SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[dogscoff]

How about a Linux Version? Does SEIV run well under one of the Windoze emulators for Linux? Seems to me this game is ideally suited for the type of people that are Linux Users.

We have seen reports on this forum of successful se4 under emulation on Linux. Run a forum search for Wine, filter out the alcoholic ramblings of ppl discussing red vs white vino and see what you get.

[Suicide Junkie]

How about eliminating the critical 'first shot' factor in large battles? Simple to do - move and fire the ships one at a time, player A then player B. Just randomising who gets to fire ALL their weapons first was not enough in my opinion.

That's a major advantage of real time combat.

While the enemy beam weapons are incoming, your ships can launch torpedoes: only having a longer range will let you fire first, and even that dosen't guarantee you'll hit first, since torpoedoes are slower than lasers

[ June 02, 2003, 16:52: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[LGM]

I would love to see construction queues start the next item with carry over capacity. There is so much micromanagement with creating a ship design and a scaled down Version that you can build in one or two less turns and retrofit to a full Versions, just to get the ship cost to utilize capacity as full as possible.

Retrofitting should take shipyard capacity so that retrofitting is not a loophole past the capacity limit!

Weapon balance should be more carefully considered in designing the game.

[Fyron]

Make the formations and strategies a bit more sophisticated. For example, I would normally set all ships to break formation - but I can't do this with a fleet that I want to capture a planet.

Yes you can. Make sure both the fleet and the troop transports have Capture Planet strategies. They can break formation as much as you like.

Or perhaps an assault ship would hold back on unloading its entire complement of napalm bombs if the fleet is supposed to be capturing the planet, not wiping it.

If you are using the correct strategies, ships stop firing on planets as soon as the weapon platforms are destroyed. With low population, it is possible for the Last shot to do enough extra damage to glass the planet as well as destroy the Last WP.

[ June 02, 2003, 19:07: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Rigelian]

Yes you can. Make sure both the fleet and the troop transports have Capture Planet strategies. They can break formation as much as you like.

I will have to try this again in a solo game.. I thought that this would result in the ships wiping the planet before the transport could get there. I always follow that scheme in any event (fleet AND troopship set to 'capture planet'), but I thought I had to keep the fleet in formation.

If you are using the correct strategies, ships stop firing on planets as soon as the weapon platforms are destroyed. With low population, it is possible for the Last shot to do enough extra damage to glass the planet as well as destroy the Last WP.

Yeah, the low-pop scenario is what concerns me. The problem is, each ship will unload all or none of its ordnance on that Last turn - and if we are talking about the multiple napalm-bomb ships I use for planetary assault, they often wipe out the 100M+ pop in the final volley. What I was looking for was for the ship to fire 'em one at a time, so that there is a chance of preserving the population.

[Fyron]

Yeah, the low-pop scenario is what concerns me. The problem is, each ship will unload all or none of its ordnance on that Last turn - and if we are talking about the multiple napalm-bomb ships I use for planetary assault, they often wipe out the 100M+ pop in the final volley. What I was looking for was for the ship to fire 'em one at a time, so that there is a chance of preserving the population.

No they don't. If using the right strategies (default capture planet), direct fire weapons stop being fired as soon as there are no weapon platforms left. A ship will not fire 6 direct fire weapons if the first 2 finish off the Last WP. Now, seeker weapons (which napalm is not one of, it is direct fire) cause a problem because all of them get fired off before the damage from any is done, so too many will get launched.

Do you have SE4 Gold, or regular SE4?

[ June 03, 2003, 00:47: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Rigelian]

I have regular SE4. I did not upgrade to Gold because (I am told) it doesn't fix any of the problems I really care about. And drones are useless apparently. I will definitely upgrade to SE5 when it comes out, or go to Gold if I run out of 1.49 opponents..

The situation I keep encountering is my ships blowing sub-100M pop planets out of the water, and I had thought that they were unloading all their ordnance into it.. possibly it could be that the large napalm bombs 3 are taking out too much pop in one shot? Is there a way of relating damage points to population loss so I can work it out?

[Fyron]

Check settings.txt for the damage to kill one population setting (I forget exactly what it is called). I do not recall what the value is. But basically, take damage done / that number and that is how much pop you can kill in each shot. Planetary Napalm III may well be able to kill those <100 M people.

What are the problems you really care about that were not fixed in Gold? Maybe they have been fixed in a recent patch and your friend is unaware of the fixes?

[tesco samoa]

when you look at the colony window... You can sort by planet type ( ice , rock , gas.. )

[Rigelian]

Check settings.txt for the damage to kill one population setting (I forget exactly what it is called). I do not recall what the value is. But basically, take damage done / that number and that is how much pop you can kill in each shot. Planetary Napalm III may well be able to kill those <100 M people.

Aha, there it is.
Damage Points To Kill One Population:= 10
Those monster napalm bombs are going to be doing about 800 if I remember correctly, so that plus the 'overspill' from the Last WP hits is going to finish off 100M pop more often than not.
Thanks.

What are the problems you really care about that were not fixed in Gold? Maybe they have been fixed in a recent patch and your friend is unaware of the fixes?

For the detailed arguments see my earlier Posts in this forum, rather than me repeating them here. But my top ones would be:

- trade relationship values should be based on smaller economy
- edge effects (don't want to rehash that one again!) - even if I accept the additive system, there is still that massive dropoff at max range
- Volley fire (player A fires all, then B fires all). There's no processor-power reason to persist with that I'm sure. Alternating fire would take a lot of the luck out of big battles.

These are the ones that can't be modded away or dealt with by house rules. I have a lot of issues like that, but they would be the same in 1.49 or Gold.

Then there are some PITA user interface issues, like not being able to jump from ALL the lists to the planets or ships. The one-or-all fleet windows. Not being able to assign the same build to multiple queues at a time. No context menus. Non-sizable list windows in general. No option to turn off the graphics and get more items in a list. No use of high resolution screens. Can't tell a freighter to load until it is full, or a minelayer to lay up to the limit, or pre-order a freighter to pick up/drop off less than the maximum. No zoomable/scrollable galaxy map.

Basically Gold doesn't give me anything extra that I think is needed. But then, I haven't kept up with the patches lately - what would you say are the main advantages of Gold? And BTW, that list looks like I hate the game, doesn't it? . Actually its my favourite computer game, but I think a few small fixes would make it so much better.