Technological arms races

[Suicide Junkie]

The point here was not to nessesarily make the techs harder to reach, but to create a one-upmanship cycle.

Ha! Cloaked ships
HA Ha! tachyon sensors!
oh, yeah, i got level 4 now!
no prob, i'll just get level six
too late, I'm at ten!

specific scanner-blocking cloaks would be good, so we could split it up so that you have to research the techs individually, but each one area will give you general cloaking against all, but of a lower level.

Ie. research active-cloak V, get active cloaking lev 5 & general cloak lev 3

[AJC]

I agree Suicide_Junkie- More levels of cloak and sensors are needed. Right now cloaking becomes obsolete rather early in the game once all the sensors have been researched.

[Aussie Gamer]

I think that just increasing the number of levels for both is the best way to go.

The more tech to get the better, really makes the game more fun.

Increasing the tech points required for the lower end stuff will just unbalance the game I feel.

[Marty Ward]

Not only increasing the number of techs but also the possible combinations of cloaking/sensors. If you had a cloaking device for each type of sensor you would have what, 5X5 combos? Now any level 1 sensor reveals level 1 cloak.
I like more combinations. That way I have to ask myself did I research the right thing?

[mottlee]

Cool Ideas..a lot like life My hat's off to those of you that can and do hack into this it makes it a lot more enjoyable!
Mott

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mottlee@gte.net

[Aussie Gamer]

It's not hard to alter the game, as most of it is in a text file.

The game tells you if you stuffed a file up as it is loading, so it is pretty easy to change components, facilities and data like that.

[Q]

quote:

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Originally posted by Marty Ward:
Not only increasing the number of techs but also the possible combinations of cloaking/sensors. If you had a cloaking device for each type of sensor you would have what, 5X5 combos? Now any level 1 sensor reveals level 1 cloak.
I like more combinations. That way I have to ask myself did I research the right thing?

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I thought about this to. But as far as I understand how cloaking works it might be difficult: If you have any sensor that has the level equal or above of a cloaking device in that technological area you will see the ship. So it's no use to have cloaking level 5 (cannot be detected) in let's say aktive EM alone. Any level 1 detector in any others scanning technology will reveal the ship.
However what you could do is to create cloaking device that are completely invisible (Level 5) for all but 1 or 2 scanners. Then to be sure to see all ships you had to combine differents scanners.
But again there might be two problems. First you would have to teach the AI to handle this: lot of work! Second what happens if you combine two of these cloaking component on one ship so that all scanners are blinded? You probably would get a really invisible ship without possible counter measure, what would imbalance the game.
The solution I would prefer (but this needs change in the hard coded area) are scanners with different range: Low sensitivity scanners that cover the whole system (as now in the game for all scanners), but they would miss the higher cloaking levels, and low range scanners with high performance, that would defeat even the best cloaking.