SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[spoon]

Originally posted by Loser:
hot-keys.

customizable hot keys.

[Paul1980au]

Customisable hot keys are probably going to be in the game i would think !

[xevioso]

Here are some specific must-haves. These are things that I think would really work for the game. They would not be too hard to implement and would increase the realism and usability of the game tremendously.

1) Movable and closable windows. This is absolutly the most important thing from a UI perspective. I have two monitors and I would love to be able to move windows and keep them open on my second monitor. But even for the vast majority of people, making windows movable and maybe resizable would be very helpful. That way you could have more than one window open at a time.

2) Rotating planets. Please make the window in which the planet that you are looking at be much larger, and ideally the planet would rotate. This is not hard from a coding standpoint; many games do this. This would would make the game very realistic, expecially since much of the game focuses on planetary resources.

3) More random planetary information. I like the idea of viewing a planet and having a host of information available about the planet available, even if 90% of it is not useful from a gaming perspective. It makes it very realistic. There is a current trend among graphic designers to put lots of random, meaningless technical information in a design; this makes it look more realistic in some people's minds. I would love to see weather, climate, flora and fauna types, magnetic field strength, day and year info, tilt, albedo, % water or land, mineral makeup, density, and so on, even if the ONLY thing useful is what we already currently use. This is random information that could be put into a txt field...and if displayed properly, would be very very cool, and make each planet more discernable from its neighbors. It would also be nice to do this for stars or other astronomical objects.

4) More customizable useless information. I would like to be able to name generals and individual ministers, and also preferably star systems. If I capture a system, why the heck can't I rename it? More importantly, I would love to be able to name a general of a fleet, or a captain of a ship. This makes me grow more attached to a particular ship or fleet, and makes me care more about what happens to General XXX of task force XXX rather than merely task force Alpha Beta or whatever. In the best world, you could transfer individual generals (say, only one general per fleet) across fleets, giving them better attack capabilities. As it stands now, the game is very impersonal. That is normally fine, but adding SOME SMALL element of individual personalization to the game other than the name of the emperor would make the game that much cooler. Even though most people would not use these features, making them available for the micromanagers among us would be great. What would Star Wars be without Vader and Luke?

5) If I could have anything other than the detachable windows, it would be a true 3d environment from a galactic perspective. I don't mean just 3d ships and such, but a 3d galactic environment with a freaking Z axis. Maybe they are planning on doing this for the game already, so slap me already, but if not, PLEASE look at Homeworld and how they did their Z axis...it's very cool. I know other games do this as well. This would be great.

Well, maybe these items have already been said. Sorry for the long post. I hope I'm taken seriously.

--Jeremy

[Atrocities]

Again it seems that many good suggestions are being glanced over without being considered. A list must be organized in order to insure that everyones contribution to this discussion is recognized. This would also avoid duplicate ideas, and save us the trouble of re-inventing the wheel every few hundred Posts.

So many great ideas have already been buried and forgotten that if one were to mine this thread, one would akin to an arceologist (sp) exploring the a lost and forgotten planet with mulitiple extinct civilizations.

I still think my anicent ruin of a system wide mine field was a good idea but how many of you remember that post let alone any of the previous Posts dating as far back as the beginning of this thread and the many threads that preceeded it?

[Aiken]

All we need is a bit of planning and some volunteers.
A. Split overall wishlist into the subject areas, ie:
0. Game physics.
1. Visual appearance and Interface.
2. Game startup and empire creation.
3. Empire infrastructure and economics.
4. Research.
5. Intel.
6. Diplomacy.
7. Ships and units design.
8. Military operations.
9. Space combat.
10. Ground combat.
11. AI.
12. Modding (graphics, AI and main data files).
...{it's a draft afterall}

B. We have 70 pages in the wishlist topic so at least 4 volunteers are needed - each one can parse 18 pages in the topic. The more people we have (but 10 max) he faster we got the compiled wishlist.
C. Each member of the team scans his portion of the tread and once he find a suggestion he should categorize this suggestion according to structure above, evaluate it (to avoid sh*t in wishlist, but be unbiassed) and copy it to the appropriate section of his file.
D. As soon as the partial wishlist is ready, team member should send his file with suggestions to the coordinator/maintainer. He should collect all the files, remove duplicates and post the merged list to the separate sticky tread. From here he should track the main wishlist tread and maintain the compiled wishlist.

Before posting new suggestions it will be strictly recommended to read the compiled wishlist to avoid duplicates.

What do you people think? Any comments? Volunteers ? As for me, I'm ready to parse about 1/4-1/5 of the tread.

[Fyron]

Again it seems that many good suggestions are being glanced over without being considered.

How can you say that? Have you seen the game yet? No.

Aaron has stated on several occassions that he keeps ALL of the suggestions he receives via email in a huge table, to be looked at when he starts working on whatever part of the game they apply to. He has also stated that he pays attention to this thread...

[Tanus]

quote:
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Originally posted by Tanus:
I'm sure it's probably been said before, but I'll throw it in anyway.

I'd like the option to set cloaking/detection 'distances' - kind of how long range scanners work.

Eg. Level 3 detectors would be able to see a cloaked ship up to 3 sectors away, level 4, 4 sectors away, etc. This would get more complicated as you add different cloak levels as well, but that's the general idea. System wide detection eliminates pretty much all 'stealthy' options and misdirection
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I proposed an idea like that awhile back. Though I was thinking more of having a scanner level combined with a sensor range, to make the different scanner types in SEIV be a bit different. Scanner level would scan out to the range, and be able to detect lower level cloaks further out.

Essentially, a Lvl 4 scanner w/range 2 would be able to detect cloak lvl 4 and lower at range 2, lvl 3 and lower at range 3, lvl 2 and lower at range 4. It would also detect cloak lvl 5 at range 1 and detect cloak lvl 6 if in the same sector.

Also wanted the cloak levels to stack, but only one particular component (or sector level obscuration) to work. So, you couldn't mount two cloaking devices to stack their cloak levels, but you could stack a cloaking device with stealth armor and hide in a sensor-obscuring nebula system or a sector-sized obscuring storm.

Definitely... I was really tired, and didn't explain clearly what I meant.

My thought (now that I'm awake) was something along these lines.

Detection 1 sees cloak 5 at range 1, cloak 4 at range 2, cloak 3 at range 3, cloak 2 at range 4, cloak 1 at range 5, and uncloaked at range 6

Detection 2 sees cloak 5 at range 2, cloak 4 at range 3... etc

All numbers are just examples of course, but the point is that the better cloaks allow you to get closer without being seen, but not totally invisible - eventually you'll be so close that no matter how good you're able to suppress the signature of your ship, it's just too close to miss.

Also, as you can see, just entering a system does not allow you to see all ships. Planets should show colonies, as that's harder to miss, but in the scale of a star system, a single ship is beyond minute, and a ship with no detection should not be able to 'see' a ship on the far side of the system.

Hope that makes a bit more sense.

Also, having the different types of cloak and detection work properly would be make for a lot of different variations on the theme.

[Paul1980au]

Im sure that aaron is making a cataglogue of this thread and will even come up with a few of his own ideas.

[Karibu]

Suggestion of how to use mines in SEV (adds propability to get through minefield without damage and adds minesweepers a propability to fail at minesweeping -> mines are not always automatically swept when going through the field).

One thing to make mines better would be so, that when you sweep mines, there would be certain percentual for one sweeper component to sweep a mine. Also so, that bigger minefields are easier to sweep. For example:

1 sweeper component of level 5 has five shots. 1 shot has 10% basic chance to sweep a mine. In this case this component would have 5 shots of 10 percent chance each of them = 1-(0,9^5) = 0,41 mines/turn.

This number would apply in... lets say a minefield size of 50 mines. Now this percent grows linear up to 20% chance when the size of the minefield is 100 mines. This is logic, because more mines in one sector means they are closer each other.

So, lets say a ship, which has 20 components of level 5 minesweeper components goes into minefield of 100 mines. Then it sweeps like this:

1 component sweeps: 1-(0,8^5) = 0,67 mines/turn.
20 components sweeps approximately 13,4 mines/turn.

So, in this case you would need approximately 8 ships (20 components in each of them) to sweep every mine in the field in one turn. Yes, this is a quite many ships, but also mines would have a propability to hit one ship (not automatically, like now). The mine hit propability could be for example 50%. In this kind of minefields, enemy could pass it taking some damage, but it would not sweep all the mines at one sweep like now.

The sweeper components could also become more accurate in upper levels and mines would have better hit ratio when more developed. Sure these numbers I presented needs some refinement, but I think the idea would be great. Mines would be quite more usable and they would have this unpredictable element which they have in real life also. You rarely find all mines in one area in one day (or month, for that matter). You need to inspect the area very closely.

[Starling]

I agree with Karibu, I think that mines need some adjustments along those lines.

An additional factor I would like to see is the probability of a mine field correctly identifing a ship entering the mine field. Currently in SEIV, a mine field always correctly identifies the owner and allies, and always correctly identifies those who are not. Suppose, there is a 99% chance of correctly identifing any ship entering the mine field as an owner, ally or not. For example an non-allied fleet entered your mine field. Each ship would be queried by the mine field. Any ship that is incorrectly identified would be treated as an ally for this turn. The same would apply to the owner or allied ship entering the mine field.

I believe that this would more closely reflect the realities of a mine field.