Secret of the 89 Movement point BaseShip

[Lucanos]

I call them "Federal Ships", those millitary vehicles that can be transported to any place in my empire within ONE turn.

They are essential so I don't need lots of fleets in every system.

One thing though:
To bad I can use the Component when the ship is assigned to a fleet.
So I must first disband the fleet, Use the emergency propulsion, and then assign them to the fleet again.

Another thing. If you have enough pop transports you could (theoretically) move an entire planets population to the other side of the quadrant in ONE TURN just by transferring the cargo from transport to transport.

Is this a bug? Mabbe not if you have access to temporal knowledge? Perhaps there should be some kind of turnlimit for transfering population?

Which brings me to a final ...thought,
What's with Cargo Containers vs Population?
How come an entire planets population can be stored on a light cruiser?

I mean... isn't that wierd?

[Tomgs]

The colonists are dehydrated and frozen then stored on racks thereby using up much less room . Just defrost and add water.

[Drake]

quote:

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Originally posted by AJC:
Self repairing was just a thought - if the limit is 1 EP component per ship it would make sense.

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Argh, don't say that! My point was that it never makes sense to make it self repairing. Even if the limit was 1, if you had it self repair, what would be the point of calling it an emergency propulsion component in the first place? It would serve the same function as the solar sail, by allowing more movement each turn. The only difference would be that it wouldn't carry over into combat, and you'd have to go through the annoying process of manually activating it each turn.

(mini-rant on) Manual activation under your suggestion would reward people who put them on every ship, and took the time for each ship to use the component, which would be restored for the next turn. Basically you're encouraging micromanagement, which I consider to be A Bad Thing. I seriously think a good strategy game should reduce pointless micromanagement as much as possible. Otherwise instead of a strategy game, you have a micromanagement game. Much as I liked Stars!, that's the kind of game it turned out to be for me after a while. I found myself able to compete well on a strategic level, but had to resort to brutal MM to optimize things, or risk losing to ppl who were willing to put more time in. SEIV is a little better in that regard, but not by that much. The TG contest drove home that point to me when the ministers proved woefully inefficient for what I needed to do to optimize my score. I eventually caved in at one point and settled for a less efficient execution of my plan in order to save what was left of my sanity.
(mini-rant off)

Anyway, I think it would make more sense to have the component completely destroyed and made unrepairable without retrofitting at a SY, IMO. Then maybe people would only use it in an emergency.

Since I would be surprised if the change could be made without other potential problems being introduced, either a component limit should be introduced, use of the components causes damage to the ship because of the stress on the hull, or it should be an all-or-none thing. I'd prefer one of the first two, as the all-or-none solution gives the possibility of wasted components. If someone won't ever get the benefit from 4 (actual number may vary) EPs because they have to use all 4 at once and there is a max movement for the ship, don't let them put 4 on the design in the first place. Limit it to 1/2 the number of engines or to 1 or something.

[Suicide Junkie]

Probably the best way to fix it is to make repairs cost supplies.

Ie. to repair a Emerg. supply pod (2000) requires 2500 supply.
to repair a Emerg. movement pod requires 500 supply.
A good guide to how much repairs should cost would be say 10% of the resource cost of the part.
Then you wouldn't be able to retrofit and repair unlimited numbers of components. You would need to add a bunch of dedicated supply generation ships that make a few thousand supplies per turn in order to keep your repair ships running.

Just add another line in the components.txt
---------------------------------
Supplies to repair :=
---------------------------------

Thus, a repair ship must carry a lot of supplies (spare parts) and will quickly run out after repairing a few ships.

If you have a quantum reactor, then using emergency power for engines every turn is OK.



[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 16 March 2001).]

[geoschmo]

It's a good idea, but it will take more than just adding a line to the txt file. You have to rewrite the code in the exe file to look for the data on that line, and to change the function of the reapair bay. That will take some work for MM. Otherwise all you end up with is a line in the txt file that doesn't do anything.

Geo

[Nitram Draw]

You shouldn't need to do much. Just edit the repair bay component to use supplies. It should cause supply usage to occur when components are repaired, at least it looks this simple.

[LintMan]

Reading ColdSteel's message, I gotta comment:
Conquered Kingdoms! I _LOVED_ that game! If someone wrote a modern updated Version, I'd buy it immediately. <sigh> I really miss QQP.

I'm really curious, though: what was the double wizard fireball tactic? I played the game for a long time and never heard of it.