Is Resupply Tech worth it???

[Taqwus]

Hrmmm. Something that makes the movement penalty, but no weapon-fire penalty, even stranger when out of supply is that combat movement doesn't cost supply at all -- only weapon firing does (although PD is free IIRC).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Psitticine]

I think the supply system is a good workable abstraction but I do think firing should be disallowed if your ships don't have the supply left for the shots.

As for movement in combat being "free", albeit limited to speed 1 when you are out of fuel, well, I think the fact movement during combat is on a much smaller scale than movement outside of combat makes it reasonable that there's no supply consumption. A small charge might be reasonable but if you really want to get realistic, ships out of fuel won't move slow - they'd just keep moving at the same velocity and on the same vector indefinitely!

Eesh! I don't want to think about the programming it would take to add a Newtonian movement system to the game, or the frustration of trying to plot intercept vectors and so forth for a fleet as you move.

[Taqwus]

Eventually, when systems get powerful enough, it might be reasonable to switch to a full RT (but *slow* RT, since we mere humans have much slower reflexes than machines... unless the unit AI is much stronger as well) Newtonian combat model.

That'd do away with silliness like move-fire-move where there isn't even a risk of opp fire, and also it'd reduce some other cheesiness like early missile ships fleeing while shooting missiles backwards since the runner's missiles would be penalized with the ship's forward velocity vector.

Things like intercepts can be computed via trig, anyway. I once sat down, scribbled for a while, and then added a torpedo targeting system to a Netrek client (BRMH); the code worked in real time on vintage-'94 systems. OTOH, it only had to compute traces for up to 8 torps at a time. I don't have the code anymore, but it was very, very short.

But not yet. And the benefits would be much less clear for the strategic phase, probably.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night