SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[dogscoff]

I had an Idea about the colony dome thing Last night, What if you could just build more "domes" on a planet that is unbreathable? just put it in the construction que or have another colony modual land on the planet. Or perhaps a new type of modual, There are three types already, rock gas and ice, how about a 4th, "Domed", or make that a smaller thing you have to use in combination with the three colony components.

I've suggested somethiong along these lines before. I'd like to see planets with zero default population capacity, and all planets of each size given the same number of facility slots regardless of atmosphere. It's up to the player to decide how much population the planet can hold by building "habitat" facilities. (Colonisers would have one of these habitat facilities built in.)

This way you could have lots of mineral miners on a planet but hardly any population to run them, or lots of population and only a few miners - or anywhere in between. With careful balancing of the population-based production bonuses some really interesting decisions would be necessary.

The clever bit is that "domed" habit facilites would give less population space per facility slot than undomed ones. This way, domed planets have less potential for population growth, but the player can choose to counter this by building more domed habitats (at the cost of other facilities).

The other advantage is that you could have both types of facilities on the same planet at once- then you could have a planet that holds up to 500 million oxy breathers AND up to 60 million domed breathers at the same time - this would solve the problem caused by a minority of non breathers (ie one million) doming a planet that already has 150 million native-breathers on it.

Also, this system could introduce realistic population damage effects during orbital bombardments/ ground combat/ random events: Destruction of a dome or habitat facility would cause the death of millions in a single strike (or it might cause an overcrowding crisis in the other domes- see my suggestion earlier in this thread about allowing overpopulation/ refugee crises). This bit might be a little more complicated to implement than I describe here, but the foundation would be in place for a really effective damage system.

More efficient/ durable habitats could be researched, and if the whole thing was handled as abilities, it could be modded too. Imagine what Proportions mod cultural centres and cities would look like under this this system.

A similar system to the above could be devised for ice/gas/ rock, so that in order to put humans on a captured gas giant, you have to research and build special platforms of some kind there first.

Finally, I always assumed that on ice planets the population was below the ice (ie underwater) rather than above it. In the Star Wars example already mentioned, I would say Hoth was just a very cold rock planet. Some of Jupiter's moons are ice planets in this sense, and some speculate that there might be life under there. (Europa? Io? Can't remember off hand.)

SE5 needs a better icon, why is SE4 icon an SE3-like star?

I like the icon, but get David Gervais on to it anyway! Maybe the installer could give the player a choice of a new icon or the old one.

[ February 24, 2003, 16:20: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[dogscoff]

Another idea, kind of linked to the one below:

How about if two players could control a planet at once? Habitat facilities A, B anc C are yours, C, D and E are yours. Space yard X is mine, Y is yours.

How cool would ground combat be with this? Could lead to some interesting treaty situations too.

Have I had my "designer treaties" rant on this thread yet? I'll let you all digest this lot first...

[Aloofi]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
Have I had my "designer treaties" rant on this thread yet? I'll let you all digest this lot first...

Yeah, we need new treaties, and the default shouldn't be war. I've never understood why first contact with an alien ship always end up in combat.
Imagine that an alien scout just get to our orbit, but since we don't know them and of course we don't have a trade treaty with them yet, our military decides to blow them out of the sky. Next month an alien fleet arrives asking for their scout, and since we killed all their friends at first contact, they decide to drop us a level 5 Plague Bomb.

[dogscoff]

Yeah, we need new treaties, and the default shouldn't be war.

I'd like to be able to negotiate my own treaty terms:

You can have use of my resupply depots and space ports, in exchange I want free passage through your space and 20000 organics per turn...

I posted a huge 2 page thesis on how this might work a few months ago... I'll try to dig it out...

EDIT: Found it- here. There's quite a discussion there. Also, when searching the forums for something you posted before, knowing your registered user number is a big help...

[ February 24, 2003, 17:15: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Fyron]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
Another idea, kind of linked to the one below:

How about if two players could control a planet at once? Habitat facilities A, B anc C are yours, C, D and E are yours. Space yard X is mine, Y is yours.

See Master of Orion 3. In it, the planets are supposed to be divided into regions that get colonized separately (or at least, that was the original plan with the game a few years back ).

[Ed Kolis]

Now, you might call this pedantic, and say that it destroys an interesting tactical aspect of the game, but if a storm is opaque to level X scanners, then if you don't have level X+1 scanners and you're inside the storm, shouldn't you be unable to see outside the storm?

Also, remember SE2's idea of storms - nobody can see you in the storm unless they are in the same sector? What if there were larger storms that didn't make ships entirely invisible but instead reduced sight range? And what if you didn't get to see everything in a system by default, but instead your scanners had a limited range?

I also like Stars! idea of diminishing returns for stacking components - you CAN put two long range scanners/ECM/whatever on your ship, but while the first one might have range 50, the second one will only bump the range up to 65 or something like that.

[Instar]

I really like the idea of stacking sensor/ecm components for increased detection capability, but only slightly better (but emissions would still be high -- hey random idea -- how about missiles that target ships emitting more electronic emissions? Like Anti-SAM HARM missiles that hone in on radar sites?)
If you added the sensor stacking along with the ability to share targeting data amongst a fleet (with a very small component that increases the ability to hit), I could very easily imagine a sensor ship that pointed out all the enemies (like the E-2C Hawkeye, or maybe the SPY-1 radar on ships that is shared with other ships.)

[Fyron]

You should be able to design the missiles your ships use when adding CSM components and such. Not building them separately and loading them on, as that would be micromanagement hell. But, you should have options as to what your missiles are like. Do you want more engines (speed), more/larger warheads (damage), more armor (hit points), better defensive bonuses (ECM), etc.? Or do you want cheap missile launchers? All of these choices should alter the cost of your missile launcher components.

[ February 26, 2003, 06:26: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Fyron]

I just emailed this to MM:

Mines need fixing. In SE4, it is really easy and cheap to get enough sweepers to sweep 100 mines in each of your fleets. So, here is an idea for revamping mines:

Make sweepers do damage to mines instead of just sweeping X mines. Sweeping damage should accumulate until all sweepers in a task force have had a chance to sweep. Then, any partially damaged mines are restored to full strength. Make each sweeper have a chance to hit a mine. If it fails this chance, that sweeper component sweeps no mines. Then, change what can be on mines. Some possibilities include:

Mine Warhead: does more damage, and each one lowers the ECM ability of the mine. More warheads means more explosive materials, and hence is easier to detect.

Mine Armor: adds more hitpoints, so it takes more sweepers to destroy the mine.

Mine ECM: one per mine, increases the ECM ability of the mine. Stacks with the Warhead penalties.

When a task force enters a sector with mines, each sweeper component is handled separately. It rolls a to hit chance, based off of the lowest ECM ability of any mine in the sector. This is to simplify the chances to sweep mines, without losing the whole ability to fail to sweep. If the sweeper is successful, it hits a random mine. It should not necessarily hit the mine that was used to see if it could detect a mine, because there could be multiple mines with that ECM level. Once a random mine is selected, the sweeper's damage ability is done to the mine, and that damage is accumulated. You can either have excess damage hit another mine (with or without a second to hit calculation) or have that sweeper component's excess damage be wasted. Once the first sweeper component is resolved, the game checks the second sweeper component. It has a chance to hit based off of the lowest ECM of the remaining mines, then does damage to a random mine only if it hits. All sweepers are resolved in this manner, one by one.

This system allows for heavily defended mines that take a lot of sweepers to clear, but do little damage. Or, you can have weakly defended mines that do a lot of damage. Also, you can have 2 types of sweepers: one with a high to hit bonus and low damage, and one with a low to hit bonus (or none) and high damage.

I don't think that this would be very hard to implement in a game that has not been started to be worked on yet.

[Atrocities]

I agree Fyron 100%. I have more, but must go to bed now as I can not see nor can I think clearly enought to type.