SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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It should take longer than one turn to conquer a planet, unless its nuked from outer space.

You can mod that. Increase strength and numbers of milita, reduce ground combat rounds to 1.

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P&N does that in some Versions.
One militia for every 2M people, and the militia get 1 attack/30 defense points.

Battles are commonly over a year long, and if the defending race is emotionless, they can continue to build reinforcement troops while they fight.
(Non emotionless typically start rioting after a few turns)
This provides plenty of time to counterattack the enemy, and drop reinforcement troops for either race's side.

Small worlds and small numbers of attacking troops (5-20) can fight to a stalemate indefinitely under these rules.

[mvstang]

First time here, so I haven't had a chance to read through the 40 some pages of responses yet, so my one thought has probably come up already, but here it is. It's a little long read, since I tend to ramble and get down into a lot of detail, so bear with me.

The one big thing I'd like to see is crew/governors/characters within the game. There are a few parts of implementing this that would be rather easy, and also make it easily mod-able, and a few parts that might be a little more complicated.

Since the game data is mostly based on txt files, which I think is great, you start with a text file that defines characters and or character types. Either every character would then have a skill level in all applicable areas (explained in a bit), or create types of characters, such as political, ground troops and space troops, who only have skills in the areas within their type. Political skills could things like increase/decrease production amounts, building speeds, research and intelligence bonuses and planet happiness modifiers. Ground commanders would be rather simple for bonuses to combat, space would be a little more detailed. Bonuses to ship travel speed, ship combat speed, damage, maintenance costs, supply costs and repair speeds for example. All should have some sort of loyalty and morale levels. Skills should probably start at 100 for no effect, that way you could have characters with less than 100 to have them be a detractor, but they might have high skills in other areas to make up for it.

Then make a text file that defines various positions, such as ship captain, planetary/system governor, ship engineer, ship navigator, ship combat officer, mineral plant supervisor, etc. Each position then has fields for the abilities from the abilities text file that apply. For example, a mineral plant supervisor position would have it's Value1 as Resource Gen Modifier Planet - Minerals. When that position is occupied, then the amount of minerals generated by that planet would be increased by the skill of the character. Ship Engineer could have many applications, repair time, added propulsion, reduced supply costs for movement and reduced maintenance on the ship for example. Ship captains could increase the effect of all other crew in the ship based on a leadership skill. Admirals could increase the effect of all captains within an entire fleet.

To implement this to the ships and planets, there are two methods. Add a line at the end of each planet size and vehicle size of Number of Crew types, simliar to number of abilities, for example 4. Then you'd have 4 triples of lines that would describe which position it is, how many of that position are allowed (max), and how many of that position are required (min). Perhaps also the skill and minimum level required for holding that position. For example on an escort:

Number of Crew:= 4
Crew 1 Type := Captain
Crew 1 Descr := Description
Crew 1 Val 1 := 1
Crew 1 Val 2 := 1
Crew 1 Val 3 := Leadership
Crew 1 Val 4 := 50
Crew 2 Type := Navigator
Crew 2 Descr := Description
Crew 2 Val 1 := 1
Crew 2 Val 2 := 1
Crew 2 Val 3 := Ship Piloting (as opposed to fighter piloting)
Crew 2 Val 4 := 50
Crew 3 Type := Engineer
Crew 3 Descr := Description
Crew 3 Val 1 := 1
Crew 3 Val 2 := 0
Crew 3 Val 3 := Engineering
Crew 3 Val 4 := 75
Crew 4 Type := Crew
Crew 4 Descr := Description
Crew 4 Val 1 := 50
Crew 4 Val 2 := 5
Crew 4 Val 3 := Ship Crewing
Crew 4 Val 4 := 25

This could then be expanded as ships grow so that a Dreadnought could require a captain with a leadership skill of 120, and perhaps dozens of crew types to fill with crews in the thousands.

The other option to applying this to planets and ships themselves is to put these lines within components and facilites instead. For example, a Bridge could require a captain and a navigator, while a research center could have 1 position available for a research scientist, but not required. This is probably the more versatile option of the two, since positions would only be required for running the various components of a ship you decide to put on them.

The one big problem with this is it can get very complicated and overwhelming very fast for larger ships, but you could always mod it higher for more complexity, or mod it lower for less, by removing all requirements except a captain for example.

Facilities like Academies and the Ship and Fleet Training sites could either train current characters to a certain level over time, or a higher Academy level could create a better default character on average at creation, which is something I haven't figured out how it should happen yet (character creation that is)

Whew, long rambling idea, that's most of how far I've thought it out at this point. Putting in a basic character system might not be too hard to do, but I wouldn't know, and something like the above idea would allow those of us who like it more complex to mod to our hearts content to make it more detailed.

Thoughts?

[Ed Kolis]

I personally think it's a cool idea, but probably a bit below the scope of this game... remember, you're going to have empires with hundreds or thousands of ships here, do you really want to track every single crewman on every single ship? Now maybe if you could track different kinds of experience for each ship's crew, and transfer crews between ships... in other words, instead of "Executor 0001 is at 5% experience", you could have "Executor 0001 has 1562 crewmen with 10% in gunnery experience, 7% in tactical experience, 2% in scientific/exploration experience, 6% in engineering/repair experience, and 3% in medical experience. The ship requires 1500 crew to operate at optimal capacity and has quarters for up to 3000.", and if you wanted to transfer more experienced crew from the Eggsterminator 0002 (what a silly name for a ship ) then the relative experience levels would change based on how many crew you transfer - if you transfer a lot of crew, the experience changes a lot, but if you only transfer a few, it only changes a little. (So it would require a lot of 60-man Escorts to replace the crew of a 3000-man Dreadnought ) See the BBS game "Falcon's Eye" (not the Nethack front-end, the BBS multiplayer strategy game!) for a good example of handling aggregate experience; you have experience Ratings from 5 to 10, 5 being the default that people get when they change occupation. Let's say you have 100 builders, and you want to make them mages, but you already have 50 mages at rating 10. So your builders become mages with rating 5, but they're averaged in with the existing mages, so you have 100 * 5 = 500 XP from the builders, and 50 * 10 = 500 XP from the existing mages. You have a total of 1000 XP divided across 150 people, so you get a rating of 6.7 (the game rounds to 1 decimal). Now let's say you only made 10 of those builders into mages. Then you'd have 10 * 5 = 50 XP from the builders, and 500 XP from the mages, or 550 XP spread out across 60 people, or a rating of 9.2 for all the mages, old and new. And then every turn everyone's rating goes up by 0.5. Does that all make any sense? And does it sound any simpler than what you proposed?

[Q]

I would like an improved AI, e.g. improved AI decision making about locations for attack and colonisation. I see frequently in SE IV colony ships going to the other side of the quadrant while empty planets would be in the same system. And fleets moving one turn in one direction and the next turn coming back again without attacking an undefended enemy colony or ship within reach.
The AI seems an important point for the sales promotion of SE V because I think the majority of the people who bought SE IV play it solo.

[Gryphin]

I want a game with all the great
Graphics
Movement
Size of maps
Easy to use Map Editor
But:
Almost none of the
Economics
Politics
Tech tree. (maybe just 20 - 40 items 3 levels deep each. I know this can be modded. I don't have what it takes.
Just pare it down to something like the other game I play.
Oh and a human or two to play it against.
Maybe I want something on Par with SE III and CIV II but better. This is ambigous because I have not thought about it till now.
Maybe more later.

[mvstang]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:

I suppose that's true, depends on what sort of game you like to play. I hand't even thought about the fact that I've modded my game down to the point where even in a large empire, you only have maybe 100 ships, they're all expensive, take a long time to build, and are extremely important. A system something like mine would work well for game with fewer numbers of important ships (although planet governors and such would depend mostly on galaxy size), while a system like yours would work better for games which there are thousands of ships, quickly replaceable by more.

[se5a]

has this been said?

the ability to take half a turn, save it, then come back to it later and finish the turn.


how about this also
be able to give engines .5 movement per turn (or whatever) so you will get 1 movement every two turns (or can this be done already)
I was thinking of makeing a mod where the turns could be every copple of hrs, but everything would be slowed down, so althouh you get say a turn every six hrs, ships move aprox equivelent of running the turn every 24 hrs.

[dogscoff]

I love edkolis' suggestion.

A similar system could be used to track the different abilities of different races on a planet: IE I have 30million Drukshocka with a +10% mineral production bonus, and 8million Fazrah with -2%, so my total mineral production for this planet will be... {insert maths here}.

Also I love the idea of tracking the exact amount of crew on a ship, the amount needed for it to run effectively and the amount of ppl it can hold. For one thing it would be good to have to consider building extra cabin space for 'spare' crew members on your warships, and for another it would add a little meaning and challenge to the "fire on own ship" command- ie you have to have somewhere to transfer the doomed ship's crew to first (or fire anyway and take a morale hit).

Finally, it would make boarding a really interesting part of combat. Should I smash the ship to pieces first so my boarding parties will encounter less reisitance, or should I try to take it intact? Maybe the old crew will surrender and turn into population for my cargo hold?

This crewing malarky might add a little micromanagement, but maybe this could be switch on and offable, or a really good minister written..?

Finally, I'd love planetary population to be monitored at higher resoltion than millions- ideally in individuals (ie planet X has population 12,853,022 instead of simply 13 million). Then, crewing ships could actually have a real (although very small, until you start building Death Stars anyway) effect on planetary populations. Damaged ships could crash-land and set up a tiny survivor colonies, watching the skies and waiting for rescuers... imagine the roleplay potential.

[Ed Kolis]

A better manual... I know that Aaron personally wrote the manuals for SE4 and Starfury, and I hate to put his work down, but they do seem to be basically copied text out of the game screens with no further explanation... often even the useless filler text... look at the Starfury manual, there's half a page devoted to descriptions of the various "generic cargo" components, even though those descriptions mean nothing in the game! Very misleading! Perhaps if the beta testers could have some input into the manual before it's finally printed? I'd certainly be glad to help

[Parasite]

I would like to set the first "game Setup" screen to remember options set in the Last game, or have a standard setting you could make.

Something to the effect that if you always play "no intelligence", "huge map", ect. you would start a new game atleast from that base, then change it for any specialies you wished.