SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Colonel]

This next one has to do with Commerece,

First we need some sort of standard monitary figure(Ex. Dollars, euros so on) that can be used to buy ships quickly or resourse from other empires, and anything else. Money\Commerece would be created by many things, Taxes from each of your Planets, You would be able to raise or lower the percent but higher levels would cause unhappiness. To represent Industry Tax you would get money from different types of buildings and there amount of use, So a mining colony on a planet that has a high mining value would devolpe more money then a mining colony on a planet with less mining value.

Next You could devolpe Commerece\money from tourism to different planets within your empire so if you had a planet devouted to Happniness building then you might get a large amount of money from that planet from commerece but there would be one thing that would apply to this, Location if you have a planet devouted to tourism and it is out away from all inhabited planets you would get little or no tourism money but a planet that is near your capital planet which would be well traveled would get a huge tourism commerce bonus

Anyone have any thoughts on this idea?

[Fyron]

In my opinion, SE5 should stay far away from "dollars" or "credits" and stick to resources. There is not much need to add another level of complication when everything can be accomplished using resources. Emergency Build sort of covers this, by pumping more resources into the build queue per turn. Similar methods can simulate buying ships quickly and such remarkably well.

[FLX]

And how about the SE3 ship building style?
there, first you purchase a ship, and the next turn it appears with all of its components "destroyed" beeing built in your "repair priorities" order. i miss that in SE4, where a ship that has been in a space yard for 5 of 6 years cannot moove or defend the planet even beeing half-operative.
Remember the death star

[bearclaw]

what about Dis-Information Counter Intel projects. If you intercept an enemy Intel project, and you have the Dis-Info Counter Intel rather than standard Counter Intel, it gives you the option to "fill in the blanks" on the enemy project and send them back your false info. Unless they have sufficant Counter Intel (or perhaps automatic), they assume that their project was successful but end up with the wrong info.

[Kana]

And how about the SE3 ship building style?
there, first you purchase a ship, and the next turn it appears with all of its components "destroyed" beeing built in your "repair priorities" order. i miss that in SE4, where a ship that has been in a space yard for 5 of 6 years cannot moove or defend the planet even beeing half-operative.

I to also miss this from SE3. I know there is an Empire Option that skips ships 'under construction' but I've never seen it to be a part of game play. I would love to see this back in SE5. I always loved being able to destroy or even capture stuff that is still in the process of being built.

Kana

[Randallw]

In my opinion, SE5 should stay far away from "dollars" or "credits" and stick to resources. There is not much need to add another level of complication when everything can be accomplished using resources. Emergency Build sort of covers this, by pumping more resources into the build queue per turn. Similar methods can simulate buying ships quickly and such remarkably well.

I don't see any need for money. We play Space Empires NOT Space Accountants. The aim is for your empire to work towards supremacy. An empires economomic strength is easily represented by its production and resources. Narratively speaking your empire may have money for citizens to buy stuff, but surely a State run economy does not pay for things. Ships and units deemed necessary for the State are built when needed using reources supplied by State run resource suppliers. To help allies you supply vessels or give them resources. After all if you support an ally you can't just give them your own currency which differs from there's, you supply a resource of equal value. Any citizen who dares to demand payment from the government instead of fullfilling his patriotic duty should be shot

Edit: I agree with having ships built gradually. A ship being built is little different from one being repaired. It is realistic in having half completed hulls in dock, and would be interesting to have half completed ships used as a Last resort if the space yard is attacked. Although perhaps until a vessel is commisioned it will be unable to act.

[Baron Munchausen]

Money is an essential feature of civilization. As the 'trade' system in SE IV currently works you have to scrounge around for things that your trading partner might want. And if you can't find something in your possession that the party with the goods you want is interested in, you're stuck. It's like being a primitive tribal trader with nothing but raw goods to offer.

The 'technology' called money was invented many thousands of years ago to solve this problem, and there's no good reason to assume that advanced space-faring races, even very alien races, couldn't think of the same solution to the trade problem that our relatively crude and unsophisticated ancestors did. There really does need to be some sort of money in the SE universe. It doesn't require fancy accounting or banking systems. We can 'aasume' that just like we assume the trade routes and freighters moving our resources. But yes, money is essential for dealing between nations and empires just as it is between individuals. Even today the US Government pays money to other governments for various purposes, and also receives money from other governments.

On ship construction, I certainly agree that the SE III system where 'blank' ships appeared when purchased and were slowly 'repaired' to operational status was better than the SE IV 'instant ship' system. I hope something like the SE III construction method is restored in SE V.

[Colonel]

This is going along with the commerece idea, We need more to trade with there is really only ships, planets, and resourse to trade.

Next this idea has been brought up before but this is one minor change. You should be able to steal components of ships in battle and retrofit it on to that ship

[Randallw]

Money is an essential feature of civilization. As the 'trade' system in SE IV currently works you have to scrounge around for things that your trading partner might want. And if you can't find something in your possession that the party with the goods you want is interested in, you're stuck. It's like being a primitive tribal trader with nothing but raw goods to offer.

The 'technology' called money was invented many thousands of years ago to solve this problem, and there's no good reason to assume that advanced space-faring races, even very alien races, couldn't think of the same solution to the trade problem that our relatively crude and unsophisticated ancestors did. There really does need to be some sort of money in the SE universe. It doesn't require fancy accounting or banking systems. We can 'aasume' that just like we assume the trade routes and freighters moving our resources. But yes, money is essential for dealing between nations and empires just as it is between individuals. Even today the US Government pays money to other governments for various purposes, and also receives money from other governments.

Yes, but say I give you a check for 1 million galaxy Credits (Good in all empires in the galaxy )to help you. What are you going to spend it on. Will you buy resources or ships I, or another ally, could have given you, or will you use the check to buy stuff from your own people which as Emperor you could just take anyway. Money isn't just a piece of paper (or electronic credit) we all agree is worth something. Money is a guarantee that the piece of paper etc is worth part of the governments wealth. In the olden days (things were better then ) the standard was gold, and what is gold but a mineral resource. Why introduce an unnecesary element?.

Edit: The actual purpose of money, at least originally, was that you could give the guy in town 3 gold pieces instead of having to carry 3 cows, 2 sheep and a pig to market to pay for the clothes he is selling. A few coins is more convenient to carry, but we don't need to carry stuff we can just gift each other 300,000 resources.
end edit:
Meanwhile with all this talk of being dictator of your state, why not introduce the ability to modify empire settings as needed. This is one of the few good things from MOO3 (at least to me). Are your subjects dissenting?, send in the troops. Is your neighbour sending lots of spies at you, then use agents to root them all out. Also with all those AI populations you conquered, why not institute forced labour. With the benefits could of course come drawbacks like perhaps empire unhappiness at being spied on by their government all the time, unless they are the sort of people to understand the necessity of all this.

[csebal]

A PBW related wish, maybe it was mentioned before, forgive me for not reading trough 85 pages of Posts

Make a command line option to work with smaller, patch like savegames.

See, i would bet, that most of the savegame file remains unchanged when you make a new turn. This means, you wouldnt have to send all the data to the players, as they already have at least half of it.

I've tried to do some optimisations in the netcode of my mutiplayer tool based on the above assumption, but because of the encoding, there is nothing common between two save files. While i can't (or at least wouldn't like to) circumwent that encoding, malfador could easily create said functions for us.

How it would work:
- command line turn generation would create a gam file and a gam.patch file, which only includes the binary differences between the unencoded turn files of the previous turn and the new turn.
- this patch file would be encoded as well

on the client machine, the game can take the patch file as an argument instead of the gam file, in which case it uses the data from the previous save game to build the actual gam file for the current turn.

It sounds easy, and i think its not that much of an overhead, but i think this may reduce required network traffic for multiplayer games by a lot.

I think the way rsync compares files could be easily adopted to se4 as well (i was about to use its algorythm for my tool, until i realized it will not work on the generated savegame files, because of the above mentioned encryption).

for those not familiar with rsync, check out
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
and
http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/tech_report/