RFC: Thoughts on New Features

[CheshireKatt]

Well, here goes some of my thoughts on things I think would be good enhancements to an already VERY enjoyable game. Feel free to bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate as necessary. (Oh, just a warning, it's fairly wordy. My apologies in advance.)

1. Ship Portraits

The current implementation for ship design lets you choose an overall design (weapons platform, ship, etc), a hull, a design (just for grouping purposes), and name your ship. This works pretty darn well, overall.

However, there's still something missing for me -- when I'm in a large battle, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember which of my ships are which, at a glance. Sure, I can mouseover them and find out who they are. But I was thinking about ways to make ships more distinct, and here's what I came up with -- what if the "Design Type", instead of simply being a string used to group ships, also determined which ship portrait was used? This would also reduce some of the clutter in that list, as it would have to be done by type now -- which isn't bad, since it really doesn't make much sense for me to have a Destroyer-class Parasite ship with a design type of Colony Ship (Gas) anyway.

Choosing a design type would select you a design picture and a small combat picture (and while you can't fit too much detail in the small combat pictures, you could do enough to differentiate things -- the three dots I'd recognize as EEE fighters, whereas the three dots with little fins I'd recognize as bombers, or something of that nature).

This is pretty inconsequential in terms of gameplay, and a fair bit of work on MM (new ship portraits, new DISTINCT combat pictures, a redesign of the Design Type list and how it's used), so I'm not really holding my breath. But it'd rule, and I'm all for it if it happens.

2. Racial Characteristics

Racial characteristics currently allow for racial bonuses that cost you points. And, if I understand the files properly, I can also assign a penalty in the same way, say making a trait called Jinxed, that gave double the chance of bad events, as so:

Name := Jinxed
Description := Twice the chance for bad events.
Pic Num := 0
General Type := Advantage
Cost := -1500
Trait Type := Luck
Value 1 := 100
Value 2 := 0
Required Trait 1 := None
Required Trait 2 := None
Required Trait 3 := None
Restricted Trait 1 := None
Restricted Trait 2 := None
Restricted Trait 3 := None

And I think that'd work fine. For taking double the change of bad things happening, you get 1500 points more to spend. And if they then take Lucky as well, they've netted 500 points for a 50% increase in bad events, which is fine too. I can even prohibit them from taking Lucky by changing

Restricted Trait 1 := None

to

Restricted Trait 1 := Lucky

No problem. But here's the kicker. I can't mess with their tech tree in any way beyond GIVING them tech. This actually came up in an earlier discussion about a true "Organic" race, one that has different ship hulls and doesn't have the standard weapons (DU cannons, that kind of thing), but STARTS with level 1 organic guns instead.

I can see a way this could be done, by giving all the starter stuff little invisible techs that EVERYONE starts with by default, and then disallowing those techs with the "Organic Race" pick. To do this, we'd need a way to disallow a tech tree with a pick.

As another example, let's say I wanted to make a detriment called "Existential Race". This would disallow all sensors, as they don't believe anything they're not experiencing firsthand. So, I'd deny the base sensor techs from their research. But I can't do that, as far as I can see.

3. Weapon Mounts

There's a few things I'd be interested in here as well. The ability to adjust the rate of fire of weapons would be nice -- a mount that let a weapon fire more or less often, specified as a change, either a multiple/fraction or plus/minus of the weapon's normal ROF, (maybe even more than once per round -- I'm looking for a multiple-shot, less-damaging gun, used for crowd control of smaller ships, especially with engine- or weapon-targeting guns), or less often (for making a REAL wave-motion gun -- slow to recharge, but mindbogglingly powerful and long-ranged), would be WONDERFUL.

What about a modifier to the speed and range of seekers -- obviously, it'd only matter on weapons with speed and range, but it'd be a cool mod nonetheless.

Or instead of a simple range modifier, one that lets me specify degredation of damage or not. Some weapons do less damage as they get farther from the firer, maybe I want a mount that doesn't degrade damage? (Though that could be tougher to implement in an intuitive way.)

I guess what I'm _really_ looking for is a piecemeal mod system. One that lets me say "Ok, this Wave Motion Gun has the Slow Recharge mod (ROF x 4), a Massive mod (Damage x 6, Supply x 4, Tonnage x 4), and a Long Range mod (Range + 6)." and the game then figures out the net total for that gun.

'course, that's a lot more work (and more changes to the existing weapon mount system, which uses one mount per gun, and NO in-game modification to said mounts), may bother people who just liked the simple method, and requires more hooks for the AI to use to figure out what the heck they're doing with all these gun mods now.

In any event, here's my thoughts. Hopefully I'm not too off-base in at least the "wouldn't it be nice if" factor.

--Chesh



------------------
We're all mad, down here.

[Taqwus]

1. It would be nifty to be able to specify at least a list of candidate images for a hull type, rather than just one; one per type might be a bit much (many of the types won't be for many of the hulls, for instance. And I usually add certain new types -- Planetary Bomber, Biowarfare, Stellar Manipulation, Shipyard Ship, Unarmed Scout, Utility Ship -- as well.)

2. Definitely would be nifty. The whole idea of negative traits, or at least traits with some negative aspects, could be tapped. One nicely suited to an alien race: uncontrollable population growth, ala Moties.

3. MOO II-ish.

Additional abilities/flags that come to mind:

- Point-defense: auto-firing against ftr/seekers

- Automatic: ala point-defense, but against ships

- accuracy
- minimum range ?
- range modifier, relative (e.g. weapon damage attenuates as if distance were halved, or doubled, etc)
- linked (linked weapons all firing at once as one weapon bLast)

Perhaps changing RoF into (RoF -> shots per round if loaded/ready, capacity -> shots until reloading/recharging, reload time -> turns for a reload) might be nice, albeit perhaps too complicated, but it'd allow, say, for missile racks that fire a few salvos quickly, but then need forever to reload, and so forth.

------------------
-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[DirectorTsaarx]

quote:

---

Originally posted by CheshireKatt:
<snip>
3. Weapon Mounts

There's a few things I'd be interested in here as well. The ability to adjust the rate of fire of weapons would be nice -- a mount that let a weapon fire more or less often, specified as a change, either a multiple/fraction or plus/minus of the weapon's normal ROF, (maybe even more than once per round -- I'm looking for a multiple-shot, less-damaging gun, used for crowd control of smaller ships, especially with engine- or weapon-targeting guns), or less often (for making a REAL wave-motion gun -- slow to recharge, but mindbogglingly powerful and long-ranged), would be WONDERFUL.

What about a modifier to the speed and range of seekers -- obviously, it'd only matter on weapons with speed and range, but it'd be a cool mod nonetheless.

<snip>

--Chesh

---

One answer: a few of the modders have tried the "multiple firing per turn" idea and it doesn't work in the current setup. That may end up being difficult to work out, although since MM has supposedly improved the AI's ability to mix moving & firing, it might be doable in the future.

And now, an observation about the seeker mounts. I know a couple modders had trouble creating those; and I may have come up with the reason why. It's possible that the range, etc. are not coded into the mount, but rather into the seeker itself. In other words, modifying the mount could allow the ship to target something farther away, but once the seeker is launched it no longer has the mount range/damage/speed bonus applied. From a programming standpoint, an attribute of the mount was not passed to the object created by the mount (the seeker). Just a thought; if anyone's really interested in this, maybe they could ask Aaron directly. Personally, I like the seekers as they are. At least until they're used against me successfully (ALWAYS research point-defense cannons early!!!)

[CheshireKatt]

quote:

---

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
It's possible that the range, etc. are not coded into the mount, but rather into the seeker itself. In other words, modifying the mount could allow the ship to target something farther away, but once the seeker is launched it no longer has the mount range/damage/speed bonus applied. From a programming standpoint, an attribute of the mount was not passed to the object created by the mount (the seeker).

---

THAT's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way, but it would make sense. I'll just make do for now with a Large Carrier with a shipyard, fighter bays, and piles and piles of kamikaze ramfighters. It's certainly demoralizing to watch.

quote:

---

Personally, I like the seekers as they are. At least until they're used against me successfully (ALWAYS research point-defense cannons early!!!)

---

I like them just fine -- but I'm also a serious "more features than I could ever use at once" addict. And this game has SO many features, it really appeals. Heh.

--Chesh

------------------
We're all mad, down here.

[DirkHowitzer]

quote:

---

Originally posted by CheshireKatt:
1. Ship Portraits

The current implementation for ship design lets you choose an overall design (weapons platform, ship, etc), a hull, a design (just for grouping purposes), and name your ship. This works pretty darn well, overall.

However, there's still something missing for me -- when I'm in a large battle, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember which of my ships are which, at a glance. Sure, I can mouseover them and find out who they are. But I was thinking about ways to make ships more distinct, and here's what I came up with -- what if the "Design Type", instead of simply being a string used to group ships, also determined which ship portrait was used? This would also reduce some of the clutter in that list, as it would have to be done by type now -- which isn't bad, since it really doesn't make much sense for me to have a Destroyer-class Parasite ship with a design type of Colony Ship (Gas) anyway.

Choosing a design type would select you a design picture and a small combat picture (and while you can't fit too much detail in the small combat pictures, you could do enough to differentiate things -- the three dots I'd recognize as EEE fighters, whereas the three dots with little fins I'd recognize as bombers, or something of that nature).

This is pretty inconsequential in terms of gameplay, and a fair bit of work on MM (new ship portraits, new DISTINCT combat pictures, a redesign of the Design Type list and how it's used), so I'm not really holding my breath. But it'd rule, and I'm all for it if it happens.

---

This is something I've mentioned before that I would like to see implemented. Not only would it make combat easier(ie remembering which ships are what), but just this simple addition of multiple ship portraits for each hull size would add so much more color to the game.



------------------

"He's dead, Jim."-- Lt. Commander Leonard "Bones" McCoy |Chief Medical Officer / USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

[Marty Ward]

Couldn't you add additional ship types? I saw a mod where someone added additional ship sizes, corvettes and some others. Maybe you could add Escort1, Escort2,Escort3 etc as ship types. They would be available when the base type is researched. Then you could have different pictures for the same size ship.
This should work unless there is some limiter in the number of ship types allowed.

[Instar]

Well, having multiple pics for each ship would be nice, but if you added new pics for each ship size, (lets say 10), that would tremendously increase the size of race files. Plus all the work involved in making the pics. Sounds neat, I cant alwasy remember who is who

[Husky65]

I'd like to see an ability to designate a fleet as a destination (waypoint) for ships.

If the fleet moves the waypoint moves with them, it would make sending reinforcements to a fleet a lot simpler.

[CheshireKatt]

I like Taqwus' idea better -- just a batch of portraits (maybe, 6 like Moo2, or more) per ship or unit type, rather than tying them to the design type. I make up new designs too, typically so I don't forget that some designs don't have guns.

Also -- I never thought of having a Fleet be a waypoint, but now that it's been mentioned, I REALLY want that feature. That would be SO convenient.

--Chesh

------------------
We're all mad, down here.

[Trancejeremy]

What I'd like to see is pretty simple to implement:

Basically, I'd like each ship to have a different name picked from a file when it's created, not just the classname plus a 3 digit number.

Perhaps a text file with the same name as the class name (or hull size).

If it's there, anyway. If not, just use the numbering system.

Basically, it's a bit useless, but it does give them more personality...