IMNSHO.

In an ancient Version of the game, you would maintain the construction points already accumulated towards building a project when changing to a new one. But, that was easily exploitable, and so was removed. A system similar to Research and Intel was in SE3 though. MM tried to do something different with SE4, but that part didn't work. I do agree that it would be good to keep the construction done on a project just like Research and Intel Projects, but it is too late to code that into SE4. It might make its way into SE5 though.

24. Some sort of mineral alchemy would be nice. even if it is a small amount. just something to put in the queues of those planets that you can't build anything else with. like 10 to 100 of each mineral/organics/radioactives per turn. the amount could be a racial trait, or just limit it to 50 or 100. call it alchemy, or a recycling program, whatever. most cities have some sort of program like this so it is not out of the realm of reality. Recycle prgrams, comunity compost heaps, and old car batteries and used oil reclamation about cover the 3 resources in the game. lol

When you get the full game, research Chemistry 2, then Resource Manipulation. You get a Resource Converter, which can convert resources from one type to another. It doesn't use up any build queues.

[ January 08, 2003, 00:48: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[geoschmo]

18. it would be nice if the system had the Last visited info displayed. IE, I visit a system but decide to not leave a unit there to monitor traffic. It now will show as explored when selected in the galaxy window. I would like something along the lines of "this information is 15 turns old" or "system Last visited on stardate 2404.9". this could be displayed underneath the system name in the upper left corner. It could also show red if it has been more than ten turns since Last visited, but color coding is not necessary, just a nice addition.

That would be a great feature, but it would require the savegame files to be a lot larger. And I mean a lot. This is bad for MP games for Users on dial-up modems.

Actually, I am not so sure it would make the savegame all that much bigger. All the information is there anyway. It has to be otherwise you couldn't have everybodies turn running off of the same .gam file. All that would be needed would be a couple of more bits for each system to say how old the view is for each system for each empire. The coding for the actual color coding or symbols or whatever would be in the game executable, not in the savegame.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

Geo, it doesn't store the info of what is in the system on old turns in the savegame file. If it did, they would always get larger. But as players start to be eliminated, the savegame files get smaller.

[geoschmo]

Good point. I was thinking of real time info, but we can't exactly be giving that away now can we.

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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18. it would be nice if the system had

*snip*

That would be a great feature, but it would require the savegame files to be a lot larger. And I mean a lot. This is bad for MP games for Users on dial-up modems.

Actually, I am not so sure it would make the savegame all that much bigger. All the information is there anyway. It has to be otherwise you couldn't have everybodies turn running off of the same .gam file. All that would be needed would be a couple of more bits for each system to say how old the view is for each system for each empire. The coding for the actual color coding or symbols or whatever would be in the game executable, not in the savegame.

Geoschmo

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If you want to make it simpler, you don't have to keep track of every ship and sat. Just remember what planets an opponent had colonized. Sure maybe one was just glassed and now you have an opprotunity to colonize ... but really is it worth haveing the colonization minister trying repeatedly on the off chance that happens. Some systems you just don't care about.

[Gryphin]

couslee,
A lot of good ideas. I like quite a few of them. In particular having the maintance cost displayed during the design process.
Just an idea > Yes losing a partialy built ship because you have to build something else is regretable. There are many aspects this game, (and many others) that don't make, "rational sence". They "seem" dumb. There is almost always a reason weather it is play ballance or coding limitaton, or just plain practical.