New features I would like to see>>>>

[ZeroAdunn]

Again I state this would be a huge file. Think about how many ships you make in a single game. Think about how many battles you go through in a single game, even minor ones. Planets are the same way.

Now if it only kept current ships history and deleted a ships history once it was destroyed it wouldn't be to bad. Later in the game it would get pretty big, especially if you were playing in a big quadrant.

Don't get me wrong I would love to see this feature, it could just turn out to be incredibly problematic.

[Dracus]

Yes if the ship is lost then the history for that ship would be deleted and the counter in the total file would be increased by 1.

[LazarusLong42]

It wouldn't be any larger than the game file. Figure:

1000 ships. 20-30 lines per ship. Each line 10-12 bytes (once you compress the information into numbers). That's 300 kB or so.

In a 20-player game, the .gam files *starts out* around that size and gets bigger

LL/Eric

[Baron Munchausen]

The date stamp is doable and I agree it would be a good idea at least for colonies. All you'd need is an extra word because you only need to record the turn number. I doubt anyone is gonna play 65,535 turns on SE IV. Besides being informative for the player, this could be used in the game code. A 'new' colony would be much more susceptible to panic when bad events happen, but stability would increase as the colony aged. An 'old' colony would be a more severe morale loss to the empire if it was destroyed.

The other ideas might be 'cool' but others have already observed that they might become nightmares in memory and disk space usage, not to mention bookkeeping code in the game itself.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 06 November 2001).]

[President Delerith]

This feature could be done in a separate file (like other .trn files), and it musn't be send to the other players in the .gam file.

[mac5732]

Back in the old days, Star General used to have a section where it showed how many total ships, ground units, etc, each race built and the total number destroyed. Maybe something on this order could be done taking up less space then breaking it down in more individual staticitics.

They broke it down according to ship and unit types.. ie; battleships, cruisers, etc
They would show say 5 battleships built, 4 destroyed, 10 cruisers built, 7 destroyed, etc

just some ideas mac

[This message has been edited by mac5732 (edited 07 November 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

Some new abilities:
- "Explodes when destroyed"
When this component takes enough damage to be marked as destroyed, it will apply an extra [Value 1] points of damage to the ship, of damage type [Value 2].

With this ability, you can have supply storage tanks and/or weapons explode when they are hit, and even "StarTrek" style warpcores that usually destroy the ship when the enemy gets a lucky hit.

- Planet - Tractor Beam
All ships within a distance of [Value 2] have an increased maximum movement of [Value 1].

This ability would allow you to move engineless crippled ships back to base for repairs, if they are close enough to the tractor beam facility. You could also launch interceptor ships faster than their normal movement, to help defend against enemy incursions.
A long chain of planets with Tractor beam facilities would form a sort of highway, moving ships across your empire quickly, at the expense of many facilities.