Where are the Civilians?

[Gimboid]

Imagine the intelligence operations you could have with trade routes!

Your ignorant neighbour is moving some WP and fighters from one of his homeworlds to one of his fringe colonies. When u successfully perform a 'Trade Route Mimic' on them, and steal his new toys, depriving him of defences and possibly picking up some new weapons designs

[Saxon]

Fixed trade routes might not be all bad. Lots of trade routes in history we fixed by geography or the goods being carried, so they are not totally unrealistic. They would also be something you just have to live with, just like getting good planets and bad planets.

These routes might have automatic ships going on them, which you don't control, but that other people can raid. Similar to the situation where cops have to protect citizens, who do pretty much what they want. This allows for raiding, gives you something else to worry about, but still doesn't need too much micro-managing. I don't need more micro managing, I do enough of that in real life.

Someone mentioned realism. Find me a population that grows (through births) at 20% a year, anywhere in the world at any stage of history. Kenya managed 4% for quite a while in the 70's and 80's and I hear that Rwanda has really been jumping (odd psycological reaction to the genocide) but nothing like our races do in SE4. This is not a complaint, just an observation at some of the things that have been done to make the game playable. And things that made is sooo very playable.

[jc173]

quote:

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Originally posted by capnq:

I don't think the Raid option should be an automatic perfect success; you should only get a small percentage of the trade per raider. The cargo capacity of the raider should be a factor as well; you can't assume that you'll capture the traders intact and have them haul the booty home for you.

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I agree I suggested a raid ability be included in SEV if possible. I thought that the raiders success should be influenced by the speed of their ships, their sensor capability, stealthing/cloaking ability, and crew quality. I also thought the targetted player should be able to possibly defend his convoys with either escorts or placing ships or fighters in key systems with orders to intercept raiders/pirates. So if they detected a raiding force or a convoy was attacked there would be a chance for them to engage the raiders.

[DirectorTsaarx]

The convoy idea could be expanded a bit to make remote mining more useful. Rather than mining reducing an asteroid field's value by a percentage point per turn per ship/base, have asteroid fields always use the "finite resources" settings. Then, rather than automatically getting the resources from those mines, the resources have to be transported back to a spaceport (of course, resources should also be able to be stored at the asteroid field until a convoy comes by). I'm not certain what to do about planets, since eventually a player may want to colonize a planet that's been remotely mined. Maybe the reduction per turn per ship/base should be changed to a reduction per YEAR per COMPONENT.

[Baron Munchausen]

Letting part of the resources from a blockaded planet -- or even system if it's the space part planet -- does make some sense. But allowing for individual ships carrying resources from one point to another is still going to be far too much detail in a game of this scale. The option I suggested, that some random 'freighters' appear when you attack a planet with a space port, is about as far as it can reasonably go. For remote miners, you might be able to add a space port 'component' or some other component to represent shipment facilities. Requiring the presence of one of these on the same ship or in the same sector where the mining is occuring would offer some logistics problems. Exspecially if you could 'blockade' it like a planet. Even if you have defenders strong enough to hold off the attacker, their presence could still cost you the resources.