SEV- Thread on Obfuscation (MM is involved)2weeks to post

[Suicide Junkie]

Originally posted by Will:

quote:

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Originally posted by spoon:
A lot of these ideas are neat, but I wonder if their impact on micromanagement would be too much? Having imperfect views of systems would mean having to play all the movement logs every turn to see if any ships crossed through your unfogged area of each system. (though I suppose something could be put in place where you could be notified with a message in the Turn Log, or something). Limited scanning range would mean having to go and park ships/drop sats all over the place.

That said, as long as it is optional, sure, go nuts. But I wouldn't want to see a lot of features that increase micromanagement beyond the level already present in the game.

Simple. Have a toggle switch that draws a colored dotted line for the observed path of ships in the system. Select the sector with the paths, and you can pick one for more information on that particular ship/fleet that passed through. Have options to filter out based on various factors (eg. show only fleets of X ships, show only ships of X size AND Y weapon strength, hide ships greater than X size AND smaller than Y size -- show ships with Space Yard).

I think with the levels of fog, the biggest problem isn't going to be controlling the micromanagement, but making it so the AI isn't completely crippled by it.

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Or just show all the info gathered during the turn.
You should only lose info on a particular ship if it flies completely out of range to where you can't see the hull at all.

If you fly past a ship, and see a wave motion gun, you will know where the wavemotion gun is as long as you keep track of the ship. You may not see it be destroyed in a distant 3rd party combat, but it should still appear there with a question mark or partly grayed out until your info is updated.

If the ship warps out of the system and then returns, you can't tell for sure if its the same ship, so you lose the info until you fly close by again.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, I certainly agree that both 'natural' plagues and various 'bio weapons' (there should be more than one type) should affect different races differently. Each species needs a 'genetic code' as part of its definition. It could be something fairly simple like a 4 digit hexadecimal number, with each digit standing for a degree of similarity. The first digit could be for the 'type' of life chemistry, like carbon vs. silicon vs. some other wild ideas that SciFi has come up with like energy beings or whatever. The second digit could be a general 'class' thing like reptilian or mammilian or plant or whatever, and the third would be a species level code, leaving the fourth for very subtle differences betwen related species like Vulcan/Romulan.

Then your plague/bio-weapon could have a code of its own marking what life forms it affects and how virulent it is. Some weapons would affect only species that exactly match its code, some would affect any that match up to the 'species' code, and a few (very advanced) would match anything in the 'class' code. Would you want bio-weapons that could kill any and all of a given 'life form' (carbon, silicon, etc)? I wouldn't but I suppose some people would, so the game could allow it and people could mod to their taste as with so many other things in the SE universe.

As for 'types' of bio-weapons, you could have 'poisons' that are described as either chemical or biological that destroy immediately upon use but don't continue from turn to turn or linger after the population is gone, and you could have 'plagues' that are contagious and actually linger after the victims are gone, making the place unliveable for whatever they infect for years of game time.

Edit: Oh yes, plagues should travel between planets unless you implement quarantine which is the same as your planet being blockaded! All trade stops and whatever the planet produces is not available to your empire.

[ May 08, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

As for 'types' of bio-weapons, you could have 'poisons' that are described as either chemical or biological that destroy immediately upon use but don't continue from turn to turn or linger after the population is gone, and you could have 'plagues' that are contagious and actually linger after the victims are gone, making the place unliveable for whatever they infect for years of game time.

Those could be plagues with a virulence of zero... They'll incapacitate and kill the people they've already hit, but won't spread at all.
If left untreated the incapacitated people would start to die and the unaffected people would become incapacitated, but no uninfected people would get the plague unless a ship was still up there dropping bombs.

Eg: 100 M people hit out of 500M on the planet, 10% fatality rate, 50% incapacitation, and no virulence.
turn 1: 10M die, 50M incapacitated, 40M infected but ok.
turn 2: 90M left... 9M die, 45M incap, 36M infected but ok.
turn 3: 81M left... 8M die, 40M incap, 33M infected but ok.

Edit: Oh yes, plagues should travel between planets unless you implement quarantine which is the same as your planet being blockaded! All trade stops and whatever the planet produces is not available to your empire.

Ooh, yeah. I forgot to add that ships not carrying population should count as 1M infected people after visiting a plague world and travelling to another planet.
Given a virulence factor of 2.0, you'd end up with 1M infected on the planet at turn 1, then 3M, 7M, 15M. (2,4,8,16 minus the 1 that are from the ship)

Minimum new infections for non-zero virulence would be 1M per turn, just like how population growth works in SE4.

[Suicide Junkie]

Each species needs a 'genetic code' as part of its definition. It could be something fairly simple like a 4 digit hexadecimal number, with each digit standing for a degree of similarity.

Rather than trying to make each digit represent a level on your taxonomy tree, why not just use it as a genetic code flat out?
The degree of similarity is how many digits match.

(binary for simplicity of example - decimal or hex would be better I agree)
01010-11010-10100 - Krill (5/15 matches)
10001-01101-00101 - Terran (control race)
10101-01001-00010 - Bobroba (11/15 matches)

Your plague could generate some semi-random codes, and the more differences, the less virulent and deadly it would be.
The randomness would depend on how high your tech level is... the higher tech, the closer you can get it to your target race.

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Perhaps the genetic code could be user-chosen during race creation, or even better would be if it were based on some function of the traits and characteristics you pick.

Then a race which chooses not to play the berzerker with maxxed aggression and defense and maint reduction would get a very different code from all the other copycat races...
The copycats would then all get thrashed by the same plague bomb

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Ooh, and the race using plague bombs should have to take extra care not to infect its own populations when the ships return home after an attack. The ships should be infected when they fire, and have to visit a medical facility for treatment or self destruct to prevent infection of the race that built it

[ May 08, 2004, 02:31: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Baron Munchausen]

I supposed the 'tapering off' model would be a good way to deal with chemical weapons since the chemicals would indeed tend to hang around for a while, just not 'reproduce' themselves. So a declining kill per turn might be better than a kill on the first turn and then no more for certain weapons. But we will still want a 'neutron bomb' type weapon that kills population immediately with no after-effects.

The genetic code thing is just supposed to be a simple way to represent the very complex factors of life. The longer you make this code, the more variation you can have, sure, but also the more complex the game code gets. I think that a few digits is enough for our purposes. If you give plagues and bio-weapons a 'range' of effect as well as categories I think you can create some fairly interesting interactions with 4-8 digits.

("Range" as in +/- a certain amount from the actual match but with less virulence. So you can have a perfect match suffer full effects while a species that is +1 or -1 would still be affected but less than a species that is a perfect match.)

I guess the bio-weapon would have to have its range independently defined at each 'code' digit. Messy but well worth the variability in use.

[QuarianRex]

I don't have time to read the entire thread right now, so I don't know if this has already been mentioned (or is even appropriate), but what I would like to see is starcraft style fog-of-war for previously visited systems. The ability to remember which worlds were alien homeworlds (and not possible colinization destinations) would be greatly appreciated.

[Suicide Junkie]

Baron:
You could simply set a 100% fatality rate, with 0% incapacitation. All infected people would die at the end of the turn, ending the "plague".

Even with a neutron bomb, not everyone will recieve an instantly-lethal dose, though... most would end up suffering a longer and more painful death at the outer edges of the bLast's kill zone.

It also allows for medical personnel to save some of the people. (Presumably the ones with the smallest doses)
Left untreated, more would die from survivable doses of radiation/toxin/plague.

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As for the number of digits in the code, definitely the dec/hex would require fewer digits to get an appropriate level of variation.
Computers are great at number crunching, though, and the optimum number of digits would depend on how efficient the implementation is

[ May 08, 2004, 03:57: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Paul1980au]

The idea of a few turns to fully kill off the population is a good idea - how about a intel project plant plague bomb - which would kill a % of people on a planet - would be cured next turn but could be used to weaken enemy planets and also with such a intel project a flexible amount of resources to put towards a project such as said above

Say 5000 intel points might be enough to kill 50M pop
10000 intel pnts say 100M pop
ANd rising steadily to say 200000 pop which would be enough to wipe out a large planet of say 2B population

Just some additional ideas to play with

The idea of progressing levels of scanner and extended range is a good idea. Some new components could reduce enemy scanning in a sector - sort of like increasin scanner tech vs increasing levels of anti scanner tech.

[Suicide Junkie]

If only the host keeps a copy of the full map, and each player has a separate .gam file to download, each player's file could be populated with the info they have seen Last.

The downloads for each player would be smaller, at the cost of more storage space on the host machine.

[Roanon]

Separate .gam files for each player is generally a good idea. There would be no need to encrypt the data, and this would even encourage the player community to write addons for game data management. Only the administrative overhead is a bit higher, for instance pbw would have to be reprogrammed so that each player only will get his .gam file and do not have access to others.