Possible idea about warping?

Alneyan · #1 November 27th, 2003, 09:34 PM

One idea occurred to me while I was thinking about how warping is handled by SEIV. So here you are:

I have always found permanent wormholes allowing the passage of any ship a bit strange. As you unfortunately cannot put ships on a cargo (and units cannot do everything either), I can only think of one way to restrict travelling from one system to anoter. What about allowing only one specific ship to open temporary wormholes? The component would be a basic Warp Opener with a size of 5,000kt (or so), and only a peculiar class of ship could use this component thanks to a mount reducing the size by 99%. (That is, 50kt)

As wormholes are permanent in SEIV (unless closed by a Warp Closer obviously), the solution would be to use a modified events file with only Warp Closed events, and a *very* high frequency for this event to happen. If everything works right, the wormhole should be closed a turn later. The settings should have to be No-Warp points of course.

The component would have to be limited, perhaps by requiring the component to be repaired at a space yard or making it expensive to maintain, or... This tweak would make travelling to long distances harder, and could allow for surprise attacks among other possible tactics.

Now the questions are, would it be possible to implement such a tweak? (I believe it can be done, but I have yet to test) And above all, would any of you find an interest to play this way? Or am I the only one?

Of course, I don't expect the AI to be really able to handle a game with this sort of settings, but who knows?

Fyron · #2 November 27th, 2003, 10:50 PM

I think there is a limit of just one event per turn though... or it might be one per empire per turn, but I suspect the former.

Baron Grazic · #3 November 28th, 2003, 01:16 AM

Alneyan - I think I remember some people here doing testing on this before. Perhaps do a search and find their results, which could save you some testing time.

IF - "National Security Advisor" - I thought you were "Ruler of the World"? It you resign from the post?

Fyron · #4 November 28th, 2003, 01:27 AM

Richard increased the rank threshholds a bit to shake things up.

Alneyan · #5 November 28th, 2003, 09:50 AM

*Grumbles* That would be annoying. (The only other way would then to ask players to close themselves any WP used after a month, the component would be free of course)

Grazic, I launched a search but while I found a thread speaking of a very similar idea (by QuarianRex), I didn't find anything concerning these event limits. I guess I will run a test on my own, but unfortunately what Fyron said seems too likely.

se5a · #6 November 28th, 2003, 11:10 AM

ok this is funky but what if you made the opener an engine as well, then once used it would drain all suplys.
then the close warp point could be an emergency resuply as well...

himnnn,
could you make this ship class not able to join fleets?

Alneyan · #7 November 28th, 2003, 11:23 AM

I am still considering a few ideas for the warp-opener component, but before that, I would like to figure out this problem with Warp Closing. *Grumbles*

So. I don't think you can put both ship movement and Open Warp on the same component, as "destroyed on use" wouldn't work I believe. So I thought of using two special components, one engine (speed one, these ships should be slow) with a *huge* supply drain to prevent it from being in a fleet, and the component itself. (And if needed, a "free" warp closer which would have to be used to close the warp point afterwards) Sadly, you cannot prevent a specific ship from joining a fleet, and even a base could do it if a line in settings.txt was tweaked.

Baron Munchausen · #8 November 28th, 2003, 07:00 PM

I always thought that the warp point graphic was just a convention, a 'notation' to show you where the WP was, not a represeentation of an actual object that you would see if you were there. That a 'warp engine' or some sort of activation was required was just assumed.

It would be nice to have this made explicit, though. In the old SE IV config files (maybe not in 'Gold' anymore?) there was an unimplemented ability for Warp Points 'Requires Ability'. All we need is for MM to implement this and we could have 'warp' ships and 'system' ships. Just mod your system files to make all warp points require a special ability and then a special 'jump engine' component that has the 'ability required' to go through a warp point. Ships without a 'Jump Engine' would have more space for weapons and other equipment, of course, and the strategic puzzle we're all craving would be within reach.

Alneyan · #9 November 28th, 2003, 07:16 PM

If you play Star Fury, you will see that warp points are represented as a true object looking like a blue sphere of some sort. (Usually, when warp points are not objects, they are represented with some symbol. Here it wasn't the case) So I would assume warp points are "true" objects, some sphere allowing to travel between the stars at once or so.

But it is more for strategical reasons that I (and from what I read in other threads, a few other as well) would like to change the way warp points are handled.