Next Version of P&N: suggestions

[jimbob]

Phoenix and Suicide,

Poop. So much for beaming in the expendible security officers. How are abilities defined, are they all 'range zero' effects?

What about a weapon that specifically targets the SDD? I'm guessing that this would be possible. Then there would finally be a need for defence marines.

Jimbob

[Rollo]

I like the idea of seekers launched by fighters and want to point some things out that I have found when playing Phoenix-D's techmod (early Versions). One has to be very careful to make them balanced. Their damage/kt/turn should probably be lower then the standard rocket pods, because they can be fired from range before the fighters can be destroyed. The Small Missile I suggested by AJC seems okay in that respect, because their damage/kt is lower and like the rocket pods they can fire only once per combat. Another thing to take into account is the tonnage, if you can fit too many of them into a fighter they will be very hard to stop, because each PDC shot will kill only one seeker (damage will not carry over to other seekers in the group). Making them too small (1kt for AJC Small Missile) will create huge seeker Groups that will be very hard to shoot down (maybe that is desired, but it can be unbalancing). Another thing is the reload, to make them a little different from the pods, perhaps a reload of 5 or 10 could be considered. Of course damage and tonnage have to be adjusted accordingly.

All those balance issues can be resolved, but one thing I have noticed with fighter missiles might be a problem. Here is part of an email that I wrote to Phoenix-D some time ago:
"... I also found an odd bug when using seeker weapons on fighters: If I didn't select all missiles to be fired in tactical combat, they would still be released, but wouldn't move because they didn't have a target. While this is not so bad, here comes the odd thing: After I have some seekers sitting in space doing nothing, all seekers fired by this or other fighter Groups would run out of fuel after moving only one space. Don't ask me why, very strange. Seeker fired by ships seem to behave normally (at least if fired by the enemy)... "

Maybe you can try and to reproduce this bug. It could be a serious problem, if the fighter missiles get too small and the AI decides not to launch all of them at once (it does that sometimes with large Groups of sats or many WPs). Humans can be notified of this bug and advised not to launch partial volleys, but the AI cannot.

Rollo

[Rollo]

Now for my suggestions for future Versions of P&N:
There have been many very good ideas for space monsters in this thread.
Adding a new racial trait "is a monster"/"not a monster" would work well with P&N. Give them their own really nasty tech tree. IIRC, there have been some problems with the monster planets. I tried to give facilities the self-destruct ability once, but that didn't work. Whether or not it would be possible to make AI controlled space monsters, it would still be great to make them player controlled. Either just for fun to terrorize the helpless AI races in the role of a monster in a solo game , or (even better) think of a PBW game where one player plays as a monster and harasses the other players... . Give him some planets hidden in nebulae, the goal of the other players would be to make the galaxy monster-free. The one who destroys the main monster lair will be the winner. Other scenarios are possible with several monster races competing against each other... whatever.

Maybe it would be worth to revive this idea. I would love it .

Rollo

edit:typo

[This message has been edited by Rollo (edited 12 October 2001).]

[dogscoff]

My P&N suggstion: (Wot I 'ave suggested elsewhere before)

Give crew quarters boarding party abilities. That way you can take over enemy ships from the very beginning of the game, and you have a reason to design ships with a little CQ redundancy. Of course CQ boarding defence would be considerably higher than CQ boarding attack.

The only downside is that your specialised boarding ships will lose their crews when they board. Unless... You make a second CQ component available when boarding parties come into the game - one which has no boarding attack value. Then you could design specialised boarding craft with good old fashioned non-destroying crew quarters. If you made these available from the begininning though you might as well make boarding parties available...

Another suggestion (specially useful given your new approach to resupply) is to add a few more tech levels to the solar harvesting tech tree: After solar panels and solar sails, add solar sail-panels, which generate movement AND supplies. I think you'll definitely need some new supply generation options.

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/SE4 Code
Go to my meagre SEIV pages to generate your own code.

[BeeDee10]

quote:

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Originally posted by jimbob:
What about a weapon that specifically targets the SDD? I'm guessing that this would be possible. Then there would finally be a need for defence marines.

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Since SDDs supposedly work by overloading the ship's engines, how about giving them "engine component" status so that ion weapons will affect them as well? The result would be that most captured ships will be dead in the water with their engines destroyed and most (or all) of their supplies gone, but it seems reasonable to me that if you're trying to board an enemy ship in RL one of the things you'd have to do would be to disable its engines anyway.

[ZeroAdunn]

Space monsters are an excellent idea. A few suggestions to toughen them up:

Mouth or ingestion ability of some kind: Point blank weapon, does tons of damage, would be like the monster ate another ship.

Make all components armor and make all components use the armor regen ability.

Create something life leaves for solar supply regen.

Give them compnents that boost defense (a space monster is going to have a little better responses than a ship with people at the helm)

well, just some suggestions.