SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Suicide Junkie]

Atrocities said:
I doubt with the new 3d engine that we will see fleets larger than 40 ships or so.

SF handles thousands of ships, just with a poor framerate

And there is nothing stopping players from sending their entire 100-turn buildup of ships at each other in once combat

[Phoenix-D]

Psuedo turn based combat!

Actually the biggest problem would be pathfinding issues. so here's another item for the wishlist:

Either have ships pass over each other or please, PLEASE improve the pathing AI. Way too much ship death in SF because of collisions, especially at higher game speeds.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

And PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT FLEET MOVEMENT IN TACTICAL COMBAT!!!!! It is EXTREMELY irritating to rotate your fleet slightly and have a ship move between two squares endlessly just because some other ship which moves later occupies the square in which it should be. I am SO fed up with that...

[douglas]

Please make sure things like this can't happen in SEV:

In a recent invasion plan, I wanted to split my fleet into two, partway through the turn, but follow the same path of conquering for most of the turn. So, I split my one fleet into two, but I only had one minesweeper and had to pick which fleet got the minesweeper and which waited for the backup after they started going separately. Both fleets moved at exactly the same speed, all ships and the minesweeper arrived exactly simultaneously at the first planet in line, but the minefield damaged the fleet that didn't have a minesweeper instead of getting swept by the minesweeper that arrived at exactly the same time, following exactly the same path, just in a different fleet. Minesweeping and mines exploding should be checked only after ALL movement in a day, not in between movements that are supposed to be simultaneous.

Also, it would be nice to be able to order ships to join or leave fleets partway through their movement. There should also be a setting to leave damaged ships behind instead of letting the 1% of the fleet that's damaged hold up the other 99% that has very important things left to do that should be done immediately.

[MightyPenguin]

StrategiaInUltima said:And even if it would be more efficient to blow a hole into the ship if you're facing a Heavy War Cruiser, I don't think you'd stand up to a COMCA. My COMCAs usually sport one or two hundred top-lev shield generators and regens... and I think that it'd be far more efficient to push a ship like that into a planet than to try and blow a hole through tens of thousands of shield points with regenerators backing them up, and several hundred units of armor, all the while while the ship is pounding away at you with battery upon battery upon battery of heavy weapons... don't you think?

Considering the size of your ships, a beam strong enough to have an appreciable effect would already be a fearsome cannon.

Plus, I think a ship like that would be smart enough to move out of the way. Plus you're assuming that the repulser would have more range than your main weapons. If that main weapon is a beam or kinetic then there is no reason for this; they would both have a range as long as you could accurately aim it.

And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types.

[Puke]

Phoenix-D said:
The Moon would disagree with you there. Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.

or faster. I wonder how fast the moon would have to be going to orbit a couple feet above the surface. and how much thrust it would have to have behind it to overcome atmospheric drag.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

In my example, I assumed that:
-the COMCA is damaged, and has no engines, and less weapons than normal. As I said, soft target (where "soft" for a COMCA is your average Heavy Battlecruiser).
-the COMCA uses weapons with a mount that increases damage but decreases range.
-your ship - for some reason - was just passing by.
-your ship - for some reason - has been fitted with only a heavy repulser as a weapon. It is unarmed besides that.
-that repulser actually outranges the COMCAs remaining weapons, which should be easy, as their ranges are already reduced by a mount.
-it is still SE, be it IV or V. In SEIV even if you give a repulser a power of 5000000 it does nor do damage to my knowledge. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Fyron]

MightyPenguin said:
And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types.

The game just has to wait to process minefields until after all ships have moved in the day. It isn't that difficult to accomplish. Build up a list of all of the objects that just entered the sector and wait until all movement for the day is finished. Then, treat everything in that list as if the vehicles were all in the same "fleet" for the purposes of sweeping.

[Baron Munchausen]

Puke said:

or faster. I wonder how fast the moon would have to be going to orbit a couple feet above the surface. and how much thrust it would have to have behind it to overcome atmospheric drag.

The Moon simply could not orbit only a few feet above the surface of the earth. It's not a problem with the atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere is only about a hundred miles thick while the Moon is a couple thousand miles across. It's the simply fact of gravitational stress. There is a practical limit on how close a large satellite can be to its host without being torn apart -- broken down into smaller satellites that can handle the stress, essentially. This is called the 'Roche limit' after the scientist who calculated it.

http://www.answers.com/topic/roche-limit

[Phoenix-D]

"And douglas; things like that have to happen in a game because it is processed on a computer. That means it can't carry out more than one instruction at a time unless it has more than one processor. The best you can do is have priorities for different unit types."

That's still easy enough to fix. Check for mine attacks at the end of the day and not when a square is moved into.