SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Baron Munchausen]

I think it would be good enough to allow multiple lists to be given for different types of ships. Having early scouts, to mid-game troop transports, to battleships, to late-game stellar manipulation ships all recycling the same names takes some of the sense of 'characterization' out of it. We need to at least be able to give 'warship' names and 'utility ship' names as distinct lists.

[Fyron]

Ed Kolis said:
Large file? How so? Let's see, if we have two prefixes (one for military ships, one for civilian ships), twenty name beginnings, twenty name middles, and twenty name endings, that gives us 2*20*20*20 = 8000 unique ship names! And each name part will usually only be a few characters (e.g. the name "USS Enterprise" could be formed from the parts "USS ", "Ent", "er", and "prise"). Granted you will get a lot of nonsense names (such as "USS Trollumforce" to use a few synonyms ) but as long as some lexical rules are applied (at least for the human ship names) you won't get anything really silly (like "USS Zxbnft", which might be a good Xiati or Drushocka ship name were it not for the USS part )
Basically, the principle is to get the most out of your data entry. 8000 ship names at an average of 12 letters each would take up 96 KB of space, which would take a long time to type in; 8000 ship names in the 2x20x20x20 scheme I suggested earlier would only take 186 *bytes* (assuming each name part happens to be 3 letters). And if you add another name part to the list, it adds not just one name, but hundreds!

This is why I like programs like Everchanging Book of Names, which do all that fun stuff for me. It is how I made a bunch of Tolkien-themed files, like Quenya, Sindarin, Black Speech, etc.

[Ragnarok-X]

Where can i find that programm you mentioned, Fyron ?!

[Kana]

Ability to have a guard or escort function/option, in the strategies and mainscreen. So that a certain ship, or unit can follow or guard a another ship or unit.

Kana

[AMF]

Yeah, I did the name generation thing for the QConflict game. I just went Online, found a bunch of "klingon clan names" and a bunch of "klingon words" from some silly "klingon dictionary" and so had two columns of words to combine. With 50 clan names and 800 klingon words, I've got a whole mess o' names to use...now, if it were only automatic so I didn't have to input them for each ship that would be nice...

[AMF]

A cool thing about heroes, especially if they're pretty rare, is then you open up the field to intel projects built around them. Assasinations, subVersions, misdirections, etc...

Also, I would think that heros should have a single, or at most two, stats that they affect. Some examples I think would be good:

Local heros:

Hero Admiral: + 5-20% bonus to ship offense, ship defense or both.
Hero General: + 5-20% bonus to ground combat offense, defense or both.
Hero Governor: + 5-20% bonus to planetary production rates
Hero Administrator: + 5-20% bonus to one or two planetary resource production rates
Hero Marine: + 5-20% bonus to ship boarding actions
Hero Scientist: + 5-20% bonus to the research production of a planet
Hero navigator: +1 movement for a single ship or fleet of ships
Hero engineer: +1 repair rate, or + 5-20% to space-based shipyard rate
Hero Explorer: has 10-50% chance to avoid stellar damage (ie from storms, black holes, etc...)

I don't think heros should be "mercenaries" - they don;t get paid, and would only switch allegiances if your enemy ran a sucessful "subvert leader" intel operation on them. Neither should they stack - two hero admirals wouldn't give you both their ship combat bonuses. Only the highest.

Also, I would hope that the heros would be treated just like ships in that you could name them, move them, etc...

And, I think there should also be Empire-wide heros, such as below, which would be limited to no more than 1-3 per empire I would think (since they have empire wide effects):

Hero Spy: + 1-5% bonus to spy points, (or perhaps allows new missions, or can do missions on their own?)
Hero Trader: + 1-5% to trade amounts gained by your empire?
Hero Diplomat: +5-15% in diplomacy with neutral races (NOT AI empires)

And, once again, I don't think there is any need to have unique hero
pictures - just use the racial portrait pic, maybe modified slightly,
for all the heros in your empire.


Thanks,

Alarik
Ps: cross-posted to SE4 yahoo group

[Suicide Junkie]

Heroics shouldn't be routine, I think.

A big bonus randomly achieved every now and then would be better

[AMF]

Like, as a random event?

Suicide Junkie said:
Heroics shouldn't be routine, I think.
A big bonus randomly achieved every now and then would be better

This brings up something that I have been thinking of for a while. There are things that are treated as random events that shouldn't be. That is, the driver for some of the events are things that are under player control and so can and should be modeled if practical. Specifically, I think that component breakdowns should be based on the amount of maintenance you are spending.
I base this on my work, which involves analyzing US navy readiness and maintenance, among other things. Ship components break down all the time, constantly.

So, I would like to see maintenance be on a slider, the middle of which would be "100% funded", and then perhaps it would range from 50% funded to 150% funded.

Paying 100% would result in some level (call it X) breakdowns per turn (determined by some algorithm, with a random element)
If you took your maintenance budget down to less than 100%, then X would increase comensurately, according to some settings in the data files. On the flip side, if you increase your maintenance over 100% then X would decrease.

Therefore if you're in a tight spot, you could assume the risk of breakdowns in order to fund your entire fleet, if you're flush you can spend resources to ensure your ships are at a higher level of readiness.

Frankly, I'd actually like to take such a system further: Aircraft and vessel maintenance and lifecycles generally follow a bathtub curve, wherein after commissioning they have a period of time with many breakdowns (the "break in" period), then a longer period of time with a few breakdowns, and then, as they near the end of their service lives their breakdown rates increase greatly untile they undergo a major maintenance overhaul or something similar.

So, I would say that ships should have an age (tracked from when they were built) and their breakdown rates should vary depending on their age and the maintenance budget slider.


Also, I would like the maintenance budget to be on a non linear scale. There is only so much money/resources you can throw at the maintenance budgets but you'll always have some sort of breakdowns going on. So, perhaps do a logarithmic function of maintenance, or something else (I'm not a mathemetician) that results in a decreasing return to maintenance or an increasing breakdown rate as you reduce the maintenance budget...

I think I'll leave it at that for now...

thanks,

Alarik

[NarfsCompIsBack]

To much micromanagement.

[AMF]

No no no, I didn't explain it well. The *ONLY* thing the player has to do is either keep the maintenance slider untouched at the base of 100% or modify it. That's it.

I think Europa Universalis had this system, and it worked quite well there...

NarfsCompDied said:
To much micromanagement.