SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Q]

Scenario creator or at least starting tech levels as in SE III.

[AgentZero]

I find it a bit eerie how many features from SE3 people want back. Not that I don't agree... Of course, the one SE3 feature I really want back is the right-click menu. And I'd like it to be customizable, so it would start out with the basic Move, Warp, Colonize & Resupply, but you could add as many other orders to it if you wanted. Maybe even create seperate right-click menus for different ships, so Colonize will only show up for Colony ships, and the Stellar Manip. options would only show up for Stellar Manip ships. I'm not saying this should all come pre-defined, but should be something we can do if we want.

Oh, and does anyone know what the Attack order actually DOES? As far as I can tell it's just another Move button. Maybe this could be changed so if you use the Attack button you aren't given the prompt 'There are enemy ships is that sector...' Since you've given an Attack order, you KNOW they're there and you want to attack.

Can I also just say again how desperately missiles need to be reworked? They're just not an effective weapon at the moment. A few ways they could be improved:
1) Increase the amount of time required to close to non-missile weapons range. Thus, a fleet without missile weapons would take a serious pummelling before they could even use their weapons.
2) Only PDC & Fighter weapons should have a reliable chance of hitting missiles. Other weapons could be fired at them, but hitting them would be more fluke than anything.
3) Missile Mounts. I know these already exist in certain mods, and it's something I've put into my own SE4, to great effect. What I've done is have missiles opperate as they do now up to the BC hulls, after which you can install Heavy Missile Mounts (Or Massive on DNs), which don't significantly increase the size of the component, but vastly increase the amount of damage it does. At the moment a Massive CSM V does about 4000 damage points. I'm also playing with altered ships sizes so a DN is about 3200kT, but even still 1 CSM will pretty much strip a DNs shields. I've also increased the speed of seekers, but this is more to compensate for the short time it takes for two fleets to close on another.

[Alneyan]

The Attack order is only useful when playing simultaneous games where you are willing to take a gamble. It will order your ships to chase a peculiar enemy ship, no matter what else may happen. If you are unlucky, you could end up chasing a single lone ship, or being lured into a wormhole ambush, into a blackhole, or other annoying things.

[Tanus]

tmce said:
Oh, and does anyone know what the Attack order actually DOES? As far as I can tell it's just another Move button.

In Simultaneous games (PBW), the attack order is 'seek after'. So if you tell your ships to 'attack' an enemy ship/fleet, your ships will follow those ships until combat, whereas the move command would just move your ships to the sector where the enemy ships were at that time, and won't take into account if the enemy ships move.

Also, if you are attacking a stack of planets with a fleet containing troop transports, only one planet will be taken, and the rest glassed (or at least, I can't seem to get my fleets to *take* all the planets), the attack order will let you specify which planet to take, rather than just relying on luck or some unknown game mechanic.

Hope that helped.

[Ed Kolis]

I may have mentioned this before, but I'll bring it up again: No hardcoded relationships between the system movement speed and the combat movement speed! SE4 has Afterburners which increase combat movement but not system movement... why can't I define Warp Drives which do the reverse??? This would also come in handy if I specifically want ships to move very slowly in combat but quickly around systems, so as to make missiles more viable per tmce's suggestion without making the strategic game obscenely slow.

[douglas]

Have you tried giving your warp drives a negative combat movement ability?

[Ed Kolis]

That won't work because the negative will be overridden by any positive value on whatever does give combat movement...

[clark]

Depending on how strategic movement is handled, combat movement might be amoot issue. Remember, combat is in simulated real time- meter per sec kind of stuff. So, if I reckon correctly, there might be a seperate line item that controls combat speed-each engine in effect giving an overall m/sec. This would be meaningless in the strategic view where <I THINK> movement is turn based (it could very well not be!)

[Kana]

Well slow in combat would probaby mean slow in strategic as well...unless there were two different types of engines...like thrusters or something for combat, and 'lightspeed' or 'hyperspace' engines for strategic movement.

So if SE5 is 'completely' moddable, you should be able to design either a single engines with two different attributes for combat and strategic movement values or seperate engines for the two movement type.

<crosses fingers>

Kana

[AgentZero]

I think just splitting the two values into two seperate categories would solve the problem nicely.
A 'Normal' (meaning strategic) Speed Value and a Combat speed value. And of course the bonus movement atribute could be applied two speed types differently so you could have things like Combat Drives which generate a less strategic bonus speed but more combat speed.
So a Quantum Combat Drive might only give you 2 bonus moves instead of 3, but you'd get an extra speed point in combat.