Non A.I. issues for upcoming patch

[Eisenhans]

Remote Mining Bug:

When mining with a bunch of robominers on one battlestation(it's not really woth it, I know by now) I found the following:
I had 7 mineral miners, 5 organics and 2 radioactives miners on board. Each turn the value of the planet decreased by 7 percentage points for EACH of the ressources. This should be changed to 7/5/2 in this case, i.e. it should depend on how much is mined of the specific ressource and not on the maximum for one ressource.

I'd love to see the pirates too! Especially those component stealing ones. They would have really crazy ships!
The intel project is perfect too.

(Funny how we're beta-testing a full-release, no? But then: that's kind of part of the fun )

[Instar]

More neutral AIs as in more in number during the game? Or more to choose from during setup?

[Nyx]

I'd like trade to become more important. Right now weak empires want to trade with strong ones to get big bonuses. Big empires have no reason to trade with anyone. And I mean treaties not trade offers. Here on earth, trade is very important. Cutting external trade to a nation cripples its economy, even if the nation is essentially self-sufficient. I'd like to see something like that implemented in the game. I don't, for the life of me, know how, but I know I'd like to see it.

I'd like to see the scoring system fixed. Right now there are several ways to get an amazingly high score while being exceptionaly weak. For example, the scoring system counts numbers of ships and bases, not what's on them. So a baseship with a master computer and nothing else, sitting in orbit mothballed has about 4 times the effect on your score as a cruiser decked out with weapons and actively crushing your enemies.

Morale bonuses and penalties for battle need to extend beyong the system where the battle is fought. They need to have empire-wide effects. If I send a few hundred ships to their deaths in a far off corner of the galaxy, this should make my people unhappy. But it doesn't. Similarly, if I am victorious in battle capturing a new system from my enemy, this should make my people happy, but it doesn't. Battles only effect the morale of the planets in the same system as they occur. Blech!

I despreately want to see planet conditions get the same treatment that Atmosphere got. There is no reason to even delude yourself into thinking that a race from ice worlds with no atmosphere would use a Climate Improvement Facility to make a planet more hospitable to a race who lives on methane-based Gas Giants. My optimal conditions should be deadly to someone else, and mild to a third party. Just implement "Conditions types 1-5" or go with the Star Trek Class-system, but do something!

Low populations need to have severe production penalties, and the best way to do this would be as a formula, not as a list of population sizes and bonuses/penalties.

Ruins could have interesting things like a neutral race, an advanced ship, resources, or even something dangerous. Limiting it to tech is a little dull.

I'll back the people who want to see fighters as starting tech. I don't understand why I can build interstellar craft, but not interplanetary ones. However, I'd much prefer the idea for variable starting tech. Not necessarily totally random, but it would be nice if different races had differnt starting techs.

A race from a Gas Giant shouldn't be terribly happy living on an Ice World. Sure they can learn how, but it's just not the right environment for them. Same with people from Rock worlds on Gas Giants. right now there's a 1:5 ratio for population and facilities on domed:not colonies. I'd like to see a 1:3:5 with the 3 for not domed wrong planet type.

Domed planets, wrong world type, and conditions should all LIMIT, not modify, LIMIT happiness levels. It's too easy to get lots of modifications to happiness and overcome any penalty. But limiting the total happiness makes those worlds much more likely to get upset, and makes choosing your targets in war much more important.

Someone recently posted something about wanting plagues to spread, and I really liked that idea. Who ever posted it pat yourself on the back for me.

I'd like to see environmental resistance effect maximum population.

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[Sabre21]

What I would like to see is the ability to create specific ships, facilities, and components for a specific race. If this can be done already, will someone please enlighten me Plus I would like the ability to set certain starting techs to individual races. This way, say the Romulans would get cloaking very early while the Hydrans had fighters. (OK..so I'm a bit of a Trek fanatic)Of course this can be done to some degree by re-arranging the research tree in the Race AI files.

I really like Nyx's idea about having Ruins have more than tech...the advanced ship or race idea is great..kinda like civilization.
Maybe add a few bloopers to it too, like a plague or wild savages which kills off the colonists..hehe.

One more item..not overly important, but I would like a confirmation window when saving a game...basically saying "Do you want to save this game..yes or no". More than once I have inadvertently saved over a different saved game by accident...OK so I have 10 thumbs too. Would be nice to have anyways.

[Tampa_Gamer]

Sabre21 - cloaking is a non-issue until the next patch. The AI will not use it even if their ships are equipped. I stealthy ships built into a racial trait I created for my Darlok, but trashed it after I figured out the non-cloaking bug. Basically I created a set of low-level cloaking components that required the racial trait. So I wouldn't screw up the designs, I made 0k tonnage and required it to be on every ship the race made, thus all their ships/bases/sats were "stealthy" as the Romulan would be. So it works, we just need to wait until the next patch to match the Romulans against the Darlok!

[jonas]

You bet! In fact, some of them should be primitives with a tech level of zero: no discoveries, and no idea how to make any either.

It'd also be nice if warp drive was a discovery you had to make -- that way you could give it to neutrals near your rivals and suddenly they're a problem. Though I guess that eliminates the only distinction between neutral and AI-controlled player. Hmm. Maybe eliminate that distinction and instead have a score for expansiveness? Empires with a score of zero wouldn't expand beyond their home system, but could at least send warp ships against their enemies' home planets in retaliation.

quote:

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Originally posted by SirDarwin:

Yes seeing more neutral little empires spread through out the galaxy would defenitly be cool, providing a variable in the settings file for the percentage of systems with life would be a nice touch.

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[Barnacle Bill]

On the subject of colonization:

I interpret "ice" as being frozen atmosphere, temperatures near absolute zero, etc... Life forms which evolved there would not be able to live in any other environment. There is a book which I think is titled "Camelot 40K" about such life forms.

Similarly, gas giant critters wouldn't be living on any other type.

The notion of anything like us living on either of the above is also an impossibility.

So, I propose the following changes:

You should need domes to live on the same planet type but with different atmosphere from your home world (as you do now). The "conditions" would refer to what it is for folks who can live there without a dome. For anybody who needs a dome, it would act like the conditions were at whatever the lowest rating is (don't remember off the top of my head).

If you convert the atmosphere, the conditions would gradualy get worse, until they reached the lowest rating just before the atmosphere actually changes. It then starts at the lowest rating for the new atmosphere and have to be improved via the appropriate facility.

There should be a special tech required to be able to build domes at all. It would take a special, and specially expensive, colonization module to implace a domed colony. That would only implace the population held by the colonization module itself (so don't bother with cargo storage on a domed colony ship). The population in a domed colony would not grow. You would have to build additional dome space in the planet's production que and transfer in additional people as cargo after the dome space is ready. The maximum population limits would remain as today.

It would take special techs to be able to colonize planets of another type from your race's environment (rock, gas giant or ice). Those techs would require developing the dome tech first, and allow building the special and expensive colonization modules for those planet types.

You would not be able to obtain the special techs for colonizing planets of another type except from another race of your own type. How a gas giant race colonizes gas giants is of no use to a rock race. How an ice race colonizes gas giants is of no use to a rock race, either.

You would either not be able to convert planets between types at all, or it would be very expensive (probably cheaper to build a ring world, if you think about it).

Building a planet from asteriods should be a project akin to ring world construction (only cheaper), not something done by a component. Blowing one up is fine like it is, though (lots easier to blow things up than to build them).

Finally, the number of facilities you could operate on a planet would be determined by population. It should take a nearly full planet to operate that size of planet's full allotment of facilities. The facilities in excess of what could be operated by the current population would be "idle". Idle facilities ones would be labelled as such on the facilities report, and you would be able to reorder the facilities in some list for each individual colony to enable the ones you want.