Self-Destruct is Irrational Component

Steven-n-Donna · #1 June 1st, 2001, 08:42 AM

Hi, I'm new to this forum, but not new to SE. When I saw all the fuss over the SDD's and troops, I thought to myself, if you have a ship with a crew, arn't all the crew certified to a degree to protect the ship? I remember playing a game that was called Begin2.exe a long long time ago. It was all Dos based.
It was based on Star Trek ships roughly with different sized ships (dreadnaught, destroyer, escorts ect...). All these different ships had different amounts of crew according to their size. You could beam boarding parties over to a jacked up ship and capture it if you had enough crew to overtake theirs.
I'm not one for micromanagement, but if the basic design of a Dreadnaught held say...5000 people (or whatever you determined in the settings file) so be its ability to board. Forget the boarding parties and defense stations, they seem frvilous to anything close to reality. You could assume a computer controled ship had an android crew or whatever floats your boat. Now if you want a ship for boarding, then put pieces that allow additional crew space. Say a 1000 per pod or section that you wish to add into the design.
You could easily balance people from putting the max amount of people on a ship with the morality effect of a ship with "X" amount of people lost in battle. I remember in that begin game, once the shields were gone, you started to loose crew for damage taken to the hull. The more you had, the more you lost in variance to the impact bLast.
Now you could go all out and require facilities to be built on the planets to recruit soldiers, but I don't like micromanagement. Yet, you could leave something like that up to the ministers, or just turn it off in the settings. All depends on how much control you want in your game. The skys the limit in this game.
Sorry for such a long post...
Steve

PS: What ship dosn't have the little red button? None of that sacraligious mumbojumbo in my fleet. Besides, every ship has the ability to destory itself, it's called a 'fine tunner' to the <Copyright infringement>Warp Drive </Copyright infringement> aka a sledge hammer).

[This message has been edited by Steven-n-Donna (edited 01 June 2001).]

Q · #2 June 1st, 2001, 10:48 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Deathstalker:
Also it would be nice if there was a way to destoroy the SSD without destroying the rest of the ship so capture is possible. Maybe increasing the tech tree in computers? A virus that disables the SSD command sub-routine or something like that.

That would be a good idea. Also the possibility that the self destruction device fails (hmm, I forgot the damn password for the command of self destruction!) would be nice. The way it is now (the same was true for SE III), boarding IMO is just not worth the effort!

Suicide Junkie · #3 June 1st, 2001, 03:41 PM

Steven-n-Donna:
Although crew quarters don't have it in their description, and they don't have an ability for it, every crew quarter provides 16 defence for your ship

Boarding parties I, give 20 attack/defense.

So, you need at least two boarding parties to win a capture against anything larger than an LC, unless you start punching holes in the hull to destroy crew quarters.

Crew quarters are full of hundreds of ensign doolittles, who defend their ship with the hot coffee they're drinking and anything they can grab

quote:
I remember in that begin game, once the shields were gone, you started to loose crew for damage taken to the hull. The more you had, the more you lost in variance to the impact bLast.

Well, once your shields are down, every hit has a chance of blowing away your crew quarters, killing everyone not on duty

The more you have, the more likely that one of them will be hit.

quote:
I'm not one for micromanagement, but if the basic design of a Dreadnaught held say...5000

Well, in SE4, crew are generally used to fly the ship, and elite space marines are used to take over a ship... defense stations are stuff like ceiling-mount bLaster turrets in the halls.

Marty Ward · #4 June 1st, 2001, 04:04 PM

Does a master computer provide boarding defense?

Baron Munchausen · #5 June 1st, 2001, 05:13 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Q:
That would be a good idea. Also the possibility that the self destruction device fails (hmm, I forgot the damn password for the command of self destruction!) would be nice. The way it is now (the same was true for SE III), boarding IMO is just not worth the effort!

Yes, another request we've made many times before. Even the 'Quantum Detonator" in MOO II had a 50 percent chance to fail. There ought to be a chance of the SDD in this game failing, too, if only 20 percent or something like that.

Baron Munchausen · #6 June 1st, 2001, 05:15 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Marty Ward:
Does a master computer provide boarding defense?

As far as I know, no. This is the trade-off for immunity to Crew ConVersion.

Suicide Junkie · #7 June 1st, 2001, 07:45 PM

quote:
Yes, another request we've made many times before. Even the 'Quantum Detonator" in MOO II had a 50 percent chance to fail. There ought to be a chance of the SDD in this game failing, too, if only 20 percent or something like that.

The self-destruct does have a chance to fail. If it takes damage (easy to do once the shields are down) then it will not work

There's no dice required. If you want to capture a ship that has a SDD, get your gunners to carefully cut out the offending device.

When I'm playing a Pirate race, Self-Destruct Devices have approximately a 75% failure rate

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 01 June 2001).]