Requesting feedback on 'Expansion Pack'

[Suicide Junkie]

Did you say

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Nomad races.

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???

Try my Pirates & Nomads mod

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 04 May 2001).]

[capnq]

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How many people here don't use the TDM-Modpack???

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I'm not using it yet; I'm playing two unmodded games right now, and waiting to download TDM until I'm ready to start another game.

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What do others on this forum think of MOO/MOO2?

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My girlfriend gave me a discount bin copy of MOO a couple Christmases ago, and I still have it on my HD. I play it when the mood strikes, but it has SE4 and four other TBS games to compete with for my time.

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Cap'n Q

[CheshireKatt]

I'm baaaaaack....

More Ideas, of a less-critical (but cool to me) nature:

The majority of these are combat-related, and have little to no impact on actual gameplay, they're just "nice".

The ability to specify more "styles" of beam effect, either as a native weapon effect, or one granted from a Weapon Mount (ex. the Wave Motion Gun might fire a cone-shaped beam. It still hits one target, but fans out towards the end, or the "Rapid Fire" weapon mount fires the beam three quick times at the target) Additionally, the ability to have "animated" beams -- ones that just cycle through a series of frames specified to it.

Multiple Component Enhancements per component, restrictable from CompEnhancement.txt as to which enhancements stack or prohibit each other.

Component Enhancements as researchable tech, not just as "everyone can do this" as it is now.

The ability to have Component Enhancements that make Seekers faster or slower.

Ammunition on seekers that's not just in terms of reload time.

Area-of-effect weapons.

Line / Cone piercing weapons. (Hits all targets on a line / in a cone -- now THAT'S a Wave Motion Gun).

Stasis guns -- the ship can't move / act, but can't be shot, either.

Tholian Webs, or other weapons that can lay obstacles in tactical combat in a useful manner (laying mines in tactical is kind of silly, but other things might be nice -- placing obstructions, a gun that foams up a nice big 1x5 hex area or something with magnetic debris, organic matter, or just a plain-old force-shield. Destroyable, of course, settable to block or not block fighters / seekers / beams as the tech-modder sees fit)

Debris / asteroids / nebulae / harmful other stuff placed in battlefields as appropriate to the location of combat (or such things a sector away, maybe placing their stuff around the edges) -- could make for some interesting cat-and-mouse, flying ships between asteroids that you can't shoot over (but can blow up, given enough effort), or hiding your ship in a nebula to make it invisible.

Combat cloaking.

Combat teleporters.

Non-combat ideas:
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Debris fields. Sort of a fixed-quantity asteroid field that disappears once mined out. Maybe generated at the sites of space battles where a certain tonnage of ship(s) were destroyed? Also preplacable in sector definitions.

Derelicts

More sector "move ship" functions - slide left, slide right, slide top, slide bottom (not just "slide to this sector"), rotation functions (rotate ship around this point -- could make REALLY cool blackholes that way -- a rotator and a slide to center trigger, to let you do real slingshot moves around the blackhole).

That's it for the current batch of my ideas. Stay tuned for the third (fourth?) batch at a message board near you. :P

--Chesh

[capnq]

Well, that didn't Last long. Downloaded TDM-ModPack Last night; seem to have sorted out my mistakes on the install this morning. In the new game, I started off inside an isolated cluster, so it's going to be a while before I meet any of the new AIs.

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Cap'n Q

[jimbob55]

If someone collated all this info into a comprehensive and detailed document with headers we'd have the design doc for SE5 .....

[Marty Ward]

Maybe MM can use all the things suggested in this forum to create SE4.5, a stepping stone to SE5

[CheshireKatt]

I'm baaaaaaack...

This time with thoughts on how Space Monsters could be implemented.

Have a file for storing monster designs (Monsters.txt?). This file would contain ship designs for monsters (hull tech#, # of components, component tech#'s, name, description), as well as several important features:

Ship-specific AI -- not all monsters act in the same way.

Monster Severity -- if the game determines a monster is supposed to show up, this lets it know which ones are meaner than others, to compare with how mean a monster it wants. Maybe it could pick more than one monster, so there's an entire fleet (wing?) of Space Dragons roaming around the galaxy being mean to people.

A flag to indicate that the monster can ONLY come from a planetary event (you reach a planet that has a Monster event on it and a severity event, and maybe a monster name on it -- it first looks for monsters with the specified NAME, and if it doesn't find one (or finds duplicates), consults the severity and takes the one closest to the severity listed on the planet. If there's a tie, or no severity is specified, it just makes a random pick. Planet monsters will NEVER leave orbit of the planet they're guarding.

(Can anyone tell I _REALLY_ want an Orion in my game, complete with massively powerful Guardian, and Ancient Artifacts where I can SPECIFY what Techs it has, and another list that it chooses 3-5 randomly from?)

A flag setting whether or not the monster is boardable -- it doesn't necessarily make sense to board and take control of a Space Amoeba, for example, but maybe the Guardian of Orion might be capturable?

Monsters would be a perfect place to have "special" techs, that leave stuff in battle hexes, hit multiple hexes, shove ships around, that kind of thing.

Then, it's easy to put in abilities for 'em:

Add new monster techs to the tech tree, easy enough (just don't let anyone get 'em as part of a normal research progression).

Add new graphics to the components dir for the monster components.

Add ship pictures to either Pictures\Races\Monsters, or just Pictures\Monsters for the monsters.

--Chesh really has too much time on his hands.